Engaging discontent: Fluxus printed matter

Today I am going to address Fluxus and printed matter by way of the products spear-headed by two individuals, namely George Macuinas and Dick Higgins. Both were seminal figures in Fluxus, the former as an organiser for this international “non-movement” which commenced in the 1960s and the latter as an artist and book publisher. Both were ambitious men with grand visions to eradicate the grip of High Art and bring a sense of humour and cross-pollination between creative expression to the fore in society. It was the time of the counter-culture revolution and a profound disenchantment with the status quo. In the visual arts, painting and sculpture especially came under scrutiny; much of which was considered by Fluxists as the province of the cognoscenti. Minimalism is an example here.

Macunias is credited with arriving at the word Fluxus in the winter of 1960/61 in New York. Therefore I shall begin with the extraordinary output of published ephemera that he instigated with artists and poets and musicians and then look at Dick Higgins’ Something Else Press afterwards. I’ll end briefly on two exhibitions mounted by the Queensland Art Gallery in the 1990s at a time when Fluxus was receiving a revival of world-wide interest. This interest continues to day, although perhaps not directly under the name “Fluxus”.

On the screen you will see a photograph advertising a European mail order Fluxshop in Amsterdam taken in the mid 1960s. It is an off shoot of George Macuinas’ New York based enterprise for distributing Fluxus multiples. Seated provocatively on the floor is a friend of the artist Willem de Ridder with her classic ‘60s mini dress and teased hairdo. The setting is actually a small living room and the printed materials have been precariously arranged round a carpeted couch and on the floor where the young woman is seductively posed.  Being Amsterdam at the time, one is not surprised that sex was used to help sell the products of Fluxus!

At home-base in New York, it is inconceivable that Macuinas, the nerdy, driven, dictatorial individual who lived with his Lithuanian mother, would have set up such a tableaux himself. This personal detail aside, George Macuinas is credited with establishing Fluxus which many now see as the most radical and experimental art phenomenon of the 1960s. Under its premises, members such as Nam June Paik, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Joe Jones, Robert Watts, George Brecht, Mieko Shiomi and Yoko Ono, rejected traditional systems of the visual arts, practising instead, an extraordinary form of anti-art which encompassed everything from pavement imagery, poetry, happenings, concerts, performances, films, and printed multiples - of which I am concerned today.

Fluxus grew when Macuinas, as a graphic design student, budding art historian and apparently unsuccessful dealer in antique musical instruments met some of the young artists and composers grouped around John Cage at the New School for Social Research in New York.  Initially Macuinas wanted to publish their work in a magazine called Fluxus.

However he abandoned this idea and began organising Fluxus concerts in a number of European cities; in Wiesbaden for instance, attracting an international following of young artists. Macuinas saw these public events as a more showy and direct riposte to the bourgeoisie and as a way of getting art off its pedestal and integrated with life. Music, writing and art were to coalesce into interdisciplinary forms which were not elitist and which could be “grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals”.

We can see here with the Fluxus Manifesto which Macuinas drew up in 1963 and which Joseph Beuys, himself a revolutionary advocate for democratisation of the arts, altered in 1970 ( Beuys deleted the word “Europeanism” and wittily substituted “ Americanism”, stamping and signing the amendment nearby.) You will see that the words “Purge” and “Fuse” are dominant. So is the sense of tremendous ambition to change the world that Maciunas had. Fluxus was to “promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art”. But it was also to promote “non-art”, not in the Dada nihilistic manner but more through serendipitous actions, fun, jokes, gags. Although he attempted to rule the international Fluxus ”non-movement” in a totalitarian fashion, Macuinas also laughed at himself and encouraged work that was experimental, playful and simple. For example, a short while before his untimely death aged 47, he married a friend and they cross-dressed for the occasion.

Nevertheless, Fluxus was a complex and paradoxical movement. On one hand the publications (or multiples) connected with it, were to be cheap and distributed widely through mail order and sympathetic galleries like that of Rene Block’s in Soho. Yet the Chairman of Fluxus (as Macuinas called himself) stated in one of his Fluxmanifestos  that in order to produce an income, they had to be “rare”, “limited in quantity” etc. Not under good management, the marketing venture largely failed and the intended exclusivity of the Fluxus product was not favoured by many of the artists, musicians etc. who were involved. As a result, many soon distanced themselves from Macuinas.

However, he has prevailed, along with Marcel Duchamp and John Cage as one of the forces behind the upheavals in the art of our time and Fluxus had been particularly acknowledged for this in the last decade. Here is Duchamp's famous Boite en Valise which was produced in various editions, this one owned by Te Papa /Museum of New Zealand in Wellington is from 1959. It comprises his “readymades” in miniature and in its box format is rather like the suitcases containing Fluxus printed multiples, both, in concept, being readily portable.

     Macuinas was responsible for publishing and designing most of the Fluxus editions, which in turn, have inspired similar later ventures.  As noted at the beginning, mailing was a crucial form of dissemination. Just as the multiples can be seen as printed matter closely allied to artists books, they can also be seen as mail art.

     The Flux Year Boxes, which commenced in 1964, could be mailed without additional packaging just by stamping and addressing the integral containers of wood or masonite. With all of Macuinas’ productions there is a very strong graphic sensibility at work.

With  Fluxus 1  of the same year, he designed the anthology to accommodate a wide variety of objects as well as printed matter. Most of the pages are manila envelopes with loose items inside; the whole is held together with three nuts and bolts. Aside from taking the book form as far as possible into object form, Fluxus 1 represents the performance scores and conceptual pieces of artists and musicians from half a dozen countries. Ay-O from Japan, Ben Patterson from Germany, Ben Vautier from France, and Dick Higgins from the United States were among those represented. The wooden box had a burned in title which housed the bolted envelopes. They contained a variety of ready-made and constructed objects, printed photographs and this foldout , concertina-like acknowledgement of the artists involved.

In spite of putting quite a lot of them offside, Macuinas nevertheless continued to pursue his editorial activities undeterred, producing several hundred different products by 1978, the year of his death.

From 1963 onwards, George Brecht, Ben Vautier, and Robert Watts were among those particularly loyal to  his expansive ideologically driven visions and they willingly supplied him with ideas for Fluxus multiples which were then issued in small plastic boxes of a uniform size. Today we can easily see these Flux Boxes as a form of artists’ book, as they invariably stress text.

Here is an assortment which includes George Brecht’s famous Water- Yam which had initially been printed and distributed in the late 50s by Brecht himself. On small bits of paper he created tersely worded scores and events, such as "Concert for Orchestra" which has three instructions placed in a surreal fashion with a thermometer and clock. Under the Fluxus umbrella, Water-Yam became a box with a striking cover and were given or mailed to friends.

A portfolio of prints published by Editions Francesco Conz of event scores by Alison Knowles, which Queensland Art Gallery owns, gives an indication of the brevity and seemingly ludicrous nature of the event scores.

For instance with her Great Bear Fluxus events of 1985. a portfolio of 16 sheets, Knowles states for event no. 2 to “make a salad” followed by a variation of “make a soup” and gives details of where these were first performed in the early 1960s. Knowles was married at the time to Dick Higgins and living in New York.

Her events were printed as the first of the so-called Great Bear Pamphlet series (possibly a reference to Higgins himself) for his Something Else Press.

Which conveniently brings me to the second part of this paper. Dick Higgins was one of the founding members, along with Alison Knowles of Fluxus. However he dramatically fell out with Macuinas over his organisational ineffectiveness and the lack of marketing capability that he had in the publishing field. I suspect also, that both rivalled each other with their intense zeal to re-write the history of art and change its course. Higgins has often been regarded as Fluxus’s major thinker and he was the earliest to theorise the notion of “intermedia” as a new site of creative activity.

In August 1966, Higgins wrote that the point had been reached where to distinguish between various media was often arbitrary and often pointless. He urged that consideration be given to the social usage of creative media, stating that “there are dangerous forces at work in our world…”. This was counter-culture time and the Vietnam War with extraordinary social disruption occurring among youth. Fluxus and the growing interest in artists’ books are part and parcel of this wish to overcome the grip of High Art in the creative sphere. In fact, before Dick Higgins’ Something Else Press, which he founded in 1964, the term artists’ books was never in current usage. This is according to Peter Frank, who wrote a useful annotated bibliography on the Something Else Press in 1983.

With his Press, Higgins could make  avant garde books look deceptively conventional and mass-produced. This inspired subversive venture saw the manufacture of radical texts in conventional, high quality bindings so that standard libraries would be willing to put them on their shelves. The Press lasted for ten years when it was wound up due to a number of personal troubles besetting Higgins.

Nowadays, the publications of Something Else Press are sought and prized by artist, collector and historian alike.

The Press was definitely an outgrowth of the publishing and disseminating activity of the Fluxus group in New York, of which Higgins was a member. But rather than Macuinas’ throwaway multiples and the Flux Boxes which can, in my opinion, be equally classified as artists’ books, Something Else Press was after permanency of the product. Higgins was also driven by his idea of “intermedia”, on which he wrote a landmark essay in 1965.

He had been a student of John Cage’s and was publishing his own performance scripts and critical statements in limited edition mimeographed booklets in the early 1960s.

As Fluxus was clearly emerging as a loosely formed movement covering artists in Japan, Europe and the United States, Higgins began to want a more durable and substantial format for texts, drawings and scores produced by himself as well as others. He explored the possibility of publishing cheaply outside of New York but finally realise that Soho was the best place for it. In all, eighty titles were published by fifty-three authors; an enormous achievement for the Press over a decade of existence.

To give you an idea of how the artists’ books produced under the imprint of Something Else Press were sometimes transformed and extended into other editions later on, to give them lasting life, here is the 1995 Atlas Press version of Daniel Spoerri’s An Anecdoted Topgraphy of Chance which was co-written with Robert Filliou, Emmett Williams and Dieter Roth. It also demonstrates the comradeship of Fluxus artists; their willingness to collaborate with one another.

In this early book from February 1965, published by The Something Else Press , Ray Johnson’s The Paper Snake, we can see the poetry-like nature of the text and its humour. It is a compendium of Johnson’s mail-art works. The material includes writings and images Johnson sent to Higgins over a period of years. The book is one where we feel intimately part of the exchange;

“Dear Dick Higgins, I am now / in my frog/legs frogs/ leg period./Ray Johnson/P.S. I have 100 penguins in my bathtub,”

is one entry;

“A Bill for Dick Higgins” is another”

featuring a column of references to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.

With artist/poet Robert Filliou’s Ample Food for Stupid Thought of 1965, Higgins’ Press clearly demonstrates its debt to Macunias’ Flux Boxes. The format is small and intimate, its pages printed also as a separate set of postcards.

Higgins himself produced the ambitious A Book About Love & War & Death in 1972, in 1000 hard copies and 2000 paperback. Like Stein, Higgins wanted to liberate words in American literature but his book has a biographical force to it as well as he had just married Alison Knowles and was in love. At the same juncture, his brother was accidentally killed in the newly independent, strife-torn (Belgian) Congo.

Concrete poet Emmett Williams’ A Valentine for Noel was a joint publication between Something Else Press and Edition Hansjorg Mayer, of 1973. Hansjorg Mayer in Stuttgart is well known for his production of mass produced artists’ books. In this whimsical book, Williams has used chance operations to construct his text.

There is a direct link with the concrete poetry that was enlarged much later and screenprinted on cloth by Editions Francesco Conz in Italy. Here is Emmett Williams discussing one of his projects with Conz at Como in 1990. Which brings me to winding up my presentation today.

To end, I want to draw attention to two instances in Australia where both George Macuinas’s Fluxus printed works were shown and also Higgins’ Something Else Press. In 1993, the Queensland Art Gallery staged a show called ‘FLUXUS and after…;’ which included international and Australian artists and included printed works.

A more ambitious show occurred n the summer of 1997/98, based on a major donation of Fluxus and intermedia art to the Gallery by the Italian publisher and collector Francesco Conz. It was his intention to breathe new life into the several manifestos that Macuinas produced, reiterating that Fluxus is “something flowing, something in motion, a continuing succession of changes…to promote living art”.

The exhibition of this donation was titled ‘Francesco Conz and the Intermedia Avant-Garde.’ This collection remains the most important of its type in the Southern Hemisphere. With supporting literature held in the Gallery’s library; anyone is of course welcome to access it.

Through the printed works, such as Robert Watt’s New Yorker Cartoon of 1987, one can clearly see the engaging discontent that marked Fluxus productions in the 1960s and well-beyond that decade.