Fluxus Administration: George Maciunas and the Art of Paperwork

A new, innovative approach to the work of Fluxus artist George Maciunas. Though widely recognized as the founder of the legendary Fluxus movement, George Maciunas has long been a puzzling figure in the history of twentieth-century art. Many have questioned whether he should be considered an artist at all. In Fluxus Administration, critic and art historian Colby Chamberlain reveals the consistent artistic practice hidden behind Maciunas's varied work in architecture, music, performance, publication, graphic design, film, and real estate as an attempt to create models for community through structures of bureaucracy. In this deeply researched study, Chamberlain traces how Maciunas's art insinuated itself into settings as unlikely as the routes of the postal service, the fine print of copyright law, the zoning strictures of urban planning, and the corridors of hospitals. These shifting frames of reference expand our understanding of where an artistic practice can operate and what forms it might assume. In particular, Chamberlain draws on media theory to highlight Maciunas's ingeniously crafted paperwork, much of which is beautifully reproduced here for the first time.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Introduction. Curriculum Vitae 1 Card Files & Charts 2 Newsletters & Postcards 3 Registrations & Catalogs 4 Plans & Budgets 5 Prescriptions & Certificates Conclusion. Obituaries Acknowledgments Frequently Cited Archives Notes Index

About the Author :
Colby Chamberlain is assistant professor of art history at the Cleveland Institute of Art. His scholarship and criticism have appeared in publications including Artforum, ARTMargins, Grey Room, October, and Triple Canopy. This is his first book.

Review :
“An innovative and revelatory account of George Maciunas’s paradoxical position as the visionary and officious administrator of Fluxus’s collective and avowedly anonymized endeavors. Chamberlain’s vivid writing weaves these oftentimes unassuming and absurdist works within the larger social fabric of bureaucratic modernity, accentuating the materiality and corporeality that shaped Maciunas’s principally paperwork practice.” “This creative, interdisciplinary book explores how Maciunas’s artistic sensibility and organizing efforts influenced the development of residential lofts and changed how we think of artists’ housing needs in New York City and beyond.” “Revealing how Maciunas’s practice firmly embedded art making into the very infrastructures of everyday life, Chamberlain offers a path forward for an art history that takes the operation of administration seriously without letting it obscure what artists and artworks do. Brimming with lucid insights concerning the interrelationships of government agencies, official and unofficial regulation, the market, and artistic communities, Fluxus Administration suggests how artists might shape a civil society with which we can live and from which we can hopefully move forward.” “Chamberlain’s readers will be rewarded with several marvelous books, ingeniously interleaved: a study of an underappreciated artist, an inquiry into the New York avant-garde, and a model work of media history and theory. They will also be rewarded with a beautifully crafted object, with care given to word and image alike. Maciunas would have been pleased.” "Fluxus Administration is well-researched, well-written, well-illustrated (including some reproductions I’ve not seen elsewhere) and features a distinct point of view. It investigates and animates its subject alongside the contradictions and compromises inherent in a retelling a life that ended almost fifty years ago." "Art history has perhaps been reticent to examine the documental life of art production because it leaves little in the way of reproduction-worthy images, or so the conventional thinking goes. Fluxus Administration refreshingly departs from that norm with copious illustrations of Maciunas’s charts, ledgers, diagrams, and even related correspondence. And it works. Not only because Maciunas brought his dynamic graphic eye to many of these items, but because the design of the book itself meets the exciting challenge set by Chamberlain’s thesis, which regards the paperwork that accompanies artworks as a crucial facet of art history. Chamberlain’s prose is also a pleasure to read. The author’s enthusiasm is palpable, and at times has the effect of bringing us closer to the book’s energetic subject, as if Maciunas’s hyperdrive rubbed off on the author over the course of research." "Through a meticulous examination of Maciunas’s papers and notes and insightful analysis of his underlying goals, Chamberlain (Cleveland Institute of Art) reveals a serious artistic practice inside the whimsy of Fluxus. The result greatly improves understandings of Fluxus as a significant critical endeavor. . . . Highly recommended."