From Planned Utopias to Jerry-rigged Realities:
the Multiple Forms of Maciunas’s
Living-Working Systems
Mari Dumett
Reflecting on the life of Lithuanian-born artist and Fluxus founder George
Maciunas, fellow artist Geoffrey Hendricks once stated: “To understand
George it is helpful to reflect on where and how he lived, for the spaces
he created paralleled how he worked and thought.” 1 Hendricks
offers an important insight that is worth pursuing. Within the limited
space of this essay, I will look briefly at three examples of spaces created
by Maciunas in order to suggest how these spaces were connected to his
broader logic of art and life as a whole. My purpose is to show how the
spaces both instantiated and helped (re)produce this logic. This is by
no means a straightforward task. As we shall see, the multiplicity of
spaces he designed and occupied represent a complex and seemingly contradictory
amalgam of utopian possibilities aimed at universal ideals and jerry-rigged
solutions fitted to specific situations. He was at once a systematic thinker
devising grand solutions to social problems, such as public housing, and
a bricoleur, making the most of the usually minimal means (and
space) at his disposal.
In 1965, Maciunas first published his plan for a Prefabricated Building
System, which he had been working on since the mid-1950s.2
In Appendix One of the plan, he suggests that his design marks a watershed
in building programs. Up until that point, he avers, the Soviet Union’s
Prefabricated Building System had been the most efficient, but his plan
was even more so. While the price per square foot of his system may have
been a bit higher than that of the Soviets’, his ultimately “gave
the most performance for the least cost.” Basing this claim of maximum
efficiency on the objectives of workability, economy, adaptability, and
durability, Maciunas implied that if his program was put into production
it could surpass the Soviet’s record ability to produce three million
new dwelling units in 1960 alone.3 His diagram of the building
procedure begins in step one with a picture of twelve pre-cast concrete
piles set in a 4 x 3 grid in the ground and ends at step six with a fully
contained, single-storey, rectangular dwelling composed of exterior and
interior panels. The diagram makes it look so simple and easy that one
imagines his prefab structures proliferating across the landscape like
a child’s erector set constructions sprawling across a living room
floor, while providing living or working spaces for millions of people.
Indeed, according to Maciunas the system allowed for the utmost flexibility
and adaptation so it could expand, contract, or change shape in relation
to the required function (be it private, commercial, or governmental)
as well as any geographic or climatic restrictions.
The only component that could not be tampered with was the rectangular
box housing the service cubicle. First to be placed on the foundation,
the service cubicle formed the core around which the rest of the structure
was assembled. Still, even this fixed unit was remarkably economic and
efficient. It encased the core plumbing and electrical facilities of the
house in a tight arrangement: the bathroom and kitchen sit back-to-back
with a thin, shared plumbing wall running between them. In the kitchen,
modern appliances, including a dishwasher and a washer and dryer, as well
as the central heating and cooling unit, are all neatly tucked in. Everything
has its place, with no extraneous space left over. Today we might think
of Maciunas’s service cubicle as a precursor to the Modular Bathroom
Units of the Dutch art group Atelier van Lieshout (AvL). Dispensing with
Maciunas’s exterior panels, AvL’s modular units consist of
a single foldable panel that can be easily packed up, transported, and
set to work anywhere there is a plumbing hook-up.
Maciunas’s Prefabricated Building System, based on only
nine prefabricated components, could belong everywhere and nowhere at
once. Its utopianism was premised on such universality—a system
ostensibly applicable to every functional need and any logistical or environmental
circumstance. But Maciunas’s attempt at a catchall solution involves
a problematic preferencing of the universal to the disregard of the particular
and the local—as if sliding open or shifting over a panel could
account for important cultural, social, and economic particularities of
place. In this regard, perhaps the most telling aspect of his building
system is its inability to rise above one storey, making it in fact woefully
“inefficient” for high-density urban centers. In reality,
his plan would not have been the most efficient choice for public housing
in New York or Moscow in the 1960s and 1970s, let alone in a city like
Tokyo or São Paulo today. Indeed, when the prefab panels are forced
open to questions of a particular place, one begins to wonder whether
his system might not have been most appropriate for accommodating the
new postwar social type known as the “organization man,” moving
in droves to the suburbs of American cities at the time—a dwelling
designed to produce a subject as efficient at home as he was in the corporate
office.4
If Maciunas’s Prefab System was based on an ideal of universal
use-value, his piece Flux Combat evinced a spatial practice emerging
out of a very specific and local lived experience. Beginning in 1966,
Maciunas embarked on a plan to buy old buildings—in the neighborhood
that was then known as “Hell’s Hundred Acres” and today
goes by the much more genteel name of SoHo—and turn them into living-working
cooperatives for artists. In the early days of the process, he was able
to work fairly well under the radar of New York housing authorities. He
tried to get the buildings up to code, but sometimes took liberties, cutting
corners to save time and money. Within a few short years, however, speculators
followed the artists into the area, seeing dollar signs of profit rather
than affordable living and working spaces in the old industrial edifices.
This turned building inspectors’ eyes more closely on those living
in the so-called “illegal” co-ops, including Maciunas, who
became the subject of an investigation by the New York State Attorney
General’s office. At the time, Maciunas himself lived in a renovated
loft space at 80 Wooster Street—the very first Fluxhouse Cooperative
started in 1967. The one potential glitch in the Attorney General’s
plan to take Maciunas to court was that Maciunas had to be subpoenaed
in person. The comical image of a stuffy state official attempting to
track him down and haul him in must have titillated Maciunas’s imagination,
as he decided to turn the whole affair into a kind of cat and mouse performance.
Flux Combat represented an over-the-top, multifaceted, survival
strategy by which Maciunas would both evade the law and expose the absurdity
of its bureaucratic machinations. It included ephemera such as rubber-mask
disguises, postcards sent by friends around the world on behalf of Maciunas
to throw the cops off his trail, and letters parodying city officials
and their “bureau-speak.” In the midst of all of this subterfuge,
however, Maciunas also made plans for a dramatic retooling of his loft.
The objective: to turn the space into a “Flux-fortress.”
There were, according to Maciunas: “various unbreakable doors with
giant cutting blades facing out, reinforced with steel pipe, braces, camouflaged
doors, dummy and trick doors and ceiling hatches, filled or backed with
white powder, liquids, smelly extracts. Funny messages behind each door,
real escape hatches and tunnels leading to other floors, vaults etc.,
various precautions in entering and departing flux-fortress.”5
It is not clear how much of this was actually built, but we do have accounts
from several Fluxus artists who remember a few of the peculiar designs
that were realized. As Robert Watts recalled Flux Combat: “…GM
now took steps for a prolonged siege. The door was reinforced on the inside
with a steel bar, angle and plate, including the door frame. The outer
side of the door became medieval and dangerous, as running the length
and at close intervals were pieces of industrial paper guillotine blades,
and extremely sharp. In effect there was no place to knock without being
seriously cut.”6 And Geoffrey Hendricks added: “He
also devised an escape route up through a narrow secret passage to the
Cinematheque with the thought that if he kept himself thin, he could get
through but his pursuers would get stuck. But the climax of the story
was that in the secret passageway there was a disguise kept for himself,
and this he would put on and go around to the upstairs hall and greet
the people hunting for him, with the inquiry, “Who is it you are
looking for?”, and then tell them where Maciunas might be found.”7
One imagines Maciunas outmaneuvering his pursuers through his jerry-rigged
labyrinth only to confront them wearing a gorilla mask on the other side.
To create the fortress Maciunas used a hodge-podge of materials—likely
the scraps of his co-op renovation efforts—and imaginative methods—transferring
the notorious “blade” of the French Revolution to his front
door where it would cut the hand of those state agents who dared to knock.
And it was particular in the extreme. For example, the functional efficacy
of the narrow escape hatch and secret passageway was wholly dependent
on Maciunas’s own body weight—his ability to remain slim (and
the likelihood that those pursuing him would be of larger physique) the
only assurance that he could slide through while others “got stuck.”
Somewhere in between the utopian Prefabricated Building System
and the “bricoleured” Flux Combat loft, lied the
spaces in which Maciunas did his day-to-day living. Yet these too were
remarkable and revealing in their own way, perhaps the most so for our
purposes. In 1961, Maciunas left New York to take a job as a graphic designer
at the United States Air Force base in Wiesbaden, Germany. It seems that
during his first winter there, he lived for a while in his car. Artist
Alison Knowles gives a wonderful description of how this might have worked:
…we learned that George had worked the previous
winter as a draftsman by day, and in the back of his car by night!
This was verboten of course, and took daily ingenuity, courage and
presence of mind to carry it off. In fact, each night became a performance
in itself. First George bought the food at the PX, either eating
there or adding to his stash of small stock items for the car. No
need to eat in a restaurant—ever! One imagines the interior
of the car as the ultimate in space organization, with its boxes,
probably the glove compartment became a desk, correspondence inside
the compartment, and the piles of clothing that had to be worn each
night [because of the cold] in neat piles on the floor. The driver’s
seat was perhaps hollow to provide storage for food etc.?8
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Glove compartments could become desks, front seats could
become storage containers, and everything could be put in its place to achieve
optimum spatial use-value within such limited means. Air Force draftsman
by day, and Fluxus organizer by night, Maciunas could impose a rigorous
order on the most awkward of spaces—such as the interior of an automobile?so
that his work and life would run efficiently. And the car in Wiesbaden was
but one of many examples of how central organization was not only to the
spaces Maciunas created but also to everything he did. His apartment at
349 West Broadway was “designed, built, and organized…to provide
him with the maximum amount of storage and some simple clean work areas.”9
And at 80 Wooster Street, prior to Flux Combat, he also created a rationally
ordered space tailored to his specific work and storage needs. Here are
Geoffrey Hendricks’ observations on Maciunas’s basement at that
location:
…he had a large room for storage with aisles
of shelves filled with boxes all carefully labeled in his distinctive
handwriting and printing. His theory was that you shouldn’t
throw out anything, for as soon as you did, you would realize what
you needed it for. He was always shopping for bargains, odd lots,
strange things that could become elements of Fluxus editions, and
these too were stored.10 |
In this space, as in the space of the car in Germany, the systematic thinker
“met” the makeshift bricoleur, and the ideal of universal
functional order came together with the particularities of lived experience.
A mass of various and sundry things flooded into Maciunas’s spaces—from
the cheap food purchased at the United States Air Force PX to the objects
found or bought on the streets of New York—but the flood was always
controlled, the things always placed meticulously into boxes for orderly
retrieval at a later date. Ultimately, the spaces he created had to facilitate
this process, representing an ongoing negotiation between the universal
and utopian on the one hand and the particular and lived on the other.
Most of all, Maciunas’s spaces suggest a deep desire, imaginative
capacity, and organizational acumen to create living-working systems,
no matter the circumstances.
Mari Dumett received a B.A. in Political Science from
Indiana
University, an M.A. in Art History from the University of British
Columbia, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Boston University where
she is finishing a dissertation on George Maciunas and Fluxus.
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1Geoffrey Hendricks,
Manuscript (New York, 1994) as reprinted in Mr. Fluxus: a Collective
Portrait of George Maciunas, 1931-1978, eds., Emmett Williams and
Anne Noël (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), p. 177.
2It appeared in the text “Communists Must Give Revolutionary
Leadership in Culture,” which Maciunas co-produced with Henry Flynt.
This text is reprinted in Fluxus etc., Addenda I. The Gilbert and
Lila Silverman Collection, ed., Jon Hendricks (New York: Ink &,
1983), pp. 38-43.
3This is Maciunas’s figure, as cited
in Appendix One of the Prefabricated Building System.
4For discussions of the notion of the “organization
man” see, for example: William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization
Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954); Robert Presthus, The
Organizational Society: an Analysis and a Theory (New York: Knopf,
1962).
5George Maciunas, Flux-Combat Between George
Maciunas & Attorney General of New York, 1975-76 (Stuttgart:
Staatsgalerie, Archiv Sohm).
6Robert Watts, Manuscript (1980) as reprinted in Mr. Fluxus:
a Collective Portrait of George Maciunas, 1931-1978, eds., Emmett
Williams and Anne Noël (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), p. 184.
7Geoffrey Hendricks, p. 185.
8Alison Knowles, Manuscript (1980) as reprinted in Mr.
Fluxus: a Collective Portrait of George Maciunas, 1931-1978, eds.,
Emmett Williams and Anne Noël (London: Thames and Hudson, ), p. 57.
9Geoffrey Hendricks, p. 177.
10Geoffrey Hendricks, p. 178.
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