AV: Maciunas did his own variation on fellow Fluxus artist Alison Knowles’s performance, The Identical Lunch, where she asked participants to eat her regular lunch—a tuna fish sandwich—and describe their experiences. Can you talk about this project?
CC: Maciunas’s One Year is a massive wall sculpture made from the leftover containers of everything Maciunas consumed between 1974 and 1975. Among the various cartons are a pharmacy’s worth of medications. Box after box of the steroid corticotropin, asthma mist inhalers, cold capsules, hypodermic needles: everything that Maciunas injected, inhaled, swallowed, or sniffed in order to manage his body over the course of a year.
These medical supplies were flanked by the range of foods that Maciunas was eating at the time. Everything is discount, everything is low-nutrition. He was buying things like powdered milk, egg substitute, and imitation rum. It's the sort of food that lets you subsist, that gives you enough fuel to get through the day, but it's hardly the kind of diet that gives you enough vitamins to actually stay healthy. There's a direct connection between all that over-processed supermarket food and the cold capsules, Maalox, and other medications that he's taking to compensate for the lack of nutrition. One Year is a grimly comic portrait of what it means to live on the margins of capitalism, to live precariously.
AV: I think the feeling of living precariously is something many can relate to, especially now. You write about how many of Maciunas’s performances reveal not only the vulnerability felt by individuals but by society at large. Among the objects in his work Hospital Event, Maciunas included a Police Injury Report that asked victims to indicate whether they have received any reimbursement from private health insurance, workman’s compensation, or Medicare. Alongside each listing, you write, Maciunas ticked the box labeled “No.” How did Maciunas think about this project of caring for one another in a shared world?
CC: The goal of the 20th-century “avant-garde” has often been summarized as the merger of art and life. In Fluxus, you can see that mission play out in all the different scores that make performances out of everyday actions. I find Maciunas particularly fascinating because, in so many of his works, the version of “everyday life” we see is one marked by regulations, laws, and institutions.
The piece you mentioned, Hospital Event, took place after Maciunas was assaulted by two goons and rushed to the hospital. He retroactively declared his entire hospital stay to be a performance and turned the resulting paperwork into material for a Fluxkit multiple. Hospital Event was rooted in a specific terrible event from Maciunas’s own personal biography, but the accumulated details, like his lack of health insurance, speak to widespread conditions of precarity that so many of us can identify with as a common experience.
I think the core of Maciunas’s practice is something that we don't necessarily always recognize as an artistic project. His main goal was to create a collectivity, to bring all these disparate artists together into something called Fluxus.. He spent World War II in a Displaced Persons camp. He was an emigré who came to New York and tried to recreate some set of new communal bonds partially as compensation for the loss and dislocation of his early life. The whole history of Fluxus, and Maciunas’s role within it, begins to make more sense if you look at his practice as a series of attempts to create structures for collectivity.
Chamberlain’s book, Fluxus Administration: George Maciunas and the Art of Paperwork, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.
