Maciunas, George

Artist

Born: 08.11.1931 in Kaunas (Lithuania)

died: 09.05.1978 in Boston, Massachusetts (USA)

Chronic illness overshadowed Maciunas' early childhood. In 1947, after a three-year stay in Germany, the family emigrated to the USA, where Maciunas studied art, architecture, musicology and art history. From 1959, he attended Richard Maxwell's composition class at the New York School of Social Research. There he met La Monte Young, George Brecht, Al Hansen, Dick Higgins, Allan Kaprow and Jackson Mac Low. It was during this time that the term FLUXUS first appeared, which was intended as the title for a journal. The layout developed by Maciunas in 1961 for the influential magazine "AN ANTHOLOGY" became influential for the later FLUXUS publications.

Maciunas moved with his mother to Wiesbaden-Erbenheim, where he worked as a designer for the U.S. Air Force. In 1962, he organized the first "FLUXUS*International Festival of New Music" in the auditorium of the Wiesbaden Museum. Concerts followed in Copenhagen and Paris, festivals in Düsseldorf, Amsterdam, The Hague, Nice and Wuppertal, where his manifesto "Neo-Dada in Music, Theatre, Poetry, Art" was published.

In 1963, his contract with the army was terminated due to his chronic asthma. After returning to New York, Maciunas worked in the following years as an editor of FLUXUS publications and editions in the form of multiples. In 1968, he founded the "Fluxhouse Cooperative Building Project" in order to acquire affordable artists' studios by buying and renovating lofts in SoHo. In 1976, he moved to New Marlborough, Massachusetts, where he wanted to turn a farm into an art center. In 1978 Maciunas fell ill with cancer, he married the poet Billie Hutching in February and died in Boston in May. In 1992, Ute and Michael Berger established the George Maciunas Prize in Wiesbaden.