April 2007 Issue

George Maciunas at Maya Stendhal Gallery

The career of Lithuanian-born George Maciunas (1931-1978)- art historian, architect, designer, editor and
founding member of the international Fluxus movement-happily defies categorization. Maciunas
recognized that to be engaged with many different areas of endeavor is more amusing and, ultimately, more
intellectually stimulating than to know a lot about just one thing. Between 1949 and 1960 alone, he studied
fine and graphic art and architecture at Cooper Union in New York City, architecture and musicology at the
Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh and the history of European migratory art at New York
University’s Institute of Fine Arts.

The greater part of the exhibition at Maya Stendhal focused on Maciunas’s diagrams and charts. Succinctly
laying out various types of information pertaining to a given subject, he allowed previously overlooked and
occasionally fanciful links to be established, and the whole to be more easily absorbed. Elsewhere, we
could admire Maciunas’s experiments with typography, in which letters in different fonts and sizes are
squeezed together and rotated, so that they read as abstract patterns before they divulge meaning. The rapid
succession of patterns, single large numbers and letters in the silent black-and-white films produced in
1966 on clear film without the use of a camera also deconstruct meaning through processes of collage and
displacement, achieving oddly mesmerizing, syncopated effects.

The charts and diagrams have a poetry all their own, with lines of information lovingly written out in
careful longhand on delicate, now-yellowed supports and including more than a few misspellings. Atlas of
Russian History (1953), in ink on translucent paper, comprises 36 sheets with meticulously traced maps
supplemented by columns of handwritten information. The 38 charts in the European and Siberian Art of
Migrations cycle(photo-collage, ink and pencil on paper), 1955-60, include small black-and-white
photographs arranged in a gridlike fashion, balanced by written statements on the left and right. What
makes these laborious projects compelling is that they continue to raise the question of what constitutes art
more urgently than a great deal of later art using unorthodox materials, forms and strategies. In the wake of
Duchamp’s notes for the Boîte-en-valise and in many cases years before Conceptualism, Maciunas implied
that the artist can provide the connection between discrete bodies of knowledge. His charts look very much
like the charts we find hanging in classrooms; artistic intention makes all the difference.

-Michaël Amy

Best in Show
States of Flux
by R.C. Baker
October 12th, 2006 5:37 PM

Artist Name Tag by George Maciunas
image: Courtesy of the Maya Stendhal Gallery
George Maciunas
Maya Stendhal Gallery
545 W 20th
Through October 28

Too bad he died before its advent—Maciunas (1931–78) would've loved the
Internet. A one-man Wikipedia, his charts and atlases from the 1950s, executed
in immaculately hand-lettered grids on notebook or onionskin pages, take in
numerous subjects, including the history of Russia ("900-973: Christianization")
and the evolution of prehistoric Chinese art; these are frequently accompanied
by postage-stamp-size photos with such captions as "Odin on horseback. Magic
device—amulet." It's fascinating to see this Fluxus founder's meticulous mind,
then turn to his "No camera" films of the '60s, made with "Prestype" and Benday
dots applied directly to clear film strips; the letters, numbers, and dot matrices
flash by like patterned strobe lights. Also on view is Maciunas's playful
typography—letters are stacked, jumbled, and rotated, the various fonts
forming shapes that read first as sharp graphics before the names of artists,
composers, and writers become discernable. A "Skeleton Plan for Contents of
the First Six Issues" of a never realized Fluxus magazine promised articles such
as "Deflating the NY abstract expressionists" and "The great fakers of
architecture," plus multiple definitions of "fluxus," including "To purge . . . an
excessive discharge, from the bowels" and "any substance or mixture used to
promote fusion." Which sums up this witty, half-century-old American art
movement.