Grey Room 33, Fall 2008, pp. 56–83. © 2008 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 57

Maciunas as Producer:Performative Design in the Art of the 1960sJULIA ROBINSON

George Maciunas is best known as the “impresario” of Fluxus.He coined the name for the group of artists, and organized, pro-moted, and documented their activities in the United Statesand Europe from 1962 until his death in 1978 at age forty-six.The word impresario has been a way for scholars to avoid thedifficult territory of how and with what to credit Maciunas. Ithas also evoked the persona he seemed to need to assume toaccomplish his work—idiosyncratic, authoritarian, that of theleftist general—a persona which likewise has proven difficultto explain. By virtue of the unorthodox range of tasks Maciunastook on to organize Fluxus, debate has arisen among Fluxusartists and historians about Maciunas’s proper title and evenwhether he warrants the description of “founder” or “leader.”For simplicity’s sake, Maciunas is often called an artist, but therole he adopted among artists resists this classification. As atrained graphic designer with broad political ambitions,Maciunas’s Fluxus work—designing posters, flyers, and labels;compiling editions and multiples; drawing up calendars ofactivities; writing and circulating “news (policy) letters”; andplanning and directing concerts—suggests a complex and hybrid“authorial” model that would suspend the term artist or revealit to be irrelevant. Rather than imposing conventional oranachronistic characterizations onto the figure of Maciunas, asdebates about his proper title in Fluxus would do, it wouldseem more useful to examine the hybrid role he devised forhimself, and its fundamental motivations. Maciunas sought toposition the art produced under the banner of Fluxus such thatit would take on what he saw as an historically urgent role.

What, then, would be the significance, in 1962, of interveningin an existing field of artistic production while relinquishingthe role of artist? What can be made of the fact that Maciunassaw as his most essential task to remain a graphic designer andto use systematic design principles to organize and frame themeans of production of a particular group of artists? Why thezealous performance of propagandist and the exhaustiveattempts to shore up an identity for this ephemeral work andits politics? At the height of his powers as Fluxus’s chief organizer, many of the artists vehemently contested the leftist

58 Grey Room 33

language that Maciunas was using to speak on their behalf. Hecalled for a “United Front,” announced “revolution” and “purg-ing,” unilaterally produced manifestos (which nobody signed),and chose the LEF group of Soviet productivists as his point ofreference at a moment when this project was hardly known inthe United States.1 Almost all the formats Maciunas selectedfor Fluxus had an ancestry in leftist propaganda layouts: the poster, the broadsheet, the flyer, the manifesto, and the dia-grammatic chart.

In a well-known letter Maciunas wrote in January 1964 tothe German artist Tomas Schmit, his deep political commit-ments were clarified unequivocally in relation to the new “col-lective” he was creating:

Fluxus objectives are social (not aesthetic). They are con-nected to . . . the LEF group of 1929 [sic] in Soviet Union(ideologically) and they [are] concern[ed] with:

Gradual elimination of fine arts (music, theater, poetry,fiction, painting, sculpt—etc. etc.). This is motivated bythe desire to stop the waste of material and human resources(like yourself) and divert it to socially constructive ends.Such as [sic] applied arts would be (industrial design,journalism, architecture, engineering, graphic-typographicarts, printing, etc.) ➡ these are all most closely relatedfields to fine arts and offer best alternative profession tofine artists. (All clear until now?)

Thus Fluxus is definitely against [the] art-object asnon-functional commodity. . . .

Fluxus therefore, should tend towards [a] collectivespirit, anonymity and ANTI-INDIVIDUALISM.2

Retroactively “interpreting” the Fluxus concerts he and Schmithad been organizing over the previous year-and-a-half with thehelp of Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys, and others across Europeand, subsequently, in New York, Maciunas stated, “TheseFluxus concerts, publications etc—are at best transitional (afew years) & temporary until such time when fine art can betotally eliminated (or at least its institutional forms) and artistsfind other employment. . . . All LEF revolutionaries . . . wereworking as journalists or applied artists.”3 This letter has oftenbeen cited in the Fluxus literature as an explanation ofMaciunas’s motivations and goals. But neither its simple cita-tion nor the detailed extrapolation of its historical sourcesreveals the importance of the model for Maciunas (and forFluxus). What the LEF actually was and Maciunas’s use of theLEF reference are two very different historical objects. Weknow Maciunas was selective in his use of the Soviet example.4

However, the matter of his model’s precise historical referent isless interesting than that of the function of LEF as a signifier

Robinson | Maciunas as Producer: Performative Design in the Art of the 1960s 59

Maciunas put into play.One reason the presence of the Soviet model in Maciunas’s

representation of Fluxus has proven difficult to analyze isbecause it seems so inaccessibly other to the primary contextsfor Fluxus activities: New York as well as the major cities ofcapitalist countries in Europe, at the start of the 1960s. IfMaciunas’s reference to a 1920s Soviet avant-garde model ofartistic practice is not to be dismissed as mere folly or blindutopianism, it requires complex mediation with acute sensi-tivity both to its radical propositions and the limits of theirapplication. At the heart of this essential critical mediation is the need to recognize and distinguish Maciunas’s workfrom that of the Fluxus artists themselves, and to see his pro-ject as a contribution in its own right. This requires a focus onthe contemporary postwar context, full of its own shocks andtransformations, rather than on Maciunas’s self-cited historicalprecedents.

Adapting the Soviet Model: The Author as ProducerOne of the most important examples of the ideas of the LEFgroup being transposed to a new context is Walter Benjamin’s1934 essay “The Author as Producer.”5 Benjamin’s abidinginterest was to move the “cultural producer” to be conscious ofactual “production” and to create out of that consciousness andthose real conditions.6 The author’s responsibility, accordingto Benjamin, is to acknowledge that from the outset he or shemakes a choice whether to side with the proletariat. Benjamin’sfocus is the literary author, but the importance for an “artist”-as-producer is easily seen.

“The Author as Producer” opens with a penetrating critiqueof the autonomous work of art. Echoing Plato, Benjamin asks,“What right does the poet have to exist?” and states that hebelieves that at certain historical moments this profound ques-tion should be posed anew. At issue was not merely the ques-tion of the poet’s existence but of his or her autonomy and thatof the work. The challenge Benjamin put to the author was toenvisage the relationship of the work within the conditions ofproduction, rather than relating to them, from a safe (critical)distance. Benjamin lambastes the existing (bourgeois) frame-works of literary production, specifically the newspaper andthe book, for commodifying—via structure and convention—even the most politically committed content:

the bourgeois apparatus of production and publicationcan assimilate astonishing quantities of revolutionarythemes—indeed, can propagate them without calling itsown existence, and the existence of the class that owns it,seriously into question. . . . I define the “hack writer” as a

68 Grey Room 33

Brecht’s distancing effect, as an important starting point for theinevitable removal of the author. He describes such a shift (andmediation) of the basis for creative energy in terms that echothose of Fluxus:

The fact is (or, it follows) that writing can no longer des-ignate an operation of . . . representation, “depiction” (asthe Classics would say); rather, it designates exactly whatlinguists . . . call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclu-sively given in the first person and in the present tense) inwhich the enunciation has no other content (contains noother proposition) than the act by which it is uttered—something like the I declare of kings . . . .40

If writing is always already performative for Barthes—as art is always already the product of a performative act forDuchamp—Fluxus’s move was to further politicize this condi-tion by thrusting the object, the action, the text, and the perfor-mance, into the arena of performativity.

Performativity has been a key element in Fluxus, but itsactual operation has often been obscured in its critical confla-tion with performance. While “performance” is simply a genreof the visual arts, “performativity” denotes something different.In the context of the Fluxus concerts, with the language of thescore split from the spectrum of its potential interpretations, adegree of performativity is discovered in the realm of perfor-mance. Judith Butler’s definition of performativity—as the actof altering or undoing certain semantic conditions or conven-tions through their own means and terminologies—extendsBarthes’s “performative” in a manner that is useful for clarify-ing the distinction between performance and performativitycrucial to Fluxus.41

Over the course of a year, Maciunas brought the name Fluxusfrom the status of an idea (for another anthology of scores or ajournal) toward its final meaning, affirming a politics, which herecognized in the work of a particular group of artists. The con-certs in Düsseldorf, Copenhagen, and Paris began to establisha Fluxus identity, and Maciunas worked to augment this iden-tity at all levels—logistically, through his exhaustive planning,and graphically, through his designs of the different posters foreach city. Immediately following Wiesbaden concerts, Maciunasjettisoned the German title, and the attachment to New Music,adopting a name that would work at all venues: the faux-LatinFestum Fluxorum.

Manifesting FluxusFor Düsseldorf, Maciunas produced the now-famous FluxusManifesto (1963). This was prompted by Joseph Beuys, whowas based in Düsseldorf and had been enlisted by Maciunas to

Robinson | Maciunas as Producer: Performative Design in the Art of the 1960s 69

help with organization; Beuys felt that the group needed someformal declaration of their project.42 Anticipating Barthes’sidea of a “ready-formed dictionary,” Maciunas mailed Beuys aclipping of the dictionary definition of the word “flux,” ren-dered negative (as white on black). By the time of the concert,Maciunas had amended the definition by interspersing the dic-tionary text with his own handwritten statements. This mani-festo entered Fluxus performance literally, as hundreds ofcopies were thrown to the Düsseldorf audience.

Although reproduced numerous times, Maciunas’s mani-festo has rarely been analyzed beyond its overt content. As astructural intervention into the function of language/represen-tation, it remains one of the earliest and most important docu-ments Maciunas used to initiate and define Fluxus. It did notmatter that no one added his or her signature as an endorse-ment of the manifesto’s ideas. The important thing for Maciunaswas that being defined and presented as such, he could projectmanifesto-like energy onto Fluxus.

The most striking aspect of the single-page document is thecollaged layout of two types of text, establishing a stark con-trast between the “institutional” format of the dictionary (inreverse, white on black), and the graffito-like intervention ofMaciunas’s own handwriting (black on white), which pulseswith arbitrary uppercasing and punctuation marks. On asemantic level, words like purge, promote, and fuse, present inthe dictionary text, are transformed into imperatives in thehandwritten segments. Echoing the functionand stakes of the document’s performance con-text, the scale, arrangement, and emphasis ofthe parts mobilize various orders of meaning,oscillating between the “objective” givens andtheir “subjective” interpretations. The wordsin the manifesto are activated, graphically andsemantically, to refunction the meanings thatcirculate around them—evoking a tentative,projective (and performative) idea of “Fluxus.”

The dictionary excerpts give the primarydefinitions of “flux” as follows: “To affect, orbring to a certain state, by subjecting to, ortreating with, a flux. ‘Fluxed into another world,’”and then the “Med[ical]: To cause a dischargefrom, as in purging. . . . A flowing or fluid dis-charge from the bowels or other part: esp., anexcessive and morbid discharge.” Below thefirst collaged strip of dictionary type areMaciunas’s handwritten additions: “Purge theworld of bourgeois sickness, ‘intellectual,’ pro-fessional & commercialized culture.” The next

George Maciunas. Manifesto,1963. Offset on paper, 81⁄4 x 57⁄8 in.The Gilbert and Lila SilvermanFluxus Collection, Detroit.

70 Grey Room 33

dictionary segment makes the transition to a more poetic mean-ing, conjuring the term’s sense of dynamism: “Act of flowing: acontinuous moving on or passing by, as of a flowing stream.” Asif to demonstrate the “readymade” character of words, showingthat the very same word can be deployed for opposite func-tions, Maciunas selects particular words and converts them tohis purposes (moving to uppercase): “PROMOTE A REVOLU-TIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART, Promote living art, anti-art, promote NON ART REALITY to be fully grasped by allpeoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals.” Finally,to the secondary definition of flux as “fusion,” Maciunassutures his own alternative definition: “FUSE the cadres of cul-tural, social & political revolutionaries into united front action.”

Beyond the manifesto’s intricate linguistic operations, thestrangeness of Maciunas’s language as it must have struck thegroup—consisting of young artists from capitalist countries,both Americans and Europeans—is important. That Maciunas,in concerts in postwar Germany gathering free, young artists,would purport to summon and speak for them through suchextreme and patently anachronistic political terms, whichmust have seemed like so much jargon, deserves attention.Maciunas had always learned quickly (his radicalization interms of art had occurred in a matter of months). In the case ofthe manifesto, it seems that he sensed the (political/ performa-tive) scope of the collision of language and meaning(s) in thearena of performance as it was being demonstrated by the artistsin the concerts: the way the body, the context, and the contin-gency of events could redefine any given text. Clearly, he wasconvinced that the terminology of the manifesto would have

the impact he desired, which would not be lit-eral but could perhaps be performative. Havingleaned on the institutional authority of dictio-nary definitions, Maciunas retooled the keystructures out of which meaning is producedand forged his “revolutionary” term Fluxus.

The manifesto alluded to the gap betweenthe linguistic and the bodily by moving fromthe most blatant level of content, albeit of apointedly extremist kind, to introduce thenotion of the “sickness” of bourgeois cultureand the need for it to be “purged.” Although theterm “purge” evokes revolutionary discourse,in this context it becomes specifically bodily.Just as the bodies of the artists on stage couldchange the reality of the textual score, so thefully elaborated sense of “Fluxus” had to bedefined in bodily terms. Maciunas evoked thisin the manifesto by referring to a rupturing of

George Maciunas. Negative (definition of Fluxus), 1963. The Gilbert and Lila SilvermanFluxus Collection, Detroit.

Robinson | Maciunas as Producer: Performative Design in the Art of the 1960s 71

the discrete boundaries of the body, bringing the inside out ina manner that has remained perplexing for many. He forged aparticular critical nexus between language, the body, and thecontingency of enactment.

Whereas Barthes invokes the performative in the realm oflanguage, Butler demonstrates how the concept of performa-tivity can be more broadly elaborated.43 According to Butler,taboos and boundaries, the very boundaries of the body, are thelimits of the social. The aptness of the term Fluxus, defined as aviolent bodily reaction against culture, is captured in Butler’sstatement, “If the body is synecdochal for the social system perse or a site in which open systems converge, then any kind ofunregulated permeability constitutes a site of pollution andendangerment.”44 For Maciunas, such threats to the systemwere desirable, and the body was clearly implicated as muchas language in the effort to construct them.

Drawing on Michel Foucault, Butler states, “the body is theinscribed surface of events,” history’s “essential and repressivegesture.”45 She identifies the domain of the social in which thebody is situated: “cultural values emerge as the result of aninscription on the body, understood as a medium, indeed, ablank page; in order for this inscription to signify, however, thatmedium must itself be destroyed—that is, fully transvaluatedinto a sublimated domain of values.”46 If a kind of nihilisticsubjection of the body (reified or blown apart by history) wasan important feature of early Dada, then the more administra-tive or institutional subjection of the socially inscribed body, asindicated by Butler, is arguably at the heart of Fluxus.47 Thisnew, institutionalized sphere of subjection is paralleled in theperformance space (which is also, potentially, a performativespace) that Maciunas organized. This performance/performa-tive space was the “theater” in which Maciunas produced apaper trail of documents, as if to inscribe the “transformationof functions” he saw going on, that it might not be lost in thechaotic and ephemeral field of contingent bodily action.

In addressing the imposition of social control, of legislativeperformances upon the body and, by extension, sexuality andgender, Maciunas raised an issue that had been a subject in artat least since Duchamp. But from the relatively sublimated terrain of Duchampian strategies, a shift occurs in Maciunas’sturn to the visceral attack of a “morbid discharge.” The latter,as a definition of Fluxus, as much as the utopian verbiage of“cadres” and “revolutionaries,” serves to detonate the systemof repression evoked by the words “bourgeois culture.” Butlerargues that the very notion of a “discrete subject” is con-structed on the basis of exclusion, impenetrability, and the setting of civilized boundaries in opposition to an unwieldy“other”: “The ‘abject’ designates that which has been expelled

72 Grey Room 33

from the body, discharged as excrement, literally rendered‘Other.’ This appears as an expulsion of alien elements, but thealien is effectively established through this expulsion.”48

Examples of this kind of rupture abound in Fluxus perfor-mance, from Paik’s “Fluxus Champion” score—requiring allperformers/contestants to urinate into a central bucket whilesinging their respective national anthems, with the longest last-ing being the winner—to Maciunas’s packaged and labeled col-lections of excrement (from various animals).

Butler’s argument about the function of the abject allows usto better understand Maciunas’s deployment of the name “Fluxus,”including the performance of its definition through the mani-festo design: with the variously scaled and otherwise differen-tiated lettering (print and handwritten), as well as the manifestinstability of words such as purge contributing to the con-vulsive transformation of language, it shifts from a politicalsense to a metaphorics of the body. Such a metaphorics (whichwould include Butler’s bodily boundaries as the limits of thesocial) also suggests plausible motivations for the utterly arrest-ing—and still hardly understood—postcard Maciunas wrote toYoung in July 1962 announcing that he had designed the firstFluxus prospectus “as a tight roll for rectal insertion” to bepackaged in an enema box.49 While some have reduced this toMaciunas’s “toilet” humor, when read with Butler the strategybecomes apparent: the purpose of such forceful and incongru-ous language seems an apt method for asserting the agency andsociopolitical disruption he intended through Fluxus.50

This idea announced the next strategy Maciunas wouldembark upon for Fluxus, which once again deployed design,but also packaging, and the concept of mass production. Workingon boxed editions of scores, such as George Brecht’s Water

Robinson | Maciunas as Producer: Performative Design in the Art of the 1960s 73

Yam (1963) and Fluxus I (1964), Maciunas saw that Fluxusshould not only evoke a clash between text and performance,or merely the functions of performative text, but that it had tofurther implicate the object world. In particular, it had tobecome involved in the actual means of production by whichthe art object had already, irreversibly, been redefined. DuringMaciunas’s final months in Europe in 1963, he wrote to RobertWatts saying, “Now . . . how about . . . boxes. I mean we couldpublish a 100 [sic] boxes each containing objects which youwould ‘mass produce’ like in a factory.” Later in the letter hereiterates his idea to “start a factory!”51

Fluxus ProductionUpon his return to the United States, Maciunas moved into awarehouse in the abandoned “trenches” of industrial NewYork. The space at 359 Canal Street would be the site of Fluxusperformances and the location where Maciunas would realizehis vision of Fluxus as mass production, disseminated througha venue he named the “Fluxshop.”52 Calling on artists to keepsupplying him with ideas to be produced “by Fluxus,” Maciunasassembled collections of games and scores with all manner ofinexplicable objects, using readymade items purchased onCanal Street, which he packaged and labeled. Having estab-lished the infrastructure to assemble these products on demand,Maciunas used the Canal Street post office as the auxiliary tohis mail-order “business.”

The labels he developed turned each artist’s name into akind of “brand.” Generated with scrupulous economy, he var-iegated letters, changing their scale by photostatic enlargement,and printed them in black and white. Reiterating the initial dic-tates of Maciunas’s letter to Schmit, Barbara Moore has written

Opposite: George Maciunas.Design for George Brecht’s collected scores, Water Yam,1963. The Gilbert and LilaSilverman Fluxus Collection,Detroit.

Below: George Maciunas. Design for Fluxus I, 1964.Collected scores. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman FluxusCollection, Detroit.

74 Grey Room 33

that by his own admission Maciunas’s visual solutions “should beconsidered utilitarian rather than poetic.”53 While the label designssatisfied Maciunas’s concern with efficiency, they also served hispolitical ends of making art confront commodification by inge-niously serving only some of the functions of the logo. Like alogo or product label, Maciunas’s packaging created an appealfor the object through design. But a label must also seduce bythe simplicity or clarity of its message, by how expeditiously itconveys a sense of the anticipated experience of the product, asif that experience is somehow contained in the design.

Maciunas’s logos defeated their purpose. Fluxus labelsthrived on being cryptic, on forcing the “consumer” to have tothink and work out their meaning. One example is the particu-larly efficient logo for Yoko Ono, a set of axial lines superim-posed to spell out the letters of the artist’s name. In a mannerrelated to the function of a score, which must be read andenacted, even if only in the mind, this cryptic letteringaddressed Maciunas’s concern to generate an active rather thana passive subject of design.

George Maciunas. Fluxus artists’ name labels, 1964–65. The Gilbert and Lila SilvermanFluxus Collection, Detroit.

Robinson | Maciunas as Producer: Performative Design in the Art of the 1960s 75

Performative DesignIf the difference between a text and its interpretation that waselaborated in the enactment of Fluxus scores evinced thepotential for what might be called “performative performance,”the void established between packaging and “product” inMaciunas’s Fluxus production might be understood as perfor-mative design: a model of design that subverts its conventionalfunction to political ends. Maciunas’s stated goal was to reducethe “value” of art “by making it unlimited, mass-produced,obtainable by all and eventually produced by all.”54 This heaccomplished by confusing the codes of art and the commod-ity. The work submitted by Fluxus artists consisted largely ofideas, games, events, or actions, eschewing any particular real-ization within a defined artistic medium. Maciunas understoodthat by packaging this work and branding it “Fluxus,” he couldframe the politics at the heart of such humble objects and ideas,while at the same time contributing his own work to the mean-ing of Fluxus. He saw that he could serve a larger “mission”: toevoke the tautology of artistic production—reified, and alwaysalready a commodity like any other—a status the market wasrapidly cementing.55 Ratcheting up the stakes of what he under-stood as the deeply “concrete” statement of the Duchampianreadymade—to calibrate the readymade to the order of 1960sproduction—Maciunas made nonfunctional commodities,whereby the idea, presumably what people were buying, wassubjected to the order of the commodity, and art was subjectedto the fallacy of actual consumption.56 His 1964 label and packaging design for Mieko Shiomi’s score, Water Music, forinstance, adopts the classic consumer strategy of combiningthe esoteric and the mundane (the score for Water Music andbottled water) while introducing a degree of mystification intothe prospect of consumption: Can we imbibe a score? Is thewater itself music?

The impact of Maciunas’s labeling of Fluxus objects is dra-matically demonstrated in before-and-after views of Ay-O’sFinger Box (1964). Playing upon the subject’s irresistible desireto touch, Ay-O’s box features a finger-size hole with varioushidden materials placed inside (the materials, such as a nylonstocking, rubber, or nails, were different in each box) to chal-lenge tactile perception. If the finger box, Ay-O’s invention, wasalready a brilliant joke on tactility and perhaps even the sexu-ality of the subject, its transformation by Maciunas’s designunderscored the fact that those are the first details of humanityto be erased by spectacle. Maciunas’s reifying design convertedthe strange pierced box into a flashy product: stacking the let-ters of the artist’s “name,” with the “O” echoing the hole on topand uniting the animated letters spelling out “Finger Box” and“Tactile Box” with “Fluxshop.” This visual encryption of

Top: George Maciunas. Name label for Yoko Ono, ca. 1965. The Gilbert and LilaSilverman Fluxus Collection,Detroit.

Bottom: George Maciunas.Design for Mieko (Chieko)Shiomi’s Water Music, 1964. The Gilbert and Lila SilvermanFluxus Collection, Detroit.

76 Grey Room 33

Ay-O’s box, and its beckoning hole, parodied the codes of massproduction while desublimating the ocular address of the com-modity. In its raw state, Ay-O’s Finger Box might ultimately havebeen dismissed as an eccentric and largely illegible item ofFluxus pranksterism, its unassuming form proposing an actionthat seems like a futile one-liner. However, with the additionof Maciunas’s label the object becomes something else—bothmore hermetic and more effective.

Labeling was at the heart of Maciunas’s performative design.His “transformation of functions” began with the function ofthe label. If the label could be so effective in the operations ofthe commodity, why not have it function in the service of theanticommodity as well? Maciunas’s work on Ay-O’s FingerBox, like all the other Maciunas-designed labeling for the objects,scores, ideas, and games by Fluxus artists, turns the creative actinto an aspect of marketing, preserving the pathos of what isbeing inexorably lost as subjects are replaced by objects.57

Remnants of performance are preserved, as the cue of the scorebecomes the address of the label, in the new condition of“packaged experience.”

Revolutionary DesignA particularly clear and astute testimony to Maciunas’s com-mitment to design as a political practice appeared in the pam-phlet, Communists Must Give Revolutionary Leadership inCulture (1966), written by Henry Flynt with some appendicesand the design by Maciunas. This document/design objectstands as a kind of blueprint providing at once a model for“ideal” approaches to design and a gloss on the rationale behindMaciunas’s life-long work. Although everything produced by Maciunas exemplified engaged design principles, theRevolutionary Leadership pamphlet attested in explicit termsto the breadth and seriousness of his project. The text—which,though written by Flynt, had parts contributed by Maciunas—

Below: Ay-O prototype for Finger Box and Maciunas designfor Ay-O’s Finger Box, 1964. The Gilbert and Lila SilvermanFluxus Collection, Detroit.

Opposite: George Maciunas.Design for Maciunas/Henry Flynt, Communists Must GiveRevolutionary Leadership inCulture, 1966. Private collection.

Robinson | Maciunas as Producer: Performative Design in the Art of the 1960s 77

conducted a systematic appraisal of the political and socialimplications of contemporary design within the apparatus of cul-ture, spanning an extraordinary spectrum of fields from archi-tecture to music to cinema to cars.58 The careful analysis of allthese examples asks the reader to consider, and even learn to iden-tify, efficient and egalitarian design and production procedures.

The format of the Revolutionary Leadership pamphlet isunique in that it exemplifies the efficiency of design called forin the text. Featuring what had by that time become Maciunas’ssignature, the sans-serif typeface produced on his IBM Executivetypewriter, the pamphlet was printed on a broadsheet-sizepage. The sheet was then folded against a piece of polystyreneseveral inches thick (a sample of the building material thatMaciunas proposed to use in his mass-produced housing designas described in the text), and both were encased in translucentplastic to form a packet that could be used for mailing.

One section certainly contributed by Maciunas is titled“Note on the Graphics”; it explains the efficiency rationalebuilt into the very object the reader has to contemplate whiletaking in the information about efficient design, and showshow it can be variously transformed, including by transform-ing the broadsheet into a poster:

A colored stock, which is more rugged and durable thannewsprint, but costs as little because itis not bleached, is used.

One type is used throughout. Largersizes are obtained by photo-staticenlargement. Costs and arbitrary styl-istic choices are eliminated.

The text fills one conveniently sizedsheet. It is thus uniform with the appen-dices, which must be on large sheets.Costs of cutting, binding and blankpaper for page margins are eliminated.Text and appendices can also be dis-played as posters. . . .

The expanded polystyrene and trans- lucent plastic samples, which have tobe included to illustrate Appendix 2,are utilized to form permanent backand front covers and a mailing container.

The folding system and size whenfolded are such that the title sectioncan be shown through the translucentfront cover.

While we have become familiar withdesign formats as sophisticated as (and

78 Grey Room 33

more so than) this one, it is still all but unheard of for the modelsto be explained much less justified to their users. The explana-tion of the format empowers the reader, allowing her or him tohold a design object in hand and know why all its details arethus. The explanation, and the package itself, may also allowreaders to appreciate how they, too, could undertake to makeefficient, egalitarian objects.

The organization through design that was Maciunas’s life-long project for Fluxus and the critical awareness that theRevolutionary Leadership pamphlet exhorts and enacts revealdesign strategies in art that can be considered “performative.”Just as the almost tautological notion of “performative perfor-mance” deploys the structure and convention imposed uponthe “administered” subject of language back upon the institu-tion of language—precisely in order to question social controlof the subject—so, too, does such an actively critical designpractice constitute a similar model of quasi-mimetic resistanceto the regime of design culture. A design performative acknowl-edges design as a code, one that is accepted by the masses andeven enjoyed as entertainment, but a code that can nonethelessbe scrambled by oppositional codes that are able to act in sim-ilar ways. “Performativity” here denotes a new approach toartistic practice in the 1960s that focused on the means of pro-duction and came about amidst an escalated consumer culture.

Design Performatives in the Art of the 1960sBenjamin’s model of the “author as producer” is inherentlyperformative. He saw the urgency to “transcend specializationin the process of intellectual production” in order to make theauthor’s work “politically useful.” He argued that if this wereachieved, the author as producer might discover solidaritywith certain other producers who might initially haveappeared not to concern her or him. In regard to design perfor-matives in the art of the 1960s, Maciunas was not alone in seizing upon such a new “author” role, one that transcendedspecialization. The appropriateness of such a model was rec-ognized by a contemporary with whom Maciunas has rarelybeen compared: Andy Warhol.

The fact that both Maciunas and Warhol conceived of thesites of their production as “factories” is hardly coincidental;nor is the fact that both trained and worked as graphic designers,bringing this expertise to the context of art. Maciunas’s performative performance of the left-wing zealot, proclaimingCommunist values and obsessed with converting art into fac-tory production, can hardly be seen as more eccentric thanWarhol’s factory production championed by the statement “I want to be a machine.” Both saw the direction of art and production as it was being transformed in their midst, though

Robinson | Maciunas as Producer: Performative Design in the Art of the 1960s 79

they differed on whether this called for a performance of actionor putative passivity. As Warhol explained,

Someone said that Brecht wanted everybody to thinkalike. I want everybody to think alike. But Brecht wantedto do it through Communism, in a way. Russia is doing itunder government. It’s happening here all by itself withoutbeing under a strict government; so if it’s working with-out trying, why can’t it work without being Communist?Everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we’re gettingmore and more that way.59

Although both Maciunas and Warhol adopted enactments of“factory production,” they chose to adopt opposite self-styledimages that corresponded to the actual subject of their work. Inall his work for Fluxus, Maciunas’s “subject” was “produc-tion,” while the long-standing theme of Warhol’s own state-ments and sound bites, the subject of his production, wasconsumption. In choosing the uniquely perceptive stance of aradically revised author role and the concomitant subjection ofart to the codes of mass production, both Maciunas and Warholsaw that even the most radical qualification and disavowal ofthe old author/artist model presented choices. If Warhol’s well-known performance can be characterized as that of the authoras consumer, Maciunas’s choice, equally as poignant, was theauthor as producer.