Fluxus Threads in Eastern EuropeBy Magdalena Moskalewicz, Christian Rattemeyer Posted on

July 28, 2015.

Fluxus was an art of distribution, of experimentation, and of participation. It abhorred finiteness, monumentality, and academicism, and it envisioned a creative enveloping of all aspects of life. But was Fluxus an Eastern European invention? An easy answer could be found in the fact that the movement’s self-proclaimed chairman, George Maciunas, was Lithuanian born; but more to the point, very few other cultural movements seem to share a spirit so in tune with the political, social, and cultural realities of Eastern Europe during the Cold War, and yet are so clearly intended to express the opposite. That, for Maciunas, Fluxus was also a desired tool for commerce (a spectacular failure at that, it must be said) is beside the point. It was an art that celebrated the illogical, the confounding, the ad hoc, and the improvised, all the while adhering to a rather strict and very well designed sense of instructional obedience. Where, if not behind the Iron Curtain, could the paradoxes of freedom and instruction, logic and creativity, ephemerality and dissemination, provinciality and universalism that were Fluxus be better understood?

And how to tell the story of the presence of Fluxus in the former Eastern Europe? One way is to start with George Maciunas’s infamous letter to Nikita Khrushchev from 1962, sent when the movement barely existed. There, Maciunas describes the “fusion and unity” between the revolutionary Soviet society and the international community of revolutionary artists, seeking the first secretary of the Communist Party’s “esteemed auspices” and his political leadership for “the [forthcoming] programme under the name of FLUXUS.” (The letter remained unanswered.) Another would be Maciunas’s never-realized Eastern European Fluxus Year Box, planned for its #6 or #7 issue, discussed by Maciunas with his acquaintances from the region. The most prominent narrative written from the Western European perspective chronicles the trip that Tony and Eric Andersen took in 1964 from Copenhagen to Warsaw, Krakow, Prague, Brno, Bratislava, Budapest, Lviv, Kiev, Moscow and Leningrad, where they gave concerts and distributed Fluxus materials

in the mode of the early avant-garde agitprop tours (the only, if partial, realization of Maciunas’s plan for an “exhibit-tour” through the USSR, which he outlines in the aforementioned letter.)

But there are many more stories specific to particular countries of the former Soviet Block and their art scenes, which were affiliated with the “orthodox” Fluxus to various extents. In Prague, Aktual Art group was active since 1962, and its leader Milan Knížák was later nominated the “Director of Fluxus East” by Maciunas. In Warsaw, the director of Polish Radio Experimental Studio, Józef Patkowski, was in touch with multiple experimental composers and musicians around the world since the 1950s—his name appears in the earliest Fluxus newsletters and brochures. Another Pole Jarosław Kozłowski later established an international network of artists, NET, which intersected with that of Fluxus. In Vilnius, then part of the USSR, Maciunas’s childhood friend Vytautas Landsbergis organized an early Fluxus concert in 1966. There were multiple links and mutual inspirations that traveled across borders in both directions—East and West; many of them loose and open enough to be hard to classify. Artists shared creative strategies and personal attitudes regardless of denomination. Belonging to Fluxus “was not like being recruited to the US Army,” as one of our interviewees, the Yugoslav film critic Branko Vučićević, graphically put it. That is why this edited set of materials is called “Fluxus threads,” stressing bilateral connections and recurring artistic strategies, rather than one all-encompassing or dominant narrative.

Many artists featured here knew each other through direct correspondence or from the widely circulated Fluxus newsletter. But this particular selection of materials, interviews, and works owes its structure to the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection, the biggest existing collection of Fluxus, gathered and organized by Jon Hendricks for the Silverman family in Detroit from the late 1970s on. When in 2008 more than eight thousand objects entered MoMA’s holdings, among them were art pieces and documents by Eastern European artists that the museum had not collected before. The story of Fluxus-related art in the former Soviet Block is told here through objects in this very collection, while the interview with Jon Hendricks about the strategies and politics of making the Silverman Collection provides a necessary background for this particular selection.

Materials gathered here include newly commissioned essays; interviews conducted in Vilnius, Prague, Belgrade and New York; as well as artworks, magazines and archival material from the Silverman Collection that have been imaged and are published for the first time. These contents, to be released gradually in the next months, have been developed since 2012 by a group of MoMA-based curators and researchers with the help of our Czech and Polish guests and colleagues, who visited the Museum as a part of the C-MAP research initiative. We hope they will serve as basis for further research on the experimental art in the former Eastern Europe.

—Magdalena Moskalewicz and Christian Rattemeyer, Editors

Fluxus Threads in Eastern Europe was started on: July 28, 2015Latest Activity: December 18, 2015

Keywords: Vilnius, BUDAPEST, PRAGUE, Belgrade, Warsaw, ZagrebRelated Themes: Polish Radio Experimental Studio: A Close Look

ABOUT POST

ESSAYS

Milan Knížák’s "Destroyed Music"By Magnus Schaefer

INTERVIEWS

"By the way, what's Fluxus?": Jon Hendricks on the Formation of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus CollectionBy Kim Conaty, Jon HendricksSince around 1977 when Gilbert and Lila Silverman began to develop their Fluxus Collection, Jon Hendricks has played a central role in fostering the formation of that renowned collection that...

ARTIST PRACTICES

“Away with Pleasant Frivolity in Art!”: The Aktual Group and Its Magazine Aktualní UmêníBy Kim ConatyAktualní umêní (Contemporary Art), a rare, hand-assembled magazine by the Czech artists’ group of the same name, began production in late 1964. In it, the newly founded group—including Milan...

INTERVIEWS

Shared Language: Interview with Jarosław KozłowskiBy Jarosław Kozłowski, Magdalena MoskalewiczWhen in 1971 Jarosław Kozłowski sent a manifesto of NET to over 350 addresses of artists and critics around the world, his intention was to create an open network for the communication of art...

SOURCES

A Fluxus BibliographyBy Allie Tepper

CURATED SELECTIONS

Festum Fluxorum: Posters of Fluxus FestivalsBy Emily Edison

ESSAYS

Milan Knížák and Ken Friedman: Keeping Together Manifestations in a Divided WorldBy Tomáš Pospiszyl

ARTIST PRACTICES

Sonia Švecová’s "Striptease" and International Artistic Networks

By Kim Conaty

INTERVIEWS

“Revolution Not Only In The Arts, But In Connection.” Interview with Vytautas LandsbergisBy Christophe Cherix, Jon Hendricks,Vytautas Landsbergis

LOCAL REPORTS

A Walk Through Prague with Jiří KovandaBy Pavlina Morganova

ARTIST PRACTICES

Milan Knížák's Performance Files

By Kim Conaty

INTERVIEWS

An Interested Observer: Interview with Branko VučićevićBy Jon Hendricks, Branko Vučićević,Gretchen Wagner

NETWORK

Jon Hendricks

Branko Vučićević

Gretchen Wagner

Kim Conaty

Christophe Cherix

Vytautas Landsbergis

Pavlina Morganova

Jarosław Kozłowski

Magdalena Moskalewicz

Tomáš Pospiszyl

Christian Rattemeyer

Allie Tepper

Emily Edison

Magnus Schaefer