Colby Chamberlain | Fluxus Administration

Colby Chamberlain

Fluxus Administration

Chicago, USA: University of Chicago Press, 2024

280 pp., 23.5 x 18.5 x 2.5 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

Note: this book arrived yesterday and I’m only a chapter in. A full review may follow, later. 

The first page of Fluxus Administration is a reproduction of the brief artist biographies from the 8th issue of Aspen magazine (see previous post), including Richard Serra, Steve Reich, Phillip Glass, Yvonne Rainer, Dan Graham and Ed Ruscha. Virtually all of them follow the classic conventions of the curriculum vitae, stating where they were born, where they studied, where they have shown their work, what collections have bought their work, and what publications have featured their practice. 

For author Colby Chamberlain, this approach “tether[s] a body to the state” and then cedes power to the institutions many of these artists were seemingly antagonistic towards: universities, art galleries, museums and magazines.

The short biography in Aspen for George Maciunas is a dispassionate list that includes his social security number, bank account number, passport number, driver’s license, blood type, and various other bureaucratic biographical data. 

Chamberlain wonders if this is a “deadpan provocation or a serious joke” and then acknowledges that the book he is authoring faces related problems regarding the nature of biography and institution. 

He writes: "For histories of the avant-garde, the institution of art is also the horizon of political praxis, the framing condition that must be attacked, interrogated, or escaped."

With the exception of (Fluxus Artist) Yoko Ono, I have probably read more biographies of George Maciunas than any other person.1 No less than three of them are titled Mister Flux/us (including a collective portrait edited by Emmett Williams, and a children’s book) indicating how difficult it is to separate Maciunas from the loose-knit collective he founded, corralled, or at least titled. 

Simply defining Maciunas’ role in the group is tricky enough. Fluxus Chairman? Flux Pope (as he was portrayed after his death in 1978)? Freelance designer (as he sometimes called himself)? Curator? Artist? 

I typically use ‘impresario' because it helps convey his role as organizer and funder, but also his enigmatic, larger than life persona. 

Performance Art would be different without Maciunas, as would Conceptual Art. Artist Multiples even more so (over five percent of the approximately five thousand posts here are Fluxus works). Maciunas has been called the "Father of SoHo" for developing dilapidated loft buildings with the aim of creating artists cooperatives. Etc. etc. 

But ‘impressario' is only useful in terms of his relationship to Fluxus. I have no compunction about calling him an artist in his own right.  I think he is easily on par with the best artists associated with the group, and Fluxus Administration makes the case that his radical approach to bureaucracy was an essential part of his own artistic exploration. 

Maciunas could also be elusive, antagonistic and irascible - making writing his biography particularly difficult. Chamberlain compounds the problem with his recognition that biography itself is both a problematic form, and ever-changing. 

Several years ago I attended a play written by a friend, and reading the short self-penned biographies of the cast and crew in the program was eye-opening. They did not shy from singing their own praises: "The best curtain-puller in Southwest Ontario!”, and other such hyperbole. 

Visual artist capsule biographies at the time were downright timid in comparison, mostly employing mealy-mouthed phrases like “is interested in” and “hopes to explore”. 

Today the self-written artist bio (I’m sitting on two juries at the moment, and can confirm the ubiquity of this trend) typically emphasize pronouns, Indigenous place names, and medical conditions. Many will use the word “settler”. 

Cree/Mohawk comedian Shawn Cuthand wrote an Op-Ed piece for the CBC a few years ago, noticing the rise of this well-intentioned trope: 

"Opening a conversation with the preface that you are a settler focuses on the past and creates a division right off the bat,” he writes. "It's like saying you're on the winning team [...] Are you trying to match some sort of intergenerational privilege to my intergenerational trauma? I don't want to trauma bond over here.” 

The term has become an instrument of penance, a contemporary hairshirt, like the perfunctory Land Acknowledgments that academia constantly trots out, in lieu of mandatory classes on Indigenous history. 

"I know I'm not alone in feeling this [discomfort with the word ’setter'],” Cuthand continues, "so I wonder who was consulted on this practice." 

In the early nineties Laurie Anderson answered an interviewer’s question about how she self-identified by saying that she considered herself an artist, a woman and a New Yorker. And that the order of the list changed constantly. 

The nature of biography itself has undergone seismic changes in the last decade - from who warrants a story, to who is permitted to tell it. 

Literary biographer Dame Hermione Lee believes that it has always been a "mongrel genre”, undergoing numerous "adolescent shifts" before evolving only in the last few decades into an acceptable "respectable form”.2

The genre reflects our shifting attitudes towards race, gender and sexuality, but also perspective. Films about serial killers are now careful to present the victims as more than crime statistics, only appearing moments before their demise. Naming the victims has become commonplace, something considered exploitative - almost blasphemous - only a decade or so ago.3

Cinematic portrayals are also beholden to essential IP (rights to music, life-rights) which are usually controlled by family estates who can dictate the parameters of the story before granting access, leading to recent sanitized accounts of Bob Marley, Freddie Mercury and Elvis4 that approach hagiography. 

In the last week, I’ve coincidentally watched three biopics: Midas Man (about Beatles manager Brian Epstein), Saturday Night (Lorne Michaels, SNL), and Lee (photographer Lee Miller). Lee is possibly the best of the three, but it still feels like the adaptation of a photo archive, entirely episodic by virtue of having to position Miller in place to take the photographs she is known for.5 

In the documentary Tish (a better film about an unheralded female photographer, see earlier post, here), an angry Tish Murtha notes in an unearthed writing that "History is so posh.”

Maciunas was anything but - he was famously thrifty and borderline impoverished for much of his life. He was known for eating the same food for breakfast, lunch and dinner to take advantage of bulk purchasing. In 1975, he was left blind in one eye after a beating arranged by an unpaid electrician. He drank tea made by submerging rope into boiling water. He proposed to Fluxus artists that they learn to write smaller on postcards, to save on stamps. A sign in his shower admonished visitors to turn off the water while shampooing. 

He is hardly a household name, but is his legacy a win for the non-posh? Not necessarily. We know about his work now because of the efforts of wealthy collectors and influential institutions. 

These are the sort of paradoxes that Chamberlain seems ready to grapple with in the remaining five chapters of Fluxus Administration (“Card Files & Charts,” “Newsletters & Postcards,” “Registrations & Catalogs,” “Plans & Budgets,” and “Prescriptions & Certificates”). 

Many artists have used the subject of bureaucracy as the starting point for their work. The genre of Institutional Critique (from Hans Haacke to Andrea Fraser to Joshua Schwebel6) is at its sharpest when it digs into the bureaucratic machinations of galleries and museums. The N.E. Thing Co. used corporate strategies to frame its artistic practice, including annexing the first floor of the National Gallery in Ottawa for their company headquarters. Before Mail Art devolved into quirky photocopied collages, it functioned as a way to challenge the governmental agency of the Post Office. Christo & Jean Claude often argued that their work was primarily about the bureaucracy necessary to wrap the Reichstag, or install 7500 fabric gates in New York’s Central Park7.

Chamberlain makes the case that George Maciunas challenged existing bureaucracies in innovative ways, often discreetly enough that we’re just learning about some of them now. 

The story of Fluxus has been told countless times, through the lens of Artist Multiples (the essential Fluxus Codex), newspapers (the new Primary Information facsimile reprint), audio (Sense Sound Sound Sense) bookworks (Fluxbooks), performance (the Fluxus Performance Workbook) as well as exhibition catalogues and general overviews8. Chamberlain has a found a new and novel entry point, building on Mari Dumett’s 2017 title Corporate Imaginations: Fluxus Strategies for Living.  

 

Fluxus Administration is well-researched, well-written, well-illustrated (including some reproductions I’ve not seen elsewhere) and features a distinct point of view. It investigates and animates its subject alongside the contradictions and compromises inherent in a retelling a life that ended almost fifty years ago. 

The handsomely designed cloth-bound book is available from the publisher here, or from Amazon, here, for only $40.00. 

1. Biography is not a genre I’m instinctively drawn to, but I’ve read musician memoirs (Kim Gordon, Morrissey, Sinead O’Connor, Kristin Hersh), biographies about enigmatic personalities (Quentin Crisp, Bern Porter, Sun Ra), books about historical monsters (Joseph Mengele, King Leopold) and other biographical accounts of artists, musicians, filmmakers, and poets (La Monte Young, Leonard Cohen, Joseph Beuys, Luis Bunuel, Vic Chestnut, Brian Eno, John Cage, etc.). 

One of my favourite biographical documentaries of late is about a biographer: the 2022 film Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb. It looks at the relationship between Caro - best known for his multi-volume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, and his long-time editor. 

2. Historian Sir G.R. Elton argued that "even at its best biography is a poor way of writing history [because] the biographer's task is to tell the story, demonstrate the personality, and elucidate the importance of one individual; he should not be concerned with the history of that individual's times except insofar as it centres upon or emanates from him. In measure as he deserts his proper subject for what concerns the historian, that subject's age, he fails in his own task.” Roland Barthes referred to the Biography genre as “the fiction that dare not speak its name”. David Nasaw called it “the profession’s unloved step-child”. 

3. Possibly the first instance of mainstream newspaper coverage received by indie rock band The Smiths was following the release of "Suffer Little Children", the closing track of their self-titled debut LP. The Manchester Evening News reported that relatives of the Moors murder victims had taken exception to the lyrics of the song, in which the victims are mentioned by name. In response, Woolworths withdrew the album, as did other retailers. Singer Morrissey later became friends with the mother of Moors victim Lesley Ann Downey, after she accepted that the band's intentions were “honourable". Now, a retelling of a crime that failed to name the victim would be viewed as glorifying the criminal. 

4. Sophia Coppola’s Priscilla was intended, I’m sure, as an antidote to the Elvis biopic the year prior. But the film begins minutes before she meets Presley and literally ends only seconds after she last drives beyond the gates of Graceland. If it was intended to present her as a person in her own right, not a pop music footnote, it didn’t succeed.

5. World War II similarly dominates the story of Lee Miller. It occupied no more than two of her seventy years, but the bulk of the screen time in Lee. This comes at the expense of an account of her time as a model for some of the country’s most successful fashion photographers; her relationships with Picasso, Henry Moore, Eileen Agar, Jean Dubuffet, Dorothea Tanning, and Max Ernst; and her romantic and professional relationship with Man Ray. She began as his apprentice and became his model, collaborator, lover and muse. Some claim his famous use of solarization was discovered by her, and that there are images credited to Man Ray that were actually her creations. None of this made it into the film. 

6. See also: Raphaël Ouellet’s From Forms to Form: Contemporary Art and the Practice of Bureaucratic Everyday Life, here. 

7. The title of the work is The Gates, Central Park, New York, 1979–2005, which refers to the time elapsed between the initial proposal and when the pair were allowed to proceed. 

8. I predict architecture next.