Fluxus 1

 

[Fluxus]

Fluxus 1

New York City, USA/Wiesbaden, Germany: Fluxus, [c1964]

53 pp., 19 x 21 cm., bound with nuts and bolts

Unlimited Edition 

Designed, edited and published by George Maciunas, this anthology work is a one of the most important documents of Fluxus (and therefore of early conceptual art, performance art, artists' books, mail art, etc. etc.). It is the first collective Fluxus publication, following the proto-Fluxus book An Anthology, which was designed by Maciunas and edited by La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low. 

The bookwork features all of the hallmarks of the subsequent Fluxus publications: an inventive format, objects, typographical experiments, event scores, etc. etc. No two copies are alike. They feature different inserts, different artists and different covers. Most, but not all, are housed in either a cardboard or wooden slipcase, which typically doubles as the book's shipping crate. 

Designed as an unlimited edition, it is unclear how many were actually produced, due to production difficulties as well as limited resources - and limited interest from buyers. Best estimates put the edition size at around two hundred copies. The books are scarce and now valued at over ten thousand dollars. I've only handled one once, years ago when I was at Art Metropole. A book scout brought it in, I took it home for the night, collated it (with the help of Fluxus expert Jon Hendricks) and we sold it the next day to the Walther Philips Gallery in Banff. 

Hendricks comments that “There are a number of variations in Fluxus 1 because it was assembled by hand over a period of perhaps 13 years. During this time Maciunas’ attitude toward certain artists and/or works in the anthology changed, some works got lost or mislaid, and others ran out of stock.” The work variously included contributions by Ay-O, George Brecht, Stanley Brouwn, Congo the Chimpanzee, Brion Gysin, Ann Halprin, Sohei Hashimoto, Dick Higgins (early copies, before an ongoing dispute with Maciunas excluded him from later issues), Hi Red Centre, Joe Jones, Alison Knowles, Takehisa Kosugi, Shigeko Kubota, György Sándor Ligeti, Jackson Mac Low, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Benjamin Patterson, Takako Saito, Tomas Schmit, Mieko Shiomi, Ben Vautier, Robert Watts, Emmett Williams and La Monte Young

The cover is typically hand-stamped and the volume held together with nuts and bolts, possibly a nod to the 1927 book Depero Futurista by Fortunato Depero. The pages are interspersed with envelopes which house printed materials and small objects, including a strip of celluloid film, a 7-inch record, a surgical glove, a mirror, a white folded paper napkin, a burnt match stick, cards, stamps, and other envelopes.  

As the Fluxus anthology that followed was titled Flux Yearbox 2 (below), Fluxus 1 is sometimes referred to as the first Yearbox. Hendricks has noted that while portions of the work were printed in Europe in 1962, fully assembled copies were probably not completed until sometime in 1964. Production continued for more than a decade, with many changes to the format and contents. 

The work warrants more than a single post, so - over the next week or so - I'll be posting the book page by page, and (where possible) will include the same works as they appeared as stand-alone projects outside of the anthology. 

“Here the book is the performance, as well as containing it, and the work achieves the Fluxus goal of making the audience member a performer through the structure of the piece. One does not ‘read’ this work, but enacts it."

- Joanna Drucker