George Maciunas | Burglary Fluxkit

 

George Maciunas

Burglary Fluxkit

New York City, USA: Reflux Editions, c1981

2.2 × 10.2 × 12.1 cm.

Edition size unknown

While George Maciunas published countless boxed 'flux kits' by other artists (sometimes without their knowledge), he produced relatively few himself. His own multiple output was more likely to take the form of aprons, tattoos, face masks, stationery, postage stamps, or ping pong paddles. 

Alongside Excreta Fluxorum (varieties of animal excrement, labelled in Latin) Burglary Fluxkit is probably his best known boxed work. 

The above Reflux Edition (continued as an open edition, after his death, by Barbara Moore) is a clear compartmentalized box containing seven keys. It is packaged with a vintage Maciunas designed offset label, featuring images of tools. 

The 1971 original (see below) was sometimes clear, sometimes red, sometimes compartmentalized, other times not. The boxes contained found keys, mostly door keys but with some notable exceptions, such as a roller skate key. Kits included as many as two-dozen found keys, often broken. 

In typical Fluxus absurdist fashion, the keys are unlabelled and disconnected from their locks. The kit would prove fairly ineffective as an aid to robbery. But Mari Duvet argues in Corporate Imaginations: Fluxus Strategies for Living that the box's potential usefulness "tracked directly with Maciunas' ideas for purging the system". 

Somewhere I have a book on the subject art and theft, but I can't locate it on the shelves. If I recall correctly it features work ranging from Tom Friedman's Hot Balls to Janice Kerbel's bank heist work 15 Lombard Street. Several other artists (unwittingly or otherwise) later built upon the premise laid out by Maciunas with this work. For the rest of the week I'll post images of Artist Multiples involving keys, including projects by Douglas Gordon, Jon Sasaki, Yoko Ono, Levin Haegele, and Vienna Doria Pighin.