Geoffrey Hendricks
Flux Divorce Box
New York City, USA: Fluxus, 1973
11 × 51 × 37 cm.
Edition size unknown
Ten years into their marriage, Geoff and Bici Hendricks mutually revealed to each other that they were gay, and separated. They remained close friends, and Bici Forbes Hendricks changed their name to Nye Ffarrabas.
Flux Divorce Box documents the couple’s joyous divorce. All of their shared belongings were ceremouneously sliced in two. Items from their decade-long marriage - including documents, clothing, a love seat, and their marital bed - were cut in half with scissors, a paper cutter, an ax, and a power saw.
Housed in a box crafted by a woodworking graduate student, Flux Divorce Box includes "Our Flux Divorce" which resembles a wedding album bisected horizontally. Fragments of coats, barbed wire, plastic, correspondence cut in half, and half of a wedding announcement are also included.
The documentation of the performative event is by Fluxus photographer Peter Moore. The work was distributed through Fluxus newsletters and price lists (initially offered for $300), and George Maciunas assisted with the design. His invitation to the couple’s divorce features a graphic that had previously been used on Ken Friedman’s Flux Corsage, from 1968. It too is sliced in half.
When Maciunas married in 1978, Hendricks officiated (in a clerical robe) and the event can almost be viewed as the inversion of his divorce. Hendricks told Lars Movin "Early in 1978 while George Maciunas was battling terminal cancer, he said to me "Geoff, we had your "Flux Divorce", we should also have a "Flux Wedding". He wanted to have a Flux Wedding with Billie Hutching, who he was with, and he wanted me to be 'minister’."
I visited Hendricks’ home in the nineties and he showed me this extraordinary work. I asked how many were produced and he replied “ Not a lot. They were all hand done. There's one in the Silverman collection, there's one in the Jean Brown collection that's now in the Getty. Francesco Conz has one, Barbara Moore. Not many more than that.”
I recall him showing me images of the Maciunas wedding, including one of a chair that had been sliced in half and then tied back together again, reinforcing the idea of marriage as an inverse to a divorce.
The above copy of Flux Divorce Box is from the Conz collection, and differs in size slightly from the one that MoMA acquired (the dimensions of which are listed as 39.7 x 50.6 x 10.5 cm., see below).
From an Oral history interview with Geoffrey Hendricks, 2016 August 17-18:
GEOFFREY HENDRICKS: With our 10th wedding anniversary coming along, it was like, How do we celebrate it? Because we were both, you know, queer and involved with others, and I just sort of tossed out the idea, what about a Flux-divorce? And it sort of resonated, and I said, "Let me talk to George Maciunas." And so I talked to George. He was absolutely thrilled and so he did a lot of the orchestrating of it, and figuring out how to divide up the house with a wall of cardboard boxes to separate one half of the room. For another, barbed wire between the living room and the kitchen island in the middle of the—before the dining room.
[...]
And then upstairs in the bedroom, we had a division of property and with a paper cutter, we cut our wedding document in half, the wedding invitation, some correspondence that was sort of symbolic. And then with, I guess, a utility knife, cut the mattress in half with scissors and ripped the sheets in half. And then I had this circular saw and cut the wooden platform of the bed in half. And there was a wicker loveseat that I chopped in half. So this was the division of property and we tore our wedding garments in half.
LINDA YABLONSKY: Was this documented?
GEOFFREY HENDRICKS: There's some documentation of it.
LINDA YABLONSKY: Photographs or video?
GEOFFREY HENDRICKS: Yeah, Peter Moore took photographs. And there are maybe some others. I don't know that there's video, but then I made a Flux–Divorce Box so that I have this as an object. And there are copies of it in, I guess, in MoMA and the Getty and the Sohm [Archive] collection in Stuttgart, and sort of, you know, there may be half a dozen key Fluxus collection series.
LINDA YABLONSKY: It sounds like it sets quite a precedent for Gordon Matta-Clark.
GEOFFREY HENDRICKS: [Laughs.] Yeah, right, well—
LINDA YABLONSKY: Remember he split the house—
GEOFFREY HENDRICKS: Oh, yeah, no, I know.
