Festum Fluxorum: Posters of Fluxus Festivals

From its inception in 1961, Fluxus was primed to rattle the dominant artistic culture by employing radical formats and broadening the accessibility and definition of art. Early on George Maciunas, the lead organizer of this disruptive mission, proposed a series of festivals and concerts (“festival of very new music,” as he called it) to showcase new work by visual artists, poets, musicians, and filmmakers in theaters, museums, galleries, and city streets. His aspirations were far-reaching: he envisioned an international network of artists and performers who would put into question conventional categories of artistic practice while simultaneously promulgating the Fluxus name. He recounted his early motivation for the Fluxconcerts in a 1978 interview with the artist Larry Miller:

We thought well, we’ll do concerts, that’s easier than publishing and will give us propaganda like for the publication. Maybe then we’ll find people who will want to buy publications because at first we couldn’t sell Anthology [published in 1963] either, you know, so it was just accumulating at the warehouse. So then the idea was to do concerts as a promotional trick for selling whatever we were going to publish or produce. That’s how the Wiesbaden series came by and that’s the first time that it was called Fluxus Festivals. . . .
[Jon Hendricks, ed., Fluxus etc. / Addenda I: The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection (New York: Ink &, 1983), p. 15.]

Maciunas regarded the concerts, at least at the start, essentially as advertisements for Fluxus publications, showing again this interchange of artistic categories while also suggesting a more elevated role for his printed editions and ephemera.

As early as May 1962, Maciunas, as self-appointed “chairman” of the Festival Planning Committee, was writing up detailed plans for a series of traveling “Festum Fluxorum” events, complete with provisional lists of performers and programs, for concerts in as many as 16 locations around the world—from Wiesbaden and Paris to Siberia, Luxembourg, San Francisco and Montreal. The first of these concerts to bear the “Fluxus” name was Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik in Wiesbaden, Germany, in September, 1962. (Two earlier concerts, Kleinen Sommerfest: Après John Cage, at Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal, and Neo-Dada in der Musik, at the Kammerspiele, Düsseldorf, were presented respectively on June 9 and 16 of that year, but without sanctioned Fluxus titles.) More than 65 events would follow over the next 15 years, attracting not only Fluxus artists but a wide range of like-minded associates, including Arman, Joseph Beuys, Sylvano Bussotti, György Ligeti, Gustav Metzger, Dieter Roth, and Wolf Vostell. Maciunas’s close circle would expand world-wide: festivals were organized in the Netherlands by Willem de Ridder and Wim T. Schippers and in Denmark by Arthur Köpcke and Eric Andersen; Ben Vautier organized performances in Nice, and Kuniharu Akiyama and Toshi Ichiyanagi staged others in Tokyo; in Eastern Europe, collaborations took place with Milan Knížák in Czechoslovakia and Jarosław Kozłowski in Poland; and still other events were held in Great Britain, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Lithuania, Hungary, and the U.S., and elsewhere.

Given Maciunas’s interest in publishing, his trademark typography, and background in graphic design, it is not surprising that visually dynamic posters, programs, invitations, mailers, flyers, and other printed ephemera came to play an important role in these events. At times the ephemera were even incorporated into the works and performances themselves. For example, during Fluxorchestra at Carnegie Recital Hall on September 25, 1965, flyers were distributed to the audience as thrown paper airplanes. Hundreds and sometimes thousands of printed sheets were dispersed to the public during these events, in some cases following detailed instructions from Maciunas specifying their quantity, timing, and placement. The posters themselves are now seen to embody the Fluxus ideal of mass-marketed, mass-accessible and often ephemeral art.

The posters, invitations, programs, and flyers shown below have been selected to highlight the international range of Fluxus events from 1962 to 1977 and represent some of the most significant among them. During the processing and cataloguing of The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift at The Museum of Modern Art, these materials dramatically altered our usual item-by-item approach to the related photographs, objects, scores, and ephemera, prompting us to consider them in the broader and richer context of the festivals, works, performers, photographers, designers, and audience of Fluxus. Types of materials that could be considered marginal prove to be essential in forming an understanding of Fluxus and its visual dispersal (through mailings, newspapers, posters, etc.), web of associated artists, and performative side.