Central & Eastern Europe | Transnational Histories and Non-aligned Networks

“Revolution Not Only In The Arts, But In Connection.” Interview with Vytautas Landsbergis

Christophe Cherix, Jon Hendricks and Vytautas Landsbergis

August 25, 2015

Professor at the Lithuanian Conservatory of Music in Vilnius and scholar of the early 20th-century composer and painter Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, Vytautas Landsbergis connected with the international Fluxus community in the 1960s via his childhood friend George Maciunas. As a result, he corresponded also with Ken Friedman in California and Mieko Shiomi in Tokyo, and organized the first Fluxus Event in the USSR in 1966.

In this interview conducted during the C-MAP Fluxus group research trip to Vilnius in May 2012, Landsbergis – now a prominent Lithuanian politician and a member of European Parliament – speaks about his attraction to Fluxus as a mean to freer and more inventive thinking.

Vytautas Landsbergis speaks about his childhood friendship with George Maciunas and the later intercontinental correspondence between the two. He comments on Maciunas’ idea to expand Fluxus to USSR and also mentions musical inspirations important for both Maciunas and himself.

The idea behind the 1966 Fluxus Event in Vilnius, which was loosely based on instructions from La Monte Young’s “An Anthology”, was to do something uncommon, maybe even not understandable. Landsbergis discusses the preparation process, his other inspirations from within the Soviet Block, and the effect the event had on him and his students.

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