Maciunas’s Fluxhouses: A Model for Today’s Artistic Economic Autonomies?

Susanne Neubauer

Artistic precarity, affordable studios to work and “new cooperative modes of creation and resistance”¹ have been much debated since the early 2000s and, at the moment, appear to be at a culminant point of institutionalization.² This continues a discussion that was begun by artists such as Hans Haacke and George Maciunas, among others, in the 1960s when New York city planning, in its first proper post-1945 wave of gentrification, and the upcoming problem of an increasing number of homeless people, stirred much attention among a critical group of residents and cultural workers. This early phase of institutional critique was not only focused on cultural institutions such as museums – Hans Haacke’s “MoMA Poll” of 1970 for example – but also, and even more so, on the strikingly massive urban transformations which were taken up as burning issues. One reason for this transformation was the abrupt decrease in the number of registered inhabitants on the island of Manhattan. From 1950 to 1960 the population diminished from 1,960,101 to 1,698,281, and every ten years until the 1980s it went down another 10 %³ – not taking the growing size of the “hidden city” of the homeless into account. From the mid-1960s on, a rapid increase of homeless people was observed, and “even today, nobody knows for sure why the problem became so bad so fast.”⁴ In addition to this significant change in the composition of the demographic situation in Manhattan, the closing down of many production facilities in the M districts⁵ shaped New York physically. At the end of the 1960s, Manhattan, which has ever since been considered a “speculative real estate venture” and a “matter of magnitude”⁶ also forced urban planners to find new perspectives – and to take the housing problem of many people into serious consideration. The issue became public with the exhibition “The New City: Architecture and Urban Renewal” which was held at The Museum of Modern Art from January 23 – March 13, 1967⁷. The exhibition organizers and contributors, however, would not take a closer look at what was really happening in the New York neighbourhoods at that time: namely an intensive grassroots movement that still shapes the city poignantly.

During the same period, underused buildings were half-legally renewed and converted into workshops for artists and cultural institutions. George Maciunas, a Lithuanian born immigrant, developed an idea to buy up empty warehouses and turn them into artist’s coops and collective property. His own failure as an artist-entrepreneur turned out to be a successful strategy for many others. His Fluxhouse Projects as a historical example provoke us to elaborate on the question how cultural practice can reflect upon and adapt entrepreneurial strategies today – and how problematic this can be.

In the 2011 essay “The Misfortunes of the ‘Artistic Critique’ and of Cultural Employment” by Italian-French sociologist and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato, he points out that many sociologists and economists see in artistic activity a model for neoliberal economic inspiration.⁸ Reminiscent of the May 1968 movements, there is a link between its “artistic critique” and today’s “creative industries”, as supposed by the sociologists Luc Boltanski and the economist Ève Chiapello.⁹ However, the situation is less black and white, than grey, as Lazzarato proves. Even though the “creative worker” might figure today at the “top of the socio-cultural hierarchy”, the differences within the groups of professionals are enormous (Lazzarato speaks of “extremes” between the ones in the “wealth and job security” and the creative “poor”).¹⁰ Furthermore, not only are the groups of cultural professionals in the arts (and also in design and architecture, theatre, music, fiction writing and, not to forget, journalism), very heterogeneous, the quality of a place also influences the dimension and composition of these groups. Undeniably, a place is dependent on its political, economic situation, including the price structure of the actual property. This is the reason why in “poorer” (and therefore “cheaper”) countries and cities, mostly cities with a general low income such as Berlin¹¹ an “unsuccessful” single person stays in a creative job longer than in more expensive places (it has never been properly discussed what “unsuccessful” really means – as the quality of a work and the quality of someone’s professional career strategy or non-strategy points directly to what the superior quality of art is, art that deserves historical preservation¹²). In “expensive” places, the so-called “unsuccessful” creatives are forced to change their professional fields after a while by trying to get “into the scene” and “into the market” and therefore “into the profession”. Who manages to “get in and stay in”, in the sense of making one’s one living, is increasingly an important discussion in art schools today.¹³ It seems that they are very aware of their social duty not only to educate and “produce” cultural workers for the liberal arts and the market, but also to be concerned about the careers of students after their studies. This movement, which can be observed in a number of art schools,¹⁴ will supposedly reformulate cultural production in the long term as its focus is to educate cultural workers with tools and knowledge from the field of economics. The question is, what is successful cultural work in our time, and does it have to make use of neoliberal, economic, entrepreneurial strategies of the “survival of the fittest”?¹⁵ Or is it not more challenging and long-lasting to subvert and reformulate these strategies in order to shape a space of production in which art – and not economy – has defined the rules?

After a short stay in Europe in the early 1960s George Maciunas returned to New York and made the Fluxhouses one of this projects under the umbrella of the “Fluxus” movement he founded in 1961. Maciunas was educated in art, graphics and architecture and held a bachelor degree in architecture and museology from Carnegie Institute of Technology from 1954. He also studied art history at the prestigious Institute of Fine Arts for six years and consecutively worked in commercial design and architecture.¹⁶ In 1961 he founded A.G. Gallery, and the art group “Fluxus”. When he bought 80 Wooster Street in 1967 – Fluxhouse Cooperative II –

as one of the first buildings of 16 in all,¹⁷ he started a redevelopment of SoHo which was exemplary. In the “Fluxus” Manifesto he laid out the foundation of his project to “promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, promote living art, anti-art, promote NON ART reality to be grasped by all people, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals.”¹⁸ Richard Kostelanetz retrospectively wrote in his history of SoHo, that Maciunas “was purchasing buildings that artists divided among themselves in a kind of cooperative venture. Some of those involved with Maciunas’s first co-op, at 80 Wooster, which he typically called Fluxhouse Cooperative II, paid less than $10,000 for an entire floor of 4,000 square feet that, once renovated and securely occupied, would escalate in value over the years to $2 million or so. Half-floors went for less than $5,000.”¹⁹ Maciunas’s financial structure was “that the co-op would own the ground floor whose rental income would contribute to defraying the communal operational expenses of taxes, insurance, maintenance of common spaces, and the elevator. (…) In another co-op nearby, likewise founded by Maciunas, the partners still pay only a negligible monthly maintenance because the ground-floor stores provide sufficient rental income to pay off all the monthly expenses including interest on the co-op’s loan for the entire building.”²⁰ Maciunas’s venture was a “complex financial arrangement with a continuous flow of new cash deposits”, as Kostelanetz states, himself a former resident of one the Fluxhouses. Maciunas “method was to hold buildings with deposits, then to line up shareholders to provide the down payments.”²¹ So it could happen that money of one co-op would go into another building – because, as Maciunas stated openly “when a particular cooperative is in danger of losing a building to foreclosure or lien, every effort – all the funds, go to the rescue”.²² Next to this adventurous financial construct, Maciunas never properly registered the buildings to the New York state attorney general, and became warranted for arrest, many times hiding behind his multiply secured apartment door.²³

Maciunas’s aim was to reduce the value of art “by making it unlimited, mass-produced, obtainable by all and eventually produced by all.”²⁴ As Julia Robinson states, Maciunas was called “an artist”, but his “authorial” role (as a manager) was so hybrid that the term “artist” even seems “irrelevant”.²⁵ In comparison to the oeuvre of other Fluxus artists, Maciunas’s work – the chronologies of art history, his manifestos, and his designed name labels and printed material for artists such as Yoko Ono, Mieko (Chieko) Shiomi or George Brecht, and the Fluxhouse cooperatives – is seen as much influenced by an attitude of “production” and less of “creation” (Maciunas quoted the Soviet LEF (“ЛЕФ”) group (“Left Front of the Arts”), a 1920s avant-garde group of writers, designers and photographers, several times).. Additionally, Maciunas succeeded in developing a financial sub-system inside the financial and political system of the City of New York which recalls in some aspects today’s hedge fund strategies. However, it made him not only an early entrepreneur in real estate, but above all a patron of the arts. It is said that everybody who invested into the lofts, gained – except Maciunas himself. There was no money found after his early death as one due to the increase in property value could have expected.²⁶ However, it was not only the purchase, the allocation of lofts to owners and tenants and the remodelling of the buildings that are essential to the question of how to contextualize these projects within Maciunas’s entire oeuvre as an artist. Maciunas managed to interpolate his strategies into fields that might seem today more “arty”, such as the development of models for a prefabricated mass building system of Fluxhouses and the idea of an entire, flexible city – Fluxcity.²⁷ Working with models is very common in art and design and due to their abstract nature, some of them manage to change everyday commodities paradigmatically. A rather recent case for such a paradigmatic model is the 2010 Time/Bank initiative by artists Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle. The artists adopted the economic idea of “using time as a unit of exchange”²⁸ to contemporary needs, mainly in the arts sector. The projects makes immaterial goods available on a website: art, communication, education, food, general assistance, handy works, organization, research, shelter, transportation. The site does not only lists these goods (“categories”) but also the number of requests similar to a stock exchange. In the category “shelter” people look for house-swapping or simply look for a room to rent. In this category at least, the idea of time for time exchange is very close to the new share economy that is becoming more and more popular these days (and here we come back to a concern raised at the beginning of this text: share economy also means that we can make a living with less and less “real” money—and this might turn into, under certain circumstances, a grading down of a standard of living). However, Maciunas was not interested in this kind of share economy where the main action is focused on providing something for no or little money, and where no time is left for the work per se. Maciunas was interested in the creation of reasonably cheap space especially in order to make possible artistic work and architectural innovation and experimentation. His own sort of creative entrepreneurship, his activity and access to worlds far from art (i.e. real estate) would fit perfectly into today’s new programs of how to foster creativity, how to turn any activity into a creative activity – and how to turn it into a sellable product or a unique experience. Such a process is particularly interesting today and has been widely taken up by design schools. The question is now how to sell experience (the artist’s key concern is to make experience happen, is it not?) and how to make experience available to everybody. We shift inevitably into areas that are transdisciplinary, structurally open and which do not follow a canon or a discipline’s language. Design schools such as d.school Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford have adopted these strategies (on the creation of experience see The Gift-Giving Project²⁹). And the idea is always to create a product for the enrichment and the facilitation of our contemporary lives. It has nothing to say against work in favour of our society, the problem to be discussed in the future is that creative energy undergoes a process of economization. Those, who want to stay far away from this development, are urged to take a critical stance towards these undertakings. Nevertheless, the critical is for free, unless paid through academic assignment. There is no way out of a typical dilemma, except the insight: There are always cheaper places to live.

This text was published in: In-Residence Magazin #2, ed. by Ronny Heiremans and Katleen Vermeir (Brussels, 2015).

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