33 Facts About George Maciunas

George Maciunas was a Lithuanian American artist, born in Kaunas.

George Maciunas's father, Alexander M Maciunas, was a Lithuanian architect and engineer who had trained in Berlin, and his mother, Leokadija, was a Russian-born dancer from Tiflis affiliated with the Lithuanian National Opera and, later, Aleksandr Kerensky's private secretary, helping him complete his memoirs.

George Maciunas's studies lasted eleven years from 1949 to 1960 and were completed in succession.

George Maciunas began a correspondence with Raoul Hausmann, an original member of Berlin Dada, who advised him to stop using the term "neo-dada" and concentrate instead on "fluxus" to describe the nascent movement.

George Maciunas began to work as a graphic artist at the New York studio of graphic designer and former Look art director Jack Marshad.

George Maciunas was closely involved with the production of a number of Flux Chess sets.

George Maciunas, a trained graphic designer, was responsible for the memorable packaging of fluxus objects, posters and newspapers, helping to give the movement a sense of unity that the artists themselves often denied.

George Maciunas designed a series of name cards incorporating multiple fonts to characterise each of the participating artists.

Whilst George Maciunas was still alive, no fluxus work was ever signed or numbered, and many weren't even credited to any artist.

George Maciunas filed a patent for the invention of a structural framework for prefabricated buildings using aluminum beams and columns on January 27,1958.

George Maciunas was awarded a patent for a modular building system on February 7,1961.

George Maciunas used this invention towards designing a modular prefabricated mass-housing system known as Fluxhouse.

George Maciunas conceived this design as a dwelling which combines the low-cost advantages of standardization with the freedom of customization.

George Maciunas converted buildings into live-work spaces for and envisioned the Fluxhouse Cooperatives as collective living environments composed of artists working in many mediums.

Kaplan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, George Maciunas began buying several loft buildings from closing manufacturing companies in 1966.

When Kaplan left the project to embark on other artist cooperative buildings, George Maciunas was left with little support against the law.

George Maciunas continued the co-op despite contravening planning laws, buying a series of loft buildings to sell to artists as working and living spaces.

George Maciunas began wearing disguises and going out only at night.

George Maciunas left New York shortly after, to attempt to start a Fluxus-oriented arts centre in a dilapidated mansion and stud farm in New Marlborough, Massachusetts.

Perpetually sick, George Maciunas developed cancer of the pancreas and liver in 1977.

George Maciunas remains enigmatic to this day, and his reputation still elicits strong responses both from artists and critics who have come after Fluxus, and by artists who knew him whilst still alive.

George Maciunas was perhaps the toughest of all on artists, reserving his strictest judgments for those he saw as self-promoting egoists who played into the hands of "High Art" barons.

George Maciunas was fascinating, talented, and by all accounts a nightmare.

Richard Long's walks, Gilbert and George Maciunas posing as living sculptures, Sarah Lucas's early work and a million other small gestures, actions and ephemeral objects can trace their origins back to Fluxus.

The life of George Maciunas is subject of a documentary film by the Manhattan-based artist and independent filmmaker Jeffrey Perkins who met Maciunas in 1966.

When I met George in 1966, he was already quite different to the George Maciunas others described to me.

George Maciunas was not the mercurial, intolerant, zealot that others described.

George Maciunas was open-minded, easy to work with, and quite supportive of what were then new approaches to Fluxus.

People spoke to me about a George Maciunas who demanded that everyone do things his way.

George Maciunas was a genius, a man of passionate moral zeal, intellectual vigor, and artistic strength.

George Maciunas did not see the world as it is, but as it might have been.

George Maciunas possessed astonishing power, depth, and insight in the fields that he understood, but he understood nothing at all about other things.

An oratorio loosely based on George Maciunas and titled Machunas premiered in August 2005 in the St Christopher Summer Festival in Vilnius, Lithuania.