Maciunas declares that “Fluxus is anti-professional”; “Fluxus should become a way of life not a profession”; “Fluxus people must obtain their ‘art’ experience from everyday experiences, eating, working, etc.”
“Fluxus is definitely against [the] art-object as [a] non-functional commodity—to be sold and to make [a] livelihood for an artist.”
Fluxus “is a collective never promoting prima donnas at the expense of other members.” Maciunas, therefore, was for the “collective spirit, anonymity and Anti-individualism,” so that “eventually we would destroy the authorship of pieces and make them totally anonymous—thus eliminating artists’ ‘ego’—[the] author would be ‘Fluxus.’”
Ay-O summed up the matter concisely when he said: “Funniest is best that is Fluxus.”
A few Fluxus people and neo-Fluxus people believe Fluxus is still a flag to follow, while others believe that “Fluxus hasn’t ever taken place yet!” George Brecht may have put the matter to rest recently, when he declaredthat “Fluxus has Fluxed.”
(source:http://georgemaciunas.com/cv/manifesto-i/)
Interview on Macunas’s Atlases of Russian History Exhibit (Hermitage 20/21, 2013 )FLUXUS_ASB
Maciunas believed that Fluxus activities “must be simple, amusing, [and] concerned with insignificances.
George Brecht’s 1965 Games and Puzzles/Swim Puzzle box game, for example, contains a seashell and a score reading, “Arrange the beads in such a way the word CUAL never occurs.” To play this game Brecht offers us only a seashell, no beads or letters, making it somewhat difficult to follow his instructions. On the other hand, because the word CUAL can never be conjured up with a seashell, you have already won. With typical Fluxus absurdity and irony, although we can’t play this game, we don’t really have to because we have won without arranging a single non-existent bead. Silliness aside, the impossibility of playing the game or performing the work hints at a conflict with the Fluxus belief that art is found in the action rather than the object, for if the action does not occur (the game is not played), what and where is the art?
Natalia Fedorova 