in grad school, a few studio visits started with the question:
"what artists or careers are you interested in modeling yourself after?"
i don't know if other students got this or if the visitors were trying to make sense of my extreme multi-hyphenate nature (and this is BEFORE I started baking!). i've been known to say my CV is like a an anthony braxton free jazz improv- in other words, hard to keep up with.
i used to feel perplexed by the question- why am i to follow in someone else's footsteps (ahhh youth is wasted on the young). born with a sense of never belonging to one category, i've always tried to create my own microuniverse i wanted to belong to by bringing people together to experience some form of cultural transcendence.
fast forward to this week: both the book my husband gifted me for my birthday and this week's push picks, help me understand the significance of following in a professional path. said book is the Editor, a biography on Judith Jones. what particularly astounds me about her life is how she launched people's careers while shaping culture all from behind the scenes. for her, culture is intellectual, spiritual and sensual. she had a life of words, poetry and cooking. julia child, roethke, john updike, anne frank's diary, sylvia plath: judith jones' hand, mind, and vision have graced all of these writers.
when i read colby's answers to this week's push picks the experience was so intimate and touching: not only because his research is so comprehensive, but because the work of george maciunas is so relevant to the legacy i want. at first all of maciunas' projects seem "dauntingly incongruous" for colby until he finds the umbilical cord in building collectively (see above with the free jazz reference). my work has also always been about growing and building together. even this newsletter is a relationship with all of you as we navigate the waters of our time on this planet. of the thousands of readers here, I have either built something, eaten something, planned something, helped craft something, envisioned something, laughed about something or dreamed something with the majority of you. i want to keep growing and tangling by your side. thank you for helping me continue to clarify the vision as we read, cook, and dream in our own ecosystems alongside each other.
now, i've already somewhat introduced today's push pick. while i can't recall exactly where i met colby chamberlain, he was a staple in my art and academic landscape in the days of my MFA and Cinema 16. he was always somewhat intimidating (yet so kind and approachable) because of the depth of research and history. it's no wonder that he has cultivated his knowledge into a book that was released YESTERDAY. it's a great pleasure to have him on these pages and i urge you to spend some time on all of his links. they are illuminating, historical, generous and delightful (i once went to a wedding where they screened Fluxwedding and the entire guest list had to switch attire- spent a long time trying to track down my leopard print jacket which ended up on MM Serra). without further ado...
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Colby Chamberlain teaches art and theory at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Before moving to Cleveland two years ago, he spent most of his life in various neighborhoods of Queens, where he split his time between academic scholarship and writing art criticism for Artforum and other publications. He was also one of the founding editors of the online magazine Triple Canopy. The University of Chicago Press just published his first book, Fluxus Administration, a monograph on George Maciunas, the founder the 1960s Fluxus movement, which was known for intermedia experiments that fused together art, music, design, film, and performance.
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what kind of life do you want to live?
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When you research and write a book, you learn a lot of unanticipated lessons from your subject. George Maciunas has always been a somewhat murky figure, since he did so many seemingly disparate things: he trained in architecture, assembled publications, produced films, organized concerts. He wrote short, enigmatic instruction pieces that Fluxus artists called “event scores.” He designed a system for modular pre-fab architecture that he hoped would be adopted by the Soviet Union. It’s dauntingly incongruous. But eventually I came to see that these different activities all fed into a single lifelong goal: buiding collectivity. Maciunas was a Lithuanian émigré. He spent part of World War II in a DP camp and arrived in New York as a teenager. Everything he did under the banner of Fluxus was to create, or recreate, a sense of community. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that another Lithuanian émigré, Jonas Mekas, was concurrently building up the infrastructure for the American underground-film community.) Modernity, capitalism, bureaucracy—there’s a constant drive to separate, individuate, atomize. With whatever materials were at hand, Maciunas tried to reverse that process, to create pockets of living in common. As horizons go, that’s a pretty good one to look towards.
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There’s one chapter of Fluxus Administration that I particularly want to highlight here, which is on the Fluxhouse Cooperatives. Maciunas is one of the main reasons why a part of Manhattan that used to be called “Hell’s Hundred Acres” (because of its frequent fires) is now known as SoHo. Maciunas recognized that the neighborhood’s cast-iron loft buildings were becoming obsolescent for industry, but were ideal for artists’ live/work studios. He rallied artists together to pool their funds and buy whole buildings and turn them into cooperatives.
I think of the Fluxhouses as one of urbanism’s great “what ifs.” In Maciunas’s original plan, the cooperatives would have included communal theater spaces, shop studios, dark-rooms, etc., and cooperative members would have led art classes to help make connections to the majority Black and Puerto Rican communities in surrounding neighborhoods. That never happened, largely because a lot of the federal and philanthropic funding that Maciunas was counting on to help subsidize the Fluxhouses ended up going to Westbeth, an artist housing project in Greenwich Village. At the time, urban planners favored big, concentrated mega-complexes like Westbeth. They thought that Hell’s Hundred Acres should be razed entirely, not rehabilitated piecemeal. The idea of changing a neighborhood building by building didn’t make sense to the city’s powerbrokers. Maciunas managed to form fourteen different cooperatives over the course of eight years (1966 to 1974), but they never quite fulfilled his initial vision. If they had, maybe SoHo wouldn’t have become such a textbook case of gentrification, and we would have a richer understanding of how artists could play a more socially attuned role in urban transformation.
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colby's social impact project
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Here in Cleveland, one of the city’s biggest recent arts initiatives, the FRONT Triennial, abruptly shut down earlier this year. According to the organization’s founder, the kind of fundraising they were able to achieve prior to the pandemic just wasn’t possible anymore.
I can’t unpack all the factors at play here, but the headline is that the philanthropic field is changing in ways that imperil the cultural life of midsize cities. Support your local institutions!
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Of the various “Fluxfilms” that Maciunas produced, my favorite is probably End After 9 (1966). Like a lot of experimental films from that era, End After 9 is extremely pared down. It’s just filmstock and some lettering. Yet it’s also very funny. Fluxus was heavily influenced by the likes of the avant-garde composer John Cage, but Maciunas also drew inspiration from the gags of Spike Jones.
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Maciunas’s favorite song was seventeenth-century composer Claudio Monteverdi’s Zefiro Torna. It accompanied one of the more extraordinary Fluxus performances, the “Fluxwedding” between Maciunas and Billie Hutching in 1978, just months before Maciunas passed away from pancreatic cancer. After the wedding ceremony, Maciunas and Hutching appeared before the assembled audience in a tuxedo and bridal gown, respectively. Then, as Zefiro Torna played, they slowly disrobed and exchanged clothes, until it was Maciunas in the gown and Hutching in the tuxedo. This was one of only a handful of occasions when Maciunas publicly shared the crossdressing he had been practicing in private since he was a teenager.
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colby's article of the week
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I’ll draw your attention to a piece I wrote on another Fluxus artist, Alison Knowles, called “Food for Thought.” Among other achievements, Knowles was one of the very first artists to incorporate food into fine art. For instance, her event score Proposition (1962) simply reads “Make a Salad.” A number of major institutions have staged performances of Proposition in recent years, and nowadays it feels very celebratory—and maybe, I fear, a little bland. The notion that the communal act of preparing and eating food could be an aesthetic experience is pretty familiar now. To recover some of the original strangeness of Proposition, I went into the archive and read accounts of its earliest iterations. One called the piece “a nightmarish, sticky urbane picnic.” ‘Nightmarish,’ ‘sticky,’ and ‘urbane’ struck me as a weird string of adjectives, so in “Food for Thought” I try to figure out what was meant by them.
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Another great Knowles piece is The Identical Lunch (1967). It’s a score that’s also a recipe: a tuna-fish sandwich on wheat toast with butter and lettuce, no mayo, and a glass of buttermilk or a cup of soup. In 1971, Maciunas suggested an alternate version: “Put tuna fish, wheat toast, lettuce[,] butter, soup or buttermilk — all into [a] blender — blend till all is smooth — drink it.”
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To assemble a renovation crew for the Fluxhouses, Maciunas placed advertisements in the Village Voice: “Demolition & Other Hardwork, Low Pay, $1.25/Hr. Free Lunch.” That “free lunch” consisted of whatever Maciunas could buy in bulk. Members of the crew, many of them artists, have recalled being served loaf after loaf of Lithuanian brown bread, which is close to the German Vollkornbrot that you can get in the US through the food company Mestemacher. A good chunk of the transformation of SoHo was powered by rye.
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and a few picks from push...
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who isn't obsessed with Hilma af Klint? get to know her better with this article on IMMA's site.
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eater has an amazing article on the history of erotic cookbooks, featuring a post by our friends at cake zine!
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checkout this amazing kickstarter for a documentary on sun-ra and afrofuturism..
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who has heard of this restaurant before? I love this excerpt from their wikipedia:
FOOD was said to inspire others who create food art, or work in the field of relational art. Many famous artists and performers, such as Donald Judd, Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage created meals at FOOD.The cooking and the meals themselves were a kind of a performance art, especially the soup.
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bon appetit has a great article on how gen-z is using dinner parties to overcome loneliness.
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we hope you are staying cool and that you enjoyed another installment of push picks. as always, if you like what you read, forward it to someone or encourage them to sign up. it would mean the world to us 🌎
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