The "Kulturbolschewiken" I: Fluxus, the Abolition of Art, the Soviet Union, and "Pure

Amusement"
Author(s): Cuauhtémoc Medina
Source: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics , Autumn, 2005, No. 48,
Permanent/Impermanent (Autumn, 2005), pp. 179-192
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Peabody Museum of
Archaeology and Ethnology

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20167686

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 The "Kulturbolschewiken" I
Fluxus, the abolition of art, the Soviet Union, and
"pure amusement"
CUAUHTEMOC MEDINA
The secret revolutionary project
One of the most telling paradoxes of the history of
Fluxus is that at the precise moment that the concept of
the avant-garde was put into question by critics and
artists in the early 1960s, George Maciunas (the
polemical "Fluxus leader") reached the conclusion that
it was finally possible to apply Dada's attack against the
institution of art to the Soviet project.1
The way anti-art was going to contribute, in George
Maciunas's mind, to the victory of Socialism has never
been entirely revealed in the different studies of the
group. This is in part due to the secrecy of Maciunas's
activities. Under the dark spell of the Cold War era, and
after having had a few bruises with the F.B.I, at the
beginning of the 1960s Maciunas always kept his
ultimate political intentions locked in his heart.
However, there are enough traces of his plans to
propose a reconstruction. At times it seemed as if he in
fact was testing his collaborators to find those who
would be ideologically prepared to join the secret. For
instance, in the letter he sent to Emmet Williams in June
1963 he tried to snare his friend to support the idea of
relating Fluxus to the Communist Party, advancing the
argument that if Dada had been only a transient
phenomenon, it was because it had lacked a clear
political commitment:
Emmet: I must know how you feel about involving Fluxus
politically with the party (you know which one). Our
activities loose (sic) all significance if divorced from socio
political struggle going on now. We must coordinate our
This is the first installment of a two-part essay; the second part,
"The "Kulturbolschewiken" II: Fluxus, Khruschev, and the "concretist
society" will appear in RES 49 2006. A previous article by this author
on "Architecture and efficiency: George Maciunas and the economy of
art" appeared in RES 45 Spring 2004.
1. See Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity Modernism.
Avant-Garde. Decadence. Kitsch. Postmodernism. (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1987), pp. 120-125.
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activities or we shall become another "new wave," another
dada club, coming and going.2
We also know that, faithful to an old leftist tradition,
Maciunas understood Fluxus's function in the two
regimes under entirely different light. This surfaced, in
fact, in one of the biggest deceptions the leader suffered
at the hands of his associates.
In the summer of 1964, Dutch Fluxus artist Eric
Andersen traveled to East Europe and the U.S.S.R. Along
the way, he decided to play a cruel joke on the Fluxus
leader. He sent Maciunas several postcards and letters
making him believe that in the company of Addi
K0pcke, Tomas Schmit, and Emmet Williams, he was
doing a Fluxus tour in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary,
and Russia. His account was grossly exaggerated:
According to him the Fluxus concerts in the Socialist
countries were attracting thousands of spectators.
Andersen claimed that they were provocatively
performing pieces like Maciunas's Homage to Adriano
Olivetti by drinking, eating, and pissing, and therefore
were creating a "succ?s de scandale" in Moscow's
newspapers. He went so far as to boast that the
authorities had decided to prohibit the press from even
mentioning their festival in Leningrad.
Maciunas was shocked. To Emmet Williams's
puzzlement, who was entirely ignorant of the hoax, he
wrote an angry letter to the four artists expelling them
from the group, explaining that he had been forced to
denounce their "apostasy" to the Soviet press.3 In fact,
Maciunas issued a press release reproving the "four
renegades and impostors" for having deliberately
performed Fluxus compositions "in the most scoundrelly
[sic] and scandalous way." Maciunas stated further that
2. George Maciunas, Letter to Emmet Williams, June 1963. in
Emmet Williams and Ann No?l (ed.), Mr. Fluxus. A collective portrait
of George Maciunas 1931-1978 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997),
p. 102.
3. See the exchange of letters and Andersen and Williams's
recollections of the event in ibid, pp. 110-113.
 180 RES 48 AUTUMN 2005
Fluxus was in "full agreement with the criticism and
denunciation of their activities published in the Soviet
Press."4 The wording of such communiqu?s is
illuminating: Maciunas's main charge, beyond the fact
that he had not been consulted about the premiere of
Fluxus in the Eastern bloc, was that they had impaired
the chances of truly disseminating the movement behind
the Iron Curtain by not adjusting the aesthetics of its
presentations in order to please the Socialist authorities
and audiences. He invoked a tactical distinction: While
Fluxus ought to be provocative and shocking in the
capitalist West, under Socialism it should behave exactly
the opposite way, offering simple pleasures and optimist
feelings:
PROGRAMMING (particularly in the USSR) (. . .) must be
very careful and delicate to achieve maximum audience
acceptance and least criticism for the press, in such case
Fluxus had to be planned as a vaudeville, amusement,
satire, etc., rather than a vulgar shock, which even I or most
New York (if not all) Fluxus members would strongly
disapprove of (pissing on stage is just about the least suitable
version of Olivetti, and I would never have approved of it to
be played anywhere, least of all in East Europe).5
The story indicates the extent Maciunas expected that
Communism would grant "meaning" to the otherwise
absurd anti-artistic tendencies of Fluxus, and
concomitantly that its humorous subversion in the West
would lose its conflictive face in the East, where Fluxus
amusement was to become purely affirmative. It is in
this pendular movement between radical satire and the
pursuit of a social constructive function that the question
of how Maciunas conceived the role of Fluxus under
Socialism ought to be answered.
The end of art... by decree
Maciunas expected something more than the
acceptance of Fluxus compositions and activities by
Socialist audiences; as we will see there is ground to
believe that, for him, anti-art was the method by which
Socialism could achieve its final victory over the West.
Moreover, he sincerely believed that the hierarchical
4. George Maciunas, "For Press Release. Statement from Fluxus
Committee Regarding So Called Fluxus concerts Recently Presented At
Warshaw [sic], Prague, Budapest, Kiev, Moscow and Leningrad by 4
Fluxus Renegades and Impostors," ca. October 1964. Sohm Archive,
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. (From now on: Sohm Archive.)
5. George Maciunas, letter to Emmet Williams, Addi Kopeke, Eric
Andersen, Thomas Schmit, ca. October 25, 1964. Getty Research
Center. Los Angeles, California. Special Collections. (From now on:
Getty.)
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structure of the pro-Soviet "centralized democracies"
could be exploited in order to put an end to art as an
autonomous modern practice.
Already in 1963, at the end of the first season of
Fluxus festivals in Europe, Maciunas had secretly
devised a complex policy that advocated the application
of entirely different anti-art strategies on the two sides of
the Iron Curtain. Instead of subscribing to the aesthetic
diktats of the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy of the Party, he
wanted to model Fluxus on the basis of the minority
Bolshevik group that Lenin brought to power by means
of a open putsch. First he decided to purge Fluxus to
ensure that it would be a minority of non-artists and
anti-artists suitable for future radicalization. But above
all, he believed that anti-art could be adopted as an
official aesthetic in the Eastern bloc. From 1963 up to
1965 at last, Maciunas expected that art could be
abolished in the Soviet bloc through a decree issued by
the communist governments, at the same time
revolutionary anti-artists in the West were going to fight
a "terrorist" war against art and its institutions. The
essence of such strategy is to be found in Maciunas's
summary of a letter he sent to American artist, activist,
and theorist Henry Flynt on February 21, 1963:
My belief in transitional "hard core"?[George] Brecht,
[Ben] Patterson, Walter [de Maria]. Can't convert art-art
artists like [Karlheinz] Stockhausen who make living from
it. Like converting factory owner to communism. Belief in
Bolshevist agitation not Christian pacifism. (. . .)
Stockhausen inflated ego claim to originality, will not
accept conscious influence. Also makes living from his art
(commissions) & depends on his fame to what he has done.
Cannot mobilize proud artists because they depend on
their "contribution."
Anti-art terrorism useful where conversion on mass scale
impossible. Substitute missing gap with borderline art.
Bolshevist revolt succeeded by aggressive strategy in
sabotaging plans of the majority. (. . .)
In East?best to convert leadership?then art eliminated
by decree.6
This was what Maciunas rightly defined as the project
for the "Kulturbolschewiken": An insurrection where a
revolutionary aesthetic minority was to be entirely
justified in employing any necessary means to attack art,
including demagogy and infiltration, seduction and
terror. Keeping this course of action in mind will allow
us to understand the radical ization of Maciunas's actions
during 1963 and 1964, along with the thrust of his
6. George Maciunas, summary of correspondence with Henry
Flynt. Cardfile. Sohm Archive.

collaboration with Henry Flynt up to 1965. But above
all, this "plan" is the key that may allow us to
understand the role that Maciunas attributed to the
Fluxus revolution in the context of the Cold War
between the two nuclear superpowers.
The Terrorist News?Policy Letter (April 1963)
All through 1963 Maciunas saw with despair that his
friends were not willing to abide by his programming
and aesthetic specifications. In one case, Dick Higgins
had to practically renounce the idea of producing a
Fluxus festival in Stockholm in March 1963 in order not
to "damage Fluxus" with another brawl with the leader.
Unable to fulfill Maciunas's financial and organizational
demands, Higgins was forced simply to offer a series of
"preview concerts."7 After that, both Higgins and Alison
Knowles returned to the United States just in time to
join the Yam Festival that George Brecht and Robert
Watts were organizing for the entire month of May
1963. Maciunas tried unsuccessfully to convince Brecht
and Watts to merge the festival with Fluxus, concerned
as he was with the possibility that it would generate
another organization.
Motivated by fears of seeing Fluxus fragmented into a
series of individual initiatives, Maciunas decided to
launch an art terrorist policy as a means of cementing
the group. He postponed his plans of traveling to Eastern
Europe "because of [a] delay in the visa process," and
early in the summer 1963 he returned to the United
States to prepare a great New York Fluxus Festival to take
place around November.8 Convinced that provocation
had been the best asset in the publicity of Fluxus in
Europe, he wanted to repeat the trick on a greater scale.
On April 6, 1963, Maciunas sent "Fluxus News-Policy
Letter" no. 6 to twenty carefully selected recipients,
proposing a "Propaganda Action" season starting in May
"against what H[enry] Flynt describes as serious
culture." Maciunas's proposals were a call to go beyond
symbolic violence to engage in direct action.
Maciunas's plan was to achieve visibility through the
disruption of the transportation and communication
systems of New York City by a variety of means:
7. Postface, 2nd ed., pp. 72-73; Dick Higgins, Letter to George
Maciunas, ca. February 1963. T?te Gallery Archive, London. (David
Mayor and the Fluxshow Archive: 815.2.1.1.18 (From now on: TGA.)
8. George Maciunas, letter to Robert Watts, ca. March 11 or 12,
1963, in Jon Hendricks, ed., Fluxus etc/Addenda II. The Gilbert and
Lila Silverman Collection (Pasadena, Calif.: Baxter Art Gallery,
California Institute of Technology, 1983), p. 151.
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Medina: The "Kulturbolschewiken" I 181
blocking bridges and busy intersections with cars,
clogging the subway during rush hours with
cumbersome objects, and flooding the postal system
with heavy objects that were going to be ascribed to any
number of cultural institutions in order to damage their
finances. His main intention was to effectively paralyze
the cultural life of Manhattan, preventing audiences
from reaching venues or provoking their exit by
throwing "smell" and "sneeze bombs" during concerts
or even making fake emergency calls to interrupt
cultural events. As with Corner's Piano Activities,
Maciunas wanted to turn some of the compositions of
his friends into means of anti-cultural sabotage:
3. Carrying posters at museums, concert halls, theatres
saying (in small letters) composition "x" & (in large letters)
"Museum closed (or moved to Fluxus) due to (burst sewage
line, leaking urinal or other reason)."
4. La Monte Young straight line composition on crowded
sidewalks at museums etc.
5. Releasing balloons (helium filled) (arranged to explode
high in the air) bearing R. Watts dollar bills, Fluxus
announcements, "pictures" etc. etc.9
While the Situationists saw similar anticultural and
terrorist actions as "initial gestures of the next
revolutionary epoch,"10 George Maciunas was quite
cynical in claiming that the major goal of his terrorist
proposals was propaganda: "(. . .) my motive for street
disturbances would largely be commercial?the more
disturbances, the more press notices, the more
audiences etc."11 However, the audacity of those plans
was a direct result of Marciunas having found an ally
ready to be as radical as he was in anti-artistic
intentions: Henry Flynt, a young New York philosopher
and activist who had been linked with La Monte Young
and Robert Morris. While Maciunas was in Europe,
Flynt had been developing the theoretical basis for an
anticultural campaign that coincided in essence with
that of Maciunas. In fact, it was through an exchange of
letters at the beginning of the year that Flynt and
9. George Maciunas, "Fluxus News-Policy Letter no. 6. April 6,
1963," in Jon Hendricks, ed., Fluxus etc/Addenda I. The Gilbertand
Lila Silverman Collection (New York: Ink &, 1983), p. 156.
10. See Guy Debord, "The Situationists and the New Forms of
Action in Politics and Art" (June 1963), and "The World of which we
Speak" (August 1964) in Elizabeth Sussman, ed., On the Passage of a
few people through a rather brief moment in time: The Situationist
International 1957-1972 (Cambridge, Mass., and London: The Institute
of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts, 1989), pp. 148-173.
11. George Maciunas, letter to Emmet Williams, April 2, 1963, in
Williams and No?l, see note 2, p. 95.
 182 RES 48 AUTUMN 2005
Maciunas had devised what they called the
"Kulturbolschewiken" project, which included not only
the usage of terror as a means of propaganda and the
intention of organizing pickets and demonstrations
against cultural institutions, but, more importantly, the
intention of convincing the "communist leadership" to
impose the elimination of art under socialism. Dutifully,
Maciunas recorded the essence of his plans in a card
file summarizing his exchanges with Flynt:
Henry Flynt. His letter. Feb. 27, 1963
He not against anti-art terrorism, but only when
supported by a systematic positive program-theory.
Important to publicize the reasons, the program. Then?
start eliminating art: by most effective methods available:
converting communist leadership, forcing galleries to close,
driving "top culture figures" out of business etc. (. . .)
Suggests demonstrations to go with each festival. Will
represent Flynt
Picket most respectable inclusive art institution
Picketters to be formally dressed. No beatniks or
hooligans.
Picket busiest hour. Say "we are picketing for the
ideas/theories of H. Flynt"
Send invitations to art critics etc.
Kulturbolschewiken.12
And, in fact, the day he wrote that letter to Maciunas,
Henry Flynt organized a series of demonstrations against
several New York cultural institutions in the company of
two of the most audacious members of the American
underground: Tony Conrad and Jack Smith. The three
radical artists went from the Museum of Modern Art to
the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Philharmonic
Hall at Lincoln Center, carrying placards that demanded
the demolition of museums and music halls, the
cessation of art, and the complete abolition of "Serious
Culture." The most Flynt achieved was that The New
Yorker magazine made a parody of his press release.13
Given the lack of a theoretical explanation of his
intentions, the next day Flynt gave a lecture to explain
the aims of his "movement" in Walter de Maria's loft in
Manhattan, which had been decorated with the banners
of the demonstration and a portrait of Vladimir
Mayakovsky.14 For more than two hours, Flynt read from
12. George Maciunas, cardfile on Henry Flynt. Sohm Archive.
13. Henry Flynt, "Mutations of the Vanguard. Pre-Fluxus, During
Fluxus, Late Fluxus," in Achille Bonito Oliva et al., Ubi Fluxus ibi
motus 1990-1962 (Milano: Nuove edizione Gabriele Mazzota, 1990),
p. 110.
14. Flynt's narrative of the actions are contained in a "PRESS
RELEASE: for March-April, 1963. FROM CULTURE TO
VERAMUSEMENT. Boston-New York." Reproduced in Henry Flynt:
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the manuscript of a book in progress what in his view
amounted to a "total critique of culture." In his lecture,
Flynt explained to a small and rather bewildered
audience the need to replace "(all) art/literary
culture/science fiction/music" with a new type of
recreation that was only known and attractive to its
practitioner. This "Veramusement" or "real amusement"
was, in fact, a vindication of a form of extreme
individualism in taste that bluntly discarded any pursuit
of aesthetical rapport between subjects.
We will discuss in time the scope and implications of
Flynt's theories. For the moment I will concentrate on
discussing the effects of Maciunas and Flynt's plans for
Fluxus, for their alliance brought the group to the point
of near dissolution.
"It is much too premature to start splitting-up":
the 1963-1964 crisis
"Newsletter 6" provoked a fierce debate between the
different artists related to Fluxus on the ethical limits of
provocation in the context of the neo-avant-garde. At
least two of the artists who remained in Germany,
Thomas Schmit and Nam June P?ik, seemed eager to
join Maciunas's plans of organizing a sabotage circus in
New York. Schmit even suggested provoking the closure
of all museums, theaters, and concert halls in New York
by launching a series of bomb threats over the phone
accompanied with previously concealed packages, each
of them with the word "bomb" written on a card. Paik
was no less aggressive: He proposed staging a pissing
contest on the subway track to "stop thus the train,"
running a hundred-meter race in one of the most
crowded streets in downtown, and staging sexual
happenings like carrying a female "atomic bomb victim"
partly disguised to look as though she had suffered
horrible wounds, yet partially naked to tease the
onlookers.15
However, the anticultural street actions were rejected
by most of the New York artists, Allison Knowles, Dick
Higgins, AI Hansen, and Henry Flynt joined briefly to
discuss Maciunas's plans, knowing that they were not
going to be well received by the rest of the artists.16
Fragments & Reconstructions from a Destroyed Oeuvre, 1959-1963,
an exhibition at Backworks April 27-June 12, 1982 (New York:
Backworks, 1982), pp. 18 and 24 facsimiles.
15. George Maciunas, "Fluxus News Letter no. 7," May 1, 1963,
in Hendricks, see note 9, p. 157.
16. See Alison Knowles's letter to George Maciunas and Thomas
Schmit from April 16, 1964, Sohm Archive: "I am rereading now
Fluxus news policy letter n. 6. We read and discussed same with AI
 Medina: The "Kulturbolschewiken" I 183

Jackson Mac Low was among the most rabid critics of You're quite mistaken about Flynt's being at all sympathetic
the "Newsletter 6" policy. As an experimental poet who to East Europe these days, he's ostensibly a Maoist but
really an ultra, he counts the West as including the Urals
had, for a long time, participated in pacifist
and wants the whole thing swamped. As for his idea of
demonstrations, he thought that Maciunas's program
picketing, he always does it to inflict severe financial loss
seemed "more of fascism than of any kind of socialism
on museums, never realizing that this only lends an aura of
worthy of the name." Mac Low argued that to engage in daring to a safe thing (. . .) keep a very hard eye on him,
antisocial and anticultural actions was "hurtful" to the
because it is just not consistent with his point of view not
very people Fluxus cultural activities ought to be to want to sabotage your east European issue, since he so
directed at, for they would make "it harder for the loves attacks, fusses, and big cracks at cultural activity."18
ordinary worker to make his living or to get about the
city or to communicate." He preferred that the group Henry Flynt played the role of the extremist well. He
become a ''benevolent & positive" social agent agreed to participate in the coming New York Fluxus
Festival on the condition that he would give a lecture
committed to facilitating cultural access for the citizens
of New York and creating create a wider political denouncing Fluxus as an example of "decadent serious
awareness: culture" in need of being substituted by his new
anticultural proposition, the doctrine of BREND.19
I would prefer, to breakdowns of Fluxus trucks, to institute Maciunas seemed unscathed: He was convinced that
free Fluxus buses & private-car pools to make things easier
the more publicity Fluxus could get, the more prepared
for people to get to work rather than harder. I'd give out it would be to reach the masses.20 But he had to back
free museum, gallery, concert & theatre news in Fluxus
down when he received a letter from George Brecht
publications containing our works & distributed like
handbills on street corners. Where there are strikes or who wanted to disassociate himself completely from
Fluxus because he found the terrorist plan too aggressive
lockouts in progress, I w[oul]d distribute leaflets & booklets
for his tastes. Maciunas was stunned: He could not
having on the first pages strong messages of support &
solidarity for the (. . .) workers (...). Where there are afford losing Brecht, the artist who best represented the
picket lines or walks for peace & freedom or against the wartransition from artworks to "natural events," which
in Vietnam or the harassment of Cuba or nuclear testing (..according
.) to him was the essence of Fluxus. He wrote
or capital punishment or racial segregation (...), I w[oul]dBrecht that the newsletter was merely a "suggestion to
similarly add our voices to such an activity while at the start a discussion among [its] recipients" and gave him
same time "propagandizing" for our cultural activities.17 assurances that Fluxus was not to become an instrument

For his part, Dick Higgins also disapproved of of Flynt's ideas. Maciunas even wrote Higgins and
"isolated acts of terrorism, cultural or otherwise" and Knowles to request their intervention in convincing
disagreed with the idea of "antagonizing the very peopleBrecht that Fluxus was an organization that above all
and classes" Fluxus supposedly wanted to convert. Butresponded to the feelings and intentions of the
"collective." Maciunas went as far as to make his own
above all, he tried to create antagonism between
Maciunas and Flynt, accusing the latter of being a permanence in the group conditional on Brecht's
Maoist who harbored anti-Soviet feelings: participation and to suggest a merge between Fluxus
and the Yam festival Brecht was organizing:
It seems George feels Fluxus is me & Flynt which is not
true. Tomorrow Emmet or Raik or you may be chairman,
Hansen and Henry Flynt last night. The propaganda activities are very
exciting, and not too ambitious if those planning to come do get here. especially if I (. . .) cannot show up in New York. I also
Yam is working out because each have our individual jobs and wrote George that without him in Fluxus Festival I would
activities, and some of these people can be used for Fluxus festival not participate either (or come to New York). I stressed his
too (...). Flynt talks about 'Creep/ the C. P., and how he really has indispensability within Fluxus etc. etc. So I trust you could
very little to do with any of us, but his conversation is much more cool George down & bring him back to the "fold." Stress
coherent to me, and you may be able to use him for picketing. (. . .) the fact that Fluxus is a "collective" (and not anyone in
The June to Sept Fluxus that you suggest using Yam organizers would
be hard to put through. Why not wait until you arrive? and before that,
propaganda, organization etc. The two festivals, Yam and Fluxus, are 18. Dick Higgins, letter to George Maciunas, ca. April 1963. TGA.
quite different as you will see when you get Yam calendar next week 815.2.1.1.18.
(. . .), Yam does not have the direct revolutionary flavor of Fluxus." 19. George Maciunas. "Fluxus News Letter No. 7 May 1 1963," in
17. Jackson Mack Low, letter to George Maciunas, April 25, 1963, Hendricks, see note 9, p. 157.
2 pp., The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection. Detroit and New 20. George Maciunas, letter to Emmet Williams, April 2, 1963. See
York, U.S.A. Curator Jon Hendricks (from now on: Silverman). Williams and No?l, note 2, p. 95.

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 184 RES 48 AUTUMN 2005
particular like me, Flynt or Paik). (. . .) Nobody is trying to
impose anything on anyone OK? My arrival [to New York
is] absolutely conditional to George Brecht's participation.
It is much too premature to start splitting-up. If George
thinks Fluxus is getting too competitive with Yam, we can
eliminate Fluxus and concentrate on Yam. Names don't
matter at all.21
As a matter of fact, Maciunas rushed to print on May 1,
1963, a seventh "Fluxus News Letter" that summarized
the reaction to his previous communiqu?.22 But it would
be a mistake to think he had changed his mind.
The Fluxus/Happening divide: The Something Else Press
Early in 1964, Dick Higgins became deeply
disenchanted about the so-called "common front."
He distrusted Henry Flynt's "Jesuistic" and "Maoist"
anticultural doctrines,23 complained about the
institutional and historical reputation Fluxus had started
to acquire,24 and got weary of the divisions between its
members.25 He disliked Maciunas's bias for simplicity
and brevity, which was inspired in great part by George
Brecht's work because it implicitly excluded from the
Fluxus program the more complex and elaborated forms
of Happening art in which he was interested. But above
all, Higgins was frustrated by the way Pop Art had
effectively taken off during 1963 and 1964, pushing
Fluxus to the margins.26 He was convinced that
Maciunas's negativism and extremism were of no use to
recover some of the public space Fluxus had already
lost. The more Pop Art became the dominant mode of
21. George Maciunas, letter to Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles,
ca. April 1963. TGA: 815.2.1.1.24.
22. George Maciunas, "Fluxus News Letter No. 7 May 1 1963/' in
Hendricks, see note 9, p. 157.
23. See for instance his letter to Schmit of December 30, 1963: "I
can hear George wheezing downstairs. He is not well. And Flynt keeps
coming by and spreading his Jesuit propaganda (he's a Maoist). But
George was this bad last year at this time. I think it's seasonal." (TGA:
815.2.1.1.20.)
24. Dick Higgins, letter to Tomas Schmit, ca. summer 1963, TGA:
815.2.1.1.20: "(. . .) there are too many who see Fluxus as an
institution now part of history, whereas for me I am mostly interested
in what is going to happen, and I do not like the institutional aspect of
Fluxus."
25. Not only Maciunas and Vostell but also Kaprow and Brecht.
The internal divisions reached something like a peak when many
artists, including Spoerri and Maciunas, got angry with Emmet
Williams for organizing the Poesia et Cetera Am?ricaine at the Mus?e
d'Art Moderne in Paris.
26. Estera Milman, "Road Shows, Street Events, and Fluxus People;
A Conversation with Alison Knowles," Visible Language 26, no. 1/2
(1991):97-107, p. 100.
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American art, the more Higgins felt at odds with
Maciunas's politics. As a result, Dick Higgins decided to
leave the group as soon as his Jefferson's Birthday book
was printed:
Andy Warhol is making a homosexual magazine. Soon he
and Flynt will meet?pop art and Flynt go well together I
think?I doubt Flynt's honesty.
I am not interested in Flynt or in Maciunas's newspaper,
and as soon as my manuscript is set in type, I will quit
Fluxus.
Maciunas has got a little tiny theater, which will be
almost completely empty, since he does not think it is
important to make publicity, and since he sends
announcements only to "important people" (who do not
know about us, and, therefore, don't come) and ignores
newspapers, bulletin boards where students could read,
and so on. I'm fed up?it's a big come-down from
Copenhagen. Besides, there's no point in belonging to a
"movement," and Maciunas more and more behaves like an
admittedly-anonymous founder of a movement.27
At that point, the two friends started to play dirty
games with each other, focused on the account of the
nature and development of the group. In the winter of
1963-1964, Higgins wrote a long memoir of the
development of the new arts that he planned to include
as an addenda to his book. Carrying the title Postface, it
is one of the main accounts of the origins of Fluxus, but
in retrospect reads as a careful provocation against
Maciunas. Postface consistently plays down Fluxus's
importance, and dismisses Maciunas's musings on
concretism and anti-art as academic formulas without
relevance for artistic judgment. So even if V TRE kept on
announcing Higgins's book among the forthcoming
Fluxus editions as late as March 1964, it is likely that
Maciunas had decided to prevent or at least delay its
publication. By February 1964 Maciunas told Higgins
that Jefferson's Birthday/Postface was going to take at
least a year to be published.28 Higgins could not wait
anymore: He retrieved his manuscript and published it
on his own. For this purpose, he founded the Something
Else Press, which during its subsequent eight years was
one of the most remarkable avant-garde publishers of
the twentieth century. On the dustcovers of his book
Higgins published a "Something Else Manifesto" in order
to denounce the theoretical concerns and personal
27. Dick Higgins, letter to Tomas Schmit, February 21, 1964. TGA:
815.2.1.1.20.
28. Dick Higgins, "Auszug Aus 'Postface,'" in J?rgen Becker and
Wolf Vostell, Happenings: Fluxus, Pop Art, Nouveau R?alisme: Eine
Dokumentation (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1965), p. 191.

divisions that in his view had impaired the development
of Fluxus:
We can talk about a thing, but we cannot talk a thing. It is
always something else. (. . .)
For what is one confined in one's activity? Commitment
on a personal level can be plural. One can be committed
to both salads and fish, political action and photographic
engineering, art and non-art. One does, we hope, what
seems necessary, or, at least, not extraneous, not simply that
to which one has committed oneself. One doesn't want to
be like the little German who hated the little Menshevik
because the little German always did his things in a roll
format, and when the little Menshevik did that kind of thing
too, the little German got into a tizzy. If one is consistent
and inconsistent often enough nothing that one does is
one's own, certainly not a form, which is only a part of
speech in one's language.29
Higgins's departure was a heavy blow to Maciunas,
not only because Higgins had been a pivotal member of
the movement, but also because (to borrow Higgins's
own words) a certain "regroupment began to take
place." A new "alliance" had started to emerge between
Wolf Vostell, Higgins, and Allan Kaprow, creating a
division between Fluxus and the "Happening people"
who were opposed to the agenda that Maciunas and
Flynt were pushing forward.
To start with, Wolf Vostell visited New York that same
spring of 1964. He had a joint lecture on "The Art of the
Happening" with Kaprow, before presenting his own
"d?collage-happening" YOU, undoubtedly one of his
most important actions. Staged in an empty swimming
pool, orchard, and tennis court in Long Island, YOU was
a complex mimicry of war, fascism, consumerism, and
mass media, of considerably more political and social
relevance than any of the previous Happenings done by
any of the New York artists. YOU immediately raised
Vostell's profile among the American avant-garde, and
convinced people like Higgins that accumulation,
collageism, and social allusion were more powerful
performance modes than the raw simplicity and
paradoxical character of Maciunas's Fluxus. Higgins felt
particularly close to Kaprow, for the two of them were
"moral and against pure elegance," and he was not
going to allow Maciunas to come between them.30 Thus
29. Dick Higgins, Jefferson's Birthday/Postface (New York-Nice
Cologne: Something Else Press, 1964), pp. 271-290. On the
foundation of the Something Else Press, see Higgins, "Something Else
about Fluxus," Art and Artists 7, no. 79 (October 1972):19-20.
30. Dick Higgins, letters to Tomas Schmit, March 23 and Sept. 13,
1964. TGA: 815.2.1.1.20.
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Medina: The "Kulturbolschewiken" I 185
when Maciunas culminated his first New York series of
performances with a "Fluxus Symphony Orchestra"
concert at the Carnegie Recital Hall on June 27, 1964,
the contrast between two artistic positions (one
reductivist, the other expansive) within the practitioners
of performance became acute. Some months later,
Higgins was adamant to present YOU not only as a
demonstration of all the qualities that Fluxus lacked
under Maciunas's leadership and/or George Brecht's
influence, but also as the paradigm of an artistic attitude
opposed to the new route Fluxus was taking:
[ VOL^'s] success led to a realization among many of us that
large work was now necessary, nay, imperative, to destroy
the effect of Fluxfussiness, Fluxtininess and Fluxabsurdity. In
Fluxus, the tendency had been growing increasingly Yam?
like even at the Carnegie Hall concert in June, which
climaxed the American festival, and was its sunset. "Now
this person does his little thing, now that person does his
little thing, now another little thing." That last Fluxus
concert gave the effect of looking at somebody's postcard
collection.31
A conflict between these "two wings" of early 1960s
performance was bound to occur. If, in fact, the debate
between these two views on the Fluxus aesthetic was to
occupy the years to come, it was this confrontation
which framed the most famous of the quarrels of
Fluxus?the events surrounding Stockhausen's Originale
performance in August 1964.
The Originale affair
Quite a lot has been written on the Originale affair,
the most prominent conflict Fluxus suffered during its
history. The action generally has been attributed to
Henry Flynt's initiative, but it is more likely that it was
devised by Maciunas in the context of his struggle with
the proponents of Happenings. Since April 1964, Henry
Flynt and George Maciunas focused their critique of the
Eurocentric bias of high art around a campaign against
Karlheinz Stockhausen, who was by then visiting the
United States. In 1958, and maybe as a result of his
proximity to Theodor Adorno, Stockhausen had derided
jazz as a regressive musical form. On the basis of those
statements, and Stockhausen's growing acceptance in
musical and business circles in Germany, Maciunas and
Flynt called for a demonstration against what they
considered Stockhausen's "fascist-like attack on Afro
American music" and his "musical decoration of
fascism." They organized a picket against Stockhausen's
31. Postface, 2nd ed., p. 85.
 186 RES 48 AUTUMN 2005
presentation at New York City Town Hall on April 29,
1964.32 The action had little if any consequences. In any
case, Flynt and Maciunas's collaboration ceased for a
while: Flynt became close with one American Trotskyite
group, the WWP led by Sam Marcy, a fact that made it
impossible for the pro-Soviet Maciunas to keep on
working with him.33 But when that same summer
Maciunas started to feel jeopardized by the growing
collaboration between American and German
Happening practitioners, and in particular by Vostell,
Kaprow, and Stockhausen, he quickly turned back to
his old ally to mount another protest against the
presentation of Stockhausen's Originale that Kaprow was
organizing as part of the Second New York Avant-Garde
Festival, organized by Charlotte Moorman, the avant
garde cellist who only a couple of months before had
helped Maciunas to produce the Carnegie Hall
Fluxorchestra Concert.34
For Maciunas, the Originale concert became a
symbol of all the forces that had opposed his projects.
Vostell's success with YOU had convinced Allan Kaprow
of the need to bring to America more examples of
German ambitious Happenings, and Originale seemed
to him particularly suitable for its analogies to his own
practice. In fact, during a radio conversation with
George Brecht in May 1964, Kaprow had violently
criticized Fluxus as "irresponsible," due to its lack of a
complex artistic platform and its pretentiousness.35 The
situation became critical when that same May George
Brecht wrote a text titled "Something About Fluxus" that
denied that Fluxus had an "agreed-upon program." Even
if Brecht's text sided with Maciunas's preference for
short "non-art" or even "anti-artistic" actions, even
claiming Flynt's critique of "professional culture" as part
of the Fluxus canon36 (a fact that is customarily omitted
in later reprints of the document),37 the fact that most
32. See Action Against Cultural Imperialism: "Fight Musical
Decoration of Fascism!" repr. in Jon Henricks, ed., Fluxus etc. The
Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection (Bloomfield Hills, Mich.:
Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum, 1981 ), p. 250.
33. Ibid., p. 104.
34. Henry Flynt, see note 13, p. 114.
35. Excerpts from a discussion between George Brecht and Allan
Kaprow entitled "Happenings and Events" broadcast by WBAI
sometime during May, VTRE no. 4 Gune 1964):1.
36. George Brecht, "Something About Fluxus. May 1964," VTRE
no. 4 (June 1964):1. Hendricks, see note 9, p. 245.
37. See Henry Flynt, "AGAINST 'PARTICIPATION' A Total Critique
of Culture," chapter 10 on "Post-Dada and the Crumbling of Art's
Purposes," in http://www.henryflynt.org/aesthetics/APchptr10.html. See
also Brecht, "Something About Fluxus. May 1964" in Henry Martin,
An Introduction to George Brecht's Book of the Tumbler on Fire. With
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performers of the Originale event were in one way or
another former associates of Fluxus, made it imperative
for him to use the occasion to establish a dividing line
between Fluxus and its critics.
For all those reasons, the protest ended in a bitter
internal quarrel. Many of the members of Fluxus who
were participating in the concert had to go through the
picket line organized by their former comrades. The
picket itself was a complete disaster: Only seven
demonstrators joined the picket line in front of the
Judson Hall in New York on August 30. According to
Flynt, most of them had little clue about the work they
were protesting, a mixture of performance and opera
that (as Flynt recognized much later) was not particularly
suitable as a target to criticize traditional high culture.38
It is recorded that many spectators actually thought that
the picket was part of the Happening.39 Of the members
of Fluxus, only Ben Vautier, who had come to the New
York Fluxus Festival to realize simple and provocative
"street theater" pieces near the Fluxshop, joined full
heartedly in the demonstration. At the end of the day,
the action just provoked a bitter feud between Maciunas
and his former associates.
At first, Maciunas expelled Raik from Fluxus and,
according to some sources, he even threatened to have
the visas cancelled of some of the Japanese artists he
had helped come to the United States. His adversaries
reacted with no less fury: According to Dick Higgins,
Maciunas was immediately banned from the group and
even denounced to his Soviet contacts. Robert Watts was
temporarily appointed "chairman" of Fluxus. Maciunas
was so infuriated that he landed flat in the hospital.
We have expelled Maciunas from Fluxus. It made him very
sad and he is almost dead as a result. He was in the
hospital. Please understand, I always talked of expelling
George, but I never did. We all did. (. . .) So to Hell with
Maciunas He will die soon, I think. The attack was so bitter
that I told Maria Joudina about it. She will forbid his entry
into the USSR and that will make George very sad. (. . .)
We all hate him, even Brecht and Watts who are almost
beyond hating.40
interviews by Ben Vautier and Marcel Alocco, Henry Martin, Irmeline
Lebeer, Gislind Nabakowski, Robin Rage, Michael Nyman. With an
anthology of texts by George Brecht (Milan: M?ltipla Edizioni, 1978),
p. 129, where the suppressed list of works by Fluxus artists is marked
by a double column situated in between the second and third
paragraph of the text.
38. Henry Flynt, see note 13, p. 115.
39. Allan Kaprow, "Maestro Maciunas, 1993," in Williams and
No?l, p. 325.
40. Dick Higgins, letter to Tomas Schmit, September 13, 1964.
TGA: 815.2.1.1.20.

There is little evidence that Watts was ever in charge
of the "collective," and it took Maciunas just a couple of
months to appear again in control of the whole
operation. But as far as Higgins was concerned,
Maciunas had murdered Fluxus:
(. . .) Fluxus could not survive this hit. Nobody had interest:
Fluxus had ceased to exist. And the sad, no anymore young
Maciunas, sits somewhere in the same street, on his flat,
composes very patiently the first issue of Fluxus magazine
and resists to accept his discharge.41
Monadic tastes: Henry Flynt's critique of culture
If not directly responsible for the conflicts within
Fluxus, Henry Flynt's actions and thought contributed to
radically redefine George Maciunas's agenda and the
direction of Fluxus. Flynt's intervention was decisive in
the transition from the first "concretist" phase of
Maciunas's anti-artistic project towards a critique of the
location of culture in the modern structure of time and
values. Through an independent route, in the early
1960s Henry Flynt developed a radical argument against
modern art and European high culture. To be sure, his
intellectual and political path has been one of the
extreme projects of the twentieth-century avant-garde: A
vision that has been rarely coherent despite its
eccentricity, but that nonetheless has remained opaque
in great part to the students of contemporary art.
Contrary to the opinion of many authors Flynt's
counter-cultural theories had little or nothing to do in
their origins with his later leftist inclinations.42 Although
during the 1960s Flynt went, in his own words, "from an
emphatic anti-communist into a kind of Maoist" and
particularly from 1963 to 1964 had links with Trotskyite
organizations in the United States, the significance of his
politics has been overestimated in relation to his anti
artistic project. Marxism as such had little if any role in
defining his aesthetic proposals.43 And if his campaign
41. In fact, Higgins wrote two slightly different versions of this
event in later editions of Postface both in German and English. See
Becker and Vistell, note 28, p 192 and Dick Higgins, Postface (1963
1965, 1970) in Dick Higgins et al., The Word and Beyond. Four
Literary Cosmologists (New York: The Smith, 1982), p. 86.
42. This applies even to sympathetic writers like Stewart Home,
The Assault on Culture. Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War
(Stirlin, Scotland: AK Press, 1991).
43. Jackson Mac Low, "Wie George Maciunasdie New Yorker
Avantgarde . . .," in Ren? Block, ed. 1962 Wiesbaden Fluxus 1982.
(Wiesbaden, Kassell, Berlin: Harlekin Art. Berliner K?nstlerprogramm
des DAAD, 1983), p. 123. Henry Flynt. "Against Participation.
Preview" (1994) at http://www.henryflynt.org/aesthetics/totcritcult.html.
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Medina: The "Kulturbolschewiken" I 187
against "Cultural Imperialism" of 1964 anticipated many
of the arguments of the multicultural and postcolonial
critiques of Eurocentrism of recent times, and was
inspired by the emergence of the civil rights movement
in the United States,44 his early critique of the racist
components of the cultural mainstream was more the
result of his departure from the orthodoxy of his age
than the motor of his anticultural adventure. Flynt's
attack against art was less founded in a social or
historical perspective than in a form of ultra-individualist
dissidence that denied value to aesthetic inter
subjectivity. His anti-artistic ideas were the result of a
skeptical departure from the analytical philosophical
orthodoxy in which he had been trained as a
mathematician and philosopher in Harvard University;
in other words it involved a nihilist passage from
philosophy into the neo-avant-garde that, at the same
time, forced his departure from academic training.45
Concept art
Still in his teens, Flynt was deeply impressed with the
radical anti-aestheticism of John Cage and La Monte
Young's works around 1959 and 1960. He was
particularly attracted to their seeming arbitrariness and
their disregard for the established cultural values.
However, almost from the beginning he related his
aesthetic interests with the development of a new form
of skeptical philosophy. Comparing the works of Cage
to those of the Darmstadt circle, he arrived at the
conclusion that chance methods of composition
rendered similar effects to the most structural and
pseudo-scientific works of composers such as
Stockhausen. As far as Flynt was concerned, such
similarity discredited the efforts of all the "laboratory"
composers to achieve distinctive musical qualities by
means of mathematical methods, for their technical
obsessions were unable to yield anything different from
Cage's "whimsical" production. As a result of this
ironical consideration of the late 1950s polemic
between indeterminacy and structuralism, Flynt decided
to focus instead on the "hidden structure" of all of
those works. Therefore he discarded sound to take on
44. In an unpublished interview with Kristine Stiles in 1989,
quoted in Elizabeth Armstrong et al., In The Spirit of Fluxus
(Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1993), p. 78.
45. Flynt was born in Greenborough, North Carolina, in 1940, and
lives and works in New York. For a biographical synthesis see [Barbara
Moore & John Hendricks] "Introduction" to Flynt, Fragments (see note
14), pp. 1-3: a general bibliography and collection of Flynt's writing is
available at. http://www.henryflynt.org/index.html.
 188 RES 48 AUTUMN 2005
mathematics itself as the proper field of new aesthetic
experimentation.46
More or less at the same time, Henry Flynt made
what he has always considered his greatest philosophical
discovery: the notion that the "scientific determination
of reality was a delusion."47 He engaged with the
metamathematical theories that, departing from David
Hubert, conceive mathematics as a conventional
construction similar to the game of chess, i.e., a
formalist game with no hold in reality nor in the
structures of the mind. For the formalists, mathematics is
defined by a theoretical consistency in following
meaningless rules. According to Flynt, the development
of non-Euclidian geometries that had no relation with
everyday experience implied that one could produce
mathematical statements and theorems in the guise of
free aesthetic creation with no concern for their
feasibility or application.48 As he put it, he conceived
the possibility of "transferring the principle of avant
gardism from art to mathematics"; in other words, he
decided that one could challenge the scientific
consensus by building alternative mathematical projects
that were presented as art products on their own.49
It was such an aestheticization of mathematical
speculation that he put forward in 1961 under his
proposition of "Concept Art," an art whose material was
concepts "bound with language" that postulated
mathematical objects purportedly able to demonstrate
that mathematics are merely arbitrary formulations.50
46. Christer Hennix, "Philosophy of Concept Art. An Interview
with Henry Flynt. Dec. 6, 1987," in Charles Stein, ed., Being = Space
x Action. Searches for Freedom of Mind through Mathematics, Art, and
Mysticism (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1989) (lo #41), p. 159.
47. Henry Flynt, see note 13, p. 107. See Flynt's presentation of
this confluence: "(. . .) the juncture which elicited concept art had two
tributaries. One was so-called new music and the avant-garde,
especially in New York around 1960. The other was mathematics as
interpreted by the twentieth-century discipline called metamathematics.
I framed concept art by way of reacting to, and cross-relating, these
precedents. My iconoclastic philosophy, again, was crucial; without it
one would never see the cross-connection I did, much less turn the
connection against mathematics and new music. See also Henry Flynt,
"The Crystallization of Concept Art in 1961" (1994) in http://www.
henryfly nt.org/meta_tech/crystal. htm I.
48. See Henry Flynt, "Structure Art and Pure Mathematics" (1960)
in Fragments and Reconstructions, see note 14, Document 2.
49. Christer Hennix, "Philosophy of Concept Art. An Interview," in
Charles Stein, ed., Being = Space x Action. Searches for Freedom of
Mind through Mathematics, Art, and Mysticism (Berkeley: North
Atlantic Books, 1989), p. 159.
50. Henry Flynt, "Concept Art" (1961) in Blueprint for a Higher
Civilization (Milan: M?ltipla Edizioni, 1975), pp. 125-129. Also
available in corrected version at http://www.henryflynt.org/
aesthetics/conart. htm I.
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With the same audacity (and candidness) with which
Cage had challenged the practice of music, Flynt
attempted to disrupt the construction of mathematics by
acts of poetic invention. To be sure, some of Flynt's
propositions were difficult to consider mathematical in
kind. For instance, in "implications?Concept Art
Version of Colored Sheet Music no. 1 " Flynt attempted
to produce a "mathematical system without general
concepts of statement, implication, axiom and proof,"
taking a series of steps that were redolent of
indeterminate composition. He burned a sheet of paper,
photographing the ashes with black and white and color
film under different lights and points of view so as to
later consider them parts of a mathematical operation
that construes two photographic prints as a "theorem."51
Certainly Flynt did not realize more than three of those
alternative mathematical models in the 1960s, but
despite the paucity of his production he thought those
demonstrations were able to unsettle the notion of
mathematics of the age. The essence of his operation
was to pose an intellectual challenge that, if it could be
made effective by our subjectivity, would defy the very
fabric of reality.
One must concede, as Flynt always claimed, that his
"concept art" had little to do with the late 1960s and
early 1970s "conceptual" or "idea" art. He was not
interested in developing self-critical games about the
nature of art, but rather in appropriating the freedom of
aesthetic invention so as to unsettle the agreed notions
of knowledge.52 The small output of his "concept art"
pieces had to do with the fact that they were not a body
of works but skeptical demonstrations. By 1962, as he
has asserted, his different fields of interest suddenly
coincided in the realization that a "dissolution of
civilization's cognitive fabric" was under way, a process
that "Concept art wished simply to bring to a
conclusion."53
A major step in his view was to discard the linguistic
base of philosophical propositions prevalent in analytic
philosophy circles with a sleight of hand. Taking his cue
from the logical positivist demand for empirical
verif?ability of all sentences, Flynt discarded the utility of
language in general because he thought he had
discovered a logical loop in the very notion of language.
As Flynt argued, the question "Is there language?"
cannot be verified outside natural language itself.
Therefore, concepts and words in themselves were not
51. Henry Flynt, see note 50, p. 129.
52. Henry Flynt, see note 13, p. 110.
53. Ibid.

in Flynt's view valid tools in dealing with reality.54 The
twenty-one-year-old philosopher asserted that "to claim
the existence of a world beyond experience is
untenable."55 Thus his concept-art propositions were
presented in the guise of physical and empirical
operations that implicitly were to replace fallacious
philosophical argument with positive demonstrations of
new metaphysical constructions. The analogies between
this form of skeptical-empiricism and the anti
intellectual and materialist principles of Maciunas's
concretism are self-evident.
As is frequently the case with nihilist arguments,
Flynt's "anti-credulous extremism" and "literal
empiricist" attitudes soon brought him to explore a
series of idealist possibilities.56 Since mental acts of any
kind seemed to him equally arbitrary and scientific
formulas were simply "nominalistic transformation
rules" stipulated on a case basis, he started considering
that impossible acts like walking through solid walls
could become everyday possibilities were we to
seriously shift the whole of our cognitive orientation.57
Flynt's skeptical empiricism drove him to a brand of
radical subjectivism that entertained the hypothesis of
the absolute sovereignty of the mind even over
fundamental physics. What today seems physically
impossible would eventually be dismissed as a prejudice
of the age in the same manner modernity disregards
medieval superstitions such as the fears of being struck
by lighting because of blasphemy.58 Since Flynt
construed mathematics as "a body of truths about a
world that does not exist," he foresaw the possibility of
new kinds of "meta-technology" that could provoke
small "miracles" that would pertain to new conceptions
of the world.59
It was in that context that Flynt decided to subvert
aesthetics so as to purge them from any inter-subjective
agreement. He turned his nihilism in philosophy into a
form of aesthetical solipsism. Fkradoxical as it may
sound, it was in order to propagate this individualist
credo that Flynt stepped into cultural politics.
54. Henry Flynt, "The Flaws Underlying Beliefs," in Blueprint for a
Higher Civilization (Milan: M?ltipla Edizioni, 1975). pp. 13-15.
55. Christer Hennix, see note 49, p. 176.
56. Henry Flynt, "AGAINST 'PARTICIPATION': A Total Critique of
Culture" (1994), available at http://www.henryflynt.org/aesthetics/
totcritcult.html.
57. Christer Hennix, see note 49, p. 178.
58. Henry Flynt, "Philosophical Aspects of Walking Through
Walls," in Blueprint for a Higher Civilization (Milan: M?ltipla Edizioni,
1975), pp. 16-19.
59. Christer Hennix, see note 49, pp. 178-180.
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Medina: The "Kulturbolschewiken" I 189
Against culture
According to Flynt, art and any other established
cultural practices are inherently unsatisfactory to the
individual because it is impossible to find pleasure in
whatever the others enjoy. Common tastes (no matter if
pertaining to high, low, or underground cultures) were
all a result of social imposition over our individuality.
In short, Flynt claimed that there was an inherent
contradiction in pretending to entertain others, in
creating forms of collective taste, or in producing art
aimed to be received by other subjects:
The artist or entertainer cannot exist without urging his
product on other people. (. . .)
But there is a fundamental contradiction here. Consider
the object which one person produces for the liking, the
enjoyment of another. The value of the object is supposed
to be that you just like it. It supposedly has a value that is
entirely subjective and entirely within you, as a part of you.
Yet?the object can exist without you, is completely outside
you, is not you or your valuing. The product is not personal
to you.
Such is the contradiction in much art and entertainment.
(. . .) In appreciation or consuming art, you are always
aware that it is not you, your valuing?yet your liking it,
your valuing it is usually the only thing that can justify it.
In art and entertainment, objects are produced having
no inherent connection with peoples liking, yet the artist
expects the objects to find their value in people's liking
them.60
Flynt argued that each person had an absolutely
unique source of self-gratification: a form of liking that
was so personal that it was not open to description or
communication. To even give examples of such intimate
"likings" was already an abuse, inasmuch as it implied
their reduction to general standards that were to betray
their personal character. The only "true" amusement
came from devoting oneself only to those in-bred
solitary pleasures that, according to Flynt, each one of
us has to discover by analyzing our own inclinations. It
was this practice of solitary gratification that Flynt
defined as veramusement (real amusement):
[What] one would do anyway, does entirely because one
likes it, is for one's liking, [and] excludes entertaining
others, [or] conforming to another's likes/'61
Stressing the pursuit of absolute meaninglessness and
disengagement from any form of "participation," Flynt
60. Henry Flynt, Down with Art (New York: Fluxpress, ca. 1968),
pp. 3-4.
61. Ibid., p. 4.
 190 RES 48 AUTUMN 2005
called this new aesthetic modality "acognitive culture."
He saw no reason "why one's acognitive culture should
mean anything to another, or even to oneself at another
time." It was essentially non-developmental and non
discursive: a form of solipsistic experience that was
entirely contrary to knowledge inasmuch as it refused
any form of common ground. Despite this, Flynt insisted
veramusement would not lead to "a nihilism of doing
anything" or to a mere absorption into "undistinguished
personality, life," or "nature." "A cognitive culture,"
according to Flynt, would involve a certain "selecting
out" of things which have a place already in the life of
conscious organisms, in other words, an exploration of
the unique incommunicable motivations related to the
human condition of rational beings.62 Nonetheless, Flynt
was clear that his speculation involved a rejection of the
common bond between aesthetics and modern culture.
Instead of yearning for a community of taste propagated
by modern aesthetics and implicit in any kind of artistic
practice, Flynt hailed kinds of pleasure that would
involve a radical estrangement between individuals. As a
matter of fact, in later years Flynt stressed this aspect.
The purpose of "BREND" (the term that Flynt finally
chose for his theory in order to break any kind of
references to other modes of intellectual activity) was to
assure the individual a certain degree of opacity that
would break him out of the assumptions of the
"community of enlightenment":
As regards "art," my argument sought to transport the
reader from art to the moment of incommunicable,
unsourced gratification. In a "community of
enlightenment," that counsel would perhaps point people
toward shared ineffable moments. But without such a
community, my solution meant cultivating that which
makes oneself opaque to other people?and separating
oneself from other people because of their acquiescence to
inherited, enslaving concepts and assumptions.63
And certainly "BREND," "acognitive culture," or
veramusement is above all an attack against the implicit
commonality of the modern aesthetic experience that
Kant first defined around the notion of the sensus
communis. As is well known, Kant argued that the
beautiful was implicitly predicated on the basis of a
"subjective necessity"; in other words, that the feeling of
the beautiful presents to us as if in principle it ought also
to be valid for other subjects. Kant contended that the
beautiful appears "as a common rather than as private
62. Ibid.
63. Henry Flynt, see note 56.
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feeling" no matter that we cannot demonstrate such
necessity by rational means or on the basis of
experience. The beautiful, Kant argued, constituted an
"ideal standard" and a "demand for universal assent"64
with a far-reaching political potential, for it suggested a
state that was "universally communicable without
mediation by a concept."65 As Jay Bernstein puts it, in
Kant's analysis of the aesthetic one finds that
"commonality, communication and sensibility entwine
in aesthetic reflective judgment to provide a notion of
validity that is distinct from the notion of universal
validity derivable from transcendental reflection." A
participation in finitude that was both rational and
sensible, cultural, sensible and perceptual, entirely
different from the "categorical cognition through the
understanding of reason."66
As we can see, Flynt's denial of such Utopian
potential was in fact a precise and literal rewriting of the
structure of modern aesthetics. In reducing taste to pure
subjectivity he actually was adapting the conditions of
taste to a form of "post-enlightenment" community
where no bond remains between reason and feeling.
Veramusement: the doctrine of "pure amusement"
Flynt's theories had a remarkable effect in the
development of Fluxus. They both fueled the most rabid
anti-artistic moment of the history of the group and
prefigured its turn towards a reflection on the
possibilities of amusement that was prominent in
Maciunas's theories after the mid-1960s. However, his
arguments had a deliberate extremism that sometimes
bordered on insanity. His dissidence goes well beyond
the rejection of established tastes to attempt to break
any links between aesthetics and society. On the one
hand, Flynt's theories were an attempt to come to terms
with personal alienation. By severing any link between
one's liking and the taste of others he wanted to prevent
the individual the kind of suffering connected with
64. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment. Including the First
Introduction, tr. and introduction Werner S. Pluhar, foreword by Mary
J. Gregor (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hacket Publishing Company,
1987), pp. cix-576. Following the standard practice, I quote this
edition according to chapter (?) and, furthermore, indicating the
approximate pagination of the fifth volume of the standard Akademie
edition of Kant's works published in Berlin in 1908-1913. Thus, for
instance, (?51 Ak. 320) will mean chapter 51, Akademie edition, p.
320. Kant: Critique of Judgment, Ak 239-240.
65. Ibid., Ak 295-296.
66. Jay Bernstein, The Fate of Art. Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to
Derrida and Adorno (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1992), p. 54.

disagreeing with other people's tastes. Flynt's
philosophical basis was a form of skeptical empiricism
for which "Only (my) immediate sense-contents are
real."67 This notion of immediate truth had, of course,
parallels to Maciunas's emphasis on the moment of pure
perception of concretism. But Flynt's project was also an
attempt to reform the design of the activities of the
individual in society that was very much in line with
Maciunas's concerns about the need for purifying free
time. What Flynt described as acognitive culture,
BREND, or veramusement was meant to be an entirely
useless, meaningless, and non-productive form of
activity. Although Flynt has always insisted that he never
belonged to Fluxus as an art movement, and claimed
that, for him, Fluxus was just a publisher of last resort,68
both Flynt and Maciunas shared the pursuit of a
categorical distinction between aesthetics, knowledge,
and production, work, thought, and sensibility. While
Maciunas attacked aesthetic culture for allegedly
distorting the means-ends rationality of material
production, Flynt denounced the quasi-productive,
quasi-cognitive effort implied in artistic production and
reflection. Flynt proposed a form of enjoyment that
would be effortless and solitary, shamelessly recreational
and solipsistic.
Henry Flynt condemned artistic or cultural
production for not being totally meaningless, and thus
involving a certain constraint and effort akin to work.
Reversing most of the leftist criticisms of the "facile"
aspects of culture, Flynt promoted an anticultural form
of aesthetic practice hoping that it would be entirely free
of ethical or cognitive values. For Flynt freedom
consisted in securing a personal space completely alien
to the standards of social behavior and the demands of
production. Like Maciunas, Flynt wanted to distinguish
entirely work from play, developing a form of "pure
amusement." Veramusement was meant to occupy the
"after-work" hours of workers with a form of anti
productive activity. This was, in fact, the reversal of the
self-developing notion of "culture." A form, thus, of
absolute subjectivity:
(...) a worker has a job, job hours, an occupation, does
work which produces material wealth, to obtain his means
of consumption. His job is a "means" even though he may
not like it he is pretty much forced to do it. This can be
extended to apply to the whole area of his responsibilities
67. Henry Flynt, "Against Empiricism" (1991), in http://www.
henryflynt.org/person_world/forempiric.html.
68. Henry Flynt, "George Maciunas und meine Zusammenarbeit
mit ihm," in Block, see note 43, p. 109.
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Medina: The "Kulturbolschewiken" I 191
to society. Then he has after-hours, time when he doesn't
have to do anything, and does what he does more as an
end, in itself, "for fun," because he likes it: Here is where
recreation is included. This is when workers listen to music,
read science fiction, play games, and the rest. (. . .)
Consider in contrast work, or the cognitive. With respect
to these, there are "objective" or intersubjective standards
of value: (. . .) Now "recreation" connotes, "general
acognitive culture" is defined to be, exactly, the opposite.
One does the latter because one likes it (no), for no other
reason. It doesn't make sense to try to do acognitive culture
as objectively valuable (. . .) one can't create acognitive
culture as a profession. (. . .) separation of entertainer
from entertained is incompatible with a thorough-going
concept of pure entertainment, entertaining as work is
discredited. (. . .)
Acognitive culture (. . .) would not (. . .) consist of
artifacts built up outside of, separated from, oneself (. . .) ,69
Given this overall intention of turning "recreation"
into the absolute opposite of work, Flynt proposed a
form of non-culture that refused any interpersonal
horizon: Neither the commonality of games, nor the
community of aesthetes. This general estrangement came
with a form of social vision. For Flynt, utopia was to be
a place where enjoyment would equal solitary
confinement. Enjoyment was to become a form of
absolute personal freedom free from interference from
the rest of the world:
In utopia, entertainment would be supplanted by a new
modality of self-identified gratifications which cannot be
objectively defined (and thereby transferred).70
It was around the development of this form of anti
culture that Flynt and Maciunas joined forces.71 In fact,
in November 1962, when he had just read the first draft
of Flynt's "New Concept of General Acognitive Culture,"
Maciunas wrote to him endorsing his new aesthetic
proposal:
My agreement with his "acognitive cul." thesis
1. same "art" experience can be stimulated by non-art
objects, events & ideas within productive occupation (math,
physics, material world in general)
69. Henry Flynt, "My New Concept of General Acognitive
Culture," in Flynt, Fragments, see note 14, Document 16, pp. 1-2.
70. Flynt, "AGAINST 'PARTICIPATION,' Thoughts for the next
draft" (1998), in http://www.henryflynt.org/aesthetics/
againstp98thoughts.html.
71. In his lecture of February 28, 1963, Flynt stated that his
theories were connected with George Maciunas's FLUXUS ("PRESS
RELEASE: for FROM "CULTURE" TO VERAMUSEMENT, March-April
1963") in Henry Flynt: Fragments & Reconstructions, see note 14, facs
20E.
 192 RES 48 AUTUMN 2005

2. Art tends to desensitize people against concrete

reality
3. Art activities draw considerable energy from large
segment of people, who instead could have their energies
diverted to?scientifically, socio-economically industrially,
educ. or politically productive work.
George Brecht agrees by implication of his work, rather
non-his non-work.72

This note, however, can show also the extent to

which Maciunas missed the fine detail of Flynt's
speculations. He could not follow the extreme
individualism of Flynt's theories, wrongly assuming
that Flynt was arguing that aesthetic reward could
develop from knowledge and science instead of their
suppression. And not by chance, the emphasis of
Maciunas's reading of Flynt's theory was, in fact, of an
economic nature. For George Maciunas, economics
was the field of social reform where the suppression of
art could have a revolutionary potential. To all of this, in
its peculiar entwinement with the Soviet culture histories
of the Khruschev era, we will turn our attention in the
next installment of this text.

72. George Maciunas, cardfile about Henry Flynt, Sohm Archive.

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