In early 1963, George Maciunas made this two-sided broadsheet collage by gathering together reviews of the first Fluxus concerts in Wiesbaden, Düsseldorf, and Copenhagen. The two sheets were designed to be glued together to make one long page that could be sent through the mail as a rolled-up scroll. Most of the clippings came from German and Danish newspapers, but some articles prove that news of the Fluxus events reached readers as far as Italy and Austria. (Mastheads from regional papers like the Telegraph-Herald in Dubuque, Iowa, may have been added by Maciunas for humorous effect.) The madcap layout, reminiscent of Dada and Surrealist publications of the early twentieth century, is characteristic of the Fluxus newspapers Maciunas would publish under varying iterations of the name cc V TRE.
The layout also amplifies and revels in the many bemused accounts of reviewers, which accord with the kind of language one finds in reviews of performances of John Cage’s radical music. To point to one example included here, the Associated Press piece penned by Richard O’Regan cheekily recounts of the Wiesbaden festival, “This wasn’t a barroom brawl. It wasn’t a political rally. It was a concert of ‘very new music and anti-music’ in Wiesbaden’s dignified art museum.” O’Regan’s account was published in the American military newspaper Stars and Stripes, which had a Darmstadt office out of which Fluxus artist and participating performer Emmett Williams worked as features editor.
Courtesy of Billie Maciunas.
