Why did Fluxus matter? Art history has found the question difficult to answer. Footnote to John Cage (arguably), prelude to conceptual and performance art (arguably), finishing school for latterly famous stars (Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik), the movement had the bad fortune of slotting into a cavalcade of sixties neo-avant-gardes that would, within a few years, make its little boxes and smashed pianos look hopelessly quaint. Yet recently, a consensus has started to emerge—a surprising one. Fluxus was an imitation of midcentury business culture. More precisely, it was, briefly and dubiously, a copyright owned by George Maciunas, the protean figure at the heart of Colby Chamberlain’s monograph, Fluxus Administration: George Maciunas and the Art of Paperwork.

Born Jurgis Mačiūnas in Lithuania in 1931, Maciunas has been notoriously hard to define. His formal training was in graphic design and architecture, but apart from a few brief stints at big firms and as a designer for the US Army, he never made a viable career of those professions. He spent much of his adult life dodging overdue bills. “Impresario,” the label habitually pinned on him, is vaguely pejorative. “Artist” probably fits even worse. Concretely speaking, Maciunas was, as Chamberlain notes, responsible above all for a uniform Fluxus graphic identity: a combination of Letraset typefaces with found vintage illustrations, plus a penchant for plans, charts, and diagrams (Fluxus Administration illustrates more of these than artworks). Yet to reduce his role to that of designer, or indeed that of organizer, publisher, gallerist, and eventually real estate developer (he pioneered the model of the refurbished postindustrial loft), is reductive: he was all these things and none, at least not permanently. One gets the impression that Maciunas had about ten utterly daft ideas for every visionary one. Yet it is impossible to gainsay the long-term impact of his initiatives—not least the artist-led gentrification of SoHo, the primal scene of New York’s neoliberal transformation.

Chamberlain argues convincingly that these myriad roles were aspects of an “administrative authorship” that was not so much about making things as it was about organizing information and social contacts. Maciunas necessarily used the analog technologies of the time; if he had a medium, it was the “paperwork” in the book’s subtitle. In a nice conceit, each chapter is named for a pairing of such paper-based technologies: “Card Files & Charts,” “Newsletters & Postcards,” “Registrations & Catalogs,” “Plans & Budgets,” “Prescriptions & Certificates.” (The conclusion is titled “Obituaries.”) Maciunas’s training at the Cooper Union and the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, followed by intervals with architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Olin Mathieson Chemical Corporation, and finally an abortive art history MA at the Institute of Fine Arts taught him not just skills but also habits of problem-solving based on modularity and compartmentalization, the tools of which were index cards, flowcharts, cost estimates, and the like. These forms reappear basically unmodified in his artistic activity. Following the lead of German media theory, Chamberlain accordingly describes Fluxus as something like an epoch of the file card system.

Fluxus Administration is packed with archival tidbits that appreciably flesh out the story. Such trouvées often relate minor but amusing episodes, such as Maciunas’s unaccountable impression that the quasi-dissident Soviet pianist Maria Yudina was some sort of highly placed cultural apparatchik. (A leitmotif in the book is Maciunas’s equally unaccountable belief that the Soviet Union’s cultural policy in the 1960s was continuous with the avant-garde of some four decades earlier; he made numerous plans—never realized, of course—to relocate Fluxus en masse to the USSR.) The book all-but self-reflexively doubles Maciunas’s paperwork with its author’s palpable delight in coming across some unexpected scrap in an old folder, though not all of these discoveries seem to have the analytic value that he assigns them. For example, in a chapter on the Fluxhouse Cooperatives—Maciunas’s scheme for moving artists into dilapidated SoHo buildings—he discusses (and illustrates, full-page) a sheet of Fluxus letterhead signed by a who’s who of the sixties avant-garde, from Robert Morris and Yvonne Rainer to Jonas Mekas and Eleanor Antin. Maciunas solicited the signatures to enclose with future petitions to the authorities. But they clearly show up in the book for the simple “wow” effect, which, needless to say, only works on readers similarly awestruck by this much-mythologized period of the New York underground.

The sheet of celebrity autographs does, though, provide an occasion to raise a more significant historiographic point. Maciunas adapted the full range of midcentury paperwork for his own ends. But what were those ends, and what did he think he was doing by gathering signatures, drafting newsletters, excommunicating turncoats by airmail, and so on? Administration is a social technology. Maciunas was both very good and very bad at using it—very good, because he managed to corral an astonishing, obstreperous roster; very bad, because he ended up alienating a great many of them. (In 1971, Yoko Ono and John Lennon sent a letter addressing Maciunas as “Dear Stalin.”) Administrative authorship came to be a survival strategy. By all evidence, though, Maciunas organized because he liked organization.

The question, again, is why. Although his scattered references to the book are dismissive, it seems to me that Chamberlain’s work extends Mari Dumett’s Corporate Imaginations: Fluxus Strategies for Living (University of California Press, 2017), as well Natilee Harren’s Fluxus Forms: Scores, Multiples, and the Eternal Network (University of Chicago Press, 2020), the two most notable recent books on the movement. Dumett proposes that Fluxus was literally a business. Chamberlain’s improvement on the argument is to show, with greater sensitivity to archival evidence, that Maciunas’s strategies were not so much “corporate” per se as they were enmeshed with a set of information-processing techniques that were common to various levels of governmentality and academia in addition to the business world. Like power itself, paperwork belonged essentially neither to “the angels or the demons” (225), as Chamberlain puts it.

The sticking point in both accounts is Maciunas’s confounding politics. He was prone to strident declarations: “FUSE the cadres of cultural, political & social revolutionaries into united front & action,” for example (to quote from his 1963 Fluxus Manifesto). For Dumett, the master term for making sense of this is mimicry. Fluxus “mimicked certain formal and behavioral features of a model, the taxonomically disparate organism of the multinational corporation,” at the same time as it mimicked those of an equally international revolutionary vanguard (Corporate Imaginations, 13). But is it quite adequate to define Maciunas’s odd merger of the corporate and the communist as mimicry, or, for that matter—as Chamberlain more or less does, following venerable precedent in Fluxus scholarship—to suppress it by consigning Maciunas’s leftist rhetoric to personal idiosyncrasy, a striving for shock value, and misappropriation of the Soviet Constructivist/Productivist legacy? Dumett holds that Fluxus artists were unable “to completely destroy the hold of commodity logic on consciousness” (Corporate Imaginations, 22) and therefore evolved pragmatic strategies for getting by in the postwar world. Chamberlain, by contrast, is not markedly concerned either with the commodity or (anti)capitalism as such. He focuses instead on the goofy, even self-destructive ways in which Maciunas’s work intersected and interfered with a set of Foucaultian apparatuses, namely, “those regulating education, circulation, production, housing, and health” (2).

What if we imagine, though, that Fluxus were neither an art movement nor a social network but rather a political party—specifically, a vanguard party in the Leninist mode? What if Maciunas’s communism were a social technology, too? The problem here is that, from today’s perspective, it is more intuitive to suspect that Maciunas was a dupe of history. Recuperation is an easy story to tell. Although he wrapped his project in the rhetoric of the interwar avant-garde, Maciunas in effect launched the Fluxus brand through what we would now call a viral marketing campaign. Similarly, the utopian Fluxhouse Cooperatives only ended up making these very neighborhoods unaffordable for subsequent generations of artists. The temptation here is to subsume Fluxus to a teleology in which there is no alternative to neoliberal capitalism. Chamberlain does probably as good a job as anyone can of balancing these perspectives: he acknowledges such ironies while at the same time arguing that provisional Fluxus collectivity is a model with political lessons still to teach. But neither he nor Dumett is inimical to an account of the sixties neo-avant-garde that has been second nature ever since the appearance of Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski’s book The New Spirit of Capitalism (Verso, 2005). Radical art’s demands for participation and informality, hurled against monolithic capitalism in the sixties, were rapidly absorbed into an even more insidious post-Fordist regime of accumulation. This makes it hard to take Maciunas’s collectivist outbursts seriously. They were, after all, most often made in the context of trying to copyright other people’s creativity.

Perhaps the second and more important reason why his politics have become incomprehensible, though, is that we have collectively lost the ability to imagine political formalization as anything other than a threshold to horrendous office work. Formalization as such, that is, reads by default as capitalist planning. We see a card file and we think business, not tractors on the Volga. The organizational media that Chamberlain isolates all have close parallels in the culture of the historical left, especially its propaganda wings: the newsletter, the manifesto, the plan, the fundraising circular, the denunciation—all forms of “paperwork,” too, though not ones that Chamberlain thematizes. It might be, then, that the futility of Maciunas’s efforts at control indexes the fading of the party-form as much as it does a transition to neoliberalism. We have only lost sight of the former. What exactly was Fluxus, then, as arguably the representative formation of the neo-avant-garde? Surely, yes, a prototype for postindustrial business, as the new scholars suggest. But it was also a late variant of Leninism—a Leninism in which the self-perpetuating rationality of the vanguard party bleeds into the self-reproducing rationality of the capitalist firm.