George Maciunas: Lecture and Performance

Doors at 7, program starts at 7:30

Join us at e-flux on Thursday, September 25, at 7pm for an evening dedicated to George Maciunas (1931–1978), coordinator and founding member of Fluxus. The program will include a lecture by Colby Chamberlain, the author of Fluxus Administration: George Maciunas and the Art of Paperwork, followed by a performance by Laura Ortman of Solo for Violin, written by Maciunas in 1962.

In histories of SoHo, George Maciunas and the Fluxhouse Cooperatives are usually a single paragraph in the larger story of how the neighborhood became an “artists’ colony” and a template for gentrification. A closer look at the Fluxhouses shows that the takeover of SoHo by chain stores and real estate developers was never as inevitable as it now seems. Maciunas’s original vision suggests that artists might have played a different role in shaping the post-industrial city. Part counter-factual, part cautionary tale, this lecture will look at the nitty-gritty of the Fluxhouses’ organization and ask what lessons its successes and shortcomings hold for art and urbanism in the future.

Colby Chamberlain is the author of Fluxus Administration: George Maciunas and the Art of Paperwork (University of Chicago Press, 2024) and an assistant professor of art history at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

A soloist musician, composer and vibrant collaborator, Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) creates across multiple platforms, including recorded albums, live performances, and filmic and artistic soundtracks. She has collaborated with artists such as Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Nanobah Becker, Okkyung Lee, Jeffrey Gibson, Caroline Monnet, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Kronos Quartet, Martha Colburn, New Red Order, Martin Bisi, Demian DinéYazhi, and as part of the trio In Defense of Memory. An inquisitive and exquisite violinist, Ortman is versed in Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and amplified violin, and often sings through a megaphone. She is a producer of capacious field recordings. Ortman has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, Venice Biennale, Brooklyn Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, MASS MoCA, MCA Chicago, REWIRE Festival at the Hague, Baltimore Museum of Art, The Stone, SF JAZZ, The New Museum, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, The Toronto Biennial, Experimental Sound Studio (ESS) and Centre Pompidou, Paris, among countless established and DIY venues in the US, Canada, Mexico, and Europe. In 2008, she founded the Coast Orchestra, an all-Native American orchestral ensemble that performed a live soundtrack to Edward Curtis’s film In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), the first silent feature film to star an all-Native American cast. Ortman was also a participating artist in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The program of sound performances at e-flux is curated by Sanna Almajedi.

For more information, please contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.