Friday, September 11, 5 PM
LNDM National Gallery of Art, Konstitucijos Ave. 22, Vilnius

This year marks what would have been George Maciunas’s 95th birthday. To mark the occasion, the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center and the LNDM National Gallery of Art invite you to public lectures by US-based art historians Gerry Beegan and Colby Chamberlain, presenting recent research on the work and legacy of George Maciunas.

The two scholars approach Maciunas from distinct perspectives. One focuses on his practice as a designer, his engagement with mass production, materials, and modes of art distribution; the other examines the administrative structures Maciunas employed in his attempts to create new forms of community. Alongside the broader history of Fluxus, the lectures will bring into view less frequently discussed mechanisms of his practice – the ways in which ideas were transformed into objects, publications, systems, and models of collective action.

Gerry Beegan is a design historian, curator, and professor at Rutgers University. He is currently working on a biography of George Maciunas that focuses particularly on his role and practice as a designer.

Maciunas’s multiples, posters, books, and catalogues challenged established modes of producing and distributing art and design, while also transforming the spatial and sensory experience of their users. His aesthetics, production methods, use of materials, and distribution strategies also questioned the status of the designer at a time when designers were not necessarily regarded as artists.

In his lecture, Gerry Beegan will examine Maciunas’s sustained interest in mass production and distribution, tracing it from his career as an architect and designer in the 1950s to his multifaceted activities within Fluxus.

Colby Chamberlain is an art historian and associate professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art. He is the author of Fluxus Administration: George Maciunas and the Art of Paperwork (University of Chicago Press, 2024) and regularly publishes on Fluxus in the US media.

Chamberlain approaches Maciunas’s activities across architecture, music, performance, publishing, graphic design, film, and real estate as an effort to create new forms of community by employing and reconfiguring bureaucratic structures.

According to Chamberlain, Maciunas repeatedly sought to transform Fluxus into a community, and in doing so relied on the methods and forms of everyday bureaucracy. His artistic thinking therefore emerged in seemingly unlikely contexts: postal routing systems, the fine print of copyright regulations, structures of urban planning, and even hospital corridors.

The two lectures will open up two distinct perspectives on George Maciunas’s practice: his engagement with design, mass production, and distribution, and his use of administrative systems in creating and organising the Fluxus community.

The event will be held in English.

Admission is free, but registration is required:
https://forms.gle/LG14BRcEJSsQ9KYo9