George Maciunas - Friends Reminisce

Friends Reminisce

"When I met George in 1966, he was already quite different to the George Maciunas others described to me. He was not the mercurial, intolerant, zealot that others described. He was open-minded, easy to work with, and quite supportive of what were then new approaches to Fluxus. People spoke to me about a George who demanded that everyone do things his way. I met a man whose most frequent expression was, “Do it yourself.” Along with that came the implicit understanding that I had an obligation to find my own way forward." Ken Friedman, "George Maciunas: Architect"

"George Maciunas was a genius, a man of passionate moral zeal, intellectual vigor, and artistic strength. He did not see the world as it is, but as it might have been. He saw it as it might have been – or ought to be. George possessed astonishing power, depth, and insight in the fields that he understood, but he understood nothing at all about other things. The strength and clarity of his focus often gave him what seemed to be a unidirectional, even narrow vision." Ken Friedman, "George Maciunas: Architect"

"So what did I learn from Maciunas? With his considerable public relations ability, he could have pushed his own art. He didn’t. He painted in the 1950s. And made charts. But he witnessed a gathering artistic sensibility in the early 1960s, and took it upon himself to harness it for the benefit of all. Many artists rebelled. Some were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. He was, above all, unselfish in his unstinting desire to advance the cause for all. That’s what I find admirable." John Held Jr. "I’ve Ripened to the Genius of George Maciunas"

An oratorio loosely based on Maciunas and titled Machunas premiered in August 2005 in the St. Christopher Summer Festival in Vilnius, Lithuania. Machunas was conceived by artist Lucio Pozzi, with music by Frank J. Oteri. Several of Maciunas' friends and colleagues protested the fact that the libretto was mistaken by many as a biography.