BIELEFELD, GERMANY.- Kunsthalle Bielefeld presents George Maciunas. The Dream of Fluxus, on view through 9 September 2007. The most amusing and, at the same time, saddest story in the history of twentieth-century art is that of Fluxus. Under this name, George Maciunas (1931-1978), the self-appointed chairman of the Fluxus movement, established strange and radical forms of performance. Many of the usual ways of presenting art—museums, theaters, concert halls, opera houses, and publishers—were supposed to disappear. Ordinary works of art would be replaced by, for example, “Drip Music,” water dripping down into a bowl; or a common exit sign, which would in turn elevate every exit to the level of a performance. Fluxus itself was supposed to be so easy that it could be performed by anyone, almost anywhere. New pieces would be protected by copyright, and be available for the price of a paperback. Clearly, Maciunas desired a more just and aesthetically valuable sort of culture, and so he fought against its bourgeois and baroque manifestations.

Maciunas, who died at 46, spent his life on all things Fluxus. Since his death, the art scene has developed with impressive speed into a billion-dollar global market, but our notion of works without any monetary value—as Fluxus tried to push through, starting in 1961—has paled to an almost frightful degree.

“The Dream of Fluxus” presents George Maciunas’s work and personal history—along with around twenty international avant-garde artists represented by several hundred works—as a real-life fairy tale. It is about the beginning of contemporary conceptual art and performance in Europe and New York. A fundamental Maciunas biography by Thomas Kellein, published by Walther Kˆnig, Cologne, will accompany the show.

Chief lender is the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Foundation, Detroit, with its loan of over 350 works. Other works come from other sources such as the Sohm Archive in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. Astrid Schmidt-Burkhardt will oversee the installation of the "Learning Machine," based on George Maciunas's own plans dealing with the course of culture from the past to the present. The exhibition is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation.