The Lives of Working Objects: Functionalism and the Institution in the Archival 'Readymades' of George Maciunas

摘要

This dissertation examines key works by George Maciunas (1931--1978), the leader of the Fluxus movement, and the trajectory they trace toward a deeper, more complex engagement with the readymade and the historical meaning of the postwar avant-garde project. This requires analysis of his intense involvement with functionalism as a result of his training in architecture, as well as consideration of his conception of the archive. These two aspects of his work converged first in the design and construction of the Archive Room (1974--76) for collector Jean Brown in her Shaker Seed House in Tyringham, Massachusetts, a work entirely overlooked in the literature, and subsequently in the Flux Cabinet (1976--77), the last Fluxus anthology. In these, the institution of art emerges as an accumulated body of choices susceptible of transmission and also recreation across generations. Maciunas thus complicates not only prevailing views on the historiography of the avant-garde since the seventies, but accepted narratives on the reception of the readymade. This approach to Maciunas' work attends closely to the relevance of historical context, from discourses on the concept of functionalism to the reception of the readymade and the avant-garde. Archive theory, theories of the avant-garde and the readymade, and institutional theory inform the analysis. The main thrust of the original research comprises interviews with key figures including Susan Reinhold, commissioner of the Flux Cabinet, as well as extensive archival research at Archiv Sohm, Kunstgalerie Stuttgart; the Tate Archive, London; the Silverman Collection, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Jean Brown Papers at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California; and at the Shaker Seed House itself, before the disassembling of the Archive Room in 2013.