George Maciunas and the Flux-Labyrinth (1974/1976): Staging a SoHo Way of Life

Ever since the first edition of Frieze New York in 2012, the art fair pays tribute each year to “alternative spaces and artist-run initiatives that have defined and transformed the cultural life of contemporary cities.”[1] In 2013 Frieze New York celebrated FOOD, the artist-run restaurant initiated in 1971 by Gordon Matta-Clark in the neighborhood of SoHo, the old textile industry district South of Houston Street in Downtown Manhattan, New York. For the 2015 edition, Frieze commemorated the Flux-Labyrinth, a room-filling installation conceived by the artist George Maciunas in 1974. Not unlike Matta-Clark’s FOOD, Maciunas’s Flux-Labyrinth was a project that was firmly rooted in the artists’ colony of SoHo. Whereas the 2015 recreation of the original Flux-Labyrinth included many of the original sections, it also included sections designed by contemporary artists.[2] “Hidden among the grid of galleries,” the reconstruction of the labyrinth was promoted as “a space in which to play and discover a new awareness of our bodies.”[3] Any additional information about the historical genesis and meaning of the project by Maciunas, however, was not provided, preventing visitors to the fair from discovering the interrelatedness with the Fluxus movement in general, and with the urban realm of SoHo in the late 1960s and early 1970s in particular.