ARTS REVIEW: GEORGE MACIUNAS EXHIBIT--JONAS MEKAS VISUAL ARTS CENTER

A Dream of Establishing Vilnius as the 21st Century Capital of Fluxus

By: Roslyn Bernstein

June 25, 2010

(May 20, 2010 in Vilnius, Lithuania) On a wall in the former Ministry of Health building in Vilnius, Lithuania, a Buddha made out of pills stands guard as hordes of young artists, most in their twenties, march up and down the stairs to their studios.

Empty for over seven years, the building has been reborn as The Ministry of Fluxus, the invention of Arturas Zuokas, the former mayor of Vilnius and also the current director of The Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center (JMVAC). Three thousand people, many of them artists, showed up at the building’s end-of-April opening.

Located on Gedimino Prospect, the main street of downtown Vilnius, the building now houses the studios of 200 artists, each of whom, in return for free work space and free WiFi (they only pay for their heat and utilities), has promised to produce an art event monthly, open to the public. Word about the free studios spread through the Internet, especially through Facebook, which is very popular in Lithuania. The second floor functions partially as a sort of youth hostel, hosting up to ten artists who sleep there and have shower and laundry faculties.

In the lobby of the building, a handwritten sign on the wall sets the tone for the space. “Keep dancing, keep singing, have a good drink, and do not get too serious! OK?” writes Jonas Mekas, the Lithuanian born avant-garde filmmaker who is clearly idolized by this generation of artists. Mekas was a good friend of George Maciunas, the founder of the Fluxus Art Movement, and Mekas’s Cinematheque and Anthology Film Archives were once housed on the ground floor of 80 Wooster Street in SoHo (NYC) -- the first of 16 buildings co-opped by Maciunas.

To honor their friendship and Maciunas’s accomplishments, the current exhibit at the JMVAC, “George Maciunas: The Father of SoHo,” illuminates how Maciunas performed his magic, recreating SoHo as an artist community through documents, photos and video.  On display are charts describing the lofts for sale in the various buildings, named Fluxhouses by Maciunas, homemade flyers advertising organizational meetings, original documents, photos, and videos. The exhibit will run through September 1, 2010.

Published by the Jonas Mekas Foundation, in conjunction with the exhibit at JMVAC, is Illegal Living: 80 Wooster Street and the Evolution of SoHo, co-authored by Roslyn Bernstein and Shael Shapiro. The book traces the history of the site through its farm, industrial, post-industrial, and artistic life. The loft building at 80 was a manufacturing building (paper boxes, candy companies) until 1967, when Maciunas bought it for $105,000. The book’s official American launch will take place in SoHo in September, 2010. With Jonas Mekas’s Cinematheque anchoring its street-floor space, the building quickly became a hub for avant-garde film screenings and happenings of every sort: Fluxus dinners, a butchering event by Hermann Nitsch, Trisha Brown’s Man Walking Down the Side of a Building performance (performed by Joe Schlichter, her ex-husband, on the back wall of the building), plays by Richard Foreman, and concerts by Philip Glass and others. 

Arturas Zuokas’s dream is to establish Vilnius as the Capital of Fluxus in the 21^st Century. Following in the tradition of Maciunas and Mekas, Zuokas is a bold thinker.

He seeks to attract artists from all genres to The Ministry of Fluxus — painters, photographers, filmmakers, digital video, 35mm, experienced musicians...  Little touches, he says, create community. Friday night is grilling night, with large barbecue grills set up on the street adjacent to the Fluxus Ministry and with artists bringing their own meat to grill and share. Both Friday and Saturday are noisy days with concerts including jazz every Friday night. The idea is to foster artistic freedom. Says artist Vilma Samulionyte, “People can do what they want. No restrictions. No borders. You can do anything. You can close the door and do nothing.”

The basement bomb shelter with remnants of Russian equipment used to clean the air has become transformed into individual screening booths for Jonas Mekas’s films. Also, appropriately located in the bomb shelter, is a traveling exhibit from Belarus: "Visual Code of the Time: post Soviet poster art in Belarus." In one particularly striking poster from 1990, 1937 Rusian Naidzen, the artist Alyaksandr Navazhylau has a tongue serving as a revolver trigger, symbolizing the harsh reality that “Stalin’s persecutions were often formally initiated by the accusations of informers.” A Fluxus room and library will soon be added to the Ministry with copies of existing works that the City of Vilnius bought for the JMVAC.

Zuokas has even bigger dreams for the JMVAC. Last year, renowned architect Zaha Hadid won the architectural competition for a proposal for a new museum, a collaboration of the State Hermitage Museum and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to be built in Vilnius. Although the project is still tentative and very much dependent on financing, it is moving forward and a site has been selected.

“We will create the New Wave of Fluxus,” Zuokas said. “Everyone can be creative. Fluxus is creativity.”