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Abstract
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.
Highlights
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]
By returning to the first built iteration of the labyrinth during New York – Downtown Manhattan – SoHo, a 1976 exhibition dedicated to the artistic hotbed of SoHo at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, curated by the German art dealer René Block, this essay aims to disclose that the labyrinth functioned as more than a mere funhouse.[5]
Teeming with all kinds of obstacles that visitors had to overcome, the FluxLabyrinth was invariably devised as an intricate experience of the SoHo way of life.[6]
Summary
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]. Not unlike Matta-Clark’s FOOD, Maciunas’s FluxLabyrinth 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 included sections designed by contemporary artists.. The genesis of the project, we will argue, was firmly grounded in Maciunas’s pioneering activities in the transformation of “Hell’s Hundred Acres” into the “Artists’ Colony” known as SoHo. Whereas Maciunas’s efforts for the Fluxhouse Cooperatives are generally understood as separate from his artistic practice, this essay aims to demonstrate that the role and position of the Flux-Labyrinth within the Berlin exhibition establishes a direct parallel between this groundbreaking installation and Maciunas’s Fluxhouse projects.[7]
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