Fluxus founder George Maciunas, a friend of Ono's during the 1960s, admired her work and promoted it with enthusiasm.

After returning to New York, Maciunas became reacquainted with Henry Flynt, who encouraged members of Fluxus to take a more overtly political stance.

I thought it was funny, and so first I walked around with Maciunas and with Henry with a card, then I went inside and joined the circus ; so both groups got angry with me.

This was an homage to the 1965 anti-art picketing of a Stockhausen concert in New York by Fluxus members Henry Flynt and George Maciunas.

As well as Maciunas ' concerts at the AG Gallery, March 1961 featuring music and events by Maciunas himself, Ichiyanagi, Mac Low and Higgins, the two other most important precursors to fluxus were La Monte Young's influential series of performances in the Chambers Street loft of Yoko Ono and Ichiyanagi Toshi, in 1961 involving Henry Flynt, La Monte Young, Joseph Byrd & Robert Morris amongst others ; and Robert Watts and George Brecht's Yam Festival, spring 1963 at Rutgers University and New York, which included a series of mail art event scores and performances by John Cage, Allan Kaprow, Alison Knowles, Ay O and Dick Higgins.

Other key influences noted by Maciunas included the happenings that had occurred at the Black Mountain College involving Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, David Tudor, Merce Cunningham and others ; the Nouveaux Réalistes ; the Concept Art of Henry Flynt and Marcel Duchamp's notion of the readymade.

Stockhausen was deemed a ' Cultural Imperialist ' by Maciunas and Flynt, while other members vehemently disagreed.

Because of his friendship and collaboration with La Monte Young and George Maciunas, Flynt sometimes gets linked to Fluxus.

" Maciunas seemed to have a fantastic ability to get things done .... if you had things to be printed he could get them printed.

* Fluxus: George Maciunas

Fluxus was named and loosely organized in 1962 by George Maciunas ( 1931 – 78 ), a Lithuanian-born American artist.

Maciunas invited Ono to join the Fluxus group, but she declined because she wanted to remain an independent artist.

Fluxus Manifesto, 1963, by George Maciunas

" The Fluxus movement ... developed its ‘ anti-art ’, anti-commercial aesthetics under the leadership of George Maciunas.

Flux Year Box 2, c. 1967, a Flux box edited and produced by George Maciunas, containing works by many early Fluxus artists.

These classes – later taught by Richard Maxfield – were attended by many artists and musicians who would become involved in Fluxus, including Jackson Mac Low, La Monte Young, George Brecht, Dick Higgins and George Maciunas.

Fluxus was conceived by Lithuanian-born George Maciunas as an attempt to ' fuse ... cultural social & political revolutionaries into united front and action '.

Maciunas first publically coined the term Fluxus ( meaning ' to flow ') in a ' brochure prospectus ' that he distributed to the audience at a festival he had organized, called Aprés Cage ; Kleinen Sommerfest ( After Cage ; a Small Summer Festival ), in Wuppertal, West Germany, June 9, 1962.

Since Maciunas was colorblind, Fluxus multiples were almost always black and white.

Deploying his expertise as a professional graphic designer, Maciunas played an important role in projecting upon Fluxus whatever coherence it would later seem to have had.

Traitor, you left Fluxus !, a postcard sent by George Maciunas to Nam June Paik, c late 1964, after the latter's involvement with Stockhausen's Originale

The event, arranged by Charlotte Moorman as part of her 2nd Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, would cement animosities between Maciunas and her, with Maciunas frequently demanding that artists associated with Fluxus have nothing to do with the annual festival, and would often expel artists who ignored his demands.

This hostility continued throughout Maciunas ' life – much to Moorman's bemusement – despite her continued championing of Fluxus art and artists.

The picketing of Originale marked the high point of Maciunas ' agit prop approach, an approach that estranged many of Fluxus ' early proponents ; Jackson Mac Low had resigned immediately after hearing ' antisocial ' plans laid in April 1963, such as breaking down trucks under the Hudson River Brecht threatened to quit on the same issue, and then left New York in the spring of 1965.

Dick Higgins fell out with Maciunas around the same time, ostensibly over his setting up the Something Else Press which printed many key Fluxus texts.

Since returning to Japan in 1961, Yoko Ono had been recommending colleagues look Maciunas up if they moved to New York ; by the time she had returned, in early 1965, Hi Red Center, Shigeko Kubota, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi and Ay-O had all started to make work for Fluxus, often of a contemplative nature.

After the death of George Maciunas in 1978 a rift opened in the movement between a few collectors and curators who placed Fluxus in a specific time frame ( 1962 to 1978 ), and the artists themselves, many of whom continued to see Fluxus as a living entity held together by its core values and world view.

Some have argued that the unique control that curator Jon Hendricks holds over a major historical Fluxus collection ( the Gilbert and Lila Silverman collection ) has enabled him to influence, through the numerous books and catalogues subsidized by the collection, the view that Fluxus died with Maciunas.

One of the most notorious events performed at Wiesbaden was Maciunas ' interpretation of Philip Corner's Piano Activities, the score of which asked a group of people to ' play ', ' scratch or rub ' and ' strike soundboard, pins, lid or drag various objects across them.

We would have gone our own ways and done our own things: the only reference point for any of this bunch of people who liked each other's works, and each other, more or less, was Maciunas.

After having fled Lithuania at the end of World War II, his family had moved to New York, where Maciunas first came into contact with a group of avant-garde artists and musicians centered around John Cage and La Monte Young.

Growing out of John Cage's Experimental Composition classes from 1957 to 1959 at the New School for Social Research, Fluxus was a loose collective of artists from North America and Europe that centred around George Maciunas ( 1931 – 78 ), who was born in Lithuania.

A Norwegian American, he was briefly a member of Fluxus, the artists ' collective centred around George Maciunas.

He would charm them, boss them around for years, then perform summary excommunications, banishing those who displeased him ..... Maciunas would take against individuals for no good reason-composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was one-and damn by association those who had anything to do with them.

Maciunas ’ work has been exhibited in many of the major museums around the world with archives held in The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, The Getty Research Institute, and Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.

He was a key member of, and influence on, Fluxus, the international group of avant-garde artists centred around George Maciunas, having been involved with the group from the first performances in Wiesbaden 1962 until Maciunas ' death in 1978.

During her career, Ono has collaborated with a diverse group of artists and musicians including John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Klaus Voormann, Cornelius ( Keigo Oyamada, Naoki Shimizu and Yoko Araki ), Frank Zappa, Sean Lennon, Yuka Honda, Jim Keltner, Earl Slick, Peaches, John Cage, David Tudor, George Maciunas, Ornette Coleman, Charlotte Moorman, George Brecht, Jackson Mac Low, Jonas Mekas, Fred DeAsis, Yvonne Rainer, La Monte Young, Richard Maxfield, Zbigniew Rybczyński, Yo La Tengo, and Andy Warhol ( in 1987 Ono was one of the speakers at Warhol's funeral ).

The American musician and artist La Monte Young had been asked to guest-edit an issue of a literary journal, Beatitude East, and asked George Maciunas, a trained graphic designer, for help with the layout ; Maciunas supplied the paper, design, and some money for publishing of the anthology, which contained a more or less arbitrary association of New York avant-garde artists at that time.

The score – which asks for any number of performers to, among other things, “ play ”, “ pluck or tap ”, “ scratch or rub ”, “ drop objects ” on, “ act on strings with ”, “ strike soundboard, pins, lid or drag various kinds of objects across them ” and “ act in any way on underside of piano ” – resulted in the total destruction of a piano when performed by Maciunas, Higgins and others at Wiesbaden.

After his contract with the US Air Force was terminated due to ill health, Maciunas was forced to return to the US on September 3, 1963.

Along with the New York shop, Maciunas built up a distribution network for the new art across Europe and later outlets in California and Japan.

" Some years ago, when I spoke with Robert Watts about Degree Face Clock and Compass Face Clock, he had recalled thinking up the idea himself and was surprised that George Maciunas advertised them as Per Kirkeby's.

Other tactics from this time included Maciunas buying large amounts of plastic boxes wholesale, and handing them out to artists with the simple request to turn them into Fluxkits, and the use of the rapidly growing international network of artists to contribute items needed to complete works.

The plans were continually dogged by financial problems, constant run-ins with the New York authorities, and eventually resulted, on 8 November 1975, in Maciunas being severely beaten by thugs sent by an unpaid electrical contractor.