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.

Water Yam, a series of event scores printed on small sheets of card and collected together in a cardboard box, was the first in a series of artworks that Maciunas printed that became known as Fluxkits.

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.

The first warehouse, intended to house Maciunas, Watts, Christo & Jeanne-Calude, Jonas Mekas, LaMonte Young & others, was located on Greene Street.

* 1963: George Brecht's collection of Event-Scores, Water Yam, is published as the first Fluxkit by George Maciunas.

The first of these, " Nothing by Ray Johnson ", was part of a weekly series of events in July 1961 at AG, a venue in New York operated by George Maciunas and Almus Salcius ; Yoko Ono ’ s first solo show was on view in the gallery at the time.

In 1963, Maciunas composed the first Fluxus Manifesto, ( see above ), which called upon its readers to:

The first one to be planned was Fluxus 1, a wooden box filled with artworks by most of Maciunas ' colleagues.

Although it was illegal to sell the units publicly without first filing a full-disclosure prospectus with the New York State Attorney General, Maciunas ignored the legal requirements, beginning a series of increasingly bizarre run-ins with the Attorney General of New York.

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.

Young, a musician who had arrived in New York September 1960, had been asked to guest edit a special edition of Beatitude East on avant-garde art, which evolved into the seminal compendium, An Anthology Of Chance ( see ) Brecht was the first artist listed in the compendium ; the graphic designer and publisher of the book was George Maciunas, who had been attending the same music classes, although by now they were being given by Richard Maxfield.

In his renowned diagram of 1973 showing the development and scope of Fluxus, George Maciunas included Mail Art among the activities pursued by the Fluxus artist Robert Filliou ( who coined the term " the Eternal Network " that has become synonymous with Mail Art ).

Artists linked with the term include Genpei Akasegawa, John Chamberlain, Jim Dine, Kommissar Hjuler, Jasper Johns, Yves Klein, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Allan Kaprow, George Brecht, Wolf Vostell, Joseph Beuys, Dick Higgins, Ushio Shinohara, and Robert Rauschenberg.

* Fluxus: George Maciunas

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

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

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 '.

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

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

" Maciunas and his friend Henry Flynt tried to get the Fluxus people to march around outside the circus with white cards that said Originale was bad.

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.

With photographs taken by Maciunas himself, pieces by Ben Vautier, Alison Knowles and Takehisha Kosugi were performed in the street for free, although in practice there was ' no audience to speak of ' anyway.

Maciunas ' Fluxus Manifesto, copies of which were thrown into the audience at the Festum Fluxorum Fluxus, Düsseldorf, February 1963.

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.

At the same time, Maciunas used his connections at work to start printing cheap mass produced books and multiples by some of the artists that were involved in the performances.

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.

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.

In 1960, whilst attending composition classes of the electronic composer Richard Maxfield at the New School for Social Research in New York, Maciunas met many of the future participants of Fluxus, including La Monte Young, Al Hansen, Allan Kaprow, & Jackson Mac Low.

To avoid debt collectors, Maciunas took a job as a civilian graphic designer at a U. S. Air Force base in Wiesbaden, Germany in late 1961.

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.

Maciunas began wearing disguises and going out only at night.

As part of a touring exhibition organized by Dartmouth College, Maciunas ’ work was most recently featured in “ Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life ” at New York University ’ s Grey Gallery in fall 2011 and University of Michigan ’ s Museum of Art in spring 2012.

* First Fluxus event organised by George Maciunas at the AG Gallery in New York.