Part I: Fluxus and the Graphic Design of George Maciunas

Buquet, Benoît

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Part I: Fluxus and the Graphic Design of George Maciunas

Benoît Buquet

Art & Graphic Design: George Maciunas, Ed Ruscha, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville

Part I

Author

Benoît Buquet

PublisherYale University Press

PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22433

Part I: Fluxus and the Graphic Design of George Maciunas

Each of us had his own ideas about what Fluxus was, and that is all to the good. That way, it will take longer to bury us!

George Brecht, conversation with Irmeline Lebeer (1973)

Rereading Fluxus through the prism of graphic design will enable us to identify both the characteristics and the fundamental ambivalence of George Maciunas’s visual stamp. Paradoxically, his graphic design, the primary vehicle of flux, constitutes its point of stasis. A typographical bricolage that puts the IBM Selectric, Letraset, and the Photostat to good use; an inclination for expressive “constructions” in the manner of Herb Lubalin; and anachronistic iconography are all part of a branding operation in the service of an “anti-art” whose ideological content varies a great deal, depending on the objects and protagonists considered.

* * *

1. Constructing a Visual Identity

2. Ideological, Technological, and (Ty)poetic Context

3. Maciunas’s Pharmacy

Book details

BOOKArt & Graphic Design: George Maciunas, Ed Ruscha, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville

Benoît Buquet

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00305

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22429

This fascinating study of the role that graphic design played in American art of the 1960s and 1970s focuses on the work of George Maciunas, Ed Ruscha, and Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. Examining how each of these artists utilized typography, materiality, and other graphic design aesthetics, Benoît Buquet reveals the importance of graphic design in creating a sense of coherence within the disparate international group of Fluxus artists, an elusiveness and resistance to categorization that defined much of Ruscha’s brand of Pop Art, and an open and participatory visual identity for a range of feminist art practices. Rigorous and compelling scholarship and a copious illustration program that presents insightful juxtapositions of objects—some of which have never been discussed before—combine to shed new light on a period of abundant creativity and cultural transition in American art and the intimate, though often overlooked, entwinement between art and graphic design.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*

Author

Benoît Buquet

PublisherYale University Press

Terra Foundation for American Art

Print publication date November 2021 (in print)

Print ISBN 9780300249859

EISBN 9780300269338

Illustrations 152

Print Status in print

Publisher (in print)

WorldCat

Google Books

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