Written by George Maciunas and distributed as a broadsheet in 1963. The Fluxus Manifesto is one of the most concise and aggressive statements of the anti-art position in postwar culture. Maciunas (1931–1978) designed the manifesto as a typographic object — a single sheet combining dictionary definitions, political slogans, and graphic design in the tradition of Futurist and Dada broadsides.
George Maciunas was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, in 1931 and emigrated to the United States in 1948. Trained as an architect and graphic designer, he organized the first Fluxus events in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1962, and spent the remaining sixteen years of his life attempting to maintain organizational control over an inherently uncontrollable network of artists, musicians, poets, and provocateurs. Fluxus — the name derived from the Latin for “flowing” — was never a movement in any conventional sense. It was a mailing list, a distribution network, a series of festivals, and above all an attitude: that art should be as cheap, accessible, disposable, and unpretentious as a joke or a sneeze.
The manifesto reproduced below reflects Maciunas’s own orientation — more politically radical and organizationally ambitious than many of his Fluxus colleagues. Its language draws heavily on Soviet revolutionary rhetoric, which Maciunas deployed with a combination of sincere commitment and ironic self-awareness that has kept scholars debating his intentions ever since. What is beyond debate is the text’s force: no other document of the period compresses so much hostility toward bourgeois art into so few words.
Manifesto
Purge the world of bourgeois sickness, “intellectual,” professional & commercialized culture, PURGE the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art, illusionistic art, mathematical art, — PURGE THE WORLD OF “EUROPANISM”!
PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART.
Promote living art, anti-art, promote NON ART REALITY to be grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals.
FUSE the cadres of cultural, social & political revolutionaries into united front & action.
Definitions from the Manifesto Broadsheet
Maciunas structured the broadsheet around dictionary-style definitions extracted from standard English-language dictionaries, using them as found text to build his argument:
PURGE: To make clean, to clear of impurities, of foreign matter, of impure elements, of persons considered undesirable, treacherous, etc. To remove by cleansing, to clear, to clean out. An act of purging. Cathartic, laxative, purgative.
FLUX: Act of flowing; a continuous moving on or passing by, as of a flowing stream; a continuous succession of changes. A stream; copious flow; the setting in of the tide toward the shore. Fusing, to melt, to make fluid. To flow, to stream.
The juxtaposition was deliberate: art as purgative, art as flowing, art as the dissolution of boundaries between disciplines, between art and life, between high culture and everyday experience. The medical and hydrological metaphors positioned Fluxus not as a creative movement but as a natural process — inevitable, cleansing, beyond individual control.
On the Social Role of the Artist
Maciunas was explicit about his vision for the social function of art. In his programmatic writings and correspondence, he outlined positions that went far beyond the manifesto’s broadsheet rhetoric:
The artist must demonstrate the self-sufficiency of the audience. The artist must demonstrate that anything can substitute for art and anyone can do it. Therefore art-amusement must be simple, amusing, unpretentious, concerned with insignificances, require no skill or countless rehearsals, have no commodity or institutional value.
The value of art-amusement must be lowered by making it unlimited, mass-produced, obtainable by all and eventually produced by all. Fluxus art-amusement is the rear guard without any pretension or urge to participate in the competition of “one-upmanship” with the avant-garde. It strives for the monostructural and nontheatrical qualities of a simple natural event, a game, a gag.
It is the fusion of Spike Jones, Vaudeville, gag, children’s games and Duchamp.
Fluxus as Practice
The manifesto’s rhetoric of purging and revolution was enacted through a practice that was deliberately modest. Fluxus events — or “Fluxconcerts” — typically consisted of brief, scripted actions performed with everyday objects. Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964), in which audience members were invited to cut away the artist’s clothing with scissors, reduced performance to a single gesture of vulnerability and participation. George Brecht’s event scores — index cards bearing instructions like “Three Aqueous Events: Ice, Water, Steam” — eliminated the distinction between artwork and instruction manual. Nam June Paik’s early video work treated the television set not as a medium of communication but as a sculptural object to be altered, destroyed, and rebuilt.
What united these diverse practices was the conviction expressed in the manifesto: that the institutional apparatus of art — galleries, critics, collectors, museums — had become an obstacle to the experience of creativity rather than its enabler. The solution was not reform but purge. Not better art but less art — or rather, art so thoroughly dissolved into the texture of everyday life that it could no longer be identified, separated, and sold.
Editorial Note on Significance
The Fluxus Manifesto’s significance lies in its refusal of significance. Where other art manifestos claim world-historical importance for their programs, Maciunas’s text insists on the “insignificant” — on gags, games, and natural events as the proper material of art. This inversion is the manifesto’s most radical move: by attacking the category of importance itself, Fluxus undermined the evaluative framework that sustained the art market and its institutional supports. The manifesto’s influence extends through mail art, intermedia, performance art, and net art to the present day — wherever artists seek to make work that resists commodification by being too simple, too reproducible, or too absurd to sell.
