Flux-Hall Fluxus Shop

Born from John Cage’s experimental music of the 1950s and a shared contempt for the bourgeois art world, Fluxus was one of the most influential anti-art movements of the 20th century. Led by George Maciunas and counting George Brecht, Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys, and Nam June Paik among its ranks, Fluxus fused visual art, performance, poetry, experimental music, and film. The movement had a serious problem with serious modern art — and in that irreverence, it anticipated virtually everything that came after. Kinetic sculpture, interactive performance art, participatory installation — Fluxus was doing it fifty years earlier.

The movement had nodes in Düsseldorf and New York. In 1963, Maciunas opened the tiny Flux-Hall in Chinatown at 359 Canal Street: part performance space, part retail shop. Unlike the stiff gallery system Fluxus despised, the storefront operated regular hours and sold artists’ work informally, alongside a mail-order satellite location in Germany.

The emblematic Fluxus objects — Fluxus Boxes and Flux-Kits — were available here. These were compartmentalized boxes filled with cards and objects designed by artists, intended for anyone to use and enjoy regardless of art-world credentials. The idea was radical for its time: art as an everyday experience, not a rarefied commodity.

Location: 359 Canal Street, New York, NY 10013