JONAS MEKAS PRESENTS FLUX PARTY
London Rio Cinema
Friday 17 October 2008, from 11:15pm until late

Legendary artist-filmmaker Jonas Mekas presents FLUX PARTY featuring
the Fluxfilm Anthology as assembled by George Maciunas, rare Fluxus
audio and surprise performances. Drinks and specially made Fluxcakes
will be served.

Fluxus was a provocative and humorous art movement that produced
objects, performances and events which challenged the boundaries
between traditional art and everyday life. Early Fluxus pieces included
feeding a bale of hay to a piano, a painting to be stepped on, or the
sound of dripping water.

The Fluxfilm Anthology, showing here in its most comprehensive version
to date, includes "Zen for Film" (clear film for collecting dust),
"Four" (Yoko Ono’s infamous film of bare bottoms), "Smoking" (cigarette
smoke shot with a high speed camera) and other films of comical street
performances, counting games, x-ray movies and interference patterns.
The Fluxfilms embodied the minimal aesthetic, playfulness and poetic
dimensions of Fluxus and transposed its performative aspect into the
cinema.

This informal late night screening is a unique chance to see films by
artists such as George Brecht, John Cale, Dick Higgins, Yoko Ono, Nam
June Paik, Paul Sharits, Chieko Shiomi, Ben Vautier, Wolf Vostell and
Robert Watts presented on the big screen of the Rio Cinema, East
London's splendid art deco picture palace. Jonas Mekas will be present
to discuss Fluxus and his friend and fellow Lithuanian émigré, the late
George Maciunas.

Seminal figures of the New York downtown art scene since the beginning
of the 1960s, Jonas Mekas (b.1922) and George Maciunas (1931-78) were
connected through many different projects. Mekas was a central force of
the avant-garde film scene and presented early screenings at Maciunas’
AG Gallery. Maciunas coordinated Fluxus as an international community
of artists, whose contributors also included Joseph Beuys, Henry Flynt,
Takehisa Kosugi, John Lennon and La Monte Young.

Maciunas was also fundamental in the emergence of SoHo as an artistic
centre in New York. As early as 1966, he began to purchase dilapidated
industrial buildings and convert them into cooperative real estate,
starting the trend for loft style living. Jonas Mekas was one of the
first to participate in the Fluxhouse venture, acquiring space for both
his own home and the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque / Anthology Film Archives.

Last year, Mekas returned to Lithuania to inaugurate the Jonas Mekas
Visual Arts Center in Vilnius, presenting his own Fluxus collection to
the public for the first time in a joint Mekas / Maciunas exhibition.
The centre is planning an extensive film archive and a Fluxus Research
Institute. In 2009, Mekas will act as the Ambassador of Vilnius during
its year as the European Capital of Culture.

Curated by Anne-Sophie Dinant and Mark Webber. Presented by the South
London Gallery. With thanks to Benn Northover, Serpentine Gallery,
Re:Voir and the Rio Cinema.

at

Rio Cinema
107 Kingsland High Street, Dalston, London, E8 2PB

Nearest Train: Dalston Kingsland (London Overground)
Buses: 30, 38, 75, 149, 242, 243
Night Buses: N38, N149, N242, N243

Tickets: £6 (includes drink)
Box Office: 020 7241 9410

www.riocinema.org.uk
www.secretcinema.co.uk
www.southlondongallery.org