Editing Fluxus (section)

===New York and the FluxShops===
[[File:DeRidder'sFluxMailOrder.jpg|upright|left|thumb|[[Willem de Ridder]]'s Mail Order FluxShop, Amsterdam, with Dorothea Meijer, winter 1964–65]]
After his contract with the US Air Force was terminated due to ill health, Maciunas was forced to return to the US on 3 September 1963.{{sfn|Maciunas|Ay-O|1998|p=340}} Once back in New York, he set about organizing a series of street concerts and opened a new shop, the 'Fluxhall', on [[Canal Street (Manhattan)|Canal Street]].
12 concerts, "away from the beaten track of the New York art scene",<ref name=fluxus93>{{harvnb|Kellein|2007|p=93}}</ref> took place on Canal Street, 11 April to 23 May 1964. With photographs taken by Maciunas himself, pieces by [[Ben Vautier]], [[Alison Knowles]] and [[Takehisa Kosugi]] were performed in the street for free, although in practice there was 'no audience to speak of'<ref name=fluxus93/> anyway.
<blockquote>
The people in Fluxus had understood, as Brecht explained, that "concert halls, theaters, and art galleries" were "mummifying". Instead, these artists found themselves "preferring streets, homes, and railway stations...." Maciunas recognized a radical political potential in all this forthrightly anti-institutional production, which was an important source for his own deep commitment to it. 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.{{sfn|Brecht|Robinson|2005|p=118}}
</blockquote>
Along with the New York shop, Maciunas built up a distribution network for the new art across Europe and later outlets in California and Japan. Gallery and mail order outlets were established in Amsterdam, Villefranche-Sur-Mer, Milan and London, amongst others.{{sfn|Kellein|2007|p=109}} By 1965, the first anthology ''[[Fluxus 1]]'' was available, consisting of manila envelopes bolted together containing work by numerous artists who would later become famous including La Monte Young, [[Christo]], [[Joseph Byrd]] and Yoko Ono. Other pieces available included packs of altered playing cards by George Brecht, sensory boxes by [[Ay-O]], a regular newsletter with contributions by artists and musicians such as [[Ray Johnson]] and John Cale, and tin cans filled with poems, songs and recipes about beans by [[Alison Knowles]] ([http://www.aknowles.com/beanrolls.html see]).