One night I was sleeping in the basement of 80 Wooster Street. I think it was the late Fall of 1967. George comes in, says, “Come help. I got these trees here, I have to plant them.”
“What, at this hour of night?” I hate to get up at night. But I did, and yes, he had these shabby trees lying on the sidewalk.
“I stole them from the parking lot on West Broadway,” he told me proudly, laughing. “They were digging up the whole place, with tractors, and I asked them to give me a couple of the trees, and they said no! So I waited until the night, and I took them, you see? We have to plant them now, it’s against the law to plant trees in SoHo.
The next day, or a day later, some city officials showed up. “No trees are permitted here,” they told me. “You’ll have to get rid of them.”
I go down to the basement, to George. He was making his Fluxus boxes or something, and he says, “Tell them if they don’t like our trees they can pull them out.” So I go back to the city officials, and I say: “No, George is not going to do it. He says you have to do it. And he wants me to take some pictures when you do it.”
The city people looked at me, then at each other, turned around, and we never saw them again.
But the trees grew and prospered. Big, big trees they are now, happy trees, the only trees on Wooster Street.
(Jonas Mekas, letter to Emmett Williams, 1993, in Mr. Fluxus: a collective portrait of George Maciunas 1931–1978)
Fluxus-blitz Pino Boresta
Auditorium Parco della Musica (Rome)
BIENNIAL Fluxus – After Fluxus
20:30 Friday, February 26, 2010
Psychic Interview # 2
Interviewed by George Maciunas Ramundas Malašauskas
As soon as I arrived, I quickly visited the room dedicated to Maciunas and when Lucio Perotti started to play the piano a large number of people made a semicircle around him. After the first tune I realized that it was my turn in the show. I took off my jacket, I stood next the piano and pianist and started jumping and screaming “Be happy, there is Maurizio Cattelan …. be happy, there is Maurizio Cattelan …. “ No one stopped me and the pianist continued to play, so the public did not understand if this was part of the performance or not. After a couple of minutes someone of the organization asked me very politely to stop. Nevertheless I was almost passing out from the effort. I pointed at my watch to tell her that I had nearly finished my blitz-perfomance. So I kept it up again for another couple of minutes. When I was almost exhausted and I stopped, unexpectedly the entire audience cheered me by clapping.
When I sat, visibly tired, on a chair in the foyer of the Auditorium, someone asked me why I had made that action… I replied that it was, certainly, a tribute to three brilliant minds such as George Maciunas, Simon Cristicchi and Maurizio Cattelan but anyone could draw their own conclusions.
Pino Boresta