Flux-Labyrinth was a large-scale, immersive installation conceived by George Maciunas in 1974 and first realized in 1976 for the exhibition New York – Downtown Manhattan – SoHo at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Rather than functioning as a playful amusement or theatrical spectacle, the work translated the lived realities of SoHo in the late 1960s and early 1970s into a demanding physical experience. Rooted in Fluxus principles and in Maciunas’s own role as artist, architect, and urban activist, the labyrinth offered visitors not an image of SoHo, but a bodily encounter with its conditions.

The installation took the form of a narrow, enclosed maze with a strictly one-way passage. Visitors entered a freestanding structure whose exterior was wrapped in life-size photographs of SoHo’s cast-iron buildings, creating the illusion of stepping directly into the neighborhood. Once inside, however, the sense of familiarity disappeared. The interior was dark, tight, and disorienting, composed of corridors, doors, steps, and barriers that made movement awkward and often uncomfortable. Crucially, the labyrinth did not allow retreat: every door could be opened only from the entry side, forcing each participant to continue forward until the end.

Progress through the Flux-Labyrinth required constant physical and mental effort. Doors pivoted unpredictably, some rotating on central axes or requiring unusual gestures to open, including a 270-degree rotating door that echoed Marcel Duchamp’s experimental studio architecture. Other doors lacked handles altogether on one side, while trap doors and constricted passages heightened feelings of uncertainty and claustrophobia. In one section, visitors were required to walk using slippers mounted on wooden posts of increasing height and unstable angles, compelling the body into strained and unnatural movements. These obstacles often provoked anxiety or frustration, and some visitors reportedly panicked, damaged the structure, or attempted to escape by climbing over its walls.

The entrance to the labyrinth already established its confrontational tone. Posted instructions listed who was permitted to enter and who was excluded, mixing absurdist Fluxus humor with pointed references to Maciunas’s own struggles. Among those barred were building inspectors, insurance agents, people wearing high heels, and even “runaway gorillas from the zoo,” an allusion to the violent attack Maciunas had suffered during a real-estate dispute in SoHo. Entry itself was conceived as a test of attentiveness and intelligence, reinforcing the idea that survival within the labyrinth—and by extension within SoHo—required ingenuity and alertness.

The exit of the labyrinth culminated in a final, unsettling gesture. Visitors were required to reach through a small door to locate a handle hidden inside a box filled with elephant dung. While this element reflected Maciunas’s characteristic Fluxus humor and fascination with bodily materials, it also referred directly to the filth, overcrowding, and deterioration of SoHo’s streets as the neighborhood grew denser and more contested.

As a whole, the Flux-Labyrinth functioned as an embodied metaphor for life in SoHo during its formative years as an artists’ colony. The physical constraints, enforced forward motion, and persistent discomfort echoed the everyday challenges faced by artists living illegally in industrial lofts, navigating obstructed streets, resisting eviction, and confronting municipal authorities and real-estate interests. In this sense, the work paralleled Maciunas’s Fluxhouse Cooperatives: both were collective, anti-commercial projects aimed at reshaping the conditions of artistic life.

Rather than offering a nostalgic or visual representation of SoHo, Flux-Labyrinth demanded that visitors experience its pressures directly. Through disorientation, exertion, and persistence, the installation conveyed the resilience, inventiveness, and endurance required to live and work in SoHo at the time, making it one of the most visceral and socially grounded expressions of Fluxus practice.

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Based on the essay written by Anton Pereira Rodriguez and Wouter Davidts for Stedelijk Studies.