Score — One Sentence, No Stage

How a group of artists in 1962 reduced performance to a single typewritten instruction — and why that economy still unsettles everything we call art.

In the spring of 1961, George Maciunas handed out cards at the AG Gallery on Madison Avenue. Each bore a single sentence in monospaced type — no title, no illustration, no explanation. The audience read them, turned them over, and began to wonder whether the reading itself had been the event.

The Score as Instruction

What Maciunas understood — and what separated Fluxus from the Happenings already underway downtown — was that the written instruction could replace the performed event entirely. "Composition 1960 #10" reads simply: "Draw a straight line and follow it." The instruction is the artwork. There is nothing else.

"The score eliminates the performer. The reader becomes the artist. The page becomes the stage."
— George Maciunas, Fluxus Newsletter, 1964