IN OCTOBER 1976, the artists Geoffrey Hendricks and Brian Buczak met at a SoHo loft party. Hendricks, then 45, was associated with the Fluxus movement, a loose affiliation of 1960s conceptual artists, including Joseph Beuys, John Cage and Yoko Ono, who rejected traditional practices like abstract painting in favor of elaborate performances. Five years earlier, he’d co-starred in a notable one: In the summer of 1971, Hendricks and his wife of 10 years, the artist Nye Ffarrabas (then Bici Forbes), who were both gay, staged a piece called “Flux Divorce,” which involved taking a chain saw to their marriage bed and dividing the entryway to their home with barbed wire. (Their young children, Tyche and Bracken, weren’t around for the actual show; they only observed the cleanup afterward.) Buczak, a painter who was 23 years Hendricks’s junior, had recently relocated from Detroit, where he was raised. As luck would have it, Hendricks had been staying in a dilapidated townhouse in Hudson Square, then a manufacturing neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan, which he’d eventually buy from his younger brother Jon, a Fluxus artist and archivist who lived next door. Buczak moved in a few months later. Read More