73 Events
Ken Friedman 73 Events 1956 – 2009
Ken Friedman
The Indiana University Art Gallery Kokomo Contents
4 Scrub Piece 36 Terminal Stairway 63 Rational Music
5 Green Street 37 The Three Ages of Man 64 Homage to Mahler
9 White Bar 38 Vacant Lot 65 Toothpaste
11 Cheers 39 White Label, White Contents 66 White Tooth Workshop
12 Edison’s Lighthouse 40 Cloud Chamber 67 After Ad Reinhart
13 Open and Shut Case 41 Shadow Box 68 Fluxus Balance Piece 69 Marching Band 15 Dark Mirror 42 Studio Pieces 70 One Million Minutes 16 Incognito, Ergo Sum 43 Heat Transfer Event 71 Precinct 17 Light Table 44 Ordinary Objects 72 Renter’s Orchestra 19 Mandatory Happening 45 The Silent Night 73 The Secrets of Nature 20 Thirty Feet 46 The Artist Becomes the Art 74 Stage Fright Event 21 Zen for Record 47 Completions 75 Alchemical Theater 23 Zen Vaudeville 48 Distance 76 Bartholomew in Munich 24 White Objects 49 Earth Work 77 Tønsberg Ship 25 Do-It-Yourself Monument 50 Open Land 78 Frozen Time 26 Empaquetage pour Christo 51 Silent Shoes 79 Magic Trick #1 27 Orchestra 52 Water Table 80 Magic Trick #2 28 Rock Placement 53 Flow System 81 Magic Trick #4
29 Blockade 54 Chess Shrine 82 Magic Trick #5
30 Boxing Day 55 Replication 83 Magic Trick #7
31 Broken Record 56 Woolen Goods 84 A Whispered History
32 Contents 58 24 Hours 85 Centre Piece
33 Paper Architecture 60 The Last Days of Pompeii 86 Portrait of Secret Fluxus
35 Salt Flat 62 Rotterdam Exchange 87 Time Zones
88 Ken Friedman: Event, Idea and Inquiry by Carolyn Barnes Scrub Piece Go to a public monument on the first day of spring. Clean it thoroughly. No announcement is necessary.
1956
Realized at the Nathan Hale Monument in New London, Connecticut on March 20, 1956, this was my first event. I did not think of it as an artwork until I came into Fluxus. It was simply something I did. It was an event in the strictest sense of the word. While I engaged in these kinds of events throughout much of my life, it was not until I began working in the context of Fluxus that I thought of events in the sense that I use the term today. I simply built things, realized ideas, or made models of things that interested me. Many of them were acts or works that I repeated, much as I did after meeting the other Fluxus people. When George Maciunas explained the event tradition to me, it gave a theoretical structure to a practice that had been central to my experience. I did these kinds of things earlier, but this is the first event for which I was able to find notes when George brought me into Fluxus.
73 Events 4 Ken Friedman Green Street Acquire a Japanese folding scroll. Keep it in a blank state. After a minimum of ten years, or on the death of the performer, inscribe the name of the performer, the date of acquisition and the date at the time of inscription. The performance continues until the scroll is filled with inscriptions.
1959
The scroll for this event came from two occasions, I used scrolls. On Most of the blank books went a little Japanese shop on Green others, I used old journals, account to people in the Fluxus network Street in New London, Connecticut, books or diaries that I managed to or the mail art network. The where I first bought such Japanese acquire at a discount. book contained the invitation to artifacts as ink, scrolls and brushes. participate. I did not ask whether Each book contained request inside I acquired the scroll in 1959. The people would agree to take part. the front cover asking the person performance using the original scroll In effect, this approach tested the who received the book to execute an is still in progress in the sense that possibility of communication and artwork or drawing in the book, then I have not yet written my name in commitment using open-ended, give it or mail it to another friend. I the scroll. one-way communication in a social requested the person who completed network. This is an obvious problem Nevertheless, I never found anyone the book to return it to me. Between when commitment in social networks willing to take responsibility for 1968 and 1974, I mailed or gave requires voluntary assent along with accepting the scroll and carrying away over one hundred books. The communication among participants. the piece forward. The scroll itself is collection in Iowa contains examples probably at the Alternative Traditions of the blank books I used for the In 1967, Stanley Milgram conducted in Contemporary Art collection at drawing project or other projects. a famous experiment asking sixty University of Iowa. None of the books sent out for the people in Omaha, Nebraska to drawing project ever returned. attempt to deliver packages to In the 1960s and 1970s, I people they did not know by sending wondered what would happen if one Over the years, I wondered why no packages to people who would be gave away a book or scroll to pass completed books ever returned. likely to know someone who could from person to person in an ongoing Many issues probably come move the package closer to its performance. I experimented with into play. While time, duration, destination. Milgram’s study gave the idea by circulating blank books and commitment are the key rise to the famous notion of “six with a request that people contribute philosophical notions for a project degrees of separation”, the idea to them and pass them on. such as this, choice and voluntary that there are only six degrees of participation in social networks may Most iterations of the experiment separation between anyone on the be why no books returned. involved blank books, bound books planet and anyone else. As important with blank, white pages. On one or as the experiment was, it has often
73 Events 5 Ken Friedman been misunderstood. Only a few world to be. Robert Filliou described an economy of increasing returns. In of the packages reached their the art world as an “eternal theory, these kinds of art should not destination, and replications of network”, but he was wrong. The art be subject to the market economics the experiment have had poor or world is not a network, but a social of scarcity. Even so, they seem to inconclusive results. ecology. One defining feature of the work that way, if only because their social ecology is that the seeming creators or those who represent their Recently, Duncan Watts replicated connections that appear to constitute art structure the art of increasing the Milgram experiment by a network do not form a genuine returns to function through the attempting to get email messages network because they offer no illusion of scarcity. from volunteers to individuals reasonably predictable mechanisms whom they did not know by sending In the years after Filliou described for linkage or the flow of energy. messages through chains of the eternal network, the idea took on intermediaries. While requests to This has given me much cause for a life of its own. It signified a global 61,168 volunteers led to 24,000 thought over the years. When Norrie community of people who believe started chains, a scant 384 reached Neumark and Annemarie Chandler in the ideas that Filliou cherished. their target. invited me to write a chapter for their This community is fluid, composed 2005 book At A Distance: Precursors of people who may never meet one While I was studying psychology to Internet Art and Activism art from another in person and who do not and social science at the time I MIT Press, I wrote a chapter on “The always agree on concepts of life mailed my first books, I wasn’t Wealth and Poverty of Networks”. and art. While these facts do not attempting to replicate Milgram’s Filliou’s notion of the eternal network diminish the reality of an ongoing work. I was exploring something was something between a metaphor community, the community is diffuse different and more philosophical. and a description of what Filliou and weak. Although this community If I were to describe the project in believed to be an emerging social has exchanged ideas for over terms of network issues, Albert O. reality. Filliou intended it as a three decades, the community has Hirschman’s work would be more genuine description, but the fact is relatively few durable engagements relevant. Hirschman had a knack for that the eternal network functioned other than artistic contact. looking at problems from unusual primarily on a metaphorical level. perspectives, bringing social insight The metaphor is powerful. The In one sense, this is not a problem. and economic theory to bear on a reality is not. The eternal network Filliou developed his concept of wide range of issues. His work might is embedded in an art world that “the eternal network” in terms of yield insight into why no books ever makes it difficult to make life more the human condition rather than came back to me. important than art. art. Filliou held that the purpose of Robust networks are stable, hardy art was to make life more important Filliou studied economics at institutions. Nevertheless, networks than art. That was the central idea of the University of California Los require continual energy inputs the eternal network. Angeles before working as an oil and development to remain robust. economist. At some point, he lost In a large, Taoist sense, Filliou was The wealth and poverty of networks interest or hope in what he saw as right. We are all linked in some means that the art networks I used standard approaches to knowledge rich way by robust and indissoluble for this project were far more fragile and knowledge production in the bonds. But the social ecology of than I realized. The fact that these technocratic society. In a 1966 art operates in quite the opposite networks were never robust in any pamphlet from Something Else way, built on a market economy genuine sense should have enabled Press, he published a manifesto that requires the illusion of scarcity: me to predict the results. The titled, A Proposition, a Problem, a scarce attention, scarce resources, networks into which I sent the blank Danger, and a Hunch. His manifesto deliberately limited editions of art to books were art world networks. They offered an alterative. create a sense of restricted supply were a sub-set of the larger world of and increased demand at ever higher Looking back over the developments economic and social actors rather prices. This is even the case for of the past half-century, I no longer than the kind of ideal community kinds of art that ought to function in believe that the situation for society that we sometimes assume the art
73 Events 6 Ken Friedman at large is as hopeless as Robert Filliou’s work, colonizing it and inquiry, and debate that affected all believed it to be. At the same time, adapting it to the art markets. research fields and most fields of I am far less optimistic about the These markets include the economy professional practice. Robert Filliou potential of art. Art is lodged in a of buying and selling art, and the understood this. He sought a way to market economy that embraces and attention economy for thinking about link thought to productive action – or dominates non-profit institutions it. Robert’s proposition for a solution perhaps he sought to link thought such as museums and educational made little difference. to productive inaction, as it was for institutions such as universities. John Cage. Attempting this through Robert proposed the metaphor of a The art these institutions display art suggested a new kind of research poetic economy: and study is embedded in the as well. Moreover, it suggested “an market economy of dealers, “So that the memory of art (as art that clucks and fills our guts” in commercial galleries, and art freedom) is not lost, its age-old the words of Dick Higgins’s (1966) magazines organized around intuitions can be put in simple, Something Else Manifesto. advertising revenue. easily learned esoteric mathematical Robert Filliou was trained as formulae, of the type a/b = c/d (for It may be that I am wrong about an economist. It is interesting, instance, if a is taken as hand, b as the hopeful prospects of the larger therefore, to reflect on the work foot, d as table, hand over head can society. The history of the past fifty of economists who considered the equal foot on table for purposes of years gives evidence for pessimism problem in different ways. One recognition and passive resistance. as well as for hope. In contrast, I stream of this work began in the Study the problem. Call the study: feel safe in arguing that the art world 1940s when Australian economist Theory and Practice of A/B.” justifies my pessimistic view of art Colin Clark laid the foundation for markets and their dominant role in To be sure, no one else seems to work that Daniel Bell would explore the production and consumption have solved the problem. The idea of in his discussion of post-industrial of art. Consumption is the rule as letting artists rather than technocrats society. Others also addressed these contrasted with co-creation. make the effort was not a bad idea. patterns, notably the economist Nevertheless, this proposal involved Harold Innis (Marshall McLuhan’s Robert’s manifesto effectively a second difficulty. predecessor and mentor) and the declared social science, natural economist Fritz Machlup. Like science and the humanities to be While Robert used the terms “art” Filliou, they did better in analyzing obsolete. Instead, he argued for and “artist” in a different way problems than proposing solutions. knowledge and knowledge production than the normative art world does, However, their work had a different from an optimistic perspective he used the art world to mediate fate. It helped give birth to a slowly anchored in art. his ideas. The art world seized on evolving public conversation that Robert’s work, rather than his ideas, Robert wrote: is open to all because it generates mediating both in a narrow channel political dialogue in the larger arena rather than a larger world of public “A refusal to be colonized culturally of analysis, critique and proposition. by a self-styled race of specialists in discourse or open conversation. painting, sculpture, poetry, music, Today, we also understand a great A short note is no place to address etc. ... this is what ‘La Révolte des deal more than we did through the the broad range of issues embedded Médiocres’ is about. With wonderful work of micro-sociologists such in Robert Filliou’s manifesto. What results in modern art, so far. as Erving Goffman or behavioral can be said is that these problems Tomorrow could everybody revolt? economists such as Daniel are difficult, and solving them is How? Investigate. Kahnemann. difficult as well. The difficulties are “A problem, the one and only, but not Robert’s fault. Rather, they are The grand irony of Robert’s work massive: money, which creating does embedded in a series of challenges is that he was transformed from a not necessarily create.” we are only coming to understand. public thinker into an artist, with all the limitations this implies. As Robert’s idea of a poetical economics The difficulty, of course, is that the a thinker, Robert Filliou opposed emerged during an era of contest, specialists took control of Robert the notion of art as a new form of
73 Events 7 Ken Friedman specialization, subject to the control otherwise interact. But networks The requests inside each front cover of dealers, critics, collectors, and require both kinds of formations. asked the artist who completed the the highly specialized institutions book to return it to me at Fluxus It is inevitable that human societies that serve them. As a thinker, Filliou West on Elmhurst Drive in San have both, and this is true of the art worked in the productive border zone Diego. I left that address in 1979, world. What seems to be missing, between art and public life. and it has been years since mail sent however, is a rich series of robust to San Diego reached me. Perhaps Unfortunately, Robert Filliou became clusters that one could label an some books are still making their an artist, and the art world linked “eternal network”. Instead, the art way around the world. One or two his ideas to mercantile interests. world constitutes a series of weak may yet to attempt a return journey This was not Robert’s fault. Much ties with occasional market links or to a place that no longer has any like specialists and technocrats in links shaped by the boundaries of connection with Fluxus or with me. any field, the specialists who manage the business networks of galleries art world institutions also have and dealers. They also include Then again, as Stanley Milgram and a difficult time understanding and links through the professional Duncan Watts learned, it is neither working with the productive poetic networks of curators or people a small world, nor a big world, but a economies that emerge in the working in universities or art and somewhat lumpy world with different border zone. design schools. networks linking separated parts of the world. Huge gaps and chasms The concept of the eternal network If I were to attempt the blank book separate these islands of interaction. leads a thoughtful observer to project today, I would structure it in alternate between optimism and a very different way. The Green Street scroll raises cheerful resignation. It is easy to another series of issues beyond the The project did shape some be cheerful simply because this question of what might or might not interesting ripples in the pond. metaphor of the global village has have happened if anyone had agreed survived for as long as it has. In a While none of the books came back to take the scroll from me. This is healthy sense, the eternal network to me, I did come across several the question of what it means to foreshadowed other networks that traces of the books. Traveling across write in such a book. would become possible later using the United States and Canada in The books I sent out in the such technologies as the computer, the 1970s, I met artists who had Milgram–Watts tradition reached telefax, electronic mail, and the received a book, worked on it, and each new artist unsolicited. They World Wide Web. If it foreshadowed passed it on. They told me wonderful came as an opportunity and a a coming technology, it also stories about their involvement with request, but they entailed no prior foreshadowed the failure to establish the books. Even though the books commitment. The Green Street existential commitment and social did not return, I had the sense that scroll entails commitment. To memory as a foundation for durable something interesting and useful had accept the scroll required the change. Networks involve robust happened for people who took the recipient to acknowledge and take links and routing systems. A human project for what it was meant to be. on a responsibility. network requires commitment and On one occasion, I saw a book at memory. Without them, links and This made the scroll a book of life, the studio of an artist who proudly routes are absent. or possibly even a book of death. brought the book out to show me. To accept such a book would be In a famous article on the strength About a dozen and a half pages to accept responsibility and to of weak ties between dense network were complete. These pages were acknowledge the possibility clusters of friends, sociologist wonderful, many pages showing the of mortality. This may be too Mark Granovetter demonstrated the traces of careful work over time. This much weight for a small work of importance of weak links that took place a year or two after I had art to carry. enable information and connectivity sent the book out, and the book was to move between individuals in far from complete. It is probably for the best that no one close-knit groups to individuals ever agreed to continue my Green in other groups that might not Street scroll.
73 Events 8 Ken Friedman White Bar A bar or tavern in a simple room. The room is plain, light wood. The bar is a wooden table. Only clear liquors or spirits are served. The bottles are lined up on one end of the bar with several rows of clean glasses. There is a bowl of limes.
1964
White Bar was the score for several Italy, eiswetter and Fürst Bismarck party. The filmmaker Jan Schmidt performances and events from 1964 from Germany, brandwijn from finished the entire collection in on. The first full realization of White the Netherlands, and vodka from one night. Bar took place in 1968 for a party Finland. We also had vodka from Thirty years after the original White at the San Francisco Fluxhouse on Iceland, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Bar, this score led to a project titled Dolores Street. We built the bar Norway and Ireland – long with Grappa for the White Bar. without building the entire room. dozens of different clear fruit We organized a small party serving distillates from all over Europe. only clear liquors. The liquors Some of them were quite good. Grappa for the White Bar were vodka, rum, and tequila. We Some were terrible. mixed the liquors with fresh orange Take an ordinary bottle of clear glass. One night we had a small party at juice and fresh lime juice or served On the front, sandblast the text: the flat. Oyvind Storm Bjerke, art them neat. We had only two visitors, historian and chief curator of the the Italian art critic Mario Diacono, Grappa Henie Onstad Museum, attended. then teaching literature at the Arvid proudly pointed to the KF University of California at Berkeley, collection. Oyvind went over, looked and Mario’s girlfriend. 1964-1994 over the bottles, judiciously uncorked White Bar was the basis of a a few and sniffed them. After a On the back, sandblast the text: collection of clear liquors I few minutes inspection, he nodded Only assembled at Arvid Johannessen’s knowingly and said: “Dette maa bli flat in Norway when I lived with den definitiv samling av verdens clear liquors him. From 1988 to 1992, I brought dårligste brennevinner.” – “This are served back a bottle of local clear liquor must be the definitive collection of every time I traveled to a foreign the world’s worst liquors.” country. We had loza rakuja from The collection disappeared before we In June of 1994, Emily Harvey Yugoslavia, bailloni from Hungary, could organize a proper realization invited me to make a multiple of raki from Turkey and ouzo from of White Bar. A few weeks after a grappa bottle for Emily Harvey Greece, kirschwasser and pflumi Oyvind’s comment, we had another Editions. Several other artists had from Switzerland, grappa from
73 Events 9 Ken Friedman already done bottles in the series, some with delightful plays on the idea of drinking or the chemistry of grappa. Most of these involved beautiful hand-blown glass bottles. I wanted to do a piece that was close to the original context of grappa: humble, a local drink, sold in simple bottles. In September, she reminded me to finish my multiple. I decided to do a piece based on an idea I had for a bar in 1964, White Bar, and to some variations on White Bar. I also wanted my multiple to be much less expensive and more widely available than the other multiples, a simple edition instead of a rare object.
The multiple was to use commercially available bottles and a simple sandblasting technique. The short line length would have made it possible to sandblast the text without any trouble. For bottles manufactured in Italy, the typeface was to be Bodoni Bold or Bodoni Extra Bold.
A while later, Emily wrote me to say that the sample bottle was ready. Due to strict alcohol control laws, we did not want to ship it to Norway. I did not visit Venice after Emily produced the bottle, and I never completed the edition.
73 Events 10 Ken Friedman Cheers Conduct a large crowd of people to the house of a stranger. Knock on the door. When someone opens the door, the crowd cheers and applauds vigorously. All depart silently.
1965
73 Events 11 Ken Friedman Edison’s Lighthouse Create a passage with facing mirrors. Place candles in front of each mirror. Vary the nature and intensity of light by variations in the number and placement of candles.
1965
In 1965, I was living in Mt. Carroll, emergency surgery. A charming Illinois, as a student at Shimer version of this story appears in the College. The entrance area to my 1940 movie Young Tom Edison, room had two facing dressers. Above starring Mickey Rooney, Fay Bainter each was a vertical mirror roughly and George Bancroft. I have two feet wide and three feet tall. never been able to learn whether Standing between these mirrors, I the story is a genuine account would sometimes contemplate the from Edison’s life or an artifact of paradox of reflection and multiple Hollywood biography. images. Light and reflection occupied me intensely.
One evening, I set up a candle to observe the path of light between the two mirrors. For several weeks, I tried different arrays of candles standing in old bottles. At one point, I also made crude candelabras using Coca-Cola bottles in cartons that held six bottles.
Light traveled between the two mirrors in a narrow band roughly ten feet long, two feet wide, and three feet tall. The light spilled out of the path to illuminate the room. Varying the number of candles and their placement created a great variety of subtle differences in rich, dense light.
The title for this piece comes from a story about Thomas Edison. The story is that Edison used mirrors and lanterns to create enough light to allow a physician to perform
73 Events 12 Ken Friedman Open and Shut Case Make a box. On the outside, print the word “Open”. On the inside, print the words “Shut quick”.
1965
The first version of this project was Alison Knowles, Ray Johnson, Robert He typified the computer jocks, constructed in December 1965, Filliou, and others for my programs engineers and architects at Carnegie while I was at a meeting at the First at Radio WRSB. This was a college- Mellon University, his alma mater. Unitarian Church of Chicago. I took based radio station in Mount Carroll, George ushered me into his kitchen. a large matchbox that had been Illinois. Dick and Alison invited me It was a steamy New York summer filled with wooden kitchen matches. to stay with them for a while at their day, but the apartment was cool. I covered the outside with paper and home in New York, a few blocks away It smelled like rice mats. I printed the words “Open me” on the from the press. I was sixteen years recognized the smell. It reminded outside. On the inside, I printed the old. I’d just finished the first two me of a Japanese store I used to words “Shut me quick”. In 1966, it years of college, and I was in New frequent as a youngster in New became my first Fluxbox,The Open York to look around. London, Connecticut. and Shut Case. George’s telephone directions The apartment contained three When I first created the piece, it had brought me to his fifth floor walk- rooms. To the right was a compact, hermeneutic connotations involving a up apartment on West Broadway well-designed office and workroom. discussion that was under way at the in a decaying industrial section of The floor was covered with rice mats. church meeting. I would not have New York City that was then part of George said not to go in wearing used the term hermeneutic in those Little Italy. Henry Flynt later took shoes, so I looked in from the door days, but I understood the concept over George’s apartment, and the to see drafting tables, desks, shelves of interpretation. I was attending a neighborhood became the Soho and an astonishing clutter of papers, meeting of the executive committee art district. Back then, it was just projects, notebooks and files. It of Liberal Religious Youth, Inc., to a tenement. I walked up the stairs was the most orderly clutter I’ve help plan the annual Continental to find a black door covered with ever seen, the opposite of my own Conference for 1966. For the violent, emphatic NO! SMOKING!!! chronological project layers. conference, to take place in Ithaca, signs. I knocked. New York, I was to be editor of the The first time I saw George’s The door opened a crack, and a daily conference newspaper. workspace, it was rigged out with a pair of eyes framed in round, wire- marvelous contraption that enabled I was on my way to the conference rimmed spectacles peered out. That him to reach up and tap a weight in August 1966, when Dick Higgins was George Maciunas. to summon items he wanted. By sent me to meet George Maciunas George was a small, wiry man with means of a counterbalance and some for the first time. One morning, I a prim, owlish look. He was dressed strings and rods, whatever he wanted made one of the boxes for Dick. He in a short-sleeved business shirt, would float into his grasp. At least thought I ought to take it to George. open at the neck, no tie. He wore this is my memory. I am not sure if I I had been corresponding with Dick dark slacks and black cloth slippers. actually saw the working device, or a to make radio programs based on His pocket was cluttered with prototype, or if this is just a memory the Something Else Press books of number of pens. In current jargon, of a planning diagram that George Daniel Spoerri, Emmett Williams, we’d call him a “nerd” or a “geek”. showed me.
73 Events 13 Ken Friedman To the left of the kitchen, Maciunas of myself as an artist. Maciunas had what looked like a huge walk-in thought about this for a minute, and closet or a small storage room. The said, “You’re a concept artist.” room was filled with floor-to-ceiling It always pleased me that I shelves, like an industrial warehouse. became part of Fluxus before I In fact, it was an industrial became an artist. warehouse, the comprehensive inventory of Fluxus editions in The first version of the text was a unassembled form. The shelves personal injunction, commanding were loaded with boxes storing the the reader to “Open me” and “Shut contents of Fluxus multiple editions, me quick”. Later versions employ suitcases and year boxes. When an a simpler text reading, “Open” and order came in for a Fluxbox, George “Shut quick”. My notes for George would go to back of the closet, select read: “Make a box. On the outside, the appropriate plastic or wooden print the word ‘Open’. On the inside, container, and march through print the words ‘Shut quick’.” the room plucking out the proper The title of the piece was Open and cards and objects to emerge with Shut Case. a completed work. He’d select the While the original idea had proper label, glue it on, and have a hermeneutical implications related to completed edition ready to mail. religious issues that concerned me, The kitchen had a sink, windows, the term also has legal connotations. stove, table and chairs. These were It’s a common phrase in films or all quite ordinary except for the theater pieces about police or refrigerator. George had a bright lawyers. Maciunas played with the orange refrigerator. When he opened legal implications of the phrase and it, I could see he had filled it with prepared the label of the Fluxbox as oranges from the bottom clear to the a subpoena. top shelf. The top shelf, on either Barbara Moore made a new edition side of the old-fashioned meat chest of George Maciunas’s Fluxus version and ice tray, held four huge jugs of a few years ago. Peter van Beveren fresh orange juice. He offered me a reprinted it in a 1990s edition in glass of orange juice. Rotterdam. The Rotterdam edition Maciunas peppered me with bears a simple label, much like questions. What did I do? What did I the Chicago original. The label is a think? What was I planning? At that simple paper label and with large time, I was planning to become a black letters in a sans-serif typeface. Unitarian minister. I did all sorts of One variation on this piece was things, things without names, things planned as an installation. For this that jumped over the boundaries version of the piece, the score reads: between ideas and actions, between the manufacture of objects and “Paint a room in a single color. Paint books, between philosophy and the door to the room the same color literature. Maciunas listened for a as the room. On the door, print the while and invited me to join Fluxus. word ‘Open’.” I said yes. “On the inside wall directly opposite A short while later, Maciunas asked the door, print the words me what kind of artist I was. Until ‘Shut quick’.” that moment, I had never thought
73 Events 14 Ken Friedman Dark Mirror Create a dark, mirrored floor in a white, well-lit room. Apply high-gloss black enamel paint to a wooden floor. Sand the floor, buff it, and paint it again. Repeat the action until the floor is a reflective surface. Subdue the lighting.
1966
Dark Mirror was realized at the Avenue C Fluxus Room in New York in September 1966. The room was later used for most of the projects and exhibitions that took place there.
73 Events 15 Ken Friedman Incognito, Ergo Sum Print a page or object with the words: “Incognito, ergo sum”.
1966
73 Events 16 Ken Friedman Light Table Set a wooden table with many candles of different kinds, large and small, colored and plain, ordinary and shaped, normal and scented. Place the candles on the table. Stand thin candles in candlesticks and candleholders. Stand thick candles and square candles directly on the table. Anyone who wishes to bring new candles may place them on the table. Light the candles.
1966
In 1964, I decided on a career in In the summer of 1965, I studied first text was Newton’s 1704 classic, the Unitarian ministry. In those at California Western University in Optics. We worked our way through years, I was active in Liberal Point Loma. Discovering my interest the text, performing Newton’s Religious Youth, a community in in the history of science, a physics original experiments to debate which I dedicated myself to creating professor asked me to lecture on his findings. and organizing worship services. The the life and work of Copernicus. Newton began his work on optics quality of light and the use of space Later, I lectured on Kepler, and in the 1660s, lecturing on the play an important role in worship. then on Newton. subject in the 1670s and publishing Candles are a tool for shaping light In the autumn of 1965, I transferred his first major papers on optics in and space, and a way to define them to Shimer College. Shimer based its the Philosophical Transactions in in so doing. The use of light to focus curriculum on the original writings of 1672. Controversies attending the the mind and senses are reasons for scientists, philosophers and thinkers publication of his work led him to the ancient role of candles and light using the great books curriculum withhold the final publication of in worship and meditation. developed by Robert Maynard Optics until most of his opponents In 1965 and 1966, I performed Hutchins for the University of had died. While I was more experiments with light in Mt Carroll, Chicago. We studied natural science interested in Newton’s ways of Illinois. Worship was one source by working directly from historical thinking about science than his work of my interest in light. Physics texts to master the principles of on light I remained fascinated by was another. inquiry and theory building. Our light and spent many nights alone
73 Events 17 Ken Friedman in my room working with different kinds of light. I kept my prism long after I completed my replication of Newton’s experiments. The prism is now in a box at the University of Iowa.
The first version of this score called for “many candles of different kinds, large and small, colored and plain, ordinary and shaped, normal and scented”. I came to prefer simpler ways to perform the piece, concentrating on light rather than on color or smell with white, unscented candles. Now, I use only plain, white candles of different kinds, sizes, and shapes.
73 Events 18 Ken Friedman Mandatory Happening A card printed: “You will decide to read this score or not to read it. When you have made your decision, the happening is over”.
1966
This event was first scored at midnight on May 1, 1966 in Mt Carroll, Illinois. It was first performed at the same time. For the first performance, the text was typed on a sheet of paper. I went around Shimer College, knocking my way from door to door. When someone answered, I handed him or her the paper.
Fluxus, New York, published this event 1966 as A Fluxus Mandatory Happening. George Maciunas designed a lovely label with the famous image of Uncle Sam, pointing his finger outward at the person looking at him. The label text read, “Fluxus Wants You … for a Mandatory Happening.” Inside, a simple card of heavy white paper bore the text.
There seem to be no extant complete copies of George’s edition. Copies of George’s label are available, along with some boxes with the label attached. These boxes have no card. In the 1990s, Peter van Beveren published an edition of this in a simple version. It was like the Rotterdam edition of the Open and Shut Case and it was much like the original Mandatory Happening.
73 Events 19 Ken Friedman Thirty Feet Find a piece of paper 30 feet square. Inscribe a large circle on the page.
1966
The original version of this score was titled 30’ for John Cage. It was written in Danbury, Connecticut in October of 1966. The score read: “Find a piece of paper 30 feet square. Inscribe a large circle on the page. Send it to John Cage.”
73 Events 20 Ken Friedman Zen for Record Produce a phonograph record with no sound on it.
1966
The first version ofZen for Record and video pioneer Shigeko Kubota spray paint to render them blank was a LP record blank, grooved but and engineer Shuya Abe, Nam June’s and grooveless, removing the sound. empty of sound. I found it when I collaborator on the video synthesizer. There are three unrealized editions was working at E.S.P. Disk Records In 1971, Nam June commissioned of Zen for Record I would like to in New York in September and me to write his Third Symphony. In have realized. In the 1990s, a record October of 1966. It was probably a 1974, I published the scores to publisher was considering a series defective recording. If not, I have no Nam June’s complete symphonies of Fluxus projects. His idea for Zen idea what purpose the record had in issue 11 of Source Magazine, the for Record was to produce a series of or why anyone would have made a famous final issue. Source was an editions that took the piece through record with no sound on it. innovative music magazine edited a range of recording media from The original score to this object was, by composers Larry Austin and old to recent. I would have enjoyed “A blank phonograph record with no Stanley Lunetta. Each issue was creating a series of different kinds of sound on it”. spectacular, typified by imaginative Zen for Record, moving through such scores, rich illustrations, and recording media as player piano roll, In those days, I was new to Fluxus. delightful artifact. One might find music box, wax record, Dictaphone George Maciunas had produced machine-gunned pages for the band, wire recording, recorded tape, a couple of multiples, and I was score to Dick Higgins’s Thousand phonograph record, compact disc, planning more projects. I thought Symphonies, tactile pages for a and so on. of making a multiple edition of haptic score, or a letter from Joseph these blank records. In keeping with This publisher was also interested Beuys explaining why he did not the Fluxus idea, I hope to make an in creating a multiple edition for have time to contribute. There were LP edition at a cost low enough to the CD. I thought of a heavy, square three guest editors over the years. sell the records for the price of an wooden box constructed of massive John Cage was one, Alvin Lucier ordinary phonograph record. blocks of wood that would hinge the second, and I was the third. My career in the record industry together to form a large cube. The I never completed a version of was short-lived, and I never cube would open out in two massive Nam June’s Third Symphony. Instead produced the LP. halves. Each half block would of a score, Nam June presented a contain a small, shallow shelf on The title of the piece is homage note in Source commenting on the inner face of the half block. The to Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film. the commission. shelf would be just deep enough to George Maciunas and Dick Higgins Over the years, I realized several accommodate the CD version of Zen introduced me to Nam June’s work. variations on Zen for Record. for Record, with the CD sitting to I loved Zen for Film. Nam June and One involved blank, empty record half its depth in the face. I saw each other often when we both jackets. These contained no records. lived in Los Angeles. He taught at The idea for the project came Rather, they represent the concept California Institute of the Arts and from the Ise Shrine. The shrine of a record with no sound in an I worked nearby as general manager is a Shinto temple built on one of emblematic version. In the late of Something Else Press. We ate two adjacent sites. Every twenty 1980s, I prepared a set of records lunch or dinner together from time years, the priests of the temple take transformed into records with no to time, often with Fluxus colleague down the shrine and build it anew sound by painting them with
73 Events 21 Ken Friedman on the adjacent site. One face of the They terminated his employment sans-serif type stating title, date, open block would embody silence despite many requests and protests and composer. The jacket would in the physical recording. The other from students that he should stay. have been white, with the title and face would embody silence in the He moved to Laguna Beach, where composer in sans-serif type at the empty space. he lived with his mother for a while corner of the jacket. On the back, before moving to Los Angeles. I the liner notes would have been a My favorite unmade version of Zen went to see him a few times. He was comment by Nam June, a blank for Record developed at the time of depressed and unhappy working at space without words. I tried for Nam June’s 1982 retrospective at a menial job to live while interest in years to find a record producer who The Whitey Museum of American electronic music grew around the would publish this edition, but no Art. Nam June and I met at the nation. Advance Recordings released one agreed to do so until Jan van museum one day and he invited me a phonograph recording of Richard’s Toorn at Slowscan Editions decided out for coffee. I had been reading music for which he asked me to to try it. A few years before I spoke a copy of Art News with a richly write the liner notes. Soon after I about this with Jan, Nam June had illustrated article on the exhibition last saw him, he took his own life. a stroke. I was going to ask Emily that he had not seen. I gave it to Harvey to talk this over with him him. He thumbed through the article There are two codas to the story. when he was better, but Emily died quickly, then put it down and went Despite the fact that Richard is and I put the project on a shelf to back to talking about ideas. At one best known for electronic music, think about it. Then, a series of point, we must have talked about he wanted to me learn standard opportune letters brought a beautiful Nam June’s Zen for Film and the music notation to work with him. I set of liner notes by Craig Dworkin. long-lost Zen for Record. learned to use standard notation, but At some point, I hope to return to I was never good at it, and I never At this point, the story takes a the edition. used it after I completed Richard’s detour. In the 1960s, Advance courses. Nevertheless, I saved my Over the past forty-three years, Recordings released an LP of scores for many years, together with Zen for Record migrated from a Richard Maxfield’s compositions. several boxes full of sound tapes. phonograph record to an empty Richard was a pioneering composer I never produced sound works on record jacket to a never-produced of electronic and digital music. tape with Richard. These were tapes CD, and now to the idea of an LP He took over teaching John Cage’s from my radio programs in Illinois, from Slowscan Editions. course at The New School when tapes of the concerts I created as John stopped teaching. Richard Mozart spent much of his life music director for Karen Ahlberg’s worked with La Monte Young, realizing improvisational concerts dance troupe in San Francisco, and George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, that never took shape in written tapes of the concerts I played when and many others. Toward the end scores. These works remained alive screening the Fluxfilms that George of 1967, I got a postcard from Dick while Mozart lived. When Mozart Maciunas loaned me in 1966 – later Higgins telling me that Richard had died, these works died with him. All sent on to Jeff Berner for his great accepted a post at San Francisco music ends in silence. 1967 Fluxfest at Longshoreman’s State University. Dick urged me to Hall. One day in 1986, I listened to take Richard’s courses. I did. It was the tapes and reviewed the scores. a wonderful experience. Richard Soon after, I decided that I was a and I worked together on several terrible composer. I destroyed the projects. We grew quite close, and I entire collection of scores and tapes. oftenwentto Richard’s home to read scores, talk about music, and to For now, I’ll return to the 1982 think. I was probably the last artist conversation with Nam June and or composer to work with him closely. my thoughts for an edition of Zen for Record. The edition would have Richard was too adventurous for been a blank phonograph record the conservative music department with a white label and simple at San Francisco State University.
73 Events 22 Ken Friedman Zen Vaudeville The sound of one shoe tapping.
1966
This piece was based on a graffito found in New York in September 1966.
73 Events 23 Ken Friedman White Objects Objects are painted white. The objects may be given away or deposited.
1966
73 Events 24 Ken Friedman Do-It-Yourself Monument Build a monument.
1967
The first version of theDo-It-Yourself Monument was built in Point Loma, California, during the 1967 Fluxfest at the Red Shed Gallery. The monument was built of wood, cloth and paper. An unrealized version was proposed for stone blocks.
In 1970, the Lippincott Foundry held a competition for cast metal sculpture. I proposed an edition of 10,000 cubes, each an inch square, from which versions of the Do-It-Yourself Monument could be realized. The foundry did not appreciate the proposal.
Several small-scale models of the project exist. During the Paris Fluxus exhibition organized by Marcel Fleiss and Charles Dreyfus in 1989, I built a version of the Do-It-Yourself Monument from sugar cubes in a wooden cigar box. I gave them to Dorothy Selz, an artist who creates work from sugar. A version of the sugar-cube monument was exhibited at Krognoshuset in Lund, Sweden in 1997. I am still working on the piece, and I hope to realize it in full scale.
73 Events 25 Ken Friedman Empaquetage pour Christo A modest object is wrapped.
1967
This piece was first realized in March 1967 in Santa Cruz, California, after I began a correspondence and friendship with Christo that has lasted for four decades. I planned a version of this piece for a Fluxus edition that was never published, but Edition Vice Versand of Remscheid, Germany, issued the multiple under the title Eingepacktes in 1970.
73 Events 26 Ken Friedman Orchestra Gather an orchestra in which each member of the orchestra plays a phonograph for an instrument. The entire orchestra plays the phonographs. Concerts may consist of different kinds of performances. All performers may attempt to play the same record, perhaps trying to cue up and play at the same time or perhaps simply playing sections at random. All performers may play different versions of the same piece, either trying to cue up and play at the same time or perhaps simply playing sections at random. Each performer or different sections may play entirely different pieces of music, and so on. This may be performed in a chamber music variation by using a small ensemble.
1967
This piece was first realized in San Francisco, California. The original text was the simple statement, “The entire orchestra plays phonographs.”
73 Events 27 Ken Friedman Rock Placement Move large rocks to an area.
1967
First performed at Fluxus West in San Diego, California in July 1967 with rocks used to terraform and landscape the front yard of the house at 6361 Elmhurst Drive.
My father and I realized the first performance of this event at Fluxus West in San Diego, California in July of 1967. We moved rocks from the hills behind Fluxus West to landscape the front yard of the house at 6361 Elmhurst Drive.
A few years ago, Ditte – my wife – and I moved a collection of rocks from the Skaane countryside to our house in Torna Hällestad, a village established in the twelfth century. The rocks have moved from place to place around the yard. Sometimes, they form nice piles. Other times, they line the paths and walkways of the garden. I often wonder when the work exists and when it does not.
73 Events 28 Ken Friedman Blockade Cast and pour a cement form to create a long, low horizontal column with sides and height of equal measure. The column should meander through several rooms of a designated space.
1968
The first version of this piece was a full-scale cardboard model built in the spring of 1968 at the Divisadero Street Fluxus Center in San Francisco, California.
73 Events 29 Ken Friedman Boxing Day Acquire, fill and distribute boxes in the immediate environment and at a distance.
1968
For the first performance, one hundred boxes were acquired in Yellow Springs, Ohio. They were mostly small and medium-sized colored cardboard boxes. Some were given away empty, some with contents, some mailed with gifts, some mailed empty, some shipped with gifts or empty. A number of unusual boxes of pressed wood, woven reeds, etc., were also used.
73 Events 30 Ken Friedman Broken Record Phonograph records are thrown instead of the discus.
1968
In August 1968, I performed this piece near the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The original title was Record Break.
73 Events 31 Ken Friedman Contents Empty boxes. Each has a word printed on it to represent the contents.
1968
73 Events 32 Ken Friedman Paper Architecture Hang a large sheet or several large sheets of paper on the walls of a room. Inscribe the sheets with full-scale architectural features, such as doors, windows, or stairs, or with objects such as furniture, lamps, books, etc. Use these drawings to imagine, create or map an environment. The drawings may create or map new features in an existing environment. They may mirror, double or reconstruct existing features in situ or elsewhere. To create relatively permanent features with the drawings, apply them directly to a wall.
1968
The term “paper architecture” 1966. The contents were fluid. The or illegal samizdat publications that is a philosophical play on issues events were often exhibited in North circulated in eastern Europe and the in architecture, design and America and Europe. The loose Soviet Union in the 1960s art. In this event, it is linked sheet editions traveled even farther and 1970s. to concepts of diagramming, than the exhibitions did. They were Many of the events were realized in modeling and representation. translated into several western single editions of one event score. European languages and eastern I am not sure when I first used This might sometimes be a printed European languages. Some events the term. My event scores were edition of the score. It sometimes were also translated into Japanese. circulated in many different loose involved the realization in edition sheet editions before the first bound Because a single event on paper form of an entire piece. Most of edition appeared in 1982. I first could travel freely, I only found out my Fluxus multiples were realized this project in 1968 at about some of the translations and realizations of even scores, ready Fluxus West in San Francisco. circulating pieces years later. From to install or perform. I do not recall when I first gave it time to time, I continue to discover While George Maciunas always sent the title it now has. publications about which I never me copies of my Fluxus editions, knew. Some were formal, some Loose sheet editions of the event few other publishers sent copies of informal. Some were semi-legal scores began to circulate as early as published or realized scores.
73 Events 33 Ken Friedman More than once, publishers asked to whether I created the term “paper Conceptual Art” at Montgomery publish my work, released it widely, architecture.” At the time, I had Art Gallery, Claremont College, and forgot to send a copy to me. no idea whether I had originated and Claremont, California in May One distinguished German publisher the term. 1973. It has been executed as of multiples sent me copies of drawings or environments in different After that I did some searching on multiples by the other artists he environments since. the Web and in some dictionaries. published while forgetting to send I was unable to find usages earlier In a sense, I inherited one idea for me my own edition. Publishers did than the 1980s. While one architect this piece from my mother. Our this in the UK, Italy, the Netherlands stated that teachers used the term home in San Diego had a wall with and elsewhere. in his architecture school to show windows facing out on the boring It was even less common that anyone contempt for unbuildable projects, view of a neighbor’s wall and part would bother to send copies of there were no published citations. of his yard. My mother constructed samizdat or unofficial editions. sliding screens over the window and Since I first used the term “paper painted a bright, tropical garden In some cases, this may have been architecture,” I have seen it used in scene on the screens. After a few intentional. One Italian publisher at least eight ways. It refers to: years, it seemed as though the released a piece in a widely available 1) The philosophical and ambiguous garden view was the view from that edition of T-shirts. I found one in a issues visible in this event score, side of the house. shop in Milan, along with postcards 2) Drawn architecture that is not of the same piece. My guess is that intended to be built, 3) Drawn he wanted to avoid paying royalties. architecture that is intended to be In other cases, people simply built and will possibly be built even seemed to forget. Perhaps they though it has not yet been built, did not think of themselves as 4) Drawn architecture that is publishers. I assume this was the intended to be built but will never case with publishers of samizdat be built, 5) Drawn architecture that manuscripts. In some cases, they is impossible to build, 6) Drawings may not have known how to find me. of imaginary architecture that has never been built but could The situation was complicated be built, 7) Architectural models by two more factors. On some built in paper or in cardboard, occasions, my name was separated 8) Physical buildings made of from the work. One edition of the paper-based substances. scores traveled as an exhibition. My name appeared on the first page Some of these ideas date back and the preface, but not on the several millennia, even though sheets of individual scores, so my the term “paper architecture” has event scores (in the original wording) only been applied to the ideas in appeared without my name and with recent years. no attribution. Moreover, the ideas in While I am uncertain of when I first many of these texts can be described titled this score with the term as an idea or an idea for a work. “paper architecture”, people first When this happened, my name saw this piece at the Fluxus West and attribution of the work nearly center on Divisadero Street in San always disappeared. Francisco in 1968. A few years ago, this score was The first public museum the subject of a thread on an presentation of the work was in the email architecture discussion exhibition “Intermedia - Fluxus - group. One list member wondered
73 Events 34 Ken Friedman Salt Flat Make a table with a lip running around the edge so that the center of the table has a shallow, rectangular area two or three inches deep. Fill the rectangle with salt. Comb the salt in the manner of a Japanese sand garden.
1968
73 Events 35 Ken Friedman Terminal Stairway Construct a stairway rising from the floor to a place on a wall, terminating in a blank wall. It may rise to a point in a ceiling so that it touches no walls.
1968
The first version of this piece was modeled in wood and cardboard at the San Francisco Fluxus Center on Divisadero Street. In 1979, I took a studio loft in New York with Jack Ox. When we moved in, I found an old wooden staircase in my part of the loft. The staircase went up from my floor through a sliding metal fire door into a loft floor in the next building. During construction, we separated the two floors with bricks, and shut the door permanently. At that point, I moved the stairs away from the wall to another, completely blank wall and painted them white, turning it into a found reconstruction of Terminal Stairway.
73 Events 36 Ken Friedman The Three Ages of Man Three containers stand on an old table. A container with four legs or points touching the table contains powdered milk. A container with a solid base and one large external point contains sugar. A container with three legs or points contains salt.
1968
The Sphinx of classical Greek of Sophocles, Oedipus the King, mythology was a terrible winged Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus. creature with the head of a woman This piece presents an object and the body of a lion. She besieged solution to the riddle of the Sphinx. the city of Thebes after the murder The symbols – milk, sugar, and of King Laios. The Sphinx posed salt – are transparent in some ways, a riddle to anyone who crossed opaque in others. her path. She ate those who could not answer.
Oedipus met the Sphinx on his way from Corinth to Thebes. She challenged him with a famous riddle.
“What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?”
Oedipus answered the riddle. The answer is: “A man.” A man crawls on four legs as a baby, walks upright as an adult, and hobbles with the help of a cane in old age.
By freeing Thebes from the Sphinx, Oedipus established himself as a hero and ascended the throne of Thebes as king in the place of the murdered Laios. The story of his tragedy and the fate he tried to avoid is told in the Theban plays
73 Events 37 Ken Friedman Vacant Lot In a vacant lot, perform actions on the environment, acquiring, transplanting, adding, relocating, developing, scattering, disseminating, removing, transforming. The duration is to be determined prior to the event.
1968
The first performance of this piece began in a vacant lot next to the Divisadero Street Fluxus Center in San Francisco, California in February 1968. I didn’t plan the project completely. I was looking at the vacant lot from the porch outside my kitchen and I decided to go out into the lot and move something. The next day, I moved something else. I decided to do this every day for a month.
In 1979, I drove by the lot. It was somewhat overgrown, but it still bore marks of the plantings and transformations.
73 Events 38 Ken Friedman White Label, White Contents Acquire a large variety of bottles and flasks of assorted sizes and shapes. Fill the bottles with salt. Paint the labels white.
1968
First realized in San Diego, California. In the 1970s, I realized many versions of this piece with round boxes of Morton Salt as well as many plastic bottles and jars. I used rubber stamps on some of the versions I made in the 1970s, including a multiple series of eight with a stamped label reading Mercato del Sale for my exhibition there in 1975.
73 Events 39 Ken Friedman Cloud Chamber Charter a small airplane. Take it up into a cloudy area of sky. Hold bags and bottles out the window to collect cloud vapors. Place the bags and bottles in an empty space, white room. Open them to release the clouds.
1969
In 1969, I worked in a wonderful little room perched on the top of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Ventura, California as artist in residence there. Windows that let light in from every angle surrounded the room. One day, Rich Harris, the minister, invited me to go flying with him in a small private airplane. I realized this piece with a small, private performance, releasing the clouds in the studio.
In 1970, I proposed this piece as an exhibition for a room that overlooked the sea at the La Jolla Museum of Art in 1970, but they declined. Later, I suggested it to the Milwaukee Art Center, though I don’t know what it was about Milwaukee that led me to suggest it to that museum. I still haven’t yet realized this piece as an exhibition.
73 Events 40 Ken Friedman Shadow Box Build a shallow box with a glass top. Place a piece of paper in the bottom of the box. Lay an object over the paper. Set the box in the sunlight for an extremely long period of time. Wait until the shadow of the object is etched into the paper by the action of the sun.
1969
The first of these boxes was constructed on the back porch of the Dolores Street Fluxus Center in San Francisco. The box was destroyed in 1970, with its shadow page inside it. A second version may have been built a year later for my exhibition at Vice Versand in Remscheid, Germany. I’m not quite sure about the second box, though. The Vice Versand show was titled Time Space Light Memory and Forgetfulness, and part of my idea for the show was to send instructions for which I did not keep copies. Eventually, the show would be only memories, imperfect, evanescent, fading in the light.
73 Events 41 Ken Friedman Studio Pieces The studio is constructed or reconstructed, arranged or rearranged daily over the duration of the event.
1969
First performed at Fluxus West in San Francisco, California. This piece was a development of Vacant Lot. Variations on this piece have been the basis of several of my exhibitions and installations. At some point, I became aware of Robert Morris’s continuous rearrangement of his studio, but I think that work came after Vacant Lot, which was the first of these works.
73 Events 42 Ken Friedman Heat Transfer Event Set up a minimum of three glasses. Fill one with ice water. Fill one with boiling tea. Get one or more empty glasses. Transfer the liquids from glass to glass until the tea is cooled to drinkable temperature.
1970
First performed in San Francisco restaurant in 1970, this piece emerged from necessity with a pot of tea served boiling hot and a cup that would not cool down. I wrote the score twelve years later in a Chinese restaurant in New York with Peter Frank when Peter noticed me performing this event.
A few years ago, a group of artists in London who called themselves Secret Fluxus made this one of their two signature pieces, performing it together with or in alternation with one of the Danger Music scores by Dick Higgins involving butter and eggs.
73 Events 43 Ken Friedman Ordinary Objects Place things on the floor.
1970
In 1970, I had a conversation with the director of the art gallery at University of California at Santa Barbara about the possibility of an exhibition at the university.
He invited me to visit him, asking me to bring examples of my work and some of the pieces I might like to exhibit.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, I drove the Fluxmobile regularly between the San Francisco Bay Area and San Diego. The first time I drove south after the conversation, I made an appointment to see him. The day that I left, I grabbed a selection of objects and projects from my studio, threw them into a box and took them with me.
When I got to Santa Barbara, we spoke together for a while. Then he asked me to bring in my work.
I went to the Fluxmobile and fetched the box. I brought the box into his office, opened it and unpacked the objects, placing them on the floor, along the length of a wall.
He looked at the objects for a while. Perhaps it was a long while. I am not sure, but it seemed that way to me.
Finally, he looked at me and said, “But these are just ordinary objects.”
At first, I thought he understood my work quite well. Later, I realized that he saw these objects in a very different way than I did.
73 Events 44 Ken Friedman The Silent Night Walk quietly through a residential neighborhood on Christmas Eve with a lantern.
1970
First performed in Newhall, California on Christmas Eve 1970.
73 Events 45 Ken Friedman The Artist Becomes the Art The artist sells an edition of 50 signed, labeled containers, each with certificate guaranteeing that on death, the artist will be cremated, and the ashes distributed among the containers. The containers are stored. A careful record kept of buyers. The buyers receive the certificate. After the containers are filled, they are sent to the buyers. (The artist will ensure fulfillment of the sales contract.)
1971
73 Events 46 Ken Friedman Completions Publish a book. On each page of the book, one word is printed. The words form this sentence: “When you have finished reading this sentence, you have finished reading my book”.
1971
First published as an I.A.C. Editions booklet, Oldenburg, Germany, in 1973, in a series edited by Klaus Groh. The I.A.C. Edition title was misprinted as Completitions.
73 Events 47 Ken Friedman The Distance from this Sentence to Your Eye is My Sculpture Produce a surface or an object bearing the text: “The distance from this sentence to your eye is my sculpture”.
1971
This piece first appeared at the VII Biennale of Paris as a sign on the exhibition wall. It may be inscribed on any kind of surface. It has appeared in many versions in exhibition, publications, and broadcasts form, as a rubber stamp, a print, a rollover text, and more.
73 Events 48 Ken Friedman Earth Work Acquire by purchase or lease a parcel of land comprising one cubic foot of land at a depth of six or more feet beneath presently owned land, with or without building or improvement. Acquire no right (i.e. neither building, leasing, subleasing, mineral, oil, access, etc.) The ownership or leasehold of the land comprises the work of art.
1971
73 Events 49 Ken Friedman Open Land Acquire a plot of land. The land itself is the artwork. It is to be untouched and unchanged. It is sold as an artwork subject to the restriction that it never be changed. A small marker may identify it.
1971
In 1971, Hans-Werner Kalkmann created an organization with an ambitious title: the Center for Artistic Defense of the Environment. One of his first projects was to organize an exhibition. I created this piece for that exhibition.
73 Events 50 Ken Friedman Silent Shoes Spend the night sleeping on a friend’s doorstep. In the morning, leave a pair of shoes behind on departing.
1971
The first realization of this took place at Jock Reynolds’s farm in Davis, California while Jock was away. I had gone to visit Jock with Amy de Neergaard, a friend from New York, but I apparently forgot to notify Jock of the date of our arrival.
We arrived in the late afternoon on a summer day. Jock was not home, so Amy and I went to Davis for supper. Later, we returned, but Jock still had not come back.
We decided to spend the night camping out on Jock’s doorstep. In the morning, we decided to move on to our next destination.
I had been thinking about this piece for several months, not quite as specifically as sleeping on Jock’s doorstep, but the moment seemed right and the piece jelled into the score. I left the shoes behind when we departed.
73 Events 51 Ken Friedman Water Table A full formal table setting with full service for four. All service is white porcelain or clear glass. All objects, utensils, etc., are filled with water.
1971
This piece was created at the installation, and I used their menu invitation of Yoko Ono and John as a basis of a drawing placed on the Lennon for their exhibition, table. The restaurant had nothing to “This is Not Here” at The Everson do with Daniel Spoerri. Museum in Syracuse, New York. The title Water Table refers to the Yoko and John invited artists to project, and to the idea of a water create works involving water. This table in geological terms. was my work. Yoko and John’s assistants executed and installed The alternate instruction score reads, the original version of Water Table “Set a formal table with complete for me in the guest artist area of service for four. All service should be the exhibition, along with pieces by white porcelain or clear glass. Fill all artists such as Robert Watts, Larry objects, utensils, etc., with water.” Miller and Alison Knowles.
Bill Vazan reconstructed it in 1974 for my solo exhibition at Vehicule, Quebec. I reconstructed it a third time in Vienna for the exhibition Fluxus Subjektiv at Galerie Krinzinger. This reconstruction was the first time that I constructed the realization of this score for an exhibition.
The third reconstruction is pictured in a special Fluxus issue of Kunstforum from the early 1990s. The work is misattributed to Daniel Spoerri because the menu pictured on the table came from Restaurant Daniel. Restaurant Daniel loaned us the dishes and tableware for the
73 Events 52 Ken Friedman Flow System Invite anyone – and everyone – to send an object or a work of any kind to an exhibition. Display everything that is received. Any visitor to the exhibition may take away an object or work.
1972
This event was realized as the exhibition “Omaha Flow Systems” at Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska in April 1973. The Omaha Flow Systems exhibition became the model for most correspondence art and mail art exhibitions held since then. The principles that anyone may send a work of any kind to the exhibition and everything received is displayed have become the basic standards for mail art exhibitions since that time.
73 Events 53 Ken Friedman Chess Shrine Place a chess set in a shrine. Invite everyone who comes to visit the shrine to make one move. The white pieces open the game. The first player to play white leaves a card with a black emblem to show that it is black’s turn to move. The next visitor plays black and leaves a note indicating that it is white’s turn, etc. The game continues in the way until white or black achieves checkmate. The last player rearranges the board for the next game.
1972
73 Events 54 Ken Friedman Replication Choose a site. Act upon the site or work on the site in such a manner that after departure the site looks as it did prior to the work.
1972
First executed at Farmington, New Mexico, replicating the white divider stripes on a stretch of road. Also executed near Rifle, Colorado, using road divider stripes, and at Something Else Farms in West Glover, Vermont using a patch of dirt road. No documentation is permitted that would make it more easily possible to trace the changes Replication seeks to obscure.
73 Events 55 Ken Friedman Woolen Goods Observe an unexplained silence.
1973
The first performance of this work seemed to hope that an association physically produce Omen’s books. took place in Tucson, Arizona in of many small, undercapitalized The main fiscal problem of Omen July of 1973. The original score publishers could somehow do for Press was the fact that while Walter read, “An unexplained silence the entire group what none of them had facilities for comprehensive book is observed.” could do for themselves. This was manufacturing, he had too few books not possible, but it did bring Dick under production to justify the scale In Tucson, I worked at Omen Press, a and me back in contact with Walter. of his plant, and even if he had more small publishing house specializing books introduction, he could not in Sufi literature. At that time, Walter was hoping to locate or afford a master printer and find someone who could help him Walter Bowart was the publisher of the associated staff required to keep to develop Omen as a functioning Omen Press. Walter had been one the plant working. organization. Dick recommended me of the founders of the New York to him. I was the general manager The chaos ran a bit deeper than this, newspaper East Village Other, and for Dick’s Something Else Press in though. When we sought a secretary, a founder of the Underground Press late 1970 and early 1971, during for example, I interviewed several Syndicate. In the late 1960s, Walter the short time that the Press was dozen applicants before proposing married Peggy Mellon Hitchcock located in California, while Dick three likely candidates. Walter chose and moved to Tucson, Arizona, taught at California Institute of the among them by asking me to take where he started Omen Press to Arts along with Allan Kaprow, Nam their horoscopes to an astrologer publish books on Sufism, astrology, June Paik, Alison Knowles, Emmett whose books he produced. and mysticism. I knew Walter from Williams, and the other Fluxus the time when I had lived in New On arriving, Walter placed me people who worked there during the York and ran the Avenue C Flux in a small, cozy guesthouse – a first years of the school. Room on the Lower East Side. comfortable pueblo-style one- Dick was very persuasive, and Walter bedroom adobe building with a In 1973, one of the major book hired me, promising a modest salary private bathroom. At one point, conferences met in Los Angeles, and a place to live. Soon after, I set he decided that he wanted to do and Dick Higgins invited me to off for Tucson, Arizona. In Tucson, something else with the guest house, join him at a meeting of small I found the congenial chaos that so he proposed moving me to a press publishers. Presses such as had surrounded Walter at the East corrugated iron Quonset hut located Dick’s Something Else Press and Village Other, but it was chaos writ at the nether end of the property that Walter’s Omen Press were engaged small. Rather than the bustling seemed to have come from a surplus in a perpetual struggle for good EVO office on the Lower East Side sale associated with a closed military distribution and marketing services. with dozens of people wandering base. The hut was impossibly hot, The purpose of this meeting was to in and out at any hour, Omen was cooled only by running a noisy, see if some of these publishers could a small warehouse behind Walter rickety air conditioner that generated work together in an association or and Peggy’s home. The warehouse a terrible, moldy smell. The place cooperative network of some sort included the press offices and a had ancient motel carpets, and to develop the kind of effective small but complete printing plant. 1940s-era furniture that looked marketing that typified the major Walter had purchased a massive as though they had come with the presses. While many publishers had printing press and complete original hut. At this point, I decided good ideas, none had money or staff bindery equipment so that he could to decamp to California. to implement their ideas. All of them
73 Events 56 Ken Friedman My summer at Omen had some year or so, I made a nice living off epistemological awareness designed good moments, though. Walter was the stack of prints that I produced. to reveal the ontology of being. a scattered, impossible boss, but Interestingly, most of the prints were The Sufi masters amounted to far a lovely person and an inventive, dated 7.7.73, the same date as Dick more than epistemology, and it is congenial friend. We spent hours Higgins’s beautiful series of prints the search for truth and being that talking, planning, and inventing. In with themes from nature, discreet typifies their quest. an effort to figure out how to make erotic photography, and typography. One side of Sufism involved the expensive printing press pay This conjunction was unknown to the archetype of the trickster- for itself, I planned a series of a either of us when we produced our epistemologist. Another involved the hundred or so books that would have respective series. passionate search for the truth the made marvelous multiple editions. The other great relic of that summer lies beneath words. The thirteenth Unfortunately, these books required is a series of notes and prototypes century poet and theologian Rumi the skills and network of an art for the books. typifies this quest. I met Rumi again dealer to sell them. As an artist, when I studied for my doctorate with I would have loved to make them. Another unrealized scheme for Omen Anwar Dil at the Graduate School As a manager, I soon realized that Press books involved an idea that of Leadership and Human Behavior Omen could not market them. would have been quite marvelous. I at United States International decided to produce book versions of I did make a kind of prototype University. Prof. Dil’s courses ranged George Maciunas’s Fluxus editions. of one series of ideas. The books widely over history and time. In I called George and secured his were to have been based on food, these courses, I had the opportunity agreement for an imprint to be called with a print of a steak – obverse to explore the history, theology, and Fluxus Editions. These would have and reverse – so printed that the philosophy of Islam in a cross- been George’s products, redesigned book pages together would be cultural context. Rumi and his work by George into book formats. I tried roughly the thickness of a steak. were a highlight of the courses. to carry this plan forward back in Walter helped me to figure out how California. Late in 1973 or early To understand Sufism, one must to print a prototype. I went to a 1974, I took out the legal papers for understand the relations between local supermarket and purchased a business with that name, hoping speech and what is not said. On the a number of steaks and chops. We somehow to raise the money to fund side of speech, this inquiry led me marinated these in a rather nasty the series. I never did manage it, so through a tradition of epistemology solution of type wash, and printed the idea ended with a set of business and exegetical hermeneutics off several dozen different kinds of papers filed in the San Diego County anchored in the symbolic steaks and chops. These became Courthouse and a few rubber stamps. interactionism of Herbert Blumer my meat prints. Because Walter did and George Herbert Mead, and not have the kind of blind-stamp The durable result of my Arizona through them to Wilhelm Dithery’s printer’s chop that fine art printers stay involved my encounter with hermeneutics. On the side of silence, generally use, I asked him to sign Sufism and Islam. During my stay this leads through ontology. the prints as printer, which he did. A at Omen Press, I immersed myself few copies still exist here and there. in Sufi literature. This was a new The word Sufi refers to the woolen world for me. robes that Sufi mystics wore. That In the long run, the meat prints gave rise to the title Woolen Goods. redeemed my costs of the trip to Here, too, I shared an interest Arizona and back. In those days, art with Dick. For years, Dick had This event may be realized by dealer and curator Betty Gold had been collecting and recounting installing a stack of neatly folded a gallery in Los Angeles, and she Hodja tales, stories of the great blankets and other woolen goods. liked the prints. She took some on Turkish mystic Nasruddin Hodja. consignment. One of her clients, the Hodja is a trickster and a folk heir to a meat packing fortune, fell hero whose antics disguise a deep in love with the prints and bought level of philosophical inquiry, and quite a few to give to friends. For a – beneath that – a deeper level of
73 Events 57 Ken Friedman 24 Hours 720 clocks are placed in a room, each set to one of the minutes between 12:00 and 11:59.
1974
The literary work of the late one version of Homage to Borges Versand in Remscheid, Germany, Argentine writer and librarian Jorge- was created for the Coltejer Biennale titled Time, Space, Light, Memory, Luis Borges explores themes in in Medellin, Colombia in the early and Forgetfulness. contemporary life that are visible in 1970s for a section organized by While the piece remained unrealized, the mediation of new technology. Jorge Glusberg of the Center for the score traveled widely, in English Borges explored ideas of the book Art and Communication (CAYC) in and in translation. Over the years, I and the library that we can read Buenos Aires. Jorge showed another have seen a number of installations as metaphorical predictions of way in the exhibition Arte de Systems and exhibitions similar to the in which the technology-mediated organized at the Museum of Modern installation described here. Artists world of cyberspace engages human Art in Buenos Aires in 1971. who had seen this score created consciousness. This piece speaks This piece may be executed in several of these. An artist who to the universal, everywhere-all-at- several ways. All 720 clocks may be translated and exhibited my event once nature of those notions. While the same kind of clock. Alternatively, scores created one such installation. this piece predates cyberspace and each clock may be different than When I saw the installation, it the Internet, it engages ideas that all the other clocks, a selection seemed to me that he had forgotten were already current among those of alarm clocks, cuckoo clocks, this specific work. Even so, he who shared Nam June Paik’s ideas pendulum clocks, grandfather continued to be influenced by the of cybernetics and the information clocks, wristwatches, spring wound way in which this piece addresses superhighway. It also addresses clocks, electric clocks, digital clocks, the everywhere-all-at-once nature the ideas of thinkers whose work and so on. of time. engages the concept of time, as well as the links across time and space From time to time, I have considered Of course, this is an illusion. In his visible in Mieko Shiomi’s great series other possibilities. These might Confessions, Augustine wrote that of projects titled Spatial Poem. include all clocks in any hour being he understood time perfectly well the same kind of clock, with the as long as no one asked him what Over the years, I created several 720 clocks divided among twenty- time was, while he did not know pieces honoring Borges. This piece four different kinds of clocks. what time is when asked to explain was originally titled Altar to Borges. These solutions never seemed as it. Newton saw time as uniform I changed the title to avoid confusing interesting to me as all clocks being and absolute, flowing equally and this with the score for Homage to different or all the same. uniformly of its own accord through Jorge Luis Borges, an installation the universe. Time formed one axis designed for the exhibition “Arte While the score to this piece has of the universe, with space – also de Systems” that Jorge Glusberg been exhibited often, the piece itself equal and uniform – forming the organized in 1970 at the Museum remains unrealized. It is related to other axis. Together, time and space of Modern Art in Buenos Aires, another unrealized project, Time formed a perfect Cartesian frame, Argentina. My recollection is that Piece, and to an installation at Vice
73 Events 58 Ken Friedman an x-axis and a y-axis that together constituted the stage or ground on which everything takes place and against which all can be measured. Einstein’s space – time (or time – space) changed all this, just as gravity deflects the flow of time even measured against the short distance between the floor and ceiling of an ordinary room.
Is time everywhere and all at once? Yes, and no. Time is the fabric of everywhere, but it is different everywhere all at once, and the time that flows where I am located in space is never quite the same time where you are.
73 Events 59 Ken Friedman The Last Days of Pompeii A desk or table. A beautiful calendar or time planner is open on the desk. The book is open to a date selected at random. Written on the page with 3 p.m. circled: “Destroy Pompeii this afternoon.”
1985
For years, I have cherished the vain While the expensive time planners the quiet of the early morning, I’d hope that I would eventually develop never helped, they gave rise to this usually get three or four hours of more efficient work habits, wake event. I did get something useful out work done. Then I’d crawl back into up promptly at dawn, get to bed on of them, though I’m not sure what bed for another hour of sleep before time, and find myself able to write use it is. starting the day. and get work done on the deadlines I wrote the first version of this piece This habit continued with our next that other people seem to be able to in an expensive time planner I dog, Jacob, who came to us when he master. I never managed to do so. bought in New York in 1985, placing was a middle-aged six-year-old. Even Every now and then, I have tried to it on a desk at the front of my loft. though Jacob is gone now, I still reach the goal with the help of a wake up in the early hours to work. These days, I am closer to my dream desk diary, a pocket agenda or any of the efficient life than I have been Two new factors have moved me of one of the several time planning in the past. I owe my first step to my beyond getting up early to write systems that are supposed to help late dog and companion, Oliver. toward efficiency and organization one to manage professional and on several fronts. In January 2008, I private life more effectively. None When I settled down with my wife moved from a professor’s life at the of them have worked for me. The Ditte in 1998, she had a wonderful Norwegian School of Management only one that has been reasonably old poodle named Oliver. Oliver and in Oslo to a dean’s role at the useful was the little “seventh I hit it off very well. In fact, we fell Swinburne University of Technology sense” pocket-sized diary. I’m told in love. We were so fond of each Faculty of Design in Melbourne, Thor Heyerdahl carried one on his other that Ditte would occasionally Australia. One of the tools I use to expedition across the Pacific. Later, complain that I only married her for keep track of what I have to do is a living outside Lund, I used the her poodle. calendar and diary system in Novell’s Swedish Lilla Fick that shows the As old men do, Oliver often had to GroupWise software. It’s easy to holidays of the Swedish church. get up in the middle of the night to make entries – and I must, to juggle This was more useful to me, being pee. We fell into a pattern. Oliver the multiple responsibilities of the married to an ordained deacon who would jump out of bed at 3 a.m. job. I support this with a Moleskin worked on many holidays. Now, I use every morning. I’d get up and take Pocket Weekly Diary. a Moleskin Pocket Weekly Diary. him out to the garden. When he went The added factor in my life is a in, he’d stroll back upstairs, hop into tremendously effective executive bed, and fall asleep. I’d be awake, assistant named Tania Westcott. so I’d go into the study to work. In Tania keeps track of my calendar,
73 Events 60 Ken Friedman adds things when new requirements in Intelligent Management in the the work of hundreds or – in some come up, and reminds me when I’ve Knowledge Economy edited by cases – hundreds of thousands. got to get something done. Sven Jung Hagen and Henrik The difference a leader makes is to Linderoth. I’d have a bit more to Prof. Elliott Mintzberg made what provide strategy and focus. It is the add today, now that I’ve moved was then a groundbreaking discovery flow of those ten-minute chunks of from research in leadership in by following managers in their daily action that bring the strategy to life, organization to a managerial role. life. He learned that a managers role evolving, and changing as people While I was an entrepreneur, is not the well-organized strategic enact and enable it, changing it publisher, and organizer as a young flow that many believe it to be. appropriately, making it their own man, I did not have the experience Rather, it is a series of flowing as they shape the organization in I now have combined with the encounters in which managers daily action. theoretical perspectives that allow get about ten minutes to work on me to integrate experience, theory, That’s what I think of when I something before the next task and philosophy. An interesting look at my Moleskin and my commands their attention. aspect of my job is the fact that GroupWise calendar. Since moving from a life in research these three facets of leadership On a grand level, of course, I to a life leading my faculty, I’ve interact clearly, explicitly and often can still imagine Jove hurling found this to be so. It’s interesting in my life – and in the conversations his lightning bolts and Vulcan and rewarding – and the process I have with other deans, as well as hammering at the forge as the is actually quite reasonable. The with my deputy vice chancellor and great volcano covers Pompeii with reasonable nature of this sequence vice chancellor. ash. What I’m not sure about is comes from the fact that a leader The flow of work keeps me at the whether they had it planned and does more than set strategy and coalface where theory, thought marked in their diary, or whether the execute it. Rather, he shapes a and action intersect. Constant cataclysm simply emerged from the strategy, then develops it together engagement with our executive daily flow when Juno put a project with his senior management team, group and the academic heads forward or Mars got something wrong and then works with the people pushes my work and thinking in the workshop. who actually execute the strategy. forward, while the deputy dean A leader shapes and gives direction Prof. Lyndon Anderson and faculty to organizational strategy. As a manager Fiona Spurrell join manager, he or she is required to me in shaping a complex series implement the strategy and he is of intersections that become responsible for achieving strategic the intricate choreography of goals through detailed day-to-day organizational life. All of this is actions. But the great secret to invisible to anyone outside a specific successful organizations is the fact organization, and it is for this reason that everyone drives the strategy that one can imagine a world in forward through their achievements. which leaders take credit for what To function as a successful their colleagues and co-workers executive, therefore, a leader spends achieve. A good leader is a strategist, a great portion of his or her daily to be sure, but the concept of a work serving the people who make good leader deserving a salary and things happen in the organization. bonus package hundreds of times There are practical, theoretical, and greater than the lowest-paid worker philosophical reasons for this. Some in an organization is inconceivable years ago, I addressed some of these to anyone who genuinely understands issues in an article titled “Leaders what makes an organization work. for the Knowledge Economy.” No one person can claim the credit This appeared as a book chapter for an organization that thrives on
73 Events 61 Ken Friedman Rotterdam Exchange Anyone may bring an object. Objects that are delivered are painted white. Anyone who brings an object may take any other object away.
1986
First realized at Perfo Festival in Rotterdam.
73 Events 62 Ken Friedman Rational Music Take the score of a symphony. Organize the symphony in such a way that all notes of any given kind are played consecutively. For example, take all instances of the note B#. Then, assemble all B# notes in series by time value, so that whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, etc., are played consecutively. The entire series is performed in sequence. You may score the piece so that work is equally divided among all instruments, or you may use another rational scoring technique, for example, all violins represented by one violin and so on through all groups of instruments. Other techniques might permit the entire performance to be realized on piano; notes distributed by section – oboes take A $bassoons take A, bass trombones take A#, and so on; or simple rotation of notes through all performers until the piece is complete. Refinements may be considered.
1987
73 Events 63 Ken Friedman Homage to Mahler Perform a symphony. Have the different sections of the orchestra march on and off stage as they perform.
1989
First scored in Oslo, Norway.
73 Events 64 Ken Friedman Toothpaste Make a painting with toothpaste instead of white paint.
1989
73 Events 65 Ken Friedman White Tooth Workshop Brush your teeth using a different toothbrush for each tooth.
1989
73 Events 66 Ken Friedman After Ad Reinhart Choose a work by Ken Friedman. Paint it black.
1990
First realized at the exhibition Ubi Fluxus, Ibi Motus in Venice, Italy by Gino Di Maggio and Achille Bonito Oliva. For the exhibition, I painted a large group portrait of all the Fluxus artists in the exhibition. Ben Vautier had painters cover one of my walls with black paint to make room for his installation. I came in the day after I finished the painting to find half the portraits gone. In their place, I had the idea for this work.
73 Events 67 Ken Friedman Fluxus Balance Piece for Mieko Shiomi A bowl of water is placed on one side of a balance. The bowl is filled with water exactly equal in weight to whatever is on the other side of the balance.
1991
This piece was created in July 1991 for Mieko Shiomi’s international project Fluxus Balance.
73 Events 68 Ken Friedman Marching Band A marching band carries its instruments and sings or hums the music.
1991
Created in Oslo, Norway, on May 17, 1991, the Norwegian national holiday.
73 Events 69 Ken Friedman One Million Minutes Perform one million gestures – physical or verbal – in a relay, one per minute, over the time of one million minutes. The gestures may be similar or different, as decided by each participant in the relay. This piece will take 694 days. Each day contains 1440 minutes. This event is only to be performed once.
1991
When I first imagined the piece do so would be through a social preceding this event, it was a simple network. The other would be to use concept that several people could a computer program that would realize in a relatively short time. I perform the piece through a series of based the concept on works by Bob algorithmic permutations. Like the Watts, Dick Higgins and Emmett older Nietzsche looking back at the Williams in which performers were younger man’s ideas, I’m not sure I to realize an action in a series would do it. of time intervals. As I extended the sequences and numbers of performers, the piece became a variation on the earlier scores, growing to become something huge, perhaps even grandiose.
By the time that I scored this event, it had become an unrealizable event, something on the order of a Nietzsche aphorism in the body of a Wagnerian gesture. This dichotomy contains the dialectical opposition between the young Nietzsche who admired Wagner and the mature Nietzsche who warned against the dangers of Wagner’s position.
Soon afterward, the birth of the public Internet made it possible to realize this event. One way to
73 Events 70 Ken Friedman Precinct Construct a rough slab, cube, or table of natural stone or wood. Invite people to place hand-made models or objects made of wood or clay on the table.
1991
Several times over the years, I have made pieces that involve exchanging objects or art works with people, or giving them works, or creating places within which they may exchange or give objects. This piece allows others to give. It is also related to a number of projects involving shrines.
73 Events 71 Ken Friedman Renter’s Orchestra Present an orchestra of instruments owned by people who cannot play them.
1991
73 Events 72 Ken Friedman The Secrets of Nature Two metal balls. Both are made of the same metal, either lead or iron. One weighs ten times as much as the other.
1991
73 Events 73 Ken Friedman Stage Fright Event Wear a costume that covers almost all of the body from the top of the head to the knees. Only the legs from the knees down should be visible. Examples of the costume: a large, broad-brimmed hat, a scarf, a huge sweater with a very high neck, and a bulky wool skirt; or a bundle of layered wool blankets; or a specially sewn sack with holes cut for the hands and legs. The audience may not see the performer and the performer may not see the audience. Walk out on stage or into the hall, moving about slowly during the allocated time. At the end of the time, two or three cast members come out to guide the performer off. This may be performed solo, or many performers may perform it, slowly bumping into each other and the audience as they move through the piece. Music may be played, or the event may take place in silence.
1991
73 Events 74 Ken Friedman Alchemical Theater Assemble four elements. Place the elements. Act upon the elements.
1992
This piece requires a collection of the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. These elements may be organized in containers, in some raw form or in a combination. The elements may be rearranged in different ways during the exhibition.
73 Events 75 Ken Friedman Bartholomew in Munich Green glass bottles and clear glass bottles. Fill the clear bottles with plaster of Paris. Fill the green bottles with salt. Display on a small wooden shelf.
1992
73 Events 76 Ken Friedman Tønsberg Ship Get an old boat or a small, open ship without a deck. Paint the outside Prussian Blue. Paint the inside a deep, rich green. Fill the boat with small cubes of stone, 4 to 6 centimeters on a side. The cubes can be any natural stone, cut rough. The cubes should not be trimmed or polished. The stones can either fill the boat to cover the bottom completely or be placed in a pile or haug.
1992
73 Events 77 Ken Friedman Frozen Time Take a plastic, battery-powered alarm clock or an electric-powered alarm clock. Set the alarm to go off at the time that you wish to present the work. Freeze the clock into a block of ice. If using a battery-powered clock, prepare the battery to withstand low temperatures. If using an electrical clock, place the electrical cord outside the block of ice. Bring the block of ice to the place of the presentation an hour before the time for which the alarm is set. Leave the block of ice on a table, a pedestal, or a block of stone.
1993
This piece began when the Danish artist Kirsten Justesen invited me to contribute a work to her Melting Time project. I thought about it for a long time and tried several approaches. I wasn’t happy with any of them. I finished this version of the piece in December 1993. By then, the exhibition and performances were over, but I wrote to Kirsten to say I would take part in the next Melting Time project. In the meantime, the piece took on a life of its own, titled Frozen Time.
73 Events 78 Ken Friedman Magic Trick #1 Walk on stage with a sledgehammer and two small tape recorders. Place one tape recorder on one side of the stage. Place the other on the opposite side of the stage. Turn the first recorder on. Record something. Test it by playing back the recording. Turn the tape recorder on to record. Place it on the stage. Walk across the stage. Turn the second recorder on in the playback mode. Place it on the stage. Walk back to the first tape recorder. Pick up the hammer. Raise it high. Wait 30 seconds and then smash the tape recorder that is recording. Stand and wait. After 15 seconds, the second tape recorder plays back a loud “Ouch!”
1993
73 Events 79 Ken Friedman Magic Trick #2 Walk on stage with a sledgehammer, an egg, and a small tape recorder. Place the egg on one side of the stage. Place the tape recorder on the opposite side of the stage. Turn the recorder on in the playback mode. Walk back to the egg. Pick up the hammer. Raise it high. Wait 30 seconds and smash the egg. Stand and wait. After 15 seconds, the tape recorder plays the noise of a chicken.
1993
73 Events 80 Ken Friedman Magic Trick #4 Walk on stage with a phonograph record, a large hat, a cloth sack, and assorted tools: hammer, file, clippers, shears and a hacksaw. Break the record. Cut it up. File it, saw it, and clip it into small pieces. Place the pieces in the sack. Smash the sack with the hammer. Place the sack in the hat. Hold the hat up. Then place it on a table. Wave hands over the hat. The hat begins to play music.
1993
73 Events 81 Ken Friedman Magic Trick #5 Walk on stage with a sledgehammer, a toy piano, and a small tape recorder. Place the piano on one side of the stage. Place the tape recorder on the opposite side of the stage. Turn the recorder on in the playback mode. Walk back to the piano. Pick up the hammer. Raise it high. Wait 30 seconds and smash the piano. Stand and wait. After 15 seconds, the tape recorder plays the sound of a piano sonata.
1993
73 Events 82 Ken Friedman Magic Trick #7 Walk on stage with a big sheet of paper and a magician’s hat. Hold the paper up to the audience to show that it has been painted or printed with the word “FLUXUS”. Tear the paper into pieces and drop them into the hat. Shake them. Reach into the hat and pull out a large cloth that reads, “THE END”.
1993
73 Events 83 Ken Friedman A Whispered History Take a plain wooden table with no metal or plastic surfaces. Unpainted wood is best. Get two ordinary shoes. Place the shoes on the table. Fill the left shoe with butter. Fill the right shoe with salt.
1994
Over the years, I created many especially hot, it will not melt. When Prof. Catharina Stenqvist, the works based on the conceptual the butter is warm, it will be plastic co-chair of the conference, invited transformation of ordinary objects. and easily malleable. Use a spoon me to present something that she These objects often use ordinary to pack the butter into the shoe conceptualized as a cross between a wooden tables as platforms or as part that goes on the left foot. Packing surprise keynote and an after-dinner of the work. Shoes have been among the shoe slowly and carefully makes speech. Following the conference the objects I’ve used most. This it possible to pack the shoe tight banquet, I brought out a table and particular piece is related to a 1993 without spillover or dripping. The set a smaller table on it, talking piece titled The History of Fluxus, goal is a shoe packed with firm my way through the event while I using two shoes, one filled with salt, butter. Even though the butter is prepared the object. and one with sugar. slightly warm, it will stay firm. Following the realization, I gave 1994 saw a celebration of Robert As the shoe sits, the butter will the object to Cattis as a gift to the Filliou’s birthday in his hometown evaporate and harden slightly. faculty of theology. She entrusted in France. I created the score for After a year or two, the butter the object to a theology student. To The Whispered History in his honor. should be fairly hard, even at room preserve the shoe stuffed with butter, It’s partly a play on his work, The temperature. the student removed the shoes from Whispered History of Art and partly their table and placed them in a You should pack the left shoe with a play on my own piece, The History refrigerator in the faculty common butter this week. The evaporation of Fluxus. room. Soon after, a cleaning lady and hardening process should found the shoes in the refrigerator, This piece begins with a large begin as long before the exhibition decided that no one needed them, block of butter. Use winter butter if as possible. and threw them out. possible. Cows eat hay during the My favorite realization of this winter and their butter tends to be Since then, I have often reflected on piece came at a symposium and firmer than summer butter when the the links between theology, exegesis, seminar on the Body, Culture, and cows eat grass. Winter butter melts and deconstruction. Religion convened by the Center for less easily and runs less readily than Theology and Religious Studies at summer butter. Lund University in Lund, Sweden in Let the butter warm up to room October 2001. temperature. Unless the room is
73 Events 84 Ken Friedman Centre Piece Imagine a life. Live it.
2003
73 Events 85 Ken Friedman Portrait of Secret Fluxus A plain wooden table sits in an empty room. Eight sealed containers of colorless glass stand on the table. The containers are filled with salt. From time to time, the containers are moved to different positions on the table.
2004
In Midsummer 2004, Ditte Mauritzon and I were preparing to move from Torna Hällestad, Sweden, to Kjopmannskjaer, Norway. During the packing, furniture and objects seemed to move from room to room on their own. At one point, this artifact appeared.
73 Events 86 Ken Friedman Time Zones Build a house or an office with a different time zone in every room.
2004
Ditte, my wife, had a beautiful house chickens that never came home to in Torna Hällestad, a quiet country roost with us. Out back, we had a village in the Swedish countryside brick house built in the middle part about 20 kilometers outside the of the 20th century and a garage. medieval university town of Lund. Then, out the back porch and off to The house was built in the late the side was the store, a homey little 1880s, located on the village village version of the ICA square next to our general store and supermarket chain. post office. Sometimes, when I walked from An 800-year-old church stood across room to room to look out the the street from our house. We were windows, I had the thought that I quite fond of the ancient graveyard, was passing between centuries. and we often talked about buying Years ago, I read a science fiction a plot. Our idea was to set up a story about a house built in the form bench on our plot and have picnics of a tessarect, the four-dimensional there, so we could get used to the analog of a cube. After the house view looking back at our house from was caught in an earthquake, it the cemetery. collapsed into its several dimensions. Around the house, Ditte planted As a result, it became a time and cultivated a beautiful garden. machine, transporting the occupants The garden had six major spaces, from one time frame to another as each with a different sense of time they passed between rooms. One and place, all linked. Looking out evening, I thought that it would be the front windows of the house, it interesting to organize a house with was possible to see one or two very rooms in different time zones. The different garden vistas, or one could pleasure of this event is in thinking look across the garden to the church up different ways to do it. and graveyard. On summer nights – and sometimes in the winter – the old bell tower stood out against the sky, and one could look across the centuries into the past. From one side of the house, and from my study window, we looked onto side garden with a chicken house. The chicken house was a small gabled cottage that we had acquired and moved to the side yard. It was really small … just big enough for the
73 Events 87 Ken Friedman Ken Friedman: Event, Idea and Inquiry by Carolyn Barnes
Event, Idea and Inquiry The Event Score
Opportunity and chance led Ken Friedman to become The ‘event score’ or ‘word piece’ emerged in New York an artist. The nature of his art challenges the sense in the late 1950s as one of several new art practices of art as a fixed and single vocation. Friedman never developed to test the limits of art and renegotiate the had formal art training. Rather, George Maciunas gave nature of audience engagement. George Brecht conceived him the title of artist in 1966, stating that the creative the term ‘event’ in 1959 to refer to simple acts and activities Friedman had pursued since childhood could situations realized in the world by artists or others; a be categorized as art. Friedman’s youthful experiments practice that other future Fluxus artists also explored in with objects and situations intersected with a key their work, including Yoko Ono, La Monte Young, Dick impulse of European and American vanguard art since Higgins and Ben Vautier. The event score was a short the early twentieth century. This was the will to reduce descriptive text outlining an action or situation. The art to provocative ideas and gestures. Material form often new musical notation of composer John Cage inspired came into play, but for radical artists the ideas behind the idea of ‘scoring’ interventions in everyday life, as the image, object, text, or activity were increasingly the did his classes in experimental composition at the most important issue, particularly in their capacity to New School for Social Research in New York. Cage’s interrogate the world. practice questioned the parameters of music, musical performance and audience reception by focusing on the Ideas inspired Friedman before he engaged in art in any principles of sound and silence. His works often drew recognized sense. Original, interdisciplinary thinking is a attention to the richness of ambient auditory sensation, consistent thread in his activities and occupations more creating a need for new approaches to musical notation. than the specific form in which ideas are realized. It is In his composition classes at the New School between not surprising that Friedman paid attention on hearing 1957 and 1959, he encouraged participants—most of that an art of ideas was an important development in whom were artists—to conceive and take part in diverse contemporary art, at least in Fluxus circles. Since 1966, performance activities. Friedman has regularly returned to the simple, text- based form of the event score as an economical way of Both the event score and Fluxus occupy an important capturing an idea and sending it out into the world in place in the genealogy of twentieth century art and anti- a form that anyone can replicate in different contexts art, building on the efforts of the historical avant-garde without affecting the underlying premise. to contest modernist ideals of artistic independence and purity. In merging text-based instructions with the deferred performance of simple acts, the event score rejected established art values of craftsmanship, individual skill and talent, single authorship and self- expression. From the early 1960s, a fluid network of Fluxus artists with backgrounds ranging from new music, concrete poetry, and visual art to dance and experimental theatre involved themselves in scripting such activities. Some used the event score to escape the institutional
73 Events 88 Ken Friedman context of art, seeking to embed the work of art in the These three works also demonstrate what Liz Kotz ‘everydayness’ of non-art situations and locations. Some describes as the categorical ambiguity of the event score. aimed to produce a more democratic, participatory form Individual ‘event’ scores, she argues, can be variously of art. Some sought to elevate immediate engagement attributed to the fields of music, visual art, poetry, or with art over the aesthetic and commodity value of the performance.2 Kotz contends that the ‘real’ art resides in enduring art object. Others endeavored to eliminate the realization of the action or situation, not in the text the barriers between established art forms to arrive at itself, although she accepts that Brecht and Ono, innovative, interdisciplinary practices. Yet beyond the for example, were often more interested in the shared proposition of some repeatable action or conceptual impact of the things they proposed, achieved situation and a deadpan prose style, the form of the through the process of reading rather than doing. event score freed artists to pursue almost infinite paths Some event scores are certainly scripts for intervention of investigation. in everyday life, prompting the reader to become an active producer. Other scores encourage a psychological Despite the reductive form and structure of their scores, response, blurring the boundaries of inner and outer, this scope is evident in the work of those who pioneered something seen by comparing La Monte Young’s text with the form, George Brecht, Yoko Ono and La Monte Young: Yoko Ono’s.
Composition 1960 #10 Ken Friedman and the Event Score Since 1966, Friedman has produced many short, text- To Bob Morris based propositions in addition to object-based works, Draw a straight line activities in organizing Fluxus projects, and scholarly And follow it. work in the fields of art history, sociology of art, design — La Monte Young, October 1960 and organization. Like Fluxus practices in general, Friedman’s event scores disrupt established ideas of artistic production and reception, seeking to extend the WORD EVENT experiential dimension of art. Friedman’s scores are more typically scripts for producing artifacts and situations Exit or for reflecting on them than for performances. Since — George Brecht, Spring 1961 Friedman was thrown into art practice before he had a developed understanding of the cultural and social frameworks of the art world, his event scores build on his VOICE PIECE FOR SOPRANO most formative intellectual experiences.
To Simone Morris The prodigious nature of Friedman’s involvement with Scream. Fluxus is central to the discussion of his work. It is 1. against the wind well known that Friedman became part of Fluxus as 2. against the wall a 16 year old.3 As a student at Shimer College in Mt 3. against the sky Carroll, Illinois, he produced programs for the college radio station. Searching for program material, Friedman 1 — Yoko Ono, Autumn 1961 followed up an advertisement for Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press in the East Village Other, a New York underground newspaper founded by breakaway writers from the already independent Village Voice. Friedman began to correspond with Dick Higgins at the press, developing radio programs around press publications by various artists working in the Fluxus ambit, including Robert Filliou, Al Hansen, Dick Higgins, Ray Johnson, Alison Knowles, Nam June Paik,
73 Events 89 Ken Friedman Daniel Spoerri and Emmett Williams. Friedman used Open and Shut Case, for example, readily translated into the books as the basis for radio shows. He also started a set of simple written instructions for others to carry out, corresponding with Higgins, beginning what would retaining the conceptual impact of the actual object even become a lifelong friendship. though a measure of productive control was removed from the artist. Friedman’s project of knocking on doors Higgins invited Friedman to stay at his home when he in his college dormitory to present instruction cards visited New York in 1966. During his stay, Friedman became Mandatory Happening (1966), which stated, reproduced one of the objects he had been making.4 ‘You will decide to read this score or not to read it. When It was a box with the words “Open me” written on you have made your decision, the happening is over.’ the outside and “Shut me quick” inscribed inside, unconsciously inhabiting the territory of the Duchampian The event scores developed from activities Friedman readymade with its emphasis on the verbal/visual carried out before meeting Higgins and Maciunas already conundrum. Higgins arranged for Friedman to take the reflect the productive tension in the Fluxus event score box to George Maciunas, an artist and graphic designer, between critical engagement with the world and the who in 1961 gave the name Fluxus to a community reduction of art to idea. For example, Fast Food Event of experimental artists working in the United States, (1964) transforms a mundane daily activity into an Europe and Japan. From 1961 until his death in 1978, intervention that reflects on American cultural reality Maciunas was the main coordinator, promoter, and and the routines of everyday experience in mass supporter of Fluxus activities.5 He organized exhibitions, industrial society: performance events, concerts and festivals and designed and published a diverse range of publications by the group, arranging for the production of small, multiple art Fast Food Event objects by Fluxus artists. Maciunas’s response to talking with Friedman about the things he did was to invite Go into a fast food restaurant. Order one example of Friedman to join Fluxus. Maciunas also issued the box as every item on the menu. Line everything up in a row on the table. Starting at one end of the row, begin a Fluxus multiple in autumn 1966 under the title Open eating the items one at a time. Eat each item before and Shut Case.6 moving on to the next. Eat rapidly and methodically Although Fluxus generated a significant level of until all the food is finished. Eat as quickly as art activity, its network of visual artists, musicians, possible without eating too fast. Eat neatly. Do not performers and writers operated to the side of the make a mess. mainstream cultural sphere, developing alternative works 1964, San Diego, California for independent distribution channels. Moreover, many members of the Fluxus community were interested in the sphere of the everyday, frowning on the established art world and its strict disciplinary boundaries. They Another early Friedman event score shows recognition supported an open concept of artistry, making it plausible of fundamental problems in art, addressing the issue of for Friedman to operate as an artist while he continued aesthetic competence. The Judgment of Paris (1964) his studies, now at San Francisco State University. instructs the reader to pin up three images of choice, Nevertheless, receiving the designation ‘artist’ from selected from popular or art sources, construct a shelf Higgins and Maciunas validated Friedman’s relationship beneath them and place a golden apple under the to the things he did. Maciunas proposed that he notate preferred image. This contemporary re-enactment of a his ideas for objects and activities so that others could mythic story of the judgment of taste tackles the issue engage with them, explaining the nature of the event of aesthetic categories and hierarchies, while serving score.7 Friedman began conceiving new scores, the form to erode the division between amateur and expert taste presenting itself as an ideal medium for exploring the in this respect. The Judgment of Paris thus indicates vast expanse of possibility lying between the human mind something of the order of intellectual resources Friedman and the world. He also scripted scores for the earlier brought to the proposition of scripting actions and actions he had undertaken and objects he had made. situations. By the age of sixteen, he already had a
73 Events 90 Ken Friedman developed interest in political and religious processes example, Edison’s Lighthouse (1965) invites the reader and the scientific enlightenment as a result of his wide to place candles between two mirrors and note the reading and life experiences, enabling him to make a effects produced by changing the number and location rapid transition into active art practice. of candles. The score echoes Friedman’s experiments with light and reflection in his room at Shimer College; An Interdisciplinary Upbringing activities inspired by a scene in the popular filmYoung Tom Edison (1940), which shows the inventor using Friedman was born in 1949 in New London, Connecticut, mirrors and lanterns to enable a surgeon to perform an one of the first towns settled in the British North emergency operation. Scrub Piece (1956) recalls the American colonies. The American War of Independence time in 1956 when Friedman went to the Nathan Hale was still an important presence in Friedman’s childhood Monument in New London to give it a thorough cleaning.8 town. Friedman passed by the mill of Governor John Other early Friedman events have a clear connection to Winthrop the Younger on an almost-daily basis. He lived Friedman’s religious interests. Light Table (1965) calls close to the schoolhouse where American revolutionary a community of readers to place white candles on a patriot Nathan Hale taught, feeling a personal connection wooden table and light them. Friedman sees this score as to the history of colonial America. New London was a merging his twin interests in the scientific investigation whaling port, which exposed him to the influence of East of light and the role of light in architectural space in Asian cultures. For a period of his childhood, Friedman shaping religious experience.9 made weekly visits to the Yale University Art Museum in New Haven, its collections of classical art, New England The Validation of an Art Context antiques, and some modern works consolidating his interest in the unfolding of history. The museum also In their collective activities, Fluxus artists saw the codes hosted a temporary exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci’s and disciplines of established art as closing artists and engineering drawings and modern reconstructions of audiences to possibility and to the world. They offered Leonardo’s inventions. These inspired Friedman’s interest artistic experimentation as an alternative pathway to in making experimental objects and questioning how new ideas and understanding, creating an intense, things worked. interdisciplinary setting for the exploration of radical art practices. They were interested in ways of thinking Before Maciunas and Higgins showed Friedman the that they perceived as challenging the modern Western possibility of active involvement in art, he had intended aspiration for an ordered, rational and predictable to become a Unitarian minister, a plan he kept until the world. These included Eastern wisdom traditions and early 1970s. Since childhood he had read about the critical writings in philosophy, psychology and the history of religious reformation, inspired by accounts of social sciences. For Friedman, encountering artists with groups and individuals willing to undertake great risks diverse intellectual interests and a radical approach to to seek their own truth, opposing established religion art validated and extended his interest in the history of in the process. This extended to an interest in the paradigms and knowledge systems. Friedman has written customs of America’s various groups of ‘plain people’, that when Higgins and Maciunas introduced him to the who worshiped simply and adopted basic ways of living proposition of contemporary art practice and the idea of counter to developments in the modern world, while the event score it provided him with both ‘a reasonable demonstrating a capacity for invention and what we now frame within which to conceive and carry out’ future describe as sustainability. projects and a basis for understanding the kinds of Some of Friedman’s early events address interests he activities he had done for most of his life.10 held in common with John Cage and the artists of the Aside from reading, the majority of Friedman’s youthful Fluxus network, notably Zen Buddhism, sound and activities focused on conceiving, doing and making. As silence. These references are consistent with Friedman’s an example, he describes his childhood practice of using existing interests in history, science and spirituality, sturdy, simple tables – from the school his parents ran interests that continued to drive his ideas for producing on the first floor of the family home – to make towers objects and situations after he joined Fluxus. For and multi-level cities in the evenings and at weekends.11
73 Events 91 Ken Friedman This activity is recorded in the event score Table Stack dimensional realities to two’, through ‘any kind of graphic (1956). Tables also feature in various other scores by representation or projection’ is part of a distancing Friedman, as do other useful objects such as bottles, process whereby the tangible qualities of actual space bowls, glasses and hand tools. In fact, from the later are rendered abstract and homogenous, priming space for 1960s, Friedman’s event scores reveal an increasing economic and political exploitation.12 There is no direct interest in design-like activities or they describe actions link between Friedman’s two event scores and Lefebvre’s and situations involving everyday design objects, text, but following on from Paper Architecture, Precinct advancing a sense of design as constitutes of the world. appears to re-establish the importance of the tactile in the production and experience of things, echoing Such event scores dissolve the productive divisions Lefebvre’s opposition to the emphasis on the visual in between artist and audience, advancing what has been Western society and its influence in reducing things referred to since the late 1970s as a ‘do-it-yourself’ to image, thus making them ‘passive’, with no social aesthetic. Yet they also highlight processes of inventing, existence outside their appearance.13 making, and visualizing, which are intrinsic to design. Two notable works in this respect are Paper Architecture (1968) and Precinct (1991): A Life In and Outside Art Friedman’s intellectual life since 1966 has taken a winding path between social and cultural fields, reflecting Paper Architecture the idea of disciplinary hybridity modeled in Fluxus art. Taking Higgins’s early advice not to attempt to A large sheet or several large sheets of paper are hung make a living from art, Friedman gained formal in a room. The sheets are inscribed with full-scale qualifications in psychology, social science and architectural features, such as doors, windows or education.14 Although not averse to Higgins’s and stairs, or with objects such as furniture, lamps, Maciunas’s ideas of social regeneration through culture, books, etc. These drawings may be used to imagine, Friedman’s academic studies reveal a wish to be create or map an environment. The drawings equipped to make a tangible contribution to society and may create or map new features in an existing to better understand its workings. environment. They may mirror, double or reconstruct existing features in situ or elsewhere. If the drawings In 1976, Friedman earned a doctorate in leadership are to be permanent, they may be applied directly to and human behavior for a thesis on the North American a wall. art world as a social entity, reflecting vanguard artists’ 1968 concern for the institutional conditions that have framed art since Romanticism while exploring them from a sociological perspective. Friedman’s sociological interest in art expanded into a curiosity about the economic Precinct structures and organizational dynamics of post-war Construct a rough slab, cube or table of natural stone art worlds, leading to academic posts in organization, or wood. Invite people to place hand-made models or leadership, and strategic design at the Norwegian School objects made of wood or clay on the table. of Management in Oslo and the Danish Design School in Copenhagen. Design, of course, had a central part to August 25, 1991 Minneapolis, Minnesota play in the dissemination of Fluxus productions through the influence of George Maciunas. Owen Smith explains that although individual Fluxus artists supplied the Paper Architecture points to the relationship between ideas, ‘it was Maciunas who designed and produced the conception and visualization in design, addressing the array of [Fluxus] objects, publications, and multiples’.15 role of drawing in the production of architectural space Fluxus reliance on text as a medium saw various artists, that Henri Lefebvre highlighted. In The Production including Friedman, produce a range of printed material of Space, Lefebvre, having established the political that experimented with vernacular forms of graphic nature of space, argues that the ‘reduction of three- design, though mostly from an anti-design perspective.
73 Events 92 Ken Friedman Friedman’s role as manager of Something Else Press products and services that are singular and unique. (1971) and director of Fluxus West in California (1966- The business world also has an increasing need for the 1975) likewise focused his attention on the mediating skills of artists and designers, especially their capacity function of design. for creative autonomy, given the rising economic importance of entertainment, fashion and information Given the enduring nature of the idea of artistry as an industries, which constantly update their offerings and inner force dedicated to self-expression, the reorientation require inventive ways to promote them.18 of Friedman’s career toward organization and design may seem curious. Yet there are important intellectual Everywhere today, the heterogeneity explored in the underpinnings for the transition, and from the new art forms developed by twentieth century vanguard perspective of the present it appears a prescient shift. artists is becoming a cultural and social norm, often as Certainly, Fluxus art, with its stress on programmatic a result of economic influences. Traditional distinctions experimentalism and a strategic approach to the between art, craft, and design, for example, are breaking development and use of art works, had a significant down to be replaced by the nomenclature and discourse role to play in attacking modernist mythologies of the of the creative industries.19 In a more positive sense, artist. Today, however, the contiguity of art and design is the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that widely recognized. It is now understood that both works ‘creativity is a process that can be observed only at of art and design have inherent socio-symbolic value, in the intersection where individuals, domains, and fields addition to functional uses in the case of design. Both intersect’.20 In many government and university circles, works of art and design works are encoded with meaning interdisciplinarity is seen as having better potential to at the stages of production and distribution while people tackle the contemporary world’s increasingly complex decode them at the point of reception and ongoing use, problems than knowledge and expertise developed within often against the intended purposes of the artists and single fields.21 Encountering the intense, mixed art scene designers who create them. The text-based form of the of Fluxus in the 1960s gave Friedman an insight into event score suggests this process.16 Friedman directly the creative potential of integrating divergent ideas and addresses the contiguous condition of all human-made practices. His activities since the 1970s have not only objects in the event score Flow System (1972), which ranged across varied fields, many have been developed invites ‘anyone’ to send ‘an object or a work of any kind’ from divergent intellectual perspectives, combining to an exhibition, where ‘everything received is displayed’ seemingly unrelated ideas and practices like art history and anyone attending ‘may take away an object or work’. and economics or organization theory and military history. Finding the event score afforded Friedman a pliant For Friedman, design, especially in its connection to vehicle to explore the flow of ideas that fills a human the corporate and communal sphere, is constitutes of mind, unencumbered by the demand to conform to the world. As such, it is an important site for positive, some transcendent purpose or rationale. Although his critical intervention. Critical art practices such as the main involvement is now in design and organization, event score reflect a lineage of oppositional art tracing he continues to value the event score as an alternative back to the nineteenth century, when radical artists first way of exploring experiences and situations and for its challenged the attributes of emergent modern societies potential to forge intuitive connections with the mind of – capitalism, materialism and rationalism – in the aim of the reader. protecting values of independence and individuality. Eve Chiapello argues that for nearly two hundred years artists’ aspirations for authenticity and freedom of expression Carolyn Barnes forged an ‘intuitive opposition … between art worlds and Melbourne, 2009 business worlds, between profit imperatives and those of artistic creation’.17 She notes, however, that since the 1980s, areas of business have increasingly looked to art for alternatives to Fordist models of management in the belief that this will enhance the creativity of organizations, and make them better able to offer
73 Events 93 Ken Friedman About the Essay Author
Dr Carolyn Barnes is a Senior Research Fellow at the Faculty of Design, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, where she is involved in a range of research projects investigating the role of art and design in public communication. Carolyn holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne. She is an assistant editor of the International Journal of Design and book reviews editor for Artifact. Craftsman House published her monograph on the Hong Kong Australian artist John Young in 2005.
1 Cited in Liz Kotz, ‘Post-Cagean Aesthetics and the 15 Owen F. Smith, ‘Fluxus: A Brief History and Other Fictions’, “Event Score”, October 95, Winter 2001, pp. 55-56. in Elizabeth Armstrong and Joan Rothfuss, In the Spirit of Fluxus, Minneapolis, Walker Art Centre, 2 Ibid., p. 57. 1993, p. 30. 3 Peter Frank, Ken Friedman: The Fluxus Years, 16 See, for example, Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Helsinki, Oy Wärtsilä Ab Arabia, 1987, pp. 2-5. Things, New York, Doubleday, 1990; Mika Pantzar, 4 Ken Friedman, ‘Looking Back’, in Events, Peter Frank (ed.) ‘Consumption as Work, Play, and Art: Representation of New York, Jaap Rietman, 1985, p. 230. the Consumer in Future Scenarios’, Design Issues, vol 16, no. 3, Autumn 2000, pp. 13-18; Virginia Postrel, 5 Ken Friedman with James Lewes, ‘Fluxus: Global The Substance of Style: how the rise of aesthetic value Community, Human Dimensions,’ in Visible Language, is remarking commerce, culture, and consciousness, vol. 26, no 1/2, 1993, pp. 154-179. New York, Harper Collins, 2003; Pieter Desmet and Paul 6 Ken Friedman, 52 Events, Edinburgh Show and Tell Hekkert, ‘Framework of product experience’, International Editions, 2002, p. 3. Journal of Design, vol. 1, no. 1, 2007, pp. 57-66. 7 Ibid., p. 111. 17 Eve Chiapello, ‘Evolution and Co-optation: The “Artist 8 , p 118. Ibid. Critique” of Management and Capitalism’, Third Text,
9 Discussion between Ken Friedman and the author, vol. 18, issue 6, 2004, p. 585.
January 2009. 18 Ibid., p. 592.
10 , p. 111. 19 Ibid. Toby Miller, ‘From Creative to Cultural Industries’, Cultural
11 Ibid. Studies, vol. 23, no. 1, 2009, p. 94.
20 12 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1974), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, ‘Implications of a Systems trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford, Blackwell Perspective for the Study of Creativity,’ in Robert J. Publishers, 1991, pp. 285-291. Sternberg (ed.), Handbook of Creativity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 314. 13 Ibid., pp. 286. 21 Tom Horlick-Jones and Jonathan Sime, ‘Living on the 14 Friedman, 52 Events, p. 115. Border: Knowledge, Risk and Transdisciplinarity,’ Futures 36, 2004, pp. 441–456.
73 Events 94 Ken Friedman Curator Gregory Steel
Catalog Essay "Ken Friedman: Event, Idea and Inquiry” Dr Carolyn Barnes
Catalog Design Lucy Miceli, Clare McIver, Jesse Mallon and Melissa Sparrow Design Centre Faculty of Design Swinburne University of Technology Melbourne, Australia
Art Director Andrew Kean
Design Manager Simone Taffe
73 Events is the catalog of an exhibition of Ken Friedman’s event scores presented at The Indiana University Kokomo Art Gallery, March 2 - April 10, 2009 73 Events Copyright © 1966-1978 Fluxus
73 Events Copyright © 1976-2009 Ken Friedman
Notes to 73 Events Copyright © 2009 Ken Friedman
Ken Friedman: Event, Idea and Inquiry Copyright © 2009 Carolyn Barnes