KEN FRIEDMAN Ken Friedman 99 Events 1956 – 2009 TABLE OF CONTENTS 7 Ken Friedman: Event, Idea and Inquiry Carolyn Barnes Event Scores by Ken Friedman 18 Scrub Piece 55 Incognito, Ergo Sum 19 The Light Bulb 56 Light Table Variation 20 Table Stack 58 Execution Kit 21 Untitled Card Event 59 Fluxpost Cancellation 22 Card Trace 60 Fluxus Instant Theater 23 Green Street 61 Fluxus Invisible Theater 29 Fruit Sonata 62 Fluxus Television 30 The March of the Toy Soldiers 63 Fruit in Three Acts 32 Pass This on to a Friend 64 Hat 33 Christmas Tree Event 65 Imprint 34 Fast Food Event 66 Mandatory Happening 36 The Judgment of Paris 67 Melon Melody 38 Public Notice 68 Passport to the State of Flux 39 Restaurant Event 69 Radio Clock 40 White Bar 70 Sonata for Melons and Gravity 43 Anniversary 71 Stage Reversal 44 Cheers 72 Street Pieces 45 Copernicus 73 The Sympathetic Ear 46 Edison’s Lighthouse 74 Tavern 47 First Time Around 76 Thirty Feet 48 Open and Shut Case 77 Zen for Record 51 Sudden Harmony Dance Tune 80 Zen Vaudeville 52 Webster’s Dictionary 81 White Objects 53 Dark Mirror 82 Art for the Household 54 Different Card Fluxdeck 83 City 84 Do-It-Yourself Monument 111 Ordinary Objects 85 Empaquetage pour Christo 112 The Silent Night 86 Fluxmattress 113 The Artist Becomes the Art 87 Garden 114 Completions 88 Mailing 115 Earth Work 89 Orchestra 116 Open Land 90 Rock Placement 117 Silent Shoes 91 The Spirit of Geography 118 Water Table 92 String Quartet, Opus 2, 1967 119 Flow System 93 Telephone Clock 120 Chess Shrine 94 Unfinished Symphony 121 Replication 95 Blockade 122 Woolen Goods 96 Boxing Day 125 24 Hours 97 Broken Record 127 The Last Days of Pompeii 98 Contents 130 Rotterdam Exchange 99 Paper Architecture 131 Rational Music 102 Salt Flat 132 Homage to Mahler 103 Terminal Stairway 133 After Ad Reinhart 104 The Three Ages of Man 134 Fluxus Balance Piece 105 Vacant Lot for Mieko Shiomi 106 White Label, White Contents 135 Precinct 107 Cloud Chamber 136 Renter’s Orchestra 108 Shadow Box 137 Alchemical Theater 109 Studio Pieces 138 A Whispered History 110 Heat Transfer Event 140 Centre Piece 6 KEN FRIEDMAN: EVENT, IDEA AND INQUIRY Carolyn Barnes Chance and opportunity led Ken Friedman of disseminating art ideas and provided to become an artist. Though he had Friedman with a model for a simple touring no formal art training, he accepted the exhibit. Between 1973 and 1983, Friedman designation of “artist” as a young man in initiated around thirty exhibitions by 1966 when the Fluxus impresario George photocopying his event scores on standard Maciunas suggested that the creative sheets of letter paper and posting the set activities he had pursued since childhood of scores to different venues for exhibition.1 could be categorized as art. Friedman’s youthful experiments with objects and situations reflected a key impulse in The Event Score twentieth century vanguard art, the attempt to reduce art to ideas and gestures. Material The ‘event score’ or ‘word piece’ emerged in form often came into play here, but for New York in the late 1950s as one of several radical artists such as those in Fluxus circles, new art practices developed to test the limits the critical ideas driving an image, object, of art and renegotiate the nature of audience text, or activity were increasingly the most engagement. George Brecht conceived the important element of an artwork. term ‘event’ in 1959 to refer to simple acts and situations realized in the world by artists Ideas inspired Friedman before he embraced or others; a practice that other future Fluxus art practice in any conscious way and artists also explored in their work, notably original, interdisciplinary thinking has Dick Higgins, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, La been the consistent thread in his activities Monte Young and Ben Vautier. The event and occupations ever since, their variety score was a short, descriptive text outlining challenging the sense of art as a fixed and an action or situation. The new musical singular vocation. He has regularly returned notation of composer John Cage inspired to the simple, text-based form of the event the idea of ‘scoring’ interventions in everyday score as an economical way to capture life, as did his classes in experimental ideas and send them out into the world in composition at the New School for Social a form that others can enact without this Research in New York. Cage’s practice affecting the underlying premise. Indeed, questioned the parameters of music, musical this exhibition at Stendhal Gallery continues performance, and audience reception by a series of exhibitions of his event scores focusing on the principles of sound and that began in 1973 with an exhibition at silence. His works often drew attention to the University of California at Davis. That the richness of ambient auditory sensation, exhibition built on the legacy of Fluxus creating a need for new approaches to books and multiples as an alternative means 7 musical notation. In his composition classes Composition 1960 #10 at the New School between 1957 and 1959, he encouraged participants—most of whom To Bob Morris were artists—to conceive and take part in diverse performance activities. Draw a straight line And follow it. Both the event score and Fluxus occupy an important place in the genealogy of October 1960 twentieth century art and anti-art, building La Monte Young on the efforts of the historical avant-garde to contest modernist ideals of artistic independence and purity. In merging WORD EVENT text-based instructions with the deferred performance of simple acts, the event • Exit score rejected established art values of craftsmanship, individual skill and talent, Spring 1961 single authorship and self-expression. From George Brecht the early 1960s, a fluid network of Fluxus artists with backgrounds ranging across new music, concrete poetry, and visual art VOICE PIECE FOR SOPRANO to dance and experimental theatre involved themselves in scripting such activities. To Simone Morris Some used the event score to escape the institutional context of art to embed Scream. the work of art in the ‘everydayness’ of non-art situations and locations. Some 1. against the wind aimed to produce a more democratic, 2. against the wall participatory form of art. Some sought 3. against the sky to elevate immediate engagement with art over the aesthetic and commodity y.o. 1961 autumn value of the enduring art object. Others Yoko Ono2 endeavored to eliminate the barriers between established art forms to arrive at innovative, interdisciplinary practices. Beyond the shared These three works also demonstrate what proposition of some repeatable action or Liz Kotz describes as the categorical situation and a deadpan prose style, the form ambiguity of the event score. Individual of the event score freed artists to pursue ‘event’ scores, she argues, can be variously almost infinite paths of investigation. attributed to the fields of music, visual art, poetry, or performance.3 Kotz contends Despite the reductive form and structure of that the ‘real’ art resides in the realization their scores, this scope is evident in the work of the action or situation, not in the text of those who pioneered the form, George itself, although she accepts that Brecht Brecht, Yoko Ono and La Monte Young: and Ono, for example, were often more interested in the conceptual impact of the things they proposed, achieved through 8 the process of reading rather than doing. publications by various artists working in Some event scores are certainly scripts for the Fluxus ambit, including Robert Filliou, Al intervention in everyday life, prompting the Hansen, Dick Higgins, Ray Johnson, Alison reader to become an active producer. Other Knowles, Nam June Paik, Daniel Spoerri, and scores encourage a psychological response, Emmett Williams. Friedman used the books blurring the boundaries of inner and outer, as the basis for radio shows. He also began something seen by comparing La Monte corresponding with Higgins, beginning what Young’s text with Yoko Ono’s. would become a lifelong friendship. Higgins invited Friedman to stay at his home when Friedman visited New York in 1966. During Ken Friedman and the Event Score his stay, Friedman reproduced one of the objects he had been making.5 It was a box Since 1966, Friedman has produced many with the words ‘open me’ written on the short, text-based propositions in addition to outside and ‘shut me quick’ inscribed inside, object-based works, activities in organizing unconsciously inhabiting the territory of the Fluxus projects, and scholarly work in the Duchampian readymade with its emphasis fields of art history, sociology of art, design, on the verbal/visual conundrum. Higgins and organization. Like Fluxus practices in arranged for Friedman to take the box to general, Friedman’s event scores disrupt George Maciunas, an artist, architect, and established ideas of artistic production and graphic designer, who in 1962 gave the name reception, seeking to extend the experiential Fluxus to a community of experimental dimension of art. Friedman’s scores are more artists working in the United States, Europe, typically scripts for producing artifacts and and Japan. From 1962 until his death in situations or for reflecting on them than for 1978, Maciunas was the main coordinator, performances. Since Friedman was thrown promoter, and supporter of Fluxus activities.6 into art practice before he had a developed He organized exhibitions, performance understanding of the cultural and social events, concerts, and festivals, designed, and frameworks of the art world, his event scores published a diverse range of publications by build on his most formative intellectual the group, arranging for the production of experiences.