Ken Friedman

Ken Friedman (19 September 1949, New London, Connecticut) joined Fluxus in 1966 as the youngest member of the classic Fluxus group. He worked closely with artists and composers associated with Fluxus including George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, and Nam June Paik as well as collaborating with Mieko Shiomi, Yoko Ono, and John Cage.

Late in 1966, Friedman established Fluxus West as a gathering point for Fluxus activities in the western United States. Fluxus West extended its activities to projects in Great Britain and Germany in the late 1960s and 1970s.

In that era, the Iron Curtain still divided Europe – and the world – between East and West. Friedman reached across the Wall to work with fellow Fluxus artist Milan Knížák, organizing Knížák’s first solo exhibition in the United States. He also corresponded with avant-garde artists in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland, and other nations, presenting their work in exhibitions and publishing it in journals and in books. In the late 1970s Friedman donated many of these works to the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

During these years Friedman was also in active correspondence with Scandinavian Fluxus artists, initiating a long friendship with artist and folklorist Bengt af Klintberg. As with other Fluxus colleagues, Friedman presented and performed af Klintberg’s work widely, writing about it as well.

A fascination with the context and production of art led Friedman to engage in research on the sociology of art. In 1976, Friedman finished his doctoral thesis in behavioral science while working as an artist.

Event scores have been central in Friedman’s artistic career. Events represent an idea or a thought experiment. Friedman has realized his events in paintings, silkscreen, ceramics, sculpture, performances, and music. He has also presented them as text-based scores printed on paper, as in this exhibition of 92 Events.

For Friedman, the structure of the 92 Events exhibition is as important as the works in the show. Like others in Fluxus, Friedman questions the idea of art as a form of monetary value or an investment. 92 Events are produced as simple text-based scores printed on plain paper. They can be shown in multiple venues around the world at nearly no cost. The exhibition presents 92 works from 1956 to 2019. While Friedman selected the 92 event scores in the exhibition, each museum determines the number of works they will show according to available space. Each museum must also decide whether to display the works only as text or also to realize them in objects or performances. In this sense, each exhibition is collaborative and site specific, and each exhibition reflects the workings of the host museum as much as any decision by Friedman himself.

Stephen Cleland describes 92 Events this way:

“Friedman’s humble texts encompass the Fluxus group’s anarchic approach to art making. His attraction to type-written events is consistent with a strategy developed by Fluxus artists (shared by later conceptualists) to dematerialize art making. It offers a radically minimal and irreverent conception of what an art object can be.”

Cleland continues: “These instructional texts navigate a fine line between sculptural proposition, absurdist action, and concrete poetry. Through these printed propositions, Friedman offers a range of actions that can be completed by anyone, or which invite professionals – such as musicians or performers – to work outside or against the constrains of traditional forms of their chosen medium…They are a fitting model to envisage how art might function as a mental game: where the imagination can travel even if our bodies can’t.”

Friedman began to annotate his event scores in 1966, when George Maciunas planned to publish a Fluxbox of Friedman’s work comparable to George Brecht’s Water Yam or Takehisa Kosugi’s Events. While waiting for the publication of the box, Friedman gathered a series of his event scores for an exhibition at the Nelson I. C. Gallery of the University of California at Davis. This simple exhibition of event scores on paper toured the world in the 1970s and 1980s, with exhibitions across the United States as well as in Poland, Sweden, Hungary, and elsewhere. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection at the Museum of Modern Art holds an archival copy of the 1973 events exhibition.

In 2009, Stendhal Gallery in New York exhibited an updated version of the show, titled 99 Events.

The 92 Events exhibition began at Tongji University in Shanghai in 2019. After an interruption due to the Covid pandemic, it is touring once again. In the United States, the exhibition travelled to Lyman Allyn Museum in New London, Connecticut; Samek Art Museum at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania; San Diego State University Art Gallery in San Diego, California; CX Silver Gallery in Brattelboro, Vermont; and Torrance Art Gallery in Torrance, California.

In Europe and Asia Pacific, 92 Events appeared at the Jonas Mekas Visual Art Center in Vilnius, Lithuania; Adam Art Gallery in Wellington, New Zealand; Museo Vostell in Malpartida de Caceres, Spain; and Sala Uno Centro Internazionale d’Arte Contemporanea in Rome.

Each exhibition was unique. For example, the Roman exhibition took place in the Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano, the oldest public church in Rome and the oldest basilica cathedral in the West. San Giovanni is also the home cathedral of the Bishop of Rome. This exhibition reached out beyond the exhibition space into the city with a special event titled Sala Distribuito – the distributed room. Visitors were free to take specially printed copies of any score that interested them, to place it in their home or office, in a favorite bar or restaurant, or anywhere else.

Friedman’s work is represented in major museums and galleries around the world. These include the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, and the Heine Onstad Foundation in Oslo. The University of Iowa Alternative Traditions in the Contemporary Arts is the official repository of Friedman’s artwork, personal papers, and research notes. The Getty Institute, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, and the University of California at San Diego hold research collections on his work and papers.

In 1994 Friedman returned to academic life. From 1994 to 2009 he was Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design at the Norwegian School of Management in Oslo. From 2003 to 2009, he served as professor at the Design Research Center of Denmark’s Design School in Copenhagen, now part of the Royal Academy. In 2009 he was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Design at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne Australia. Friedman stepped down as dean in 2012, serving as University Distinguished Professor through 2017.

Today, Friedman is Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies at Tongji University in Sanghai and Esteemed Scholar at University of Cincinnati, Ohio, in the United States. (Ditte Mauritzon, 2023)

Publications

• Chronology of Fluxus West, 1966-1970, 1970, 9 pp.

• "Flowing in Omaha", Art and Artists, London, Aug 1973.

• "Mail Art History" The Fluxus Factor", Flue 4:3-4, Winter 1984, pp 18-24.

• editor, Fluxus Virus, 1962-1992, Cologne: Galerie Schüppenhauer, 1992, 399 pp. Exh. cat. (German)/(English)

• editor, The Fluxus Reader, Academy Editions, 1998, 309 pp.

• editor, with Owen Smith and Lauren Sawchyn, The Fluxus Performance Workbook, new ed., Performance Research, 2002, 117 pp.

• editor, with Owen Smith, Performance Research 7(3): "On Fluxus", Routledge, Sep 2002, 142 pp.

• editor, Visible Language 39(3): "Fluxus and Legacy", Sep 2005, PDF.

• "History, Historiography, Historicism, Legacy", Visible Language 39:3, Sep 2005, pp 308-317.

• editor, with Owen F. Smith, Visible Language 40(1): "Fluxus After Fluxus", Jan 2006, PDF.

• "The Literature of Fluxus", Visible Language 40:1, Jan 2006, pp 90-112.

• "Working Together", in Artistic Bedfellows: Histories, Theories, and Conversations in Collaborative Art Practices, ed. Holly Crawford, University Press of America, 2008.

• Ken Friedman: 99 Events, 1956-2009, New York: Stendhal Gallery, 2009, 140 pp. Exh. cat.

• "Fluxus: A Laboratory of Ideas", in Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life, ed. Jacquelynn Baas, Hood Museum of Art, 2011, pp 35-44.

• with Lily Díaz, "Intermedia, Multimedia and Media", in Adaptation and Convergence of Media, eds. Lily Díaz, Magda Dragu, and Leena Eilittä, Espoo: Aalto University, 2018, pp 26-60. [1]

• Ken Friedman: 92 Events, Kalmar: Kalmar konstmuseum, 2023, 175 pp. Exh. cat. Exhibition.

• Collected publications (120+ titles)

Interviews

• Martin Grennberger, ”Here, it’s personal”, Kunstkritikk, Feb 2023.
  • "– Här är det personligt", Kunstkritikk, Feb 2023. (Swedish)

Literature

• Peter Frank, "Ken Friedman: The Fluxus Years", Helsinki: Oy Wärtsilä Ab Arabia, 1987.
• Jon Hendricks, "Ken Friedman", in Fluxus Codex, Detroit: Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, and New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988, pp 251-258.
• Estera Milman, "Ken Friedman: Art(net)worker Extra-Ordinare", in Milman, Alternative Traditions in the Contemporary Arts: Subjugated Knowledges and the Balance of Power, University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1999.
• Peter Frank, "Ken Friedman: A Life in Fluxus", in Artistic Bedfellows: Histories, Theories, and Conversations in Collaborative Art Practices, ed. Holly Crawford, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2008, pp 145-186.

See also

• Omaha Flow Systems exhibition, 1972.

Links

• Publications
• Wikipedia
• Friedman in Fluxus West Digital Collection, U Iowa. [2]