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Essays by KEN FRIEDMAN, in 53 sections, on the works in his exhibition 92 Events

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 1

Scrub Piece

Go to a public monument

on the first day of spring.

Clean it thoroughly.

No announcement is necessary.

1956

This was my first event. I performed it at the Nathan Hale Monument in New London, Connecticut on March 20, 1956. 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 strict sense of the word, something that happens, an occurrence. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary gives a definition for the word “event” in physics that works nicely: “the fundamental entity of observed physical reality represented by a point designated by three coordinates of place and one of time in the space-time continuum postulated by the theory of relativity.”

While I engaged in these kinds of events through my early years, it was only when I began working in the Fluxus context that I thought of events in the sense that I use the term today.

In 1966, I began to notate event scores. That August, I met Dick Higgins after a lively correspondence. Dick introduced me to George Maciunas.

George asked me what I did, so I described my ideas and projects. I didn’t call my projects art. I had no name for them. Despite the fact that I had no name for my activities, I enacted them in systematic, organized ways. I realized them in public spaces, parks, and such visible venues as churches, conference centers, radio programs, and – once or twice – on television. George invited me to participate in Fluxus. Within a few days he had planned a series of Fluxus editions based on my ideas.

In explaining the event tradition, George gave me a theoretical structure for the activities that had been central to my experience. George suggested that I notate my activities in the form of event scores. The scores recorded activities from the repertoire of projects I had generated since childhood. The first public piece I recall doing, and one of the first that I described to George, involved scrubbing a public monument on the first day of spring in 1956. Scrub Piece was my first event score.

The fact that my activities did not take place in the context of art made me different to the other Fluxus people. George Brecht, Nam June Paik, George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Yoko Ono, Mieko Shiomi, and the others worked with event scores before I did. They were artists and composers. They produced events as art

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and music while my activities had no name. They worked in New York, Tokyo, London, and other metropolitan art scenes while I was a youngster in New London, Connecticut, and an adolescent in San Diego, California. Their work was central to the international avant-garde. I had no contact with the art world. I created my projects and realized them anywhere I could.

The distinction between realizing a public action and notating it in the form of a score is the distinction that governs my work before 1966 and after. Context determines the nature and status of any social activity and I first entered the art context in 1966.

When I performed the actions or projects notated in my event scores between 1956 and 1966, these events were not artworks. George Brecht, Allison Knowles, Dick Higgins, Yoko Ono, Robert Watts, and the others made artworks and composed music. They worked in the context of art and music, but I did not. Before 1966 I communicated “how to do it” instructions to friends in letters and bulletins, and I made comments in my own notes and journals. I first conceived and understood these activities as scores when George Maciunas asked me to notate my ideas for Fluxus publications.

Context determines the nature and status of any social activity. While I performed actions or realized projects as early as 1956, these projects only became artworks or music when George brought me into Fluxus.

There is a distinction between my work and the work of the earlier Fluxus artists. There is also a distinction between my work and the work of later artists who became active in conceptual art and performance art in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The older participants in Fluxus preceded me by a decade. In welcoming me to Fluxus, George described my work as “concept art,” like theirs. He used the definition from Henry Flynt’s 1959 essay, published in the 1963 book, An Anthology. Flynt describes “an art of which the material is ‘concepts,’ as the material of … music is sound.” Another way to define this kind of work was the term “intermedia,” a term that Dick Higgins coined in 1966 to define works by the ideas that animate them rather than by the medium to which they belong. Concept art and intermedia crossed the boundaries of recognized media, often fusing the boundaries of art with media that had not previously been considered art forms. This approach to art was still uncommon in 1966.

Fluxus people came from multiple backgrounds. Unlike the conceptual artists who emerged in the later 1960s, few of us were anchored in an art world defined by commercial galleries, dealers, established magazines, and museums. Fluxus was free – but Fluxus people paid a price for their freedom. We were disestablished and unrecognized.

In 1966, only a dozen or so people did this kind of work. I was one of them.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 3

The Light Bulb

Create and perform an

improvisational drama.

Present the drama

as a radio or television program

in which there is a symbolic or physical relationship between the sponsor and the featured characters.

1956

This event was first realized in 1956 in Mystic and Stonington, Connecticut. Titled The Light Bulb Show, I presented it on my school bus every week in the form of an imaginary radio program sponsored by General Electric. The star of the show was a light bulb.

In 1965 and 1966, I included versions of The Light Bulb Show as segments in my programs on Radio WRSB in Mount Carroll, Illinois.

A later version of score used products as characters:

Lightbulb Variations

Improvisational dramas are created as plays,

television or radio programs in which

products are the characters. Actual products

may be transformed into puppets and

figurines, such as milk-bottles, socks,

mustard-dispensers, radios, shoes, etc.

1958-1978

The first performance of this version took place in Long Beach, California. I have a vivid memory of the main characters: a bottle of soda, a hot dog, and a volley ball. I don’t recall the plot.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 4

Table Stack

Build a stack of tables.

Each table should stand

directly above and on top

of the next table below.

1956

I was born in New London, Connecticut, in 1949. My family lived in a huge house with three stories and a basement. A sea captain built the house when he retired from sailing. Much of the house was built in rare hardwoods such as mahogany. My mother told me that the captain had used the wood as ballast on his return voyages from far places.

My father and mother had a school on the first floor. We lived on the second floor. The third floor was nearly empty; the house was so big that we used it for storage.

My sister and I were free to play with the equipment and toys in the school in evenings and on weekends. The furniture fascinated me. There were four large, square, sturdy tables with thick, strong legs. It was possible to stack several on top of one another to make a tower three or four tables high or to build models of multi level cities. I started building table stacks then, and I’ve been doing it ever since.

In recent years, I’ve made the Table Stack several times. On some occasions, I’ve built it with different kinds of tables rather than stacking copies of the same table. Once or twice, I’ve built several stacks next to each other.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 5

Untitled Card Event

Send a postcard to

someone every day.

Each card in the sequence

should transmit one word or letter.

The series of cards should

spell out a word or a message.

1957

The first time I realized this event, my family was taking a summer vacation trip between the Catskill Mountains of New York and New London, Connecticut. I purchased post cards along the way and mailed them to myself.

To perform the event, one should gather the cards in order of their arrival and read the message aloud. George Maciunas included this work in the unpublished collection of my event scores that he announced and planned.

It recently occurred to me that this piece and the George Brecht Spell Your Name Kit are related to Maciunas’s 1972 Spell Your Name with Objects boxes and the Valoche kits.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 6

Card Trace

Mail a series of cards during a journey

or sequence of activities.

The assembled set of cards

becomes a map or chart of the

passage through time or space.

1958

The first Card Trace sequence planned as a map was realized during a trip my family made to California in the summer of 1958. It became a map of the journey from New London, Connecticut, to Long Beach, California.

In 1959 I realized the first time series with postcards from the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. For the time sequence, I used postcards of dinosaurs, arranging them chronologically by the times when they lived.

Card Trace was planned for a Fluxus multiple using sets of commercially printed cards. Each set was to describe a different “trace.” It would have been a sequel in two dimensional form to the three-dimensional Just For You Fluxkit. Card Trace was never produced.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 7

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 a little Japanese shop on Green Street in New London, Connecticut, where I first bought such Japanese artifacts as ink, scrolls, and brushes. I acquired the scroll in 1959. The performance using the original scroll is still in progress in the sense that I have not yet written my name in the scroll. Nevertheless, I never found anyone willing to take responsibility for accepting the scroll and carrying the piece forward. The original scroll bought on Green Street is probably in the Alternative Traditions in Contemporary Art collection at the University of Iowa.

In the 1960s and 1970s, I wondered what would happen if one gave away a book or scroll to pass from person to person in an ongoing performance. I experimented with the idea by circulating blank books with a request that people contribute to them and pass them on.

Most iterations of the experiment involved blank books. These were bound books with blank, white pages. On one or two occasions, I used scrolls. On others, I used old journals, account books, or diaries that I managed to acquire at a discount. Each book contained a request inside the front cover asking the person who receives the book to execute an artwork or drawing in the book, then give it or mail it to another friend. I requested the person who completed the book to return it to me. Between 1968 and 1974, I mailed or gave away over one hundred books. The collection in Iowa contains examples of the blank books I used for the drawing project or other projects. None of the books sent out for the drawing project ever returned.

Over the years, I wondered why no completed books ever returned. Many issues probably come into play. While time, duration, and commitment are the key philosophical notions for a project such as this, choice and voluntary participation in social networks may be why no books returned.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 8

Most of the blank books went to people in the Fluxus network or the mail art network. The book contained the invitation to participate, I did not ask whether people would agree to take part. This approach tested the possibility of communication and commitment using open-ended, one-way communication in a social network. This open-ended approach is an obvious problem when commitment in social networks requires voluntary assent along with communication among participants.

In 1967, Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment asking sixty people in Omaha, Nebraska, to attempt to deliver packages to people they did not know by sending packages to people who would be likely to know someone who could move the package closer to its destination. Milgram’s experiment gave rise to the notion of “six degrees of separation,” the idea that there are only six degrees of separation between anyone on the planet and anyone else.

As important as the experiment was, it has often been misunderstood. Only a few of the packages reached their destination, and replications of the experiment have had poor results. Recently, Duncan Watts replicated the Milgram experiment by attempting to get email messages from volunteers to individuals whom they did not know by sending messages through chains of intermediaries. Requests to 61,168 volunteers led to 24,000 started chains. Only 384 messages reached their target recipient.

Even though I was studying psychology and social science at the time I mailed my first books, I wasn’t attempting to replicate Milgram’s work, I was exploring something different and more philosophical. If I were to describe the project in terms of networks, Albert O. Hirschman’s work would be more relevant. Hirschman had a knack for looking at problems from unusual perspectives, bringing social insight and economic theory to bear on a wide range of issues. According to Hirschman robust networks are stable, hardy institutions. Nevertheless, networks require a continual energy inputs and development to remain robust. The wealth and poverty of networks means that the art networks I used for this project were far more fragile than I realized.

The networks into which I sent the blank books were a sub-set of the larger world of economic and social actors rather than the community that we sometimes assume the art world to be.

Fluxus artist Robert Filliou described the art world as an “eternal network.” I believe he this description was incorrect. The art world is not a network, but a complex social ecology. While connections appear to constitute a network, they do not form a genuine network. They lack predictable mechanisms for linkage and the flow of energy. This has given me much cause for thought over the years.

Filliou’s notion of the eternal network is a metaphor rather than a social reality. While Filliou intended the idea of the eternal network to be a social description, it primarily functioned as a metaphor.

In a large sense, Filliou was right. We are all linked to other human beings by indissoluble bonds. But the social ecology of art operates in a different way. It

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 9

involves a market economy that requires the illusion of scarcity. Scarce attention, scarce resources, and deliberately limited access to art works create a sense of tight supply and high demand at ever higher prices. This is even the case for kinds of art that ought to function in an economy of increasing returns. In theory, these kinds of art should not be subject to the market economics of scarcity. Nevertheless, they seem to work that way, if only because their creators or those who represent their art structure increasing returns to function through the illusion of scarcity.

In the years after Filliou described the eternal network, the idea took on a life of its own. The term signified a global community of people who believe in the ideas that Filliou cherished. This is a fluid community composed of people who may never meet one another in person and who don’t always agree on concepts of life and art. While these facts do not diminish the reality of an ongoing community, the community is diffuse and weak. Although this community has now exchanged ideas for nearly five decades, the community has relatively few durable engagements other than occasional contacts through occasional mail art exchanges or Fluxus-like events.

Looking back over the developments of the past half-century, I am no longer certain that the situation for the world is as hopeless as Filliou believed it to be. Robert Filliou studied economics at the University of California, Los Angeles before working as an oil economist. At some point, he lost interest or hope in what he saw as standard approaches to knowledge and knowledge production in the technocratic society. He came to believe that art offered a better way forward.

I am far less optimistic about the potential of art. As I see it, art is lodged in a market economy that even embraces and dominates such non-profit institutions such as museums and universities. These institutions primarily display and study the art embedded in the market economy of dealers, commercial galleries, and art magazines.

It may also be that I am wrong about the hopeful prospects for the larger society. The history of the past fifty years gives evidence for pessimism as well as for hope. Even so, I feel safe in arguing that the art world justifies my pessimistic view of art markets and their dominant role in the production and consumption of art. The art world makes it difficult to make life more important than art. Consumption is the rule as contrasted with co-creation

Robert’s Filliou’s idea of a poetical economy emerged during an era of contest, inquiry, and debate that affected all research fields and most fields of professional practice. Filliou sought a way to link thought to productive action. Attempting this through art suggested a new kind of research as well. In a 1966 pamphlet from Something Else Press, Filliou published a manifesto titled. ”A Proposition, a Problem, a Danger, and a Hunch.” The manifesto effectively declared social science, natural science, and the humanities to be obsolete. Instead, he argued for knowledge and knowledge production from an optimistic perspective anchored in art.

The irony is that the art world transformed Robert Filliou from a public thinker into an artist. Filliou tried to work in the productive border zone between art and public life. He opposed the notion of art as a new form of specialization, subject to the control of dealers, critics, collectors, and the highly specialized institutions that serve

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 10

them. When the art world framed and presented his work, its conventions inevitably limited his ideas.

The concept of the eternal network leads a thoughtful observer to alternate between optimism and cheerful resignation. It is easy to be cheerful simply because this metaphor of the global village has survived for as long as it has. In a healthy sense, the eternal network foreshadowed other networks that would become possible later using such technologies as computer, telefax, electronic mail, and the World Wide Web. If the ideas of the network foreshadowed coming technologies, they also foreshadowed the failure to establish existential commitment and social memory as a foundation for durable change. Networks involve robust links and routing systems. A human network requires commitment and memory. Without them, links and routes are absent.

In a famous article on the strength of weak ties between dense network clusters of friends, sociologist Mark Granovetter demonstrated the importance of weak links that enable information and connectivity to move between individuals in close-knit groups to individuals in other groups that might not otherwise interact. Networks require both kinds of formations.

It is inevitable that human societies have both – and this is true of the art world. What seems to be missing, however, is a rich series of robust clusters that one could label an “eternal network.” Instead, the art world constitutes a series of weak ties with occasional market links or links shaped by the boundaries of the business networks of galleries and dealers. They also include links through the professional networks of curators or people working in universities or art and design schools.

While none of the blank books came back to me, I did come across several traces of the books. Traveling across the United States and Canada in the 1970s, I met artists who had received a book, worked on it, and passed it on. They told me wonderful stories about their involvement with the books. Even though the books did not return, I had the sense that something interesting and useful had happened for people who took the project for what it was meant to be.

On one occasion, I saw a book at the studio of an artist who proudly brought the book out to show me. About a dozen and a half pages were complete. These pages were wonderful, many pages showing the traces of careful work over time. This took place a year or two after I had sent the book out, and the book was far from complete.

The requests inside each front cover asked the artist who completed the book to return it to me at Fluxus West on Elmhurst Drive in San Diego. I left that address in 1979, and it has been years since mail sent to San Diego reached me. Perhaps some books are still making their way around the world. One or two may still return to a place that no longer has any connection with Fluxus or with me. Then again, as Stanley Milgram and Duncan Watts learned, it is neither a small world, nor a big world, but a somewhat lumpy world with different networks linking separated parts of the world. Huge gaps and chasms separate these islands of interaction.

The ideas that emerged out of the Green Street scroll shaped some interesting ripples in the pond. If I were to attempt the blank book project today, though, I’d structure it in a different way.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 11

The Green Street scroll raises issues beyond the question of what might or might not have happened if anyone had agreed to take the scroll from me. This is the question of what it means to write in such a book.

The books I sent out in the Milgram tradition reached each new artist unsolicited. While the books arrived with a request, they entailed no prior commitment. The Green Street scroll entails commitment. To accept the scroll required the recipient to accept a responsibility that made the scroll a book of life – or possibly a book of death. To accept such a book requires us to acknowledge our own death.

This may be too much weight for a small work of art to carry.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 12

The Judgment of Paris

An installation presents three images.

Beneath each image

is a shelf or platform.

Each viewer may choose

the image he judges most beautiful.

A golden apple is placed

beneath the chosen image.

1964

The first book I remember reading as a child was an edition of Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. It was a gift from my mother. After Swift, I began to read the classics. I often spent time in the public library on Huntington Street in New London reading mythology. One of the first books I purchased for myself was a collection of classical myths, primarily Greek and Roman. I bought it at a bookshop in Laguna Beach 1956 on our first visit to California. Greek mythology was an enormous interest to me.

The archetypal themes found in Greek mythology recur in literature, drama, and art. While much mythological material is clear and explicit, authors, playwrights, and artists often disguise borrowed themes, reworking them or transforming them in different ways. In The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, George Polti argues that the entire history of drama involves only thirty-six basic plots. Many of these plots appear in the myths.

The Judgement of Paris was a doubled reworking. First, I took ordinary artifacts, exploring their nature as objects in material culture by endowing them with the virtue of actors. Then, I doubled the myth back on itself by dignifying them with the attributes of the original myth of the argument between Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena that led to the Trojan War.

The first versions of this work constructed between 1964 and 1968 consisted of forms or objects such as postage stamps, cans of food, books, architectural models, or furniture. Variations and examples of this work was realized in San Diego, Los Angeles, Pasadena, and Ventura, California, as well as in Mount Carroll, Illinois, and New York.

In 1989, I built a second version in Oslo, Norway. It consists of objects or images depicting women. The objects and images included statues, pictures from magazines, photo panels, and other images.

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In 2015, the Centre Pompidou built a version of The Judgement of Paris for an exhibition. This version is now in their collection.

Many events create a theater of the object. Objects act or participate in the action. The first version of this event was such a project. The second version turned the myth back on itself by using images of women. The meaning of the piece changes based on the image, the obvious or subtle nature of the source, the character of the model and the pose. This is a statement on the character and effect of myth.

The piece may be realized with one apple that viewers move as they make different choices in a transformative dialogue among visitors and viewers. Each viewer is able to change or accept the piece in the state it has when they find it. It is also possible to use a large basket of Golden Delicious apples, allowing visitors to stack fruit in front of the chosen object as a form of referendum or poll on viewer preferences.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 14

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 at 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 performances and events from 1964 on. The first full realization of White Bar took place in 1968 for a party at the San Francisco Fluxhouse on Dolores Street. We built the bar without building the entire room. A small party was organized serving only clear liquors. The liquors were vodka, white rum, and tequila. We mixed the liquors with fresh orange juice and fresh lime juice or served them neat. We had only two visitors, the Italian art critic Mario Diacono, then teaching literature at the University of California at Berkeley, and Mario’s girlfriend.

White Bar was the foundation of a collection of clear liquors I assembled at Arvid Johannessen’s flat in Høvikodden, near Oslo. In my travels from 1988 to 1992, I brought back a bottle of local clear liquor every time I visited a country outside Norway. We had loza rakuja from Yugoslavia, bailloni from Hungary, raki from Turkey, ouzo from Greece, kirschwasser and pflumi from Switzerland, grappa from Italy, eiswetter and Furst Bismarck from Germany, brandwijn from the Netherlands, and vodka from Finland. We also had vodka from Iceland, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Norway, and Ireland – along with dozens of clear fruit distillates from across Europe. Some were quite good. Some were terrible.

One night we had a small party at the flat. Øyvind Storm Bjerke, art historian and then the chief curator of the Henie Onstad Museum, was there. Arvid proudly pointed to the collection, Oyvind went over and looked at the bottles. He judiciously uncorked a few, sniffing the liquor carefully. After a few minutes, he nodded knowingly and said:

“Dette maa bli den definitiv samling av verdens dårligste brennevinner”. – “This must be the definitive collection of the world’s worst liquors.”

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Several weeks after Oyvind’s comment we had another party. The filmmaker Jan Schmidt finished the entire collection during our party. The collection disappeared before we could organize a proper realization of White Bar.

In June of 1994, thirty years after the original White Bar Emily Harvey invited me to make a multiple of a grappa bottle for Emily Harvey Editions. Several other artists had 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 some variations on White Bar. I wanted this multiple to be less expensive and more widely available than the other multiples, a simple edition instead of a rare object.

This was the score:

Grappa for the White Bar

Take an ordinary bottle of clear glass. On the front, sandblast the text: Grappa

1964-1994

On the back, sandblast the text:

Only clear liquors are served

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 trouble. For bottles to be 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, but strict alcohol shipping laws meant that she did not ship it to Norway. I did not visit Venice after Emily produced the bottle, and I never completed the edition.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 16

Edison’s Lighthouse

Create a passage

with facing mirrors.

Place candles

in front of each mirror.

Vary the nature and intensity

of light by varying the

number and placement of candles.

1965

In 1965, I was living at Shimer College in Mount Carroll, Illinois. The entrance to my room had two facing dressers. Above each was a vertical mirror roughly two feet wide and three feet tall. Standing between the mirrors, I could contemplate the paradox of reflection and multiple images.

For our natural science course, we read Isaac Newton’s Optics in an English translation of Newton’s original text. I became fascinated by light and Newton’s way of thinking about light. One evening, I set up a candle to observe the path of light between the two mirrors.

For several weeks, I made 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 for a physician to perform emergency surgery in an otherwise dark room. A charming version of this story appears in the 1940 movie Young Tom Edison, starring Mickey Rooney, Fay Bainter, and George Bancroft. I have never been able to learn whether the story is a genuine account from Edison’s life or an imagined incident created for the movie.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 17

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 came about in December 1965, at a meeting at the First Unitarian Church of Chicago. I took a large matchbox that had been filled with wooden kitchen matches. I covered the outside with paper and printed the words “Open me” on the outside. On the inside, I printed the words “Shut me quick.” In 1966, it became my first Fluxbox, The Open and Shut Case.

When I created the piece, it had hermeneutic connotations involving a discussion at the meeting. I would not have used the term hermeneutic in those days, but I understood the concept of interpretation. I was attending a meeting of the executive committee of Liberal Religious Youth, to help plan the annual Continental Conference for 1966. The conference was to take place in Ithaca, New York, and I was to be editor of the daily conference newspaper.

I was on my way to the conference in August of 1966 when I met George Maciunas for the first time. I was sixteen years old. I’d just finished the first two years of college, and I was in New York to look around.

I had been corresponding with Dick Higgins to make radio programs based on the Something Else Press books of Daniel Spoerri, Emmett Williams, Alison Knowles, Ray Johnson, and Robert Filliou for my programs at Radio WRSB, a college-based

radio station in Mount Carroll, Illinois. Dick and Alison invited me to stay with them for a while at their home, a few blocks from the press. One morning, I made one of the matchboxes for Dick. He thought I ought to take it to George.

George’s telephone directions brought me to his fifth-floor walk-up apartment on West Broadway in a decaying industrial section of New York City that was then part of Little Italy. Henry Flynt later took over George’s apartment. It was a tenement building. Later, when the neighborhood became the Soho art district, even tenement apartments were glamorous.

Walking up several flights of stairs, I found a black door covered with dramatic, emphatic NO! SMOKING!!! signs. I knocked. The door opened a crack, and a pair of eyes framed in round, wire-rimmed spectacles peered out. That was George Maciunas.

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George was a small, wiry man with a prim, owlish look. He was dressed in a short sleeve business shirt, open at the neck, no tie. He wore dark slacks and black cloth slippers. His shirt pocket was cluttered with number of pens. In today’s jargon, we’d call him a “nerd.” George typified the computer jocks, engineers, and architects at his alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University.

George ushered me into his kitchen. It was a steamy, New York summer day, but the apartment was cool. It smelled like rice mats. I recognized the smell. It reminded me of the Japanese store on Green Street in New London that I frequented as a youngster.

The apartment contained three rooms. To the right was a compact, well-designed office and workroom with a window facing the street. The floor was covered with rice mats. George said not to go in wearing shoes, so I looked in from the door to see drafting tables, desks, shelves, and an astonishing clutter of papers, projects, notebook, and files. It was the most orderly clutter I’ve ever seen. It was the opposite of my tendency to file material in chronological layers that become archeological.

George’s workspace was rigged out with a contraption that enabled him to reach up and tap a weight to summon items he wanted with a counterbalanced set of strings and rods. Whatever George wanted would float into his grasp. At least, this is my memory. I am not sure if I actually saw the working device, or a prototype, or if this is just a memory of a planning diagram that George showed me.

To the left of the kitchen, George had what looked like a huge, walk-in closet or a small storage room. The room was filled with floor-to-ceiling shelves, like an industrial warehouse. In fact, it was an industrial warehouse, the comprehensive inventory of Fluxus editions in unassembled form. The shelves were loaded with boxes storing the contents of Fluxus multiple editions, suitcases, and year boxes. When an order came in for a Fluxbox, George would go to the back of the closet, select the appropriate plastic or wooden container, and march through the room plucking out the proper cards and objects to emerge with a completed work. He’d select the proper label, glue it on, and have a complete edition ready to mail.

The kitchen had a sink, windows, stove, table, and chairs. These were all quite ordinary except for the refrigerator. George had a bright orange refrigerator. When he opened it, I could see he had filled it with oranges from the bottom clear to the top shelf. The top shelf held four huge jugs of fresh orange juice on either side of the old fashioned meat chest and ice tray. George offered me a glass of orange juice.

He peppered me with questions. What did I do? What did I think? What was I planning?

At that time, I was planning to become a Unitarian minister and I did all sorts of things: things without names, things that jumped over the boundaries between ideas and actions, between the manufacture of objects and books, between philosophy and literature. George listened for a while and invited me to join Fluxus. I said yes.

A short while later, George asked me what kind of artist I was. Until that moment, I had never thought of myself as an artist. George thought about this for a minute, and

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 19

said, “You’re a concept artist.” It always pleased me that I became part of Fluxus before I became an artist.

The first version of the text on the box was a personal injunction, commanding the reader to “Open me” and “Shut me quick.”

Later versions employ a simpler text reading, “Open” and “Shut quick.” My notes on this score read:

Make a box. On the outside, print the word, “Open.”

On the inside, print the words “Shut quick.”

The title I gave the piece was Open and Shut Case.

While the original idea had hermeneutical implications related to religious issues, the title has legal connotations. It’s a common phrase in films or theater pieces about police work or law. George played with the legal implications of the phrase and prepared the label of the Fluxbox as a subpoena.

Barbara Moore made a reprint edition of George Maciunas’s Fluxus version several years later in her Reflux Editions series. Peter van Beveren made a new version in Rotterdam in the 1990s. The Rotterdam edition bears a simple label, much like the Chicago original. The label is a simple paper label and with large, black letters in a sans-serif typeface.

One variation on this piece was planned as an installation. For this version of the piece, the score reads:

“Paint a room in a single color. Paint the door to the room the same color as the room. On the door, print the words, ‘Open.’ “

“On the inside wall directly opposite the door, printed the words ‘Shut quick.’ “

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 20

Light Table Variation

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 to pursue a career in the Unitarian ministry. In those years, I was active in Liberal Religious Youth, a community in which I dedicated myself to creating and organizing worship services. Candles are a tool for shaping light and space, and a way to define them in so doing. The use of light to focus the mind and senses are reasons for the ancient role of candles and light in worship and meditation. The quality of light and the use of space play an important role in worship

In 1965 and 1966, I performed experiments with light. Worship was one source of my interest in light. Physics was another.

In the summer of 1965, I studied at California Western University in Point Loma. Discovering my interest in the history of science, a physics professor asked me to lecture on the life and work of Copernicus. Later, I lectured on Kepler, and on Newton.

In the autumn of 1965, I transferred to Shimer College, Mount Carroll, Illinois. Shimer based its curriculum on the original writings of scientists, philosophers, and thinkers using the Great Books curriculum developed by Robert Maynard Hutchins for the University of Chicago. We studied natural science by working directly from historical texts to master the principles of inquiry and theory building. Our first text was Newton’s 1704 classic, Optics. We worked our way through the text, performing Newton’s original experiments with prisms to debate his findings.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 21

Newton began his work on optics in the 1660s, lecturing on the subject in the 1670s, and publishing his first major papers on optics in the Philosophical Transactions in 1672. Controversies attending the publication of his work led him to withhold the final publication of the book on Optics until most of his opponents had died. While I was more interested in Newton’s ways of thinking about science than his work on light, I remained fascinated by light, and spent many nights alone 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.” Early on, I decided that all candles in this piece should be ordinary, functional candles, there should be no novelty candles or joke candles. Later, I came to prefer even 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.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 22

Fluxus Television

Paint on the glass screens of television sets.

1966

This piece was first realized in New York using old television cabinets found in the streets. Many early television sets had protective glass screens that were part of the television cabinet – usually a wooden housing unit. The screens were positioned in

front of the television projection tube. Early television sets had many different tubes behind the large tube that projected the image. Later television sets often had a single unit including the tube. Many televisions no longer have a glass screen or a tube – they use flat screens based on a newer technology.

I first realized this project with a series of painted screens. Some were freestanding and some were in old-fashioned television sets. Most of the screens and TV sets were lost or destroyed. At one point, a surviving screen was in the collection of The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. The Atlanta screen was painted circa 1970, first exhibited in the Fluxus & Happening show in Köln, Germany at Kölnischer Kunstverein and several times since. While some past directors of The High Museum had a taste for Fluxus, the recent staff apparently does not. They deaccessioned the work a few years ago.

The painted television sets and screens were created for specific projects.

Fluxus Television has an interesting precedent in broadcast television in the successful and popular 1950s television show titled Winky-Dink and You. The hero was a cartoon character named Winky-Dink. Each week, Winky-Dink relied on the help of viewers at home to realize his adventures.

The company that produced the show sold a special sheet of plastic to be placed over the screen. Viewers were able to draw on the plastic with a special, quickly erasable crayon. Winky-Dink might ask the children to draw stairs or ladders for him to climb, doors to walk through and so on. I always remembered the program with great fondness. As I see it, Winky-Dink and You was the first interactive video art.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 23

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 and performed at midnight on May 1, 1966. 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.

The event was published by Fluxus, New York, 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:

“You will decide to read this score or not to read it. When you have made your decision, the happening is over.”

No complete copies of George’s edition seem to exist. 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.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 24

Tavern

Assemble a collection of small liquor bottles.

Construct a rectangular wooden box, open at the top.

Set a strip of wood so that the rectangular box has two areas: one square and a rectangle half the size of the square.

Set most of the bottles in the square area.

Set one bottle in the smaller area.

Mix plaster of Paris sufficient to fill the box to the edge.

Fill the box so that the plaster sets around the bottles.

1966

Tavern is made of the small liquor bottles served on airplanes, sold in gift shops, and in some tax-free shops. I made the first one in New York in 1966 as a prototype for a Fluxus multiple to have been titled Fluxtavern. The multiple was never produced. One of the variations was a collection of gag liquors that I sold to Jon Hendricks for Gil Silverman’s collection.

When I started work on the Fluxus multiple, I began to collect small liquor bottles. Whenever I had a large enough collection, I assembled them into a version of Tavern. There have been several versions over the years. I probably completed one every three or four years from the middle of the 1960s to the 1980s. The piece has several variations. Each variation has its own score.

For an exhibition in Toronto, I provided these instructions:

“Assemble a collection of small liquor bottles. Construct a rectangular box of wood, 18˝ long, 12˝ wide, and 2˝ deep. Set a strip of wood across the box at 12˝, so that the rectangular box has two areas, an area 12˝ square and an area 12˝ by 6˝ Set most of the bottles in the square area. Set one special bottle in the smaller area. Mix a load of plaster of Paris sufficient to fill the box to the edge. Fill the box so that the plaster sets around the bottles.”

For one installation, I used full-size bottles and a very large box.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 25

Thirty Feet

Find a piece of paper

30 feet square.

Inscribe a circle

on the page.

1966

The original version of this score was titled 30 Feet 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.”

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 26

Zen for Record

Produce a phonograph record

with no sound on it.

1966

The first version of Zen for Record was a single, record blank, grooved but empty of sound. I found it when I was working at E. S. P. Disk Records in New York in September and October of 1966. It was probably a defective recording. If not, I have no idea what purpose the record had or why anyone would have made a record with no sound.

In those days, I was new to Fluxus. I thought of making a multiple edition of blank records. In keeping with the Fluxus idea, I wanted to make an LP edition at a cost low enough to sell the records for the price of an ordinary phonograph record.

George Maciunas and Dick Higgins introduced me to Nam June Paik and his work. The title is an homage to Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film.

Nam June and I saw each other often when we lived in Los Angeles in the early 1970s. He taught at California Institute of the Arts and I worked nearby as general manager of Something Else Press. We ate lunch or dinner together from time to time, often with engineer Shuya Abe, Nam June’s collaborator on the video synthesizer, and with Fluxus artist and video pioneer Shigeko Kubota.

In 1971, Nam June commissioned me to write his Third Symphony. At that time, it was impossible for me to finish the work. When Nam June later published the scores to his complete symphonies in Source Magazine, he published the scores to his First, Second, Fourth, and Fifth symphonies – along with a note about the missing Third Symphony.

Source was an innovative music magazine edited by composers Larry Austin and Stanley Lunetta. Each issue was spectacular, typified by imaginative scores, rich illustrations, and delightful artifacts. One might find machine-gunned pages for the score to Dick Higgins’s Thousand Symphonies, tactile pages for a haptic score, or a letter from Joseph Beuys explaining why he did not have time to contribute. There were three guest editors over the years. John Cage was the first, Alvin Lucier the second, and I was the third. In issue 11 of Source Magazine, the final issue, I published the scores to all of Nam June’s symphonies.

Over the years, I realized several variations on Zen for Record. One involved blank, empty record jackets. These contained no records. They represented the concept of a record with no sound in an emblematic rendition. In the late 1980s, I prepared a set of phonograph records by spray painting them to render them blank and grooveless, removing the sound.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 27

There are three unrealized editions of Zen for Record. In the 1990s, a record publisher was considering a series of Fluxus projects. His idea for Zen for Record was to produce a series of editions that took the piece through a range of recording media from old to recent. I would have enjoyed creating a series of different kinds of Zen for Record, moving through such recording media as player piano roll, music box, wax record, Dictaphone band, wire recording, recorded tape, phonograph record, compact disc, and so on.

This publisher was also interested in creating a multiple edition for the CD. I thought of a heavy, square wooden box constructed of massive wood blocks hinged together to form a large cube. The cube would open out in two halves. Each half block would contain a small, shallow shelf on the inner face of the half block. The shelf would be just deep enough to accommodate the CD version of Zen for Record, with the CD sitting to half its depth in the face.

The Ise Shrine in Japan inspired the idea of this project. The Shrine is a Shinto temple built on one of two adjacent sites. Every twenty years, the priests of the temple take down the shrine and build it anew on the adjacent site.

In the CD version of the Zen for Record one face of the open block would embody silence in the physical recording. The other face would embody silence in the empty space.

My favorite unmade version of Zen for Record developed at the time of Nam June’s 1982 retrospective at The Whitey Museum of American Art. Nam June and I met at the museum one day and he invited me out for coffee. I had been reading a copy of Art News with a richly illustrated article on the exhibition that he had not seen. I gave it to him. He thumbed through the article quickly, then put it down, and went back to talking about ideas. At one point we talked about Nam June’s Zen for Film and my thoughts for a new edition for Zen for Record.

The edition would have been a blank phonograph record with a white label and simple sans-serif type stating title, date, and composer. The jacket would have been white, with the title and composer in sans-serif type at the corner of the jacket. On the back, the liner notes would have been a comment by Nam June, a blank space without words. I tried for years to find a record producer who would publish this edition, but no one agreed to do so until Jan van Toorn at Slowscan Editions decided to try it.

A few years before I spoke about this with Jan, Nam June had a stroke and I was forced to put the project on the shelf. Craig Dworkin wrote a set of liner notes for the LP that he later published as a chapter in his 2013 book No Medium. At some point, I hope to complete this version of Zen for Record.

A few years ago, Slowscan Editions produced a short single of Zen for Record, and Jan van Toorn still hopes to produce the Slowscan LP.

Over the past half century, Zen for Record migrated from a phonograph record to an empty record jacket to a never-produced CD, to a single from Slowscan Editions, and now to the LP that Slowscan will hopefully produce.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 28

Back in the 1960s, Wolf Vostell described me as “the Fluxus Mozart.” Mozart spent much of his life realizing improvised concerts that he never wrote as scores. These works remained alive while Mozart lived. When Mozart died, his improvised works died with him. All music ends in silence: my music began in silence as well.

In the context of Zen for Record, I should mention Richard Maxfield. I studied composition with Richard in San Francisco, and I was his last student.

Richard Maxfield was a pioneering composer of electronic and digital music. He took over teaching John Cage’s course at The New School when John stopped teaching. Richard worked with La Monte Young, George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, and many others. Toward the end of 1967, I got a postcard from Dick telling me that Richard had accepted a post at San Francisco State University. Dick urged me to take Richard’s courses. I did. It was a wonderful experience. Richard and I worked together on several projects. We grew quite close, and I often went to Richard’s home to read scores, talk about music, and to think. I was probably the last artist or composer to work with him closely.

Richard was too adventurous for the conservative music department at San Francisco State University. The dean terminated his employment despite many requests and protests from students that wanted him to stay at the university. Richard moved to Laguna Beach, where he lived with his mother for a while before moving to Los Angeles. I went to see him a few times. He was depressed and unhappy working at a menial job to survive while interest in electronic music grew around the nation. Advance Recordings released an LP recording of his compositions for which he asked me to write the liner notes. Soon after I last saw him, he took his own life.

There are two codas to the story. Despite the fact that Richard is best known for electronic music, he insisted that I learn standard music notation. I learned to write standard notation, but I was never good at it. I never used it after I studied with Richard. Nevertheless, I saved my scores for many years, together with several boxes full of sound tapes. I didn’t produce sound works on tape with Richard. These were tapes from my radio programs in Illinois, tapes of the concerts I created as music director for Karen Ahlberg’s dance troupe in San Francisco, and tapes of the concerts I played when screening the Fluxfilms that George Maciunas loaned me in 1966 – later sent on to Jeff Berner for his 1967 Fluxfest at Longshoreman’s Hall.

One day in 1986, I listened to the tapes and reviewed the scores. Soon after, I decided that I was a terrible composer. I destroyed the entire collection of scores and tapes.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 29

City

Construct a city of found material.

Let the city grow and change over a span of time.

Abandon the completed city where it stands.

1967

Performed over the span of one week in April of 1967 in the central quadrangle at San Francisco State University.

After the city was abandoned, it stood untouched for another week. It was found one morning neatly disassembled, stacked and piled. The stacks stood untouched for a few days. Then they disappeared.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 30

Do-It-Yourself Monument

Build a monument.

1967

The first version of the do-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. I built a version of the sugar cube monument for an exhibition at Krognoshuset in Lund, Sweden, in 1997.

This work is still in progress. I am working on the monument, and I hope to realize it in full scale.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 31

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.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 32

Chair

Mail a chair.

1967

In the 1960s, I mailed chairs and stools whole. When postal regulations changed to require smaller packages, I disassembled the chairs to mail the fragments. The chairs and pieces were always mailed unwrapped, with address and postage affixed directly to the surface.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 33

Boxing Day

Acquire, fill, and distribute boxes

in the immediate environment

and at a distance.

1968

For the first performance, I bought one hundred boxes at a store in Yellow Springs, Ohio. They were mostly small and medium sized cardboard boxes, many in different colors. I gave some away empty, some with contents. I mailed or shipped some with gifts, and some empty. I also used several unusual boxes of pressed wood, woven reeds, and other materials.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 34

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” is a philosophical play on issues in architecture, design, and art. In this event, I link the term to concepts of diagramming, modeling, and representation. I first realized this project in 1968 at Fluxus West in San Francisco.

I am not sure when I first used the term “paper architecture.” My event scores were circulated in many different loose sheet editions before the first bound edition in 1982

Loose sheet editions of the event scores began to circulate as early as 1966. The contents were fluid. The events were often exhibited in North America and Europe. The loose sheet editions traveled even farther than the exhibitions did. They were translated into several western and eastern European languages. Some events were also translated into Japanese.

Because a single event on paper could travel freely, I only found out about some of the translations and circulating pieces years later. From time to time, I continue to discover publications about which I never knew. Some were formal, some informal. Some were semi-legal or illegal samizdat publications that circulated in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s.

Many of the events were realized in single editions of one event score. Some were printed editions of the score. Others involved a physical object realized as a multiple edition. Most of my Fluxus multiples were realizations of event scores, ready to install or perform.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 35

While George Maciunas always sent me copies of my Fluxus editions, few other publishers sent copies of published or realized scores.

More than once, publishers who asked to publish my work, released the work widely while neglecting to send me a copy. One German publisher sent me copies of multiples by the other artists he published while forgetting to send me my own edition. This happened in the UK, Italy, the Netherlands, and elsewhere.

It was even less common that anyone would bother to send copies of samizdat or unofficial editions.

In some cases, neglecting my copy may have been intentional. One Italian publisher released a piece in a widely available edition of T-shirts. I found one in a shop in Milan, along with postcards of the same piece. My guess is that the publisher wanted to avoid paying royalties.

In other cases, people simply seemed to forget. Perhaps they didn’t think of themselves as publishers. I assume this was the case with publishers of samizdat manuscripts. In still other cases, they may not have known how to find me.

Two more factors complicated the situation. On some occasions, my name was separated from the work. When an edition of the scores traveled as an exhibition, my name appeared on the first page and the preface, but not on the sheets of individual scores. In these shows, the scores appeared without my name and with no attribution. Moreover, it is possible to describe the ideas in many scores. When this happened, my name and attribution of the work nearly always disappeared.

A few years ago, this score was the subject of a thread on an email architecture discussion group. One list member wondered whether I created the term “paper architecture.” At the time, I had no idea whether I had originated the term.

Afterwards, I did a search on the Web and in dictionaries. I was unable to find usages earlier than the 1980s. While one architect stated that teachers used the term in his architecture school to show contempt for unbuildable projects, there were no published citations.

Since I first used the term “paper architecture,” I have seen it used in at least eight ways. It refers to:

1) The philosophical and ambiguous issues visible in this event score, 2) Drawn architecture that is not intended to be built, 3) Drawn architecture that is intended to be built and will possibly be built even though it has not yet been built, 4) Drawn architecture that is intended to be built but will never be built, 5) Drawn architecture that is impossible to build, 6) Drawings of imaginary architecture that has never been built but could be built, 7) Architectural models built in paper or in cardboard, 8) Physical buildings made of paper-based substances.

Some of these ideas date back several millennia, even though the term paper architecture has only been used in recent years. While I am uncertain of when I first titled this score with the term “paper architecture,” people first saw this piece at the Fluxus West center on Divisadero Street in San Francisco in 1968.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 36

The first public museum presentation of the work was in the exhibition “Intermedia – Fluxus – Conceptual Art” at Montgomery Art Gallery at Claremont College in May 1973. It has been executed as drawings or environments in different environments since.

I inherited one idea for this piece from my mother, Ruth Shifreen Friedman. Our home in San Diego had a wall with windows facing out on the boring view of a neighbor’s wall and part of his yard. My mother constructed sliding screens over the window and painted a bright, tropical garden scene on the screens. After a few years, it seemed as though the garden view was the view from that side of the house.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 37

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 mythology was a terrible, winged creature with the head of a woman and the body of a lion. She besieged the city of Thebes after the murder of King Laios. The Sphinx posed a riddle to anyone who crossed 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 of Sophocles, Oedipus the King, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus.

This piece presents an object solution to the riddle of the Sphinx. The symbols – milk, sugar, and salt – are transparent in some ways, opaque in others

Oedipus:

“What evil underfoot, the kingdom having fallen

thus, kept you from learning fully what transpired?”

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 38

Creon:

“The devious-singing Sphinx led us to set aside

the mystery and look at what lay at our feet.”

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 39

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, white room.

Open them to release the clouds.

1969

In 1969, I worked as artist in residence in a wonderful little studio perched on the top of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Ventura, California. Windows surrounded the room to let light in from every angle. 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 overlooking the sea at the La Jolla Museum of Art, but they declined. Later, I suggested it to the Milwaukee Art Center. I still haven’t realized this piece in an exhibition.

In the 1970s, I often sent letters to museums to propose one event as an installation. Nearly none wrote back, not even to decline. As I drove around the country, I would often visit museums and galleries to show the Fluxkit suitcase and the Maciunas multiples. The response to these visits was generally incredulous, something between perplexed astonishment and a lack of interest.

At one point, I went to visit Peter Selz. At the time, Peter was director of the Art Museum at the University of California Berkeley. To this meeting, I brought a complete Fluxkit suitcase to show him, as well as additional Fluxboxes, Something Else Press books, and the Something Else Press wooden boxed editions of Ample Food for Stupid Thought by Robert Filliou and de-collage happenings by Wolf Vostell. I also brought works by Milan Knizak, Ben Vautier, and others. I wanted to interest him in a Fluxus exhibition. I made a small display for him on tables and chairs.

Peter looked at the things for a while without a word. Then he rocked back on his heels. Before he started talking, he slowly began clapping his hands together. The force of the gesture struck me.

Before each clap, Peter spread his arms wide. Then he clapped his hands together with palms cupped to create a loud, cracking sound.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 40

After a few claps, he started to speak with his distinct German accent. “Well [clap!],” he said, “this [clap!] is [clap!] certainly [clap!] in-ter-est-ing … [clap!] but [clap!] I [clap!] don’t [clap!] think [clap!] it [clap!] is [clap!] for [clap!] us.”

Then he stopped talking and clapping. He thanked me for coming and walked off.

The other memorable visit took place at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Someone had seen my work and told the director of the art gallery about me. The director in those days was David Gebhard, the architectural historian.

I was living in Berkeley at the time. I spoke with David on the phone. He suggested that I stop in to visit him at the gallery the next time I was driving through Santa Barbara. 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.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 41

Water Table

Set a full formal table

with full service for four.

All service is white porcelain

or clear glass.

Fill all objects, utensils, etc. with water.

1971

This piece was created at the invitation of Yoko Ono and John Lennon for their exhibition “This is Not Here” at The Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York. Yoko and John invited artists to create works involving water. This was my work. Yoko and John’s assistants executed and installed the original version of Water Table for me in the guest artist area of the exhibition, along with pieces by artists such as Robert Watts, Larry Miller, and Alison Knowles.

Bill Vazan reconstructed Water Table in 1974 for my solo exhibition at Vehicule in Quebec. I reconstructed it a third time in Vienna for the exhibition Fluxus Subjektiv at Galerie Krinzinger. The Vienna 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 installation, and I used their menu as a basis of a drawing placed on the table.

The title Water Table refers to the project, and to the idea of a water table in geological terms.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 42

Woolen Goods

Observe an unexplained silence.

1973

The first performance of this work took place in Tucson, Arizona in July of 1973. The original score read “An unexplained silence is observed.”

In Tucson, I worked at Omen Press, a small publishing house specializing in books on mysticism. Walter Bowart – one of the founders of the New York newspaper East Village Other and the Underground Press Syndicate – was the publisher. I knew Walter from the time when I lived in New York and ran the Avenue C Flux Room on the Lower East Side.

In 1973, one of the major book trade fair met in Los Angeles, and Dick Higgins invited me to join him at a meeting of small press publishers. Presses such as Dick’s Something Else Press and Walter’s Omen Press were engaged in a perpetual struggle for good distribution and marketing services. The purpose of this meeting was to see if some of these publishers could work together in an association or cooperative network of some sort to develop the kind of effective marketing that typified the major presses. While many publishers had good ideas, none had money or staff to implement their ideas. All of them seemed to hope that an association of many small, undercapitalized publishes could somehow do for the entire group what none of them could do for themselves. This was not possible, but it did bring Dick and me back in contact with Walter.

At that time, Walter was hoping to find someone who could help him to develop Omen as a functioning organization. Dick recommended me to him. I had been the general manager for Dick’s Something Else Press in late 1970 and early 1971, during the short time that the Press was located in California while Dick taught at California Institute of the Arts with Allan Kaprow, Nam June Paik, Alison Knowles, Emmett Williams, and other Fluxus people who worked there during the first years of the school.

Dick was very persuasive, and Walter hired me, promising a modest salary and a place to live. Soon after, I set off for Tucson, Arizona. In Tucson, I found the congenial chaos that had surrounded Walter at the East Village Other, but it was chaos writ small. Rather than the bustling EVO office on the Lower East Side with dozens of people wandering in and out at any hour, Omen was a small warehouse behind Walter and Peggy’s home. The warehouse included offices and a complete printing plant. Walter had purchased a massive printing press and complete bindery equipment so that he could physically produce Omen’s books. The main financial problem at Omen Press was the fact that Walter had facilities for comprehensive book manufacturing with too few books in production to justify the scale of his plant.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 43

But with more books in production, he couldn’t afford a full-time master printer and the associated staff required to keep the plant working.

The chaos ran deeper than this, though. When we sought a secretary, for example, I interviewed several dozen applicants before proposing three likely candidates. Walter chose among them by asking me to take their horoscopes to an astrologer whose books he produced.

When I arrived, Walter placed me in a comfortable pueblo-style one-bedroom guest house with a private bathroom. At one point, Walter decided to do something else with the guest house, so he proposed moving me to a corrugated iron Quonset hut at the other end of the property. The hut seemed to have come from a surplus sale at a closed military base. It was impossibly hot, cooled only by a noisy air conditioner with a terrible, moldy smell. The place had ancient motel carpets, and 1940s-era furniture that looked as though they had come with the original hut. At this point, I returned to California.

My summer at Omen had some good moments, though. Walter was a scattered, impossible boss, but a lovely person and an inventive, congenial friend. We spent hours talking, planning, and inventing. In an effort to figure out how to make the expensive printing press pay for itself, I planned a series of a hundred or so books that would have made marvelous multiple editions. Unfortunately, these books required the skills and network of an art dealer to sell them. As an artist, I would have loved to make them. As a manager, I soon realized that Omen could not market them.

I did make a prototype for one series of books. These books were based on food. The pages were to carry the print of a steak – obverse and reverse. The books were to be printed that the book pages together would be roughly the thickness of a steak. I went to a local supermarket and purchased a number of steaks and chops. We marinated these in an inedible solution and printed several dozen different kinds of steaks and chops. These became my meat prints. Because Walter did not have the kind of blind stamp printer’s chop that fine art printers generally use, I asked him to sign the prints as printer, which he did. A few copies still exist here and there. In the long run, the meat prints repaid the costs of my trip to Arizona and back. In the early 1970s, art dealer and curator Betty Gold had a gallery in Los Angeles. She took some on consignment. One of her clients was heir to a meat packing fortune. The client fell in love with the prints and bought quite a few to give to friends. For a year or so, I made a good living off the stack of meat prints that I produced.

The other great relic of that summer is a series of notes and prototypes for books.

Another unrealized scheme for Omen Press books involved an idea that would have been quite marvelous. I decided to produce book versions of George Maciunas’s Fluxus editions. I called George and secured his agreement for an imprint to be called Fluxus Editions. These would have been George’s products, redesigned by George into book formats. I tried to carry this plan forward back in California. In late 1973 or early 1974, I took out legal papers for a business with that name, hoping somehow to raise the money to fund the series. I never managed to fund it and the idea ended with a set of business papers filed in the San Diego County Courthouse and a few rubber stamps.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 44

The durable result of my Arizona stay involved my encounter with Sufism and Islam. During my stay at Omen Press, I immersed myself in Sufi literature.

In this, I shared a common interest with Dick Higgins. Dick had been collecting and recounting Hodja tales, stories of the great Turkish mystic, Nasruddin Hodja. Hodja is a trickster and a folk hero whose antics disguise a deep level of philosophical inquiry, and – beneath that – a deeper level of epistemological awareness designed to reveal the ontology of being. The Sufi masters amounted to far more than epistemology, and it is the search for truth and being that typifies their quest.

One side of Sufism involved the archetype of the trickster-cum-epistemologist. Another side of Sufism involved the passionate search for the truth behind and beneath words. The 13th-century poet and theologian Rumi typifies this quest. I met Rumi again when I studied for my doctorate with Anwar Dil at the Graduate School of Leadership and Human Behavior at United States International University. Prof. Dil’s courses ranged widely over history and time. In these courses, I had the opportunity to explore the history, theology, and philosophy of Islam in a cross cultural context. Rumi and his work were a highlight.

To understand Sufism, one must understand the relations between speech and what is not said. On the side of speech, this inquiry led me through a tradition of epistemology and exegetical hermeneutics anchored in the symbolic interactionism of Herbert Blumer and George Herbert Mead, and through them to Wilhelm Dilthey’s hermeneutics.

The word Sufi refers to the woolen robes that Sufi mystics wore. That gave rise to the title Woolen Goods.

This event may be realized by installing a stack of neatly folded blankets and other woolen goods.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 45

24 Hours

720 clocks are placed in a room.

Each is set to one of the minutes

between 12:00 and 11:59.

1974

The literary work of the late Argentine writer and librarian Jorge-Luis Borges explores themes in contemporary life that are often visible in the new technology that appeared after his death in 1986. Borges explored ideas of the book and the library that we can read as metaphorical predictions of way that cyberspace engages human consciousness. This piece speaks to the universal, everywhere-all-at-once nature of those notions.

While 24 Hours predates cyberspace and the Internet, it engages ideas that were already current among those who shared Nam June Paik’s ideas of cybernetics and the information superhighway. It also addresses ideas that engage the concept of time and the links across time and space visible in such works as Mieko Shiomi’s projects titled Spatial Poem.

Over the years, I created several pieces honoring Borges. This piece was originally titled Altar to Borges. I changed the title to avoid confusing this score with Homage to Jorge Luis Borges, an installation designed for the exhibition Arte de Sistemas that Jorge Glusberg organized in 1969 at the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Jorge was director of the Center for Art and Communication (CAYC) in Buenos Aires. He presented another version of Homage to Borges at the Coltejer Biennale in Medellin, Colombia in the early 1970s.

This piece may be executed in several ways. All 720 clocks may be the same kind of clock. Alternatively, each clock may be different than all the other clocks, a selection of alarm clocks, cuckoo clocks, pendulum clocks, grandfather clocks, wristwatches, spring wound clocks, electric clocks, digital clocks, and so on.

There are other possibilities. These might include all clocks in any hour being the same kind of clock, with the 720 clocks divided among twenty-four different kinds of clocks.

While this score has been exhibited often, the piece itself remains unrealized. It is related to another unrealized project, Time Piece, and to an installation at Vice Versand in Remscheid, Germany, titled Time, Space, Light, Memory, and Forgetfulness. While Time Piece remained unrealized, the score traveled widely, in English and translated into other languages. Over the years, I have seen a number of installations and exhibitions similar to the installation described here.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 46

In Confessions, Augustine discusses the problem of describing and measuring time. For Augustine, time had three phases – past, present, and future. According to Augustine, nothing temporal can be truly measured. The past no longer exists, the present evaporates as soon as it arrives, and the future does not exist yet. Nevertheless, all three exist together in the human mind and experience.

Newton saw time as uniform and absolute, flowing equally and uniformly of its own accord through the universe. Time formed one axis of the universe, with space – also equal and uniform – forming the other axis. Together, time and space formed a perfect Cartesian frame, 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.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 47

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 hope that I could develop efficient work habits. In my imagination, I get to bed on time, wake up promptly at dawn, and find myself able to write and get work done on the deadlines that other people seem to be able to master. I never managed to do so.

Every now and then, I tried to reach the goal with the help of a desk diary, a pocket agenda or any of one of the several time planning systems that are supposed to help one to manage professional and private life more effectively. None of them worked for me. The only one that was reasonably useful was the little “seventh sense” pocket sized diary. I’m told Thor Heyerdahl carried one on his expedition across the Pacific. When I lived outside Lund, I used the Swedish Lilla Fick that shows the holidays of the Swedish church. This was more useful to me, being married to a deacon who worked on many holidays. Still later, I used a Moleskin Pocket Weekly Diary.

While the expensive time planners never helped, they gave rise to this event.

I wrote the first version of this piece in an expensive time planner I bought in New York in 1985, placing it on a desk at the front of my loft.

Around the turn of the century, I was closer to my dream of the efficient life than I had been in the past. I owed this to my late dog and companion, Oliver. When I settled down with Ditte in 1998, she had a wonderful old poodle named Oliver. Oliver and I fell in love. As old folks often do, Oliver often got up in the middle of the night to pee. We fell into a pattern. Oliver would jump out of bed at 3 a.m. every morning. I’d get up and take him out to the garden. When he went in, he’d stroll back upstairs, hop into bed, and fall asleep. I’d be awake, so I’d go into the study to work. In the quiet of the early morning, I’d usually get three or four hours of work done. Then I’d crawl back into bed for another hour of sleep before starting the day.

This habit continued with our next dog, Jacob, who came to us when he was a middle-aged six-year-old. Even after Jacob was gone, I still woke up in the early hours to work.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 48

Two new factors have moved me beyond getting up early to write toward efficiency and organization. In January 2008, I moved from a professor’s life at the Norwegian School of Management in Oslo to a dean’s role at the Swinburne University of Technology Faculty of Design in Melbourne, Australia. One of the tools I used to keep track of what I had to do was the calendar and diary system in Novell’s GroupWise software. It was easy to make entries – and to juggle the multiple responsibilities of the job. I supported this with a Moleskin Pocket Weekly Diary. The added factor in my life was an executive assistant. My assistants kept track of my calendar, adding things when new requirements come up, and reminding me when I had to get something done.

Elliott Mintzberg made an important discovery by following managers in their daily life. He learned that a manager’s role is not the well-organized strategic flow that many believe it to be. Rather, it is a series of flowing encounters in which a typical manager has about ten minutes to work on any task before the next task commands his or her attention.

After moving from a life in research to a life as an administrator, I found this to be so. It was interesting and rewarding – and the process was actually quite reasonable. The reasonable nature of this sequence comes from the fact that a leader does more than set strategy and execute it. Rather, he shapes strategy, developing it together with his senior management team. Then, he works with the people who actually execute the strategy. A leader shapes and gives direction to organizational strategy. As a manager, he is required to implement the strategy and he is responsible for achieving strategic goals through detailed day-to-day actions. But the great secret to successful organizations is the fact that everyone drives the strategy forward through their achievements. To function as a successful executive, therefore, a leader spends a great portion of his or her daily work serving the people who make things happen in the organization.

There are practical, theoretical, and philosophical reasons for this. Some years ago, I addressed some of these issues in an article titled “Leaders for the Knowledge Economy.” It appeared as a chapter in Intelligent Management in the Knowledge Economy edited by Sven Junghagen and Henrik Linderoth. I’d have a bit more to add today, now that I’ve moved from research in leadership in organization to a managerial role.

While I was an entrepreneur, publisher, and organizer as a young man, I did not have the experience I now have combined with the theoretical perspectives that allow me to integrate experience, theory, and philosophy. An interesting aspect of my job is the fact that these three facets of leadership interact clearly, explicitly, and often in my life – and in the conversations I had with other deans, as well as with my deputy vice chancellor and my vice chancellor.

The flow of work kept me at the coalface where theory, thought, and action intersect. Constant engagement with the executive group and the academic heads pushed my work and thinking forward, while my colleagues joined me in shaping a complex series of intersections that became the intricate choreography of organizational life.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 49

All of this is invisible to anyone outside a specific organization. It is for this reason that one can imagine a world in which leaders take credit for what their colleagues and co-workers achieve. A good leader is a strategist, to be sure, but the concept of a good leader deserving a salary and bonus package hundreds of time greater than the lowest-paid worker in an organization is inconceivable to anyone who genuinely understands what makes an organization work. No one person can claim the credit for an organization that thrives on the work of hundreds or – in some cases – hundreds of thousands.

The difference a leader makes is to provide strategy and focus. It is the flow of those ten-minute chunks of action that bring the strategy to life, evolving, and changing as people enact and enable it, changing it appropriately, making it their own as they shape the organization in daily action.

That’s what I think of when I look at my Moleskin and my GroupWise calendar.

On a grand level, I still imagine Jove hurling his lightning bolts and Vulcan hammering at the forge as the great volcano covers Pompeii with ash.

What I’m not sure about is whether they had it planned and marked in their diary, or whether the cataclysm simply emerged from the daily flow when Juno put a project forward or Mars got something wrong in the workshop.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 50

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

In 2016, composer Hans Gurstad-Nilsson scored Rational Music for sheet music publication.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 51

Alchemical Theater

Assemble four elements.

Place the elements.

Act upon the elements.

1992

This piece requires a collection of the four alchemical 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 indifferent ways during the exhibition.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 52

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 works based on the conceptual transformation of ordinary objects. These objects often use ordinary wooden tables as platforms or as part of the work. Shoes have been among the objects I’ve used most. This particular piece is related to a 1993 piece titled The History of Fluxus, using two shoes, one filled with salt, and one with sugar.

1994 saw a celebration of Robert Filliou’s birthday in his hometown in France. I created the score for The Whispered History in his honor. It’s partly a play on his work, The Whispered History of Art and partly a play on my own piece, The History of Fluxus.

This piece begins with a large block of butter. Use winter butter if possible. Cows eat hay during the winter and their butter tends to be firmer than summer butter when the cows eat grass. Winter butter melts less easily and runs less readily than summer butter.

Let the butter warm up to room temperature. Unless the room is especially hot, it will not melt. When the butter is warm, it will be plastic and easily malleable. Use a spoon to pack the butter into the shoe that goes on the left foot. Packing the shoe slowly and carefully makes it possible to pack the shoe tight without spillover or dripping. The

goal is a shoe packed with firm butter. As the shoe sits, the butter will partially evaporate and harden slightly. After a year or two, the butter should be fairly hard, even at room temperaturYou should pack the left shoe with butter in advance of the exhibition. The evaporation and hardening process should begin as long before the exhibition as possible.

My favorite realization of this piece came at a symposium and seminar on the Body, Culture, and Religion convened by the Center for Theology and Religious Studies at Lund University in Lund, Sweden in October 2001.

Ken Friedman. 92 Events. Essays. 2020 January 24. 53

Prof. Catharina Stenqvist, the co-chair of the conference, invited me to present a cross between a surprise keynote and an after-dinner speech. After the conference banquet, I brought out a table and set a smaller table on it, talking my way through the event while I prepared the object.

Following the realization, I gave the object to Catharina as a gift to the faculty of theology. She entrusted the object to a theology student. To preserve the shoe stuffed with butter, the student removed the shoes from their table and placed them in a refrigerator in the faculty commons room. Soon after, a cleaning lady found the shoes in the refrigerator, decided that no one needed them, and threw them out.

Since then, I have often reflected on the links between theology, exegesis, and deconstruction.

Exhibition guide to 92 Events. | Exhibition view. | van der Meijden essay | Ken Friedman 92 Events exhibition main page | Six Philosophical Events 2021

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