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MEANINGFUL ACTIVITY, SCORES, AND COMMUNICATION Ken Friedman’s Events, 1956–present

“The distance from the sentence to your eye is my sculpture.”1

This 1971 conceptual artwork by Ken Friedman exists in as many different versions as there are people who read it. It is as solid as steel and as immaterial as a thought. It is as unique as any artwork and as common as any printed text. It can be measured objectively, but only exists in the eye of the beholder. It is a sculpture, and an invitation to reflect upon the state of one’s eyes, a work of art and a part of reality at the same time.

From as far back as 1956, Ken Friedman has produced idea-based, action oriented, language-borne works as generous toward the viewer as they are challenging for the professional. For the first ten years of his activity, he did not even call these works “art.” In 1966, Fluxus brought him into contact with such innovations as notating artworks as scores—writing them as instructions or suggestions—and producing art as multiples. He embraced the possibilities scores and multiples offered to make art widely available at a low cost, while involving others in the production of art. The result is a hybrid body of work encompassing objects, actions, scores, and organizational projects that invite participants to create and share the work themselves.

Friedman’s oeuvre is too diverse to describe in terms of any one medium. Even so, the themes of generosity, mobility, and availability remain constant throughout. This article charts the development of Friedman’s work and the relationships it creates with objects and with people (section 1), with special focus on the influence changes of work format had on Friedman’s role in the process of art making (section 2). A final section discusses how works and activities that are far removed from traditional easel painting and sculpture can be judged as art.

An Introduction: Ads, Pages, and Meaningful Activity

The short version of Friedman’s entry into the world of art is that he came into contact with Fluxus through Dick Higgins and Something Else Press. According to the slightly longer and more precise version, Friedman contacted Higgins and the Press in response to an advertisement in the East Village Other. At 50 years removed, it is difficult to establish exactly which advertisement caught Friedman’s eye. It is tempting to think that this was the ad:

[Note to designer: Place the next paragraph in a box and use a square type face such as News Gothic, sans serif. Set the first line all caps. Delete this note.]

ARE YOU THE KIND OF GUY WHO LIKES TO GO TO BED WITH A GOOD BOOK? Then do you know what to look for in a book—physically? Drop us a

1 Ken Friedman, Ken Friedman: A Perspective Exhibition (Davis, California: The Nelson I.C. Gallery, Art Department, University of California, Davis, 1973).

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card. We’ll be glad to send you our idea pamphlet on the subject. Something Else Press, Inc., 150 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10010.2

The weirdness of the ad is perfectly in tune with the other ads on the page— one tries to recruit members for the Secret Agent Society, another advances witchcraft as a remedy for boredom. However, even the more serious ads placed by the Something Else Press have a strange ring to them. One ad proclaimed: “A spiritual blast-off—A Primer of Happenings & Space-Time Art by Al Hansen.”3 Another announced: “Nouveau Roman? A fascinating form, but the most delightful and meaningful to date is Daniel Spoerri’s An Anecdoted Topography of Chance.”4 It takes a special kind of person to respond to these, and Friedman was exactly that kind of person.

Advertisements speak to people’s wants and needs. They exist to establish contact between those who want something and those who can give it to them. Their form is as basic as their content and intent. Most advertisers try to phrase their proposals using the greatest possible economy of means. Ads appear in more or less random order, only grouped together in terms of the kind of request or offer that they make. Even the most basic conjunctions, such as “and” or “or” are missing, and the word “because” can only be guessed at. There is no framework to tell the reader why it is necessary to read them. They are only expressions of the readers’ wants and needs. All of this— economy of means, lack of justifying frameworks, intimacy, the wish to establish a form of one-to-one communication—is characteristic of Fluxus . . . and of Friedman’s activities.

Instead of the word “activities,” we might expect to read the word “works.” After all, Friedman came out of his encounter with Fluxus as an artist, and works are what an artist produces.However, Friedman did not join the Fluxus ranks as an artist. He was a young man, only sixteen years old, who felt the need to establish his contact with the world via acts that seemed important and meaningful to him; a young man interested in religion and sociology, with an ambition to become a Unitarian minister. The story is repeated in just about every article on Friedman, but it is so important that it needs to be told here as well.

As a student at Shimer College in Mount Carroll, Illinois, Friedman made programs for the college’s AM radio channel, Radio WRSB. In his search for material, Friedman stumbled upon the Something Else Press ad. He wrote to the Press and they sent him books and pamphlets from their Great Bear series.5 He used these to produce shows. Friedman started corresponding

2 East Village Other, Vol. 1, No. 7 (March 1–15, 1966), 16; Vol. 1, No. 8 (March 15–April 1, 1966), 15; and Vol. 1, No. 9 (April 1–15, 1966), 16.

3 East Village Other, Vol. 1, No. 15.

4 East Village Other, Vol. 1, No. 16.

5 Peter Frank mentions books by Higgins, Al Hansen, Robert Filliou, Ray Johnson, Daniel Spoerri, Alison Knowles, Emmett Williams “and other experimental intermedia artists.” All of these artists are connected with the history of Fluxus, often intimately. Peter Frank, “Ken Friedman: A Life in Fluxus,” in Artistic Bedfellows: Histories, Theories, and Conversations in Collaborative Art Practices, ed. Holly Crawford (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2008), 147.

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with Dick Higgins, and in August of 1966, went to visit Higgins and his wife Alison Knowles in New York. One day, at Higgins’s kitchen table, Friedman remade an object that he had made earlier; an object that was later to become the Fluxus multiple Open and Shut Case.

The object was an old-fashioned box that once held large kitchen matches. On the outside, Friedman attached a hand-printed a label with the command: “open me.” On the inside, on the bottom of the box, he printed the text: “shut me quick.” The box had a gag-like quality, but it also invited contemplation of the normally overlooked act of opening and shutting something. Higgins was struck by the similarity to Fluxus works, so he called George Maciunas— Fluxus’s namer, impresario, and publisher—and sent Friedman to see Maciunas. Maciunas was interested in the object, offering to publish it as a Fluxus multiple. He also welcomed Friedman to the Fluxus fold.

Only after that did Maciunas try to establish what sort of an artist Friedman was; he decided to call him a “concept artist,” a term coined by philosopher, mathematician, and musician Henry Flynt. As Friedman later wrote about the episode: “George enrolled me in Fluxus several minutes before he bothered to ask what sort of artist I was. The truth is, until that day in August of 1966, I never considered myself an artist.”6 Friedman was first of all a young man who did things, then a Fluxus associate, and only after that an artist.

Some of Friedman’s proposed Fluxus multiples were produced. Many were not. However, what is at least as important as his activity as an artist is his organizational work for Fluxus and for Something Else Press. During his stay in New York, which lasted until October 1966, Friedman helped Dick Higgins at Something Else, organizing its mailing lists and creating strategies to give the Press greater public attention. Friedman also opened the short-lived Avenue C Fluxroom.

Upon his return to California in October 1966, George Maciunas gave him the responsibility for Fluxus West. While Maciunas meant the American West Coast, Fluxus West under Friedman soon had connections across the USA and the Atlantic. Friedman kept an archive, documenting the activities of Fluxus and other experimental tendencies at his family home in San Diego, and he established a series of Fluxhouses in San Francisco. A year later, he acquired the first Fluxmobile: an old Volkswagen bus which he used to travel around and organize festivals, talks, and so on. In late 1970 and early 1971, he worked for Something Else Press again, this time as General Manager, while Higgins took up a teaching post at the California Institute of the Arts.

Friedman’s work with the Fluxus and Something Else Press mailing lists turned out to be important. Well before this, Friedman—like many Fluxus colleagues—had become active in the mail art network. He began corresponding with Ray Johnson in 1966, and was also active in Johnson’s New York Correspondence School of Art. The postal art network around the School took shape via the mail, asking people to add things to his mailings and return them or send them on to others. However, whereas Johnson built his

6 Ken Friedman, Events, ed. Peter Frank (New York: Jaap Rietman, Inc., 1985), 230.

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network out of one-to-one contacts, Friedman built and expanded the Fluxus West mailing list and made it available to others. In 1972, this became the International Contact List of the Arts, an address list that made it possible for artists to come into contact with each other without the involvement of curators and dealers. This moment was as significant as Friedman’s meeting with Fluxus because it marks another change: earlier, he had facilitated the work of others by means of his activities as a person and a Fluxus representative, but now, he helped others to help themselves. Work became a tool for the production of work.

These lists were to overlap with those of Image Bank lists and Canada’s FILE Magazine. Image Bank published the addresses of artists who sought contributions to their projects from others. Significantly, the shape of some of these early art mailing lists was very similar to that of an ads page. This is most clearly visible in Image Request Lists from Image Bank and FILE. “Needed: The Amazing, Mysterious, Deadly and Unbelievable yet True events of the WORLD!!! ART PROPAGANDA CENTER, 1950 East 117, Cleveland, Ohio 44106,” one entry reads. Another states: “LASZLO BEKE, Budapest IX/Hungary, Thaly Kalman u. 56. If you want to be WORLD-FAMOUS you have nothing to do than send me some documentations of your works to my WORLD-FAMOUS WORLD-ARCHIVES of ideas, concepts, projects etc.”7

This is an extreme example, but even the most basic artist address lists display the same characteristics as those of advertising pages: the economy of means, the lack of justifying frameworks, the intimacy, the wish to establish a form of

one-to-one communication, and so on. Usually ads are no more than tools, but here they acquire an extra dimension. Similar to Friedman’s activities as an artist, the listings inhabit a grey zone between everyday actions and artwork. In the particular case of the contact lists, additional meaning is generated by the fact that they make it possible for artists to work together directly, without the intervention of curators, dealers, critics, and other art world professionals. They set the scene for artworks to come; they define a space for future art production; they create the conditions for a different type of artistic activity. Much of Friedman’s activity was of this type—facilitating and shaping exchanges between others as . . . well, not necessarily art, but meaningful activity.8 9

Fluxus, Flows, and Frameworks

7 File, Vol. 2, No. 3 (September 1973), 54.

8 Frank, “Ken Friedman: A Life in Fluxus,” 159–160.

9 Friedman’s lists also took a different turn. Where the Image Bank and FILE directories were predicated on a desire for contact among the people whose names and addresses appeared, Friedman’s lists were like a reference work, or a telephone book. Anyone could use them to reach out for any purpose they might deem relevant. These lists were so useful, in fact, that they became the basis of the Flash Art Art Diary, for many years a standard art world reference work. And Friedman himself would later work as a consultant and editor to standard reference works in several fields.

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The Fluxus that Friedman met in 1966 had already undergone a number of transformations during the 4-5 years of its existence. To start with, there was no name or infrastructure, just a group of artists—or several groups—who knew each other. Although they might not agree on much, they were generally interested in the same things. One of the interests they had in common was frames and framing. Whether they came from the visual arts, poetry and literature, theatre, dance, or other disciplines, they were interested in frameworks that made it possible for everyday actions, situations, objects, and images to unfold in a different, meaningful, thought-provoking way.

Composer John Cage was a source of inspiration for many of the artists associated with Fluxus. Cage created temporal frameworks for sounds to develop in. Poet Jackson Mac Low, another slightly older artist who was important to many, used “seeding” techniques to generate texts beyond the control of his own ego. German/Danish visual artist Arthur Køpcke, one of the earliest European Fluxus associates, created 127 instructions that helped the reader to experience images and objects without the intervention of social, economic, political, philosophical, or religious meaning-making systems. There were more such projects by other artists. Although Fluxus was there, it was invisible, because it did not have a name.

As the story is sometimes told, George Maciunas entered this scene, gave Fluxus a name, and there Fluxus was. Things are never that simple. Maciunas was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, in 1931. He fled to New York with his family towards the end of World War II, where he studied art history, musicology, graphic design, and architecture. He came into contact with the artistic avant garde and the phenomenon he called “concretism” via his AG Gallery. In its initial 1961-62 incarnation, Fluxus—Latin for “flow”—was the title of a series of yearbooks, documenting acts of concretism—the use of sounds and words, shapes and objects for their own sake. Maciunas’s plan was to publish an encyclopedic compilation of this work from the Middle Ages to the present day, with global coverage from the West to the Far East.10 The yearbooks never appeared. In 1962, Maciunas began to plan and organize concerts based on material he wanted to include in the yearbooks, to create interest and raise funds for the publications. Because he had moved from New York to Wiesbaden to work as a designer for the US Army in Germany, the first of these concerts took place in Europe.

Originally, the concerts had the word “Fluxus” in their titles because Maciunas put them on to support a publication called Fluxus. The first series of concerts took place in Wiesbaden in September 1962: the Fluxus International Festival of New Music. The press referred to the performers as “the Fluxus people,” so Fluxus became the name of a group of people. At the same time, Maciunas

abandoned the encyclopedic model he formerly had in mind and decided to concentrate on contemporary work. His focus was first and foremost the work

10 Maciunas’s charts and diagrams of history and art history give an idea of his encyclopedic ambitions. See, for example, Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Maciunas’ Learning Machines: From Art History to a Chronology of Fluxus, 2nd ed., revised and enlarged (Vienna and New York: Springer, 2011).

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of artists and composers who used language to frame reality in new and significant ways. This meant that it began to make sense to use the name Fluxus for a group of people and an attitude.

After returning to New York in September 1963, Maciunas once again turned his attention to publishing, and the name Fluxus took on yet another meaning. While in Europe, he had already associated Fluxus with the struggle against what he thought of as dead art, focusing on political revolution (without specifying whose politics). He continued in the same radical vein after his return to the US. Fluxus was to be what he called “art amusement,” designed to prove that the world could do without art. Fluxus art amusement had to be accessible to all—and ultimately, possible for anyone to make. To Maciunas, the difference between art and non-art had to be abolished, so that the aesthetic experience offered by art was no longer reserved for a small elite—it would be available to everyone. To attain this goal, Maciunas began to publish works in boxes he called “Fluxboxes,” along with collections of works in suitcase-like ensembles called “Fluxkits.” These multiples —so-called as they could be produced multiple times—were available at the Fluxshop on Canal Street in NYC, but they hardly ever sold. They were also available by mail order. Maciunas’s prices were extremely modest: between $1 and $100—far less than it cost to produce them.11

Fluxus publishing was slow. The first publication appeared in 1963: George Brecht’s collected works titled Water Yam, a collection of event scores. The works were published on cards in a box, allowing for new works as Brecht wrote them. Eventually, the list of Fluxus editions became quite long, but it took a while for the trickle of projects to become a flow. Something Else Press emerged as a direct result of the slow pace at Fluxus publishing. Maciunas had offered to publish Dick Higgins’s collected works, but after delays piled up, Higgins ended up snatching back his manuscript. He started the Press in order to publish it himself. It became an entirely different kind of venture—a real publishing house that specialized in high quality editions of classic and contemporary avant-garde material. Nevertheless, the Fluxus model is important to the development of Friedman’s work and activities. From a publishing venture, Fluxus turned into an infrastructure that had meaning— significance—in itself. Fluxus works had to be published and presented in the way they did to signal Maciunas’s anti-art program. Friedman’s Fluxus activities became significant in a similar way.

The Fluxus that Friedman came into contact with in August 1966 was undergoing a transformation once again. In the letter that Higgins wrote to Maciunas after sending Friedman to see him, Higgins complained about what he called the “mis-information sheet” that Maciunas had published:

“Yesterday I sent you a very capable and interesting young guy, Ken Friedman, because I wanted him to know about what you do and perhaps help get Fluxus known better in the San Diego area of

11 Fluxus multiples were intended for mass production, but actually, they were handcrafted, so that no two items are identical. It is the process of hand-assembling them that makes them so expensive to produce.

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California. You gave him a copy of the enclosed mis-information sheet, and, frankly, I object. Your remark in paragraph 4-C, that I left Fluxus because of a competitive attitude, to form a ‘rival organization,’ just isn’t fair. If I were your rival, I wouldn’t try to promote Fluxus, would I? I wouldn’t send some of the best new people we come across to see you, would I?”12

The mis-information sheet was a graphic illustration of Fluxus history. It showed influences and people going in . . . and out. The problem was that it also explained why people went out. Maciunas attributed motives to people, such as “anticollective attitude,” “opportunism,” and “forming rival operations.” 13 Maciunas did not object to Higgins sending Friedman to him. He objected to Higgins starting the Something Else Press. What was at stake was Maciunas’s vision of Fluxus as a collective. He had earlier proposed schemes by which artists gave all rights to their work to Fluxus. Projects such as the Something Else Press—and the failure to attribute the copyright on its publications to Fluxus—went against Maciunas’s demand for collectivism.

Ironically, in 1966, Maciunas’s dream of a Fluxus collective led to greater decentralization. Maciunas had earlier worked with local representatives to organize festivals and sell multiples, but in 1966, he divided the responsibility for the Fluxus network amongst four artists who were appointed as official Fluxus representatives: Milan Knižak became Fluxus East, based in Prague; Ben Vautier became Fluxus South, based in Nice; Per Kirkeby Fluxus North, based in Copenhagen; and Ken Friedman became Fluxus West, based in California.14 But circumstances also made the transition to a larger collective leadership more complex. The New York city council had just launched a scheme to renovate dilapidated industrial buildings, and Maciunas wanted to make use of the program to create Flux cooperative housing units by converting industrial loft buildings to communal living and working spaces. He had conceived forms of communal living before and would devise more over the years, from a Fluxus train to a converted minesweeper and even an entire island—Ginger Island, one of the British Virgin Islands. In contrast to these utopian plans, the Fluxhousing scheme actually worked. It played a important role in the development of SoHo. 15 The four decentralized

12 Dick Higgins to George Maciunas, 17 August 1966, in Dick Higgins Papers (Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles).

13 George Maciunas, Fluxus (Its Historical Development and Relationship to Avant-Garde Movements), reproduced in Schmidt-Burkhardt, Maciunas’ Learning Machines, 52–53. 14 In 1963, when he left Europe, he appointed German Fluxus artist Tomas Schmit as Fluxus Representative for Europe. Because of a difference of opinion as to the nature and lookout of Fluxus between Maciunas and Schmit, the title went to Dutch artist Willem de Ridder, but his involvement weakened in 1966. The new structure with four representatives for the four points of the compass is different in that it divides the entire Fluxus network into four. 15 For more information on Maciunas’s housing projects, see: Charles R. Simpson, SoHo: The Artist in the City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Richard Kostelanetz, Artists' SoHo: 49 Episodes of Intimate History (New York: Empire State Editions, Fordham University Press, 2015); Roslyn Bernstein and Shael Shapiro, 80 Wooster Street and the Evolution of SoHo (Vilnius, Lithuania: Jonas Mekas Founadation, 2010); Aaron Shkuda, The Lofts of SoHo: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950–1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Richard Kostelanetz, Soho: The Rise and Fall of an Artist's Colony (New York: Routledge, 2003).

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representatives were more or less free to do as they pleased, because the Fluxhousing project took all of Maciunas’s time and attention.

Friedman’s account of the way in which he came to join Fluxus is not dissimilar to the one told by Kirkeby, who also visited New York in the summer of 1966 and was appointed Fluxus North:

“What I wanted was to find out what FLUXUS was. But Maciunas did not give any real answers. He was ‘concrete,’ that is to say, he was busy producing his boxes and his designs. A curious dialogue, in which I tried the ‘practical’ approach. I said f.ex.: ‘If you empty a tea bag—a bag that you hang in a cup and discard afterwards—if you empty the tea bag and fill it with, let us say, salt, then the bag will look and feel like a tea bag. But when it is immersed in warm water, the contents dissolve without any visible traces and leave the tea bag empty and limp. Is that FLUXUS?”—‘I will start to produce that bag,’ Maciunas answered.”16

What had happened was this: during the first five years of Fluxus, Maciunas had gone from an interest in concretism to an interest in the concrete, from wanting to publish an encyclopedic collection of concretist tendencies in art to making and doing concrete things. At a time when many of the older Fluxus associates were keeping their distance, it seems that new arrivals could get tasks pretty quickly. This does not mean that early Fluxus members actually left Fluxus—they took Maciunas’s expulsions with a grain of salt and kept on working.

Doing things is pretty much what Fluxus is about, both as an infrastructure and as a type of work. As Fluxus scholar Hannah Higgins puts it, Fluxus works tend to “generate primary knowledge and multisensory experience through exploration of prosaic things and experiences” within the context of an event that creates a temporary subject/object out of the act of handling something, and thus “situates people radically within their corporal, sensory worlds.” 17 Fluxus is not about things or the inherent value of things. It is about people’s experience of them. Neither individual Fluxus works nor the Fluxus infrastructure as a whole distinguished between things and people, subjects and objects. The frameworks that the artists associated with Fluxus created in their works, and the framework that Maciunas and others created to

16 “Was ich wollte, war herauszufinden, was FLUXUS war. Doch Maciunas gab keine richtigen Antworten. Er war ‘konkret,’ d.h. er war damit beschäftigt, seine Schachteln zu produzieren und seine Layouts. Ein sonderbarer Dialog, wobei ich mich mit dem‚ praktischen’ Ansatz versuchte. Ich sagte z.B.: ‘Wenn man einen Teebeutel leert, einen Beutel, den man in eine Tasse hängt und hinterher wegwirft, wenn man den Teebeutel leert und ihm mit—sagen wir—Salz füllt. Dann sieht der Beutel aus und fühlt sich an wie ein Teebeutel. Taucht man ihn jedoch ins warme Wasser, löst sich der Inhalt ohne sichtbare Spuren auf und hinterlässt den Teebeutel leer und schlaff. Ist das FLUXUS?’—‘Den Beutel setze ich in Produktion,’ antwortete Maciunas.” Per Kirkeby, “Fluxus,” in 1962 Wiesbaden FLUXUS 1982. Eine kleine Geschichte von Fluxus in drei Teilen, exhibition catalogue (Wiesbaden: Museum Wiesbaden, 1982; Kassel: Neue Galerie der Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen, 1983; Berlin: Daadgalerie, 1983), 145.

17 Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 67.

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disseminate the works, were designed to facilitate the active meeting of people and things.

Fluxus’s best-known tool for bringing about these meetings between people and things is the event score. According to art historian Carolyn Barnes, Maciunas suggested that Friedman write down his works, ideas, and concepts in the form of event scores.18 Before that, Friedman had simply performed his actions, created his objects, and arranged his environments. Friedman himself states: “Before 1966, I was not an artist. I built things, made objects, undertook actions. I engaged in processes, and I created and enacted events in the physical sense of the term. These were simply things that I did.”19

Simply doing things and framing them in words are two different things. Without words and scores, actions cannot be separated from the time and place of their enactment. Words make them available to everybody, everywhere, and in an endless number of versions. Friedman’s very first action Scrub Piece, for example, was first realized on March 20, 1956, when he cleaned Nathan Hale Monument in New London, Connecticut. In 1956, it was a unique event. The event score makes it possible for everybody to clean a public monument on the first day of spring. The advantages are many.

What made the score important for Friedman was that it captured the idea as a single entity that could take on many forms. Previously, he had realized these ideas, acted them out, built them, talked about them, and so on. Each of these embodiments was a thing in itself. Through the score format, Friedman could capture the idea in a way that connected all the embodiments.

The word “score” has its roots in music. Many Fluxus artists had musical roots as well. Since composer John Cage was an important source of inspiration for artists with a background in music, as well as for those who came from other backgrounds, this is only natural. One difference between the event score and the traditional music score is that traditional music notation is as precise as possible to minimize the difference between the composer’s conception and the interpreter’s rendition. Event scores, on the other hand, emphasize the gap between concept and enactment, empowering the performer and downplaying the role of the composer.

In Friedman’s case, it is important to underline something more. John Vinton’s 1974 Dictionary of Contemporary Music quotes Friedman saying that “I consider the calligraphy and visuality of a written score as beautiful as it sounds; I consider not melody but sound-formation and have as great an interest in rhythm as I do in melodic line . . . . In 1967 I quit reading and writing standard notation altogether and devoted myself to configurations of sound.”20 What Friedman is interested in, then, is not the development of the material, in the way that melody drives the music or drama a book or a play,

18 Carolyn Barnes, “Ken Friedman. Event, Idea and Enquiry,” Ken Friedman: 99 Events, 1956–2009 (New York: Stendhal Gallery, 2009), 10.

19 Ken Friedman, ”Working with Event Scores: A Personal History,” Performance Research 7, no. 3 (2002): 124.

20 Marilyn Ekdahl Ravicz, Ken Friedman: The World That Is and the World That Is to Be (Mt. Berry, GA: Berry College, 1976), 44.

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but the mechanisms that rule the development. He is interested in the concept as well as the way it acquires shape; in the idea and its material carrier—score, notation. This becomes visible in such projects as Zen for Record,21 Friedman’s phonograph record without sound, and in such projects as Rational Music.22

From 1966 onwards, some works in Friedman’s oeuvre treat language and the score format as an integral part of the work. Consider his Mandatory Happening, for example. The score of the work reads: “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.” Maciunas published Mandatory Happening as a Fluxus multiple. He printed the card on stiff paper, packaged in a plastic box with an image of Uncle Sam and the text “Fluxus Wants You . . . for a Mandatory Happening.” The score presupposes the card but not the box. It makes the reader imagine the score as well, creating it conceptually and performing the happening in his or her mind. While work is framed as a reality, it is imagined at the same time.

Friedman writes that Mandatory Happening was first performed on 1 May 1966; but in printed form, anyone can perform it anywhere, at any time. And even though the score can be printed in any number of identical copies, each realization is different. It depends on the person who reads it and the circumstances under which it is read. Instead of melody or drama, there is a form and content that generate action and provoke thought. This is what Friedman meant when he spoke of configurations: an idea given shape in such a way that it invites the reader to meaningful action and speculation.

Some of Friedman’s configurations integrate the Fluxus infrastructure into their fabric as well. One group of works describe Fluxus editions. Maciunas planned to produce more than he finally realized. Friedman’s Open and Shut Case, the object that he constructed in 1965 and recreated in 1966, appeared as a Fluxus edition. So did his Corsage Kit (“Shaped pieces of paper, each bearing the name of a flower. Ample supply of pins.”). 23

Friedman was not the only person to use the score in this manner. Arthur Køpcke included recipes for the construction of several works in his book of instruction pieces titled Manuscript of Reading/Work Pieces.24 Piece No. 9, for example, instructs the reader to “buy a frame with glass & place different small object on the backside—finally cover the objects with several kinds of pigments—then close the picture”. While none of Køpcke’s objects were produced as Fluxus multiples, the artist made several himself. The effect is to make the object a multiple. Instructions such as Friedman’s and Køpcke’s relieve the artwork of its status as unique object and it relieves the artist of a role as the unique producer of a particular work.

21 Friedman, Ken Friedman: 99 Events, 77-79; Craig Dworkin, “Signal to Noise,” in No Medium (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013), 128–138.

22 Friedman, Ken Friedman: 99 Events, 131.

23 The Fluxus edition does not contain pieces of paper, but packages flower seeds or bags of seeds.

24 Arthue Køpcke, Manuscript of Reading/Work Piece (Copenhagen, 1965).

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Unlike Køpcke, however, Friedman also made his activities on behalf of Fluxus part of his event scores. Selling Piece from 1966, for example, reads:

“Take a Fluxkit to people’s homes in the manner of a door-to-door salesman. Open the kit and demonstrate the boxes and objects in a friendly, earnest fashion. Maintain a pleasant, straightforward attitude, just as though the objects can be entirely expected to fit into the household needs of the ordinary consumer. Make a sale.”

George Maciunas wanted Fluxus editions to be available without people having to cross the threshold of a gallery or museum. Friedman’s Selling Piece takes this strategy a step further, because he turns the door-to-door sale of Fluxus multiples into a work. This was a meaningful act to start with, sparked by Maciunas’s wish to do away with art and the art world. But framed like this, practical activities that realize Maciunas’s ideas become something to speculate about as well. Friedman’s earlier practice of exploring reality by means of significant actions remained intact, supplemented by the new possibilities and tasks that Friedman took on when he began to represent Fluxus.

The format of the score can do something more. According to Peter Frank, Friedman was the first person to organize exhibitions that consisted of scores alone—his own, that is. 25 George Maciunas hardly ever organized Fluxus exhibitions. A rare early example is a display of Fluxus scores and realizations in the kitchen of Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal during Nam June Paik’s Exposition of Music—Electronic Television in March 1963. Maciunas tended to limit himself to presenting Fluxus publications during concerts and festivals, and displaying Fluxus products at the Fluxshop.

Friedman, however, realized that the score had another implication. Scores could easily be mailed, so exhibitions could fit in an envelope and reach venues everywhere in the world. Of course, this means that the artist cannot always be there to supervise the installation or the realization of the works, but that is all in keeping with the open character of the score as a format. As a result, Friedman shows reached places such as Budapest, Hungary; Poznan, Poland; Calgary, Alberta, Canada; Canyon, Texas; or Portland, Oregon. Friedman also presented scores in exhibitions where he himself went, for example in Johnson City, Tennessee; Missoula, Montana; and Columbia, South Carolina. Fluxus made the work of the artists it published mobile by making it available in people’s homes; Friedman made his event scores available to far-flung museums and exhibition spaces by mail.

Maciunas designed Fluxus editions as boxes rather than books so that individual works could be taken out, read and performed in any sequence. Putting scores in envelopes and mailing them does the same thing: it permits the receiver to decide what to do with them and when. The practice is older than Fluxus itself. Already in 1961, George Brecht was printing his scores on small cards and sending them to friends, unasked-for and without adding any explanation. Brecht’s Lucifer Event consists of a matchbook with the title

25 Frank, “Ken Friedman: A Life in Fluxus,” 164.

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printed on it which he sent to friends and acquaintances. Dancer and choreographer James Waring wrote back: “Thank you for Lucifer Event. It happened very beautifully.”26 Sending an event score by post invites a personal response.

This takes us back to the advertisement pages of the East Village Other. Scores in a box or an envelope address the reader in a manner similar to advertisements. As a format, the score is as personal and intimate as an ad. An envelope or box containing several scores is as random and unframed as a page of advertisements. Like ads, scores contain the intentions, wishes, and desires of the sender. They also depend for their reception on the reader and his or her expectations and needs. Fluxus opened the world of the score for Friedman, both as the carrier of the single work and as an infrastructural tool. Friedman never stopped exploring the possibilities this offered.

Intermedia, Flow Systems, and Communication

In a document called “A Brief History of Fluxus West,” undated but dateable to the mid-1970s, Friedman describes the goal of his branch of Fluxus as follows:

“Fluxus West was established in 1966 to represent the work of the Fluxus group and its members in the Western United States and to promote and care for a wide variety of contemporary art which at that time represented highly experimental viewpoints in the art world such as George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Joseph Beuys, Christo, George Brecht, Bob Watts et.al.”27

Maciunas could not possibly object to Friedman promoting and caring for Fluxus. Doing the same for other types of contemporary art is another matter, and some of the artists mentioned by Friedman were not part of the collective that Maciunas had in mind. The “red mis-information sheet” that Maciunas gave to Friedman during their first meeting in August 1966 charged Higgins with an anticollective attitude and forming a rival operations. It listed Beuys as an independent and Christo was not mentioned at all.28 Almost right from the start, Friedman cast Fluxus West in the role of an information hub and general facilitator for a circle of artists that reached much further than Fluxus alone.

The scope of Friedman’s projects became visible in the wide variety of venues where Fluxus West made an appearance. Art galleries were certainly part of its territory, but it was also active at centers of countercultural activity, and in Unitarian Universalist churches.

26 Julia E. Robinson, “From Abstraction to Model: In the Event of George Brecht & the Conceptual Turn in the Art of the 1960s” (PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2008), 272. 27 “Fluxus Digital Collection,” on University of Iowa’s official website, accessed September 7, 2019, https://thestudio.uiowa.edu/fluxus/content/brief-history-fluxus-west. 28 Dick Higgins to George Maciunas, 17 August 1966; Maciunas, Fluxus, reproduced in Schmidt-Burkhardt, Maciunas’ Learning Machines, 52–53.

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Friedman was familiar with both before he came into contact with Fluxus. His radio shows and festivals at Shimer College in 1965 were called Garnisht Kigele, a phrase from a song called Nothing by the beatnik poet rock band, The Fugs.29 This song also inspired one of Friedman’s Fluxboxes, the Garnisht Kigele Fluxfeast of Nothing Pudding.30

Thanks to Friedman, Fluxus made appearances in Steve Gaskin’s Monday Night Class at the Experimental College in San Francisco, where Gaskin spoke about drugs, paranormal experiences and ecology,; at image and light shows at the Fillmore Auditorium and the Family Dog; at Ann Halprin’s Dancer’s Workshop; and at Stewart Brand Earth Game. Brand was later to create the Whole Earth Catalogue. Fluxus almost made an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson—the producers contacted Friedman to discuss performing events on what was then America’s most popular late-night talk show, but they never produced the segment.31

As for Unitarianism: before he came into contact with Fluxus, Friedman had plans to become a Unitarian minister, and he kept these plans for quite a while. Unitarian Universalism is not a dogmatic religion in the sense of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. It is a liberal religion that searches for meaning and spiritual growth in a larger sense. Originally anchored in New England Puritan Calvinism, the Unitarians broke away from the Congregationalists in 1805, later to become renowned as a seedbed for the philosophical Transcendentalism that would usher in the American Renaissance. It was famed for supporting and fueling the political abolitionism that would end slavery, the suffragette movement that would win the vote for women, and the Civil Rights movement shared by many religions in the 1960s. Unitarian belief in the individual found its counterpart in youth culture’s revolt against established hierarchies and its campaign for acknowledgement of the rights, skills and abilities of the individual. The upshot of all this was that Fluxus West could make its appearance in the God’s Eye Ice Cream Parlour in San Francisco as well as in various Unitarian churches and societies in the San Francisco area and elsewhere.

Another description of Fluxus West, in Friedman’s introduction to a special issue of Source magazine from 1973, demonstrates this inclusive view. “Since 1966, the work of Fluxus West has been to undertake a coordinated series of experimental projects in researching, interchanging, transmitting, archiving and presenting international activities in the arts, music, the dance, and allied fields of human creative behavior and philosophy.”32 Friedman presented

29 Nothing is based on a Yiddish folk song called Bulbes (“potatoes”). The lyrics of the original are: Monday potatoes /Tuesday potatoes/Wednesday potatoes/Thursday potatoes/Friday for a change potato kigele (kugel/pudding)/Saturday and Sunday potatoes. Fugs member Tuli Kupferberg, who wrote the song, replaced “potatoes” with “nothing,” as a comment on the state of America at the time. The Yiddish word for “nothing” is “garnish,” so “bulbes kigele” becomes “garnisht kigele,” “nothing pudding.”

30 Jon Hendricks, Fluxus Codex, 2nd ed. (New York: The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection in association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1995), 255–256. 31 Ken Friedman, personal communication, email, August 18, 2019.

32 Ken Friedman, “INTERNATIONAL SOURCES: Notes on the Exhibition,” Source: Music of the Avant-Garde, no. 11 (1973).

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Fluxus West as an information and research center for international activities rather than a Fluxus center in an exclusive context. He broadened Fluxus West to include all types of creativity and human thought.

An early example of Fluxus West activity can serve to illustrate the results of this broad definition. In late 1966, Friedman came into contact with the Czech artist Milan Knižak. In March 1967, Knižak wrote: “Dear Ken, I love you for your activity. We must keep together more places on the globe! To want to live—otherwise. To live otherwise.”33 Knižak was one of the founders of the Czech Aktual group, not so much an art movement as a group devoted to the transformation of everyday life. Living differently meant living every minute to the full. Knižak’s call to keep together referred to the Aktual group’s Keeping Together Manifestations—attempts to change the way people lived their lives by making them aware of each other across national borders and across the Iron Curtain; for example by means of mail contact or simultaneous actions. A document from 1966 shows just how inclusive Knižak wanted the Keeping Together Manifestations to be, reaching out to governments, the press, the clergy, trade unions, the military, and private citizens everywhere:

“embassies are delivered letters on keeping together

magazines and newspapers are asked to take part in Keeping Together Manifestation

bills are hung in houses asking for Keeping Together Manifestation military dignitaries are delivered letters asking to give up their functions in the Keeping Together Manifestation movement clergymen are asked to preach on keeping together

trade union are asked to hold meeting on keeping together

department houses are asked to make up their shop-windows with slogan on keeping together

just belligerent states are delivered petitions asking to stop the wars in the Keeping Together Manifestation movement.”34

A poster made by Friedman for Aktual USA translated the message into the words “aktual is holding hands, making love, being people, KEEPING TOGETHER. AKTUAL IS NOW—IS YOU.”35 A flyer outlining the purpose and activities of Aktual USA offers FLUXUS FRIEDMANFLUX INSTANT THEATRE, to be “given free and given with love to promote the better understanding of how we feel and move inside our bodies, and inside our

33 Milan Knizak to Ken Friedman, postmarked 14 March 1967, Ken Friedman Collection, box 2, folder 6, Mandeville Special Collections Library, UC San Diego. Quoted in Marian Mazzone, “’Keeping Together’ Prague and San Diego: Networking in 1960s Art,” Technoetic Arts 7, no. 3 (2009), 286, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/tear.7.3.275/1.

34 Milan Knížák and Ken Friedman, “Keeping Together Manifestations,” in Fondazione Bonotto, cat. no. FXC0810, accessed September 12, 2019,

https://www.fondazionebonotto.org/en/collection/fluxus/collective/7939.html. 35 Ken Friedman, “Aktual USA, 1967” (flyer), in Fondazione Bonotto, cat. no. FX1166-13B, accessed September 12, 2019,

https://www.fondazionebonotto.org/en/collection/fluxus/friedmanken/6/714.html?from=79 39.

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heads and brains. It is yours for the asking.”36 Instant Theatre was Friedman’s name for Fluxus events adapted for performance by the audience.37

Other events by Friedman connected with the 1967 Keeping Together Manifestation are Cage Event, in which as many people as possible are invited to push into a designated area for one minute and then to disperse rapidly, and Telephone for Steve Abrams, in which random people are handed a telephone with the words “It’s for you.”38 Keeping Together as interpreted by Fluxus West meant getting people to engage in everyday activities, preferably collectively, in a way that made them significant and special, in a spirit much like the situations Friedman created prior to his introduction to Fluxus. Friedman and Knizak kept their exchange on this project alive for more than a decade.39

What was remarkable about Friedman’s approach was the importance of giving and receiving and the use of the score format to repeat actions in a non identical manner, with an emphasis on the added contribution made by those who bring their life experience to the artist’s ideas.

It is hard to determine what this type of activity actually is. The context makes it clear that it is more than just art—after all, Friedman’s activities were equally at home in 1960s counterculture and the context of Unitarian Universalism. One word that has often been used to describe it, both by Friedman himself and by others, is intermedia, a term coined by Friedman’s mentor Dick Higgins in February 1966. Intermedia, Higgins writes, situates itself in “an uncharted land” between existing media. It is not multimedia—it does not refer to artworks that make use of several media at once—it describes objects and activities that cannot be reduced to any existing media. Each intermedial work, Higgins says, “determines its own medium and form according to its needs.”40 This means that intermedia is not a medium at all, no matter how hybrid. Intermedia starts with needs, and everything else follows. It is a matter of communication.

Intermedia has consequences for art criticism and art appreciation that I will discuss elsewhere. What is important for the moment is that intermedia knows no limits and acknowledges no boundaries. Higgins saw this in the wider context of the struggle against established hierarchies that had been picking up speed ever since the late 1950s. He saw the world moving towards a situation where fixed roles, fixed job descriptions, and fixed media no longer played a role; a world where everybody did things and made use of his or her

36 Knížák and Friedman, “Keeping Together Manifestations,” Fondazione Bonotto, cat. no. FXC0810.

37 Friedman, Events, 58, 94.

38 Friedman, Events, 95, 101.

39 For more on this topic, see: Mazzone, “‘Keeping Together’ Prague and San Diego,” 275– 292; See also: Tomáš Pospiszyl, “Milan Knížák and Ken Friedman: Keeping Together Manifestations in a Divided World,” Museum of Modern Art Post: Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art Around the Globe, September 1, 2015,

https://post.at.moma.org/content_items/683-milan-knizak-and-ken-friedman-keeping together-manifestations-in-a-divided-world

40 Dick Higgins, “Intermedia,” The Something Else Newsletter 1, no. 1 (February 1966).

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faculties according to need and desire. This also means that it no longer made sense to speak of art. Of course, art media can be found among the media employed; but what Higgins calls “life media”, meaning non-art practices (the production of socks, say), feature as well. They certainly do in Friedman’s work.

When speaking of intermedia in an article in the magazine The Promethean in March 1967, Friedman placed the importance of the term in the message that “art becomes ART when the distinction between art/ethics, art/religion, art/philosophy, art/life is no longer distinct; that art becomes ART when the creative process flows in a unified and organic course.”41 The action of flow implicit in the name Fluxus extends beyond art to encompass the flow of creativity in every field of human activity.

Each intermedium—each intermedia form—is born of the need to communicate something. Communication became the central element of Friedman’s work. In a typescript essay titled Event and Environment, he wrote: “The work in which I am involved moves directly into areas of our interaction with each other . . . As an artist, it has been my deepest goal to intimately involve the spectator in my work as an immediate participant and beyond this, as a participant who can take from my work some quality and perception which can serve as a tool in the personal life.”42 The role of the audience, and indeed the function of the communicative act, was not just to enable the creation an artwork, but to change people’s lives. The artist, Friedman says, is “essentially a communicator. In whatever medium, activities of art are a transmission of one sort or another of experiential or aesthetic data.” It should be noted that experiential or aesthetic data are not the same as aesthetic experience. The word “data” is important. According to Friedman, the artist is a “teacher of experience, a communications system, a resource book, a living statement of the possibility of vision.” She or he is many things: “a prophet, a therapist, a teacher, a natural resource, and a public servant.”43 The artist serves society as much as everyone else, conducts experiments that help to shape the future, engages in inner exploration, and helps others to learn what she or he learned in the process. The data concerned give information about those experiments and explorations, as well as ways of conducting them oneself.

This conception of the role of artist takes many forms in Friedman’s work. For example, many pieces have something to do with giving and receiving. Street Pieces (1966) instructs the reader to make objects and leave them in the street for passers-by. Art for the Household (1967-71) instructs the reader to construct collages or objects for the homes of friends, designed for specific rooms. The nature of these pieces as scores means that it is not necessarily Friedman himself who creates the things. It is equally possible that Friedman’s involvement in a performance may limit itself to suggesting that it could be worthwhile to make objects and give them away. Indeed, several of Friedman’s exhibitions of the 1970s explicitly took this shape. All’s Well That

41 Ken Friedman, “Mountains and Rivers,” The Promethean, March 1967, 9. 42 Ravicz, Ken Friedman: The World That Is and the World That Is to Be, 55. 43 Ken Friedman, The Aesthetics (Cullompton, UK: Beaug Geste Press, 1973), 50–51.

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Hangs Well, for example, at the Malcolm A. Love Library at San Diego State University in October 1973, consisted of a five-story high sculpture in a stairwell that grew as students and school children hung their contributions on it. In Regina, Saskatchewan, in March 1972, Friedman created The Winter Wall, a construction of used boxes and crates with an ever-changing collage of Friedman’s incoming correspondence and his studio notes. At the end of the show, Friedman encouraged the audience to take away a piece that reminded them of a shared experience. Walls provide safety and comfort, but they define a boundary as well. In giving pieces of the wall away, the work abolishes the function of a boundary to underline the act of sharing.

Friedman’s largest show based on these principles was Omaha Flow Systems at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha from April 1-24, 1973. As Friedman describes it himself, the exhibition began as an idea:

“To invite thousands of people from around the world to send their work through the mail to Omaha, and to invite the citizens of Omaha to come to the Museum to take what they wanted home, leaving something behind in exchange, and contacting the artists whose work they took. To use this series of activities as methods for trying to involve all levels of the public in the life of the arts, to involve all segments of society from businesses and civic authorities to educational institutions and religious organizations.”44

This was a new way of organizing exhibitions at the time, and certainly not something that the Jocelyn Art Museum had ever done. As a result, there were teething problems—the tools that curators now have at their disposal for financing and managing this type of show did not yet exist—but it turned out more or less as Friedman proposed it. A poster was sent out to thousands of people around the globe, asking for contributions, and thousands of works and other items came back via the post. The audience chose works to take home, left items of their own behind, and filled out forms telling the artist what they had chosen and why. A special aspect of the project was the creation of work by children from all parts of the world, organized by artists. Works were shown outside the museum at department stores and shopping malls, universities and teacher training colleges. Seminars and lectures were held, the First Unitarian Church of Omaha held a potluck and benefit event and the Lutheran and United Methodist ministries supported a celebration of the arts.

In Friedman’s own words, Omaha Flow Systems was “everything from a mail art show to a solo show of one artist’s concept to a celebration of the arts to a giant group show.”45 The result was an amalgam of contributions by artists, children, the museum and its employees, local businesses, educational establishments, church communities, and more—all within a framework that is an artwork in itself. “My artwork was the creation of the idea and the systems,” Friedman wrote.46 The purpose was “to generate communication

44 Ken Friedman, “Flowing in Omaha,” Art and Artists 8, no. 5 (August 1973), 6–9. 45 Friedman, Ken Friedman: A Perspective Exhibition.

46 Friedman, Ken Friedman: A Perspective Exhibition.

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that gives people a good time and broadens their horizons.”47 In order to achieve this, Friedman develop an intermedia form that combined the museum’s facilities, locally available infrastructures, mailing lists, and the postal services.

Even so, the intermedium he created cannot be equated to the work. An event score does the job equally well:

Flow System

Invite anyone

—and everyone—

to send an object or a work

of any kind to an exhibition.

Display everything that is received.

Any visitor to the exhibition may

take away an object or work.48

What constitutes a work and what does not becomes ever more difficult to see. If the organizational work involved in the creation of Omaha Flow Systems can be a work, why not other organizational work? Towards the end of the 1960s, more and more artists became interested in communication. Projects were initiated in which one artist created a framework for others to fill out. Fluxus artist Mieko Shiomi’s series of Spatial Poems are requests to artists around the world to perform an action and send documentation back. In Duration Piece #8 Global (1970-73), conceptual artist Douglas Huebler offered to swap a work worth $150 with other artists. Canadian artist Bill Vazan’s Contacts (1971-73) was an invitation to send documents incorporating the sign X (“an identified place, object or event, and the balance between polarities”) by mail or telex. The results of all three projects were published as a book, but the book was not the work. The responses and the book were all precipitated by the original invitation, which embodies the work.

One artist who made communication the main ingredient of his work was Ray Johnson, another artist closely related to Fluxus. Starting in the 1950s, he created a postal network around himself by sending people personalized collages, asking them to add something to them and return them or send them on to others. Friedman, too, became part of this network—called the New York Correspondence School—creating and acting as the first editor of a magazine published by the School, the NYCS Weekly Breeder. As mail was exchanged, the School’s network expanded. By the end of the 1960s, it had reached artists in Canada, amongst others Image Bank in Vancouver and General Idea in Toronto. A grant enabled General Idea (AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal) to issue a magazine called FILE, in which they also began to publish image requests, calls to participate in projects in much the same vein as the ones described above, including names and addresses.

47 Press release, quoted in Ravicz, Ken Friedman: The World That Is and the World That Is to Be, 31.

48 Friedman, Ken Friedman: 99 Events, 119.

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Friedman, too, had been publishing address lists. He started these in 1966 or 1967 by expanding the Fluxus address lists originally published in the Fluxnewsletter. Looking back, Friedman saw the creation of such lists as a way to undermine the power of art world professionals. “It was difficult to find out who was who or to reach others who might share given interests,” he wrote. “It seemed to us that certain individuals at the center of art world media—critics, curators, dealers—could reach anyone, while the rest of us had a hard time finding jealously guarded mailing lists to reach others.” 49 These efforts culminated in the large International Contact List of the Arts of 1972.

Of course, one can argue that mailing lists are mere tools, but the reason that Friedman gives in the quote above suggests otherwise, and so does the work and thinking of another Fluxus associate, French poet Robert Filliou. In 1973, Filliou proposed to redefine the art world as a fête permanente—a permanent celebration—the Eternal Network. The art world, he said, had expanded to such an extent that it had become impossible to know what everyone else was doing, let alone to establish what was avant-garde and what was not.50 A few years later, Filliou would describe the art world as completely decentered and without hierarchies. “Each one of us artistically functions in a network which now has replaced the concept of the avant-garde and which functions in such a way that there is no more art center in the world,” Filliou said. “Where we are is where the things are taking place, and although we may need to meet at times, or to gather information in certain places, the network works on its own.”51 In Filliou’s vision, an art world ruled by the art market would be replaced by an art world based on direct contact between artists; a self supporting, self-organizing system that would stay running once it was set up.

Filliou provided the blueprint of a conceptual space, and the mailing lists provided a practical way to navigate it. Together, lists like Friedman’s International Contact List of the Arts and Filliou’s concept of the Eternal Network laid the foundations for the Mail Art network, an international network of artists who made and exchanged art by means of the mail. Other lists and platforms appeared, and by 1972, calls to contribute to the International Contact List of the Arts began to circulate via other channels. In IAC (International Artists’s Cooperation, published by German artist Klaus Groh) no. 3, one could read: “if you wish that your name and address comes into the international contact artist list, send it to: fluxus west, c.o. ken friedman, 6361 elmhurst drive, san diego, calif. 92120 /usa. now the list has about 100 pages.”

Just as Filliou had proposed, the Mail Art network seemed to run of its own accord after the mechanisms were put in place. This happened in a way that resembles a Flow System.52

49 Ken Friedman, “The Early Days of Mail Art: An Historical Overview,” Eternal Network, ed. Chuck Welch (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1995), 9–10.

50 Robert Filliou, “Research on the Eternal Network,” in Robert Filliou: From Political to Poetical Economy, (Vancouver: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 1995), 8. 51 Robert Filliou on Porta Filliou, 1977 (videotape).

52 Friedman later realized that a networked system could not run on its own energy forever. He came to believe that such systems do not simply organize themselves, while the energy that powers and maintains them requires continual input. Many years later, he explained the

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Friedman himself described the International Contact List of the Arts as a “pure information system enabling any person to contact any listed person for direct and immediate contact” and a “tool for access and communication.”53 In a letter to Higgins, Friedman even described his whole work as “the creation of an entire system of connections and linkages.”54

Friedman started out trying to make sense of the world by arranging parts of it in a new and meaningful manner. After he came into contact with Higgins, Maciunas, and Fluxus he began to phrase and publish his actions in a way that made them available to others. While allowing himself to be influenced by Fluxus, he also put his own stamp on them, connecting them to other networks that looked for alternative ways of navigating the world, both countercultural and religious.

Friedman’s production of single works led to the production of frames and contexts—systems—that invited and enabled others to engage in collective creation. Friedman’s own role changed from artist to facilitator; or rather, he added more roles to that of the artist, creating a hybrid role that spanned a range of functions: artist, worker, public servant, prophet, natural resource, teacher, and therapist. This means that Friedman’s actual role and work would become hard to describe, understand and judge; a general concern during the late 1960s and the 1970s that is perhaps still unresolved.

Concept, Grace, and Revelatory Change

Omaha Flow Systems was a conceptual exhibition, because the conceptual framework was as important as the items shown. Friedman’s event scores exhibitions of the 1970s and 1980s are also conceptual exhibitions in a slightly different sense. As Friedman wrote in Event and Environment: “I began to see that these simple pages [his event scores] not only could convey an idea of a piece, but might themselves serve as the physical body of an exhibition . . . . I realized that the show could as easily tour without me as with me, and could be transported and installed at any location in the world for under $10 in its original form.”55 Here, the instructions are not explicit, but implied in the concept: the score embodies the work, so it does not need to be realized by Friedman himself, and therefore one can just as well display the scores instead of the realized works for which the scores are instructions.

Much later, this practice became a cornerstone of curator Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Do It project (1993–present). Do It consists of a growing collection of instructions by artists, to be realized at the exhibition venue. If a venue wants

challenges and problems of maintaining a network. The 1960s and 1970s were a more hopeful time, an era in which artists often thought that organic growth could outpace the effects of entropy. See: Ken Friedman, “The Wealth and Poverty of Networks,” in At A Distance: Precursors to Internet Art and Activism, ed. Annemarie Chandler and Norie Neumark (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2005), 408–422.

53 Ken Friedman, “Principles of Action,” manuscript for a lecture, quoted in Ravicz, Ken Friedman: The World That Is and the World That Is to Be, 34.

54 Quoted in Ravicz, Ken Friedman: The World That Is and the World That Is to Be, 35. 55 Quoted in Ravicz, Ken Friedman: The World That Is and the World That Is to Be, 57.

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to show Do It, it must agree to six conditions: 1) the venue must realize at least 20 instructions; 2) they must be realized by museum staff or the local community, because realization by the artist would make it an “original” work of art; 3) realizations must be based only on the instructions, not on the knowledge of earlier realizations; 4) realizations and instructions must be destroyed after the show; 5) the components must be returned to their original context; and 6) each realization must be documented. The collection of instructions that forms the basis of Do It includes several pieces by Fluxus artists. Indeed, the show would not have been possible without the groundwork done by Fluxus. However, there is a difference: Do It is a concept with a highly recognizable design based on the color orange, a specific font, et cetera. Exhibition spaces pay a fee to show it, and the rules take the shape of a kind of contract.56 Fluxus event scores, on the other hand, and especially Friedman’s events shows, are based on possibilities rather than obligations and on giving rather than taking. They are inclusive and generous.57 58

Friedman’s conceptual exhibitions came about at a time when curators and dealers were experimenting with alternative ways of presenting art. Fluxus did not feature in their concerns—it was the type of art that today is known as conceptual art that sparked their efforts. Back then, people could not agree on a definition or even a name. Other terms that circulated were idea art, process art, and project art, plus many more. Today, we have a pretty clear picture of Conceptual Art—something with text and photography—but back then, the boundaries between conceptual art, arte povera, land art, and anti-form

56 Hans-Ulrich Obrist, introduction to Do It, exhibition catalog (New York: Independent Curators Incorporated, 1997), 14–15.

57 Friedman’s concept of the work of art is also somewhat different to the premise of Do It. When Marcel Duchamp argued that the work of art requires a viewer to complete the work, he made a statement that effectively means that no work of art exists without a viewer. This, essentially, is the idea that art can only take place at the hermeneutical horizon; art comes into being with the fusion of hermeneutical horizons. For Friedman, “every realization of an event score is an original work of art. While each realization may be different from any other realization, each exists as an original of its own kind. For Friedman, the work exists in at least four forms: the idea, the score, the process of realizing the score, and—in some cases—object or artifact. This object may instantiate the realization of scores that generate objects, or it may instantiate the process in the way that the recording of a symphony instantiates the process of performance.” Ken Friedman, personal communication, email, August 18, 2019. To Friedman, this means that every realization must be an original. Friedman discusses these issues in Ken Friedman, “The Belgrade Text,” Kopernik u Beogradu: Copernicus in Belgrade (Belgrade: Student Cultural Center Gallery, University of Belgrade, 1990); Ken Friedman, “The Belgrade Text,” Ballade, no. 1 (1991), 52–57.

58 Friedman’s ideas on these issues involve what he terms the musicality of Fluxus work. The question is not whether it is an original work of art, but rather, whose original it is. Every realization of Friedman’s scores is an original in the same way that every realization of a musical composition is an original performance, and in much the same way that every realization of a play is an original production. See Ken Friedman, “Fluxus and Company,” in The Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman (London: Academy Press, John Wiley and Sons, 1998), 250–251, digital edition available at URL: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/42234. Friedman even argues that someone else may realize his work better than he does, writing, “The art market is based on physical objects. One of my Friedmans may have greater value than another interpretation. These are open issues: some may find a Ken Friedman realized by John Armleder for the 1974 Geneva show far more interesting than a Ken Friedman that I realize in 1990. For that matter, someone may believe that my work is usually quite dull, and that only John Armleder was ever able to make anything interesting out of it.” See Friedman, “The Belgrade Text,” 56–57.

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were fluid. What was clear was that the new art of the latter half of the 1960s made new demands on exhibition and criticism. This art was time-based, impermanent, and idea-borne, rather than static, object-based, and materially defined.

Within a short span of years, artists, dealers, and curators had invented a new set of exhibition practices that are still part of the standard exhibition toolkit: the on-site creation or installation of artworks, delegation of the production process, artist residencies, incorporation of printed material, use of verbal formats such as talks and seminars, and related approaches. Do It derives at least as much from this lineage as it does from Fluxus. What was once an experimental exhibition practice has now become mainstream.

With art criticism, the case is not quite as clear. As art critic Charles Harrison, who had close ties to the English Art & Language group (part of the conceptual art canon) points out, there is a difference between art that adopts new materials and processes and art that promotes new attitudes. The former can be judged in exactly the same way as art was judged in the 19th century: as a unique product, created by an artist-genius for appreciation by the few who have the connoisseur’s eye that this requires. The product is judged aesthetically, i.e., on the basis of its appearance and its impact on the senses. If Conceptual Art can be said to have had an impact at all, Harrison says—and the implication is that it did—it has to be able to defeat all attempts to judge it in the traditional way. Judging this type of work can never be a matter of sensitivity, even if it is of a different kind. Harrison arrives at the conclusion that it can only be a matter of reading. The viewer, he says, has to act like an “intelligent reader,” that is, the viewer must think about what they are seeing rather than sensing it. Friedman’s work, however, does not promote reading. It wants to make those who come into contact with it realize that there is something worth thinking about.59

When George Maciunas tried to determine what kind of artist Friedman was during their first meeting in August 1966, he decided that Friedman was a concept artist. A concept artist is not the same as a conceptual artist, but the developments of the time nevertheless make it necessary to discuss the two together. Conceptual art won the battle of terms. It came to be used for the type of art that Lucy Lippard describes in her 1973 book Six Years: The Dematerialisation of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972: art “in which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or ‘dematerialized.’”60 Concept art, on the other hand, is “an art of which the material is ‘concepts,’ as the material of, for ex.,

59 Charles Harrison,”Conceptual Art and Critical Judgment,” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 538–545.

60 Lucy Lippard, ed., Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972: A Cross Reference Book of Information on Some Esthetic Boundaries: Consisting of a Bibliography into Which Are Inserted a Fragmented Text, Art Works, Documents, Interviews, and Symposia, Arranged Chronologically and Focused on So-Called Conceptual or Information or Idea Art with Mentions of Such Vaguely Designated Areas as Minimal, Anti-Form, Systems, Earth, or Process Art, Occurring Now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and Asia (with occasional political overtones), edited and annotated by Lucy R. Lippard (New York: Praeger, 1973), vii.

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music is sound”, as philosopher, mathematician, and musician Henry Flynt who coined the term, put it in an eponymous essay from 1961.61

It is easy to see how the two are different: concept art uses concepts as its material, while conceptual art uses other materials, however ephemeral, to express a concept. What Lippard calls the ‘dematerialised’ quality of conceptual art refers to the ephemeral nature of the materials used—but it still needs materials. Concept art, on the other hand, is an art of concepts, an art that does not require any material other than the language by means of which the concept is communicated. The difference has profound consequences for the way the material in question is judged.

Flynt’s twin references in defining concept art are music and mathematics. With regard to music, his argument is that concept- or system-based music (such as serialism) cannot be judged as music because it cannot be “known” through the sonic material alone. Judgment requires knowledge of the system behind it, which means that its material is concepts. With reference to mathematics, he argues that theorems and proofs are not “discovered,” but created.62 Mathematics, as Flynt sees it, is not a matter of finding and expressing pre-existing truths, but a matter of formulating concepts. In both cases, concepts exist without external references, so the only judgment they can be subjected to is aesthetic. Concepts are treated as interesting and enjoyable in their own right, and that means that the term “art” is applicable.

A central notion in Flynt’s aesthetic thinking is the just-liked. In a 1968 text titled Art or Brend?, he points out an inherent contradiction in the argument that the existence of art can be justified by the fact that it is liked.63 Liking, Flynt says, is entirely subjective, whereas art is an object that can exist without the individual subject. In reality, liking only takes place in spontaneous self amusement or play, where “you are not aware that the object you value is less personal to you than your very valuing.”64 The subjective act of liking comes first, and the object is secondary. In an essay from 1962 called “My New Concept of General Acognitive Culture,” he describes the just-liked as “what one would have done, would do, is doing, ‘anyway,’” that is, before one has

61 Henry Flynt, “Concept Art,” in An Anthology of Chance Operations, Concept Art, Anti-Art, Indeterminacy, Improvisations, Meaningless Work, Natural Disasters, Plans of Action, Mathematics, Poetry, Essays by George Brecht, Claus Bremer, Earle Brown, Joseph Byrd, John Cage, David Degener, Walter de Maria, Henry Flynt, Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Terry Jennings, Dennis, Ding Dong, Ray Johnson, Jackson Mac Low, Richard Maxfield, Robert Morris, Simone Morris, Nam June Paik, Terry Riley, Diter Rot, James Waring, Emmett Williams, Christian Wolff, edited by La Monte Young and designed by George Maciunas (New York: La Monte Young & Jackson Mac Low,1963), n.p. 62 This proposition has been the subject of philosophical debate for centuries. Mathematician and philosopher Reuben Hersh offers a lucid summary in chapter five of What is Mathematics, Really?, in the section headed ”Creating-Discovering,” concluding ”Is mathematics created or discovered? Both, in a dialectical interaction and alternation. This is not a compromise; it is a reinterpretation and synthesis.” Reuben Hersh, What is Mathematics, Really? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 75.

63 Henry Flynt, Art or Brend, pamphlet, 1968. Text available at Henry Flynt ”Philosophy” web site, http://www.henryflynt.org/aesthetics/artbrend.html.

64 Henry Flynt, Art or Brend, pamphlet, 1968. Text available at Henry Flynt ”Philosophy” web site, http://www.henryflynt.org/aesthetics/artbrend.html.

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decided whether it is the right thing to do by any set of standards.65 This gives an essential twist to the idea of concept art. For Flynt, concepts can only be enjoyed as art if they are enjoyed anyway, without thinking about their use, without thinking that saying you like them can help your image, and without any ulterior motive.

According to Lippard, on the other hand, there is not much to “like” about conceptual art. In a 1971 article on “The dematerialisation of art,” two years prior to Six Years, she writes that it “upsets detractors because there is ‘not enough to look at’ or rather not enough of what they are accustomed to looking for.”66 Such works demand that the viewer spend a longer time looking, while at the same time the time spent looking will feel longer. What she implies is that the viewer has to want to understand them, rather than simply liking them. However, Lippard goes on to claim that there is a different aesthetic at play, an aesthetic of principle. Lippard chooses a reference to physics rather than mathematics. Quoting scientists who claim to see the elegance and beauty of nature in their work lead her to the conclusion that order itself involves the implicit aesthetic criteria of simplicity and unity. The difference in terms of criticism or judgment is that the viewer must think about what he or she sees rather than weighing the emotional impact of the work.

When trying to express what makes an artwork important in a text from 1970, Friedman used the word grace. An important work of art “is possessed of a telling power, moving, mellow of its own accord”—it has grace. A work that has grace is simple, austere; it avoids “the over-done, the half-baked.”67 However, it is impossible to describe how it comes about. One can conclude that it is there, but only by purely personal standards. “At the end, as at the beginning,” Friedman writes, “it is the responsibility of each person to meet with the work and thus to experience. Only through this meeting will come the bridge of power and grace which serves to clarify the issues of greatest importance.”68

To the unprepared reader, Friedman’s words sound distinctly modernist and traditional, almost 19th century. Art, he seems to say, is a matter of connoisseurship; and it does not help at all that his use of the word grace carries strong echoes of a canonic piece of Modernist art criticism: Michael Fried’s essay from 1967 titled “Art and Objecthood.” In that essay, the concept of grace plays a key role.69

The last sentence of Fried’s article is “Presentness is grace.” Grace can both mean elegance and salvation, but in Fried’s article the religious overtones are unmistakable: it begins with an epigraph excerpted from an essay about

65 Henry Flynt, “My New Concept of General Acognitive Culture,” décollage No. 3 (1962), n.p. 66 Lucy R. Lippard, “The Dematerialisation of Art,” in Changing: Essays in Art Criticism (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Incl, 1971), 257.

67 Ken Friedman, ”Some Investigations,” The Aesthetics (Devon, England: Beau Geste Press, 1973), 14.

68 Friedman, ”Some Investigations,” 14.

69 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood. Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 148–172.

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theologian Jonathan Edwards, which assures the reader that “we every moment see the same proof of a God as we should have seen if we had seen Him create the world at first.”70 Between the quote and his concluding words on grace, Fried makes an argument for the possibility of seeing something revealed in its entirety in an instant, as opposed to exploring it gradually over time. It is, once again, art criticism that is at stake. Does the aesthetic experience come in a flash of understanding, or can it also manifest itself when exploring an object over time, in real space? Existence in real space and time is a vital characteristic of the new art forms of the time. According to Fried, the work’s existence in the same space and time as the viewer—which he calls presentness—means the death of art. Art can only be experienced as presence, in a revelatory flash.

This quasi-religious understanding of the art experience is at odds with both Flynt’s idea of the just-liked—which is also instantaneous, but personal rather than transcendent—and Lippard’s and Harrison’s insistence on reading, which happens over time and in the reader’s own time and space. But how does it relate to Friedman’s notion of grace? According to Peter Frank, Maciunas’s reason for calling Friedman a concept artist was Friedman’s focus on “revelation and human growth to heightened awareness of all kinds”— “intellectual, aesthetic, spiritual, physical, social, political and more.”71 “Maciunas saw the concept of revelatory change as the core of Friedman’s work,” Frank writes.72 This is certainly in tune with what Friedman himself has written about it. In “Creativity, Conscience, and Art,” for example, he says that “the artist has not only professional and commercial relationship to the world about, but a spiritual or cultural relationship.”73 For Friedman, the artist is not simply an artist. His or her role requires more than making and selling works of art. The artist is part of a community and owes it to that community to share his or her findings.

Friedman does not mention criticism or judgment in “Creativity, Conscience, and Art,” but elsewhere he suggests that the way to judge this type of work is by the degree to which it serves the community. His art, he says, as well as that of his peers, is not designed to be seen as objects to be hung on a wall or placed on a pedestal, but as educational, social, communicative, transactional processes. Social action and participation replace aesthetic pleasure.74 This is a different criterion than what had been suggested by Lippard and Harrison. Both refer to the ability of the work to involve the viewer as a critical reader. Lippard refers to the simplicity and unity of systems as well.

However, this seems to be at odds with Flynt’s understanding of the art aspect of concept art as residing in the appreciation of concepts for their own sake. Flynt’s definition requires the absence of an external cause or justification, while Friedman’s remarks suggest that the opposite is the case in his work.

70 Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (New York: W. Sloane Associates, 1949), 329. 71 Frank, “Ken Friedman: A Life in Fluxus,” 152.

72 Frank, “Ken Friedman: A Life in Fluxus,” 152.

73 Ken Friedman, “Creativity, Conscience, and Art,” in The Aesthetics (Devon, England: Beau Geste Press, 1973), 50–55.

74 Ken Friedman, “Principles of Action,” unpublished, undated typescript, quoted in Ravicz, Ken Friedman: The World That Is and the World That Is to Be, 34.

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The answer is implicit in Frank’s formulation “the concept of revelatory change.”75 Friedman’s actions, event scores, and organizational activities imply alternatives and possibilities. Judging them for what they are rather than for what they might become means missing a significant part of the point. The educational, social, communicative, and transactional aspects of his work cannot be judged solely on the basis of its impact here and now, but on the possibilities that they create for effects in the future.

These works address the viewer in a certain way here and now, but they strike him or her because they show a glimpse of a different future. Grace, as Friedman describes it, is “like the legendary snake: it raises its head to strike at the right moment.”76 It is the realization that something is important—not interesting, not enjoyable, but important—and the touchstone of importance is the future.

The moment that Friedman refers to with the word grace is the moment of being struck right now by the implications a thing has for the future. What Frank calls “the concept of revelatory change” is not something that can be judged by the rules of art, religion, or politics as they apply now, but only as a

glimpse caught by the viewer, reader, or participant of rules that may apply in times to come. It is a declaration followed by a realization: a “Whoa!” followed by an “I need to think about this.”

Conclusion: 1973–1983, 2009, 2019…

Friedman’s life charts a development from Fluxus’s flows to Flow Systems, from flows to revelatory change, and from Fried to Friedman. Even so, it is impossible to summarize Friedman’s work by means of these developments. Neither can we sandwich it between an ad read in 1966 and an ad placed in 1972, as the introduction might suggest. If Friedman’s work is about communication—and if the way to judge it is by reference to its implications— it does not simply have a meaning in itself. Its meaning is only complete in its context. To judge the work in its time means placing it in the context in which it emerged. But if context has an impact on meaning, meanings change over time.

Friedman’s work was certainly relevant in the second half of the 1960s and the 1970s. It suited the anti-authoritarian spirit of the times by reducing the role of the artist and empowering the audience. The score format was relevant on similar grounds, defying the status of art as a rare commodity and making it available to many. The stress it places on the contribution of the individual participant resonates with the idea that no single profession has the right to monopolize creativity. Creativity is a general human trait and exercising creativity is a human right. The spirit of generosity in which Friedman made his work available to individuals and institutions matched the widespread spirit of the times. The ephemeral character of the work, which made it so transportable, resonated with the wish to create understanding between humans across national and ideological borders. One could go on.

75 Frank, “Ken Friedman: A Life in Fluxus,” 152.

76 Ken Friedman, “Some Investigations,” 14.

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Certain key concepts remain. The accessibility, mobility, and generosity of these works is still recognizable. However, the world has changed, and with it the connotations that such concepts carry. Accessibility is something entirely different in times of Internet access; not just in terms of technology—the Internet gives much easier access to documents than printing and the mail ever could—but in conceptual terms as well. Mobility means something entirely different in a globalized world and a world where job mobility is considered vital. Even Friedman’s change of role from artist to artist, prophet, therapist, teacher, natural resource, and public servant has different connotation in a time when so many workers have multiple roles, holding several jobs at once or working as multi-hyphenated employees whose jobs hold so many components that they are impossible to summarize in a single job title.

That the same thing can have different meanings in different contexts is visible in Friedman’s own biography. In 1971, when Friedman had been active as an artist for four years, he received his MA in interdisciplinary studies in education, psychology, and social science at San Francisco State University. Five year later, he was awarded a Ph.D. in Human Behavior, writing his thesis on the sociology of art. He became Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Contemporary Art, San Diego, and during the mid-1980s, he was President of the Art Economist Corporation in New York.

In the 1990s, Friedman added the field of design to his work in organization and behavior, first as Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design at the Norwegian School of Management in Oslo and professor at the Danish Design School in Copenhagen. In 2007, Loughborough University awarded Friedman an honorary D.Sc. degree. Later that year, he was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Design at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. He served as University Distinguished Professor at Swinburne, where he is now Professor Emeritus. Today, he is Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies at Tongji University in Shanghai. In the background, Friedman has remained quietly active as an artist.

There are always several roads open. Friedman could have decided he was an artist and only that, limiting his activities to the art world. Because he always regarded his work as multidisciplinary, it was natural to conclude that activities in the art world could be relevant in the worlds of design, innovation, sociology, education, and leadership. Friedman went further, working in these other worlds as a professor and university leader. Historically, as well as professionally, a change of context means new relevance.

From 1973 until the present, many shows have had the title “Ken Friedman: Events” or variations on that theme. The “Events” exhibition tour started with Ken Friedman: A Perspective Exhibition at the Nelson I.C. Gallery at the University of California in Davis in 1973. It traveled to over 30 venues in North America and Europe between 1973 and 1983, close to 40 if one includes appearances within a larger exhibition. It was shown at art galleries as well as artist-driven exhibition spaces, in peripheral locations as well as in such

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central art world venues as PS1 in New York, now part of the Museum of Modern Art.

In 2009, when Friedman turned 60, the events were shown again at the Stendhal Gallery in New York. Many of the works that were shown, were the same—but their relevance was different at each venue, each time, for each visitor. Like an advertisement page, the works speak of the intentions of their originator and the needs and desires of their readers; and like an ad page, whichever way they are combined, it is always the reader who connects them, judges their relevance, and chooses where to focus.

Exhibition View of 92 Events | Exhibition Guide to 92 Events | Friedman essays on 92 Events | Ken Friedman 92 Events exhibition main page | Six Philosophical Events 2021