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 van der Meijden. Meaningful Activity, Scores, and Communication.200124 . 1 

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.

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