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Fine Art PR Publicity Announcements News and Information

99 Events: Ken Friedman Solo Exhibition At Stendhal Gallery Chelasea, New York

Stendhal Gallery is proud to announce 99 Events, an exhibition of work by Fluxus artist Ken Friedman. 99 Events is a selection of printed and handwritten scores Friedman created over the span of a long and versatile career.

Ken Friedman has worked in fields and disciplines including art, design, management, and economics. He embodies the Fluxus spirit with his multi-disciplinary record and interdisciplinary creativity. He lives out the promise of an art seamlessly integrated into life with the aim of harnessing creative and novel approaches to problems facing the world.

Like fellow Fluxus artists George Brecht, Yoko Ono, and La Monte Young, Friedman’s event scores explore the interstice between document, performance, and object. They epitomize the concept of Fluxus as a laboratory for exploring important questions about social networks, design, and the flow of useful information. These questions have profound and far-reaching relevance across different fields of inquiry. What makes Friedman’s scores unique is a quality of research that aims at discovery rather than exhibition.

Friedman’s scores operate as open invitations with scripts for actions to enact or objects to assemble. They explore how people will react to reading them, manifesting ideas and changing over the course of time. Instead of operating within the autonomous realm of art, Friedman’s events explicitly question the constitution of the communities within which they operate, exploring questions of productive generation in these communities. One obvious aspect of this is the wide range cultural references within Friedman’s scores, with some scores referencing different cultures and others paying tribute to artists, philosophers, or scientists.

Friedman has been an integral part of the fluxus movement that forever changed the notion of what constitutes art, questioning and seeking to change the relationship of art to society with the aim towards exploring how each could affect the other. His work has been shown in such major international museums and galleries as the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, Guggenheim Museum, The Royal Academy, the Hood Museum of Art, and Stadtsgalerie Stuttgart.

Stendhal Gallery exhibition will consist of printed scores produced in an edition of ten, and one-of-a-kind handwritten scores and collages. 99 Events opens on September 10, 2009 and will be on display through October 10th.

Notes

Ken Friedman began conducting what he would retrospectively realize were ‘events’ before he was aware of Fluxus. Even at a young age, performing idiosyncratic tasks and realizing small projects was a mode of inquiry into the world for Friedman. Reflecting the naturalness of these inquiries, Friedman says, “I simply built things, realized ideas, or made models of things that interested me. Many of them were acts that I repeated, much as I did after meeting other Fluxus people.”

In 1959, George Brecht conceived of the term ‘event’ to describe simple scripted actions realized by artists and others. Many were inspired by John Cage’s notion of ‘scoring’ notations of actions and interventions into ‘real life’. Artists such as Brecht, Yoko Ono, La Monte Young, Dick Higgins and Ben Vautier pioneered the event score as a means of expanding notions of art and performance. In accord with Dick Higgins’s thesis of the ‘intermedia’ character of Fluxus, these scores interweave the disciplines of visual art, poetry, music and performance.

Fluxus founder George Maciunas initiated Friedman into Fluxus at the age of sixteen, when the Fluxus impresario declared the young student a ‘concept artist’, asking him to join Fluxus after Friedman showed Maciunas his score/object piece Open and Shut Case. Friedman was thus initiated into the avant-garde art world of the 1960s even before he had begun to consider himself an artist.

As Friedman says in his essay “Do It Yourself”, event scores can produce a variable number of ‘artifacts’, both physical and behavioural. As contrasted with Yoko Ono’s whimsical scores that tend to evoke thoughts in the reader’s mind. Friedman’s scores often prompt the reader to physically enact the tasks they enumerate, often creating objects in the process. Yet despite this connection to the physical, the emphasis of Friedman’s scores has to do with what Friedman calls “communities within groups that shape cultures through behaviour, enactment, and shared social patterns.”

Friedman had his first solo exhibition in New York in 1966. He later workes as the General Manager of the Fluxus publishing firm Something Else Press. He would go on to complete graduate degrees at such institutions as San Francisco State University and the United States International University. Throughout his various endeavours and courses of study, the event score continued to be one of Friedman’s preferred modes of exploration.

Friedman has worked across several fields and disciplines including art, design, management, and economics. Rather than conduct an autonomous art practice separate from a career as a designer and scholar, Friedman has integrated his artwork into research in several fields, displaying true Fluxus ingenuity. An expert in several fields with a particular focus on design research, Friedman has spoken and taught at many institutions and conferences around the world. In 1994, he became a professor at the Norwegian School of Management in Oslo. In 2007, he was appointed a Dean at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. He holds several prestigious academic honors for his novel work, including a Doctor of Science degree, honoris causa, from Loughborough University.

Stendhal Gallery is one of the leading contemporary galleries in Chelsea New York. It has been in business since 1990. Stendhal Gallery specializes in the Fluxus movement of the 1960s.