Press Release

Ken Friedman

99 Events

Works on Paper

Stendhal Gallery
September 10, 2009 – October 10, 2009

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.

Harry Stendhal

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