The Question: “What is authorship?”
A 60-year survey of work by the U.S.-born, Sweden-based Fluxus artist Ken Friedman. This is his first solo exhibition in Maryland.
Friedman produces conceptual, action-oriented, language-based works. For this exhibition, 50 instructional texts line the gallery walls. Each instruction, or “event score” as they are called, is simultaneously a sculptural proposition, an invitation to perform an absurdist action, and concrete poetry. The works can exist as they are, or they can be realized in the minds or hands of viewers. And because they have all been performed before, they are equally relics of the past and invitations from the future, operating in a suspended state of possibility with endless potential for variation.
In addition to Friedman’s scores, this exhibition includes interpretations of his work by Maryland-based cultural workers Austin Sposato with Chip Noland, David and Tara Gladden, Eric Leshinsky, Leslie Rose, Robert Haywood, Robert W. Madden, Roderick Mincher, Ruben Dobbs (filmed by Alison Harbaugh), Sammy Young, Tom Levine, and Wilfredo Valladares.
