by Ken Friedman

According to the dictionary, an event is, among other things, ‘2 a: something that happens: OCCURRENCE, b: a noteworthy happening, c: a social occasion or activity. 3: any of the contests in a program of sports. 4: the fundamental entity of observed physical reality represented by a point designated by three coordinates of place and one of time in the space-time continuum postulated by the theory of relativity. 5: a subset of the possible outcomes of an experiment’.

The term was used by the first generation of artists to work with intermedia and concept art. The term went back to the late 1950s. The artists and composers who coalesced around John Cage’s composition courses at The New School for Social Research used the term event. They applied it to the context of art and music and the boundary-spanning intermedia work that they were developing. The word event came to identify the concise kind of process piece that could be represented in the equally concise form of a score, an idea taken from musical notation and stretched to embody text notes for the realization of intermedia and conceptual art. While events were visible by the 1960s, their use was common only among the international community of artists, architects, composers, and designers known as Fluxus.

Dick Higgins — a Cage student and co-founder of Fluxus — once wrote that events ‘came to be conceptually framed as a sort of cognate of happenings’, which were new at the time — that is, intermedial, free-form pieces which lay conceptually among the bounds of music, theater and visual art’. And that ‘Events differed from happenings in that they were always as compressed as possible, minimal statements that would provide a mental or emotional impact. But, of course, they were highly abstract’.

One of the salient features of the event was the principle I later named musicality. Musicality in art refers to an artwork that, like music, can be realized by someone other than the artist or composer who creates it.

Most of the early event scores were created for work that was to be performed. The musical lineage was clear. Over the years, however, a number of scores emerged that were created for realization of physical objects or environments. One aspect that all scores have in common is that anyone can realize the works they propose. In this, the performance scores and the object scores share the quality of musicality. George Brecht’s Two Elimination Events of 1961 can be realized as a performance or an environment. If one takes the word empty as a verb, it is a performance. If the piece is, instead, a description of two empty vessels, it is an installation. The score to my 1965 object Open and Shut Case — produced in 1966 as my first Fluxus edition — is the score for an object that contains the performance score it instructs the reader to perform.

It was in 1966 that I first began to work with the issue of musicality. Dick Higgins sent me to meet George Maciunas and I became active in Fluxus. George explained the concept of the score to me, and encouraged me to begin writing out the projects and ideas that I had previously realized withhout thinking of them as art or music. The concept made sense to me. I had not thought of these activities as art or music, but rather as a form of philosophical investigation. Even so, I realized many of my investigations repeatedly, as one might repeat music, and in variation, as one might vary music.

Musicality was implicit in this work, but not all of us set out to achieve musicality. It grew from the conditions within which we were working. For many years, the conditions that led to the creation of scored works seemed so apparent to me that it didn’t seem necessary to discuss them. The obvious often hides the significant, however, and changing conditions in recent years have sharpened my focus on the concept of musicality.

The issue of musicality has fascinating implications. The mind and intention of the creator are the essential elements in the work. The issue of the hand is only germane insofar as the skill of rendition affects the work. In many conceptual works, this is irrelevant. Musicality is linked to experimentalism and the scientific method. Experiments operate in the same manner. Any scientist must be able to reproduce the work of any other scientist for an experiment to be reproducible and valid.

Musicality is an important concept in Fluxus. Musicality means that anyone can play the music. If deep engagement with the music, with the spirit of the music is the central focus of this criterion, then musicality may be the central concept in Fluxus. It is central to Fluxus because it embraces so many other issues and concepts. It exemplifies the social radicalism of Maciunas’s idea that the individual artist takes a secondary role to the concept of artistic practice in society. It activates the social activism of Beuys’s declaration that we are all artists. It generalizes Knizak’s practice of social creativity, opening art into society. It embraces Higgins’s radical intellectualism. It makes experimental art possible as a research practice, and it is medium for the communication of ideas in the laboratory of artistic experimentation. All of these meanings and more appear in musicality.

Getting Into Events

Fluxus event scores have several features that distinguish them from those art forms to which they bear a relationship. Their musicality lies in the ability of anyone to perform the work from the notation rather than the idea of virtuous performance.

Fluxus events can be performed in many styles. Some works do lend themselves to virtuoso or bravura style. One example is Dick Higgins’s metadrama, How Nemo Got Honored in His Patria. Others are best realized straight-out, with the unvarnished, direct style that many Fluxists prefer. Robert Bozzi’s Choices seem to work particularly well this way:

Events can be given a fast pace, jamming each piece into the minimal time possible. A concert or performance of several events can often gain good effect by using a number of short, fast-paced events in sequence. Alternatively, concerts shift pace and rhythm, balancing swift pieces with slow, meditative events to achieve a different kind of rhythm.

Some events require hours to perform. Others, such as George Brecht’s Three Lamp Events, are over in seconds. Most often, the performers can shift the nature of the performance by using the flexible parameters of time. Ben Vautier’s Monochrome for Yves Klein shows how the same basic idea can be reinterpreted for a piece that might run anywhere between two or three minutes and half an hour. Events can have powerful torque, energized and dramatic, as in the some of Milan Knizak’s ritual pieces. These ritual pieces can also verge on the earthy and folkloric sensibility seen in Bengt af Klintberg’s Calls.

Whichever attitude, whatever style, the artists who created the event works are the composers of these pieces. When a Fluxus artist performs a Fluxus event, it’s like Bach playing Bach or Copeland conducting Copeland. The work is embodied in the notation. It is open to many interpretations. The creator need not be present for a valid interpretation to be realized.

Musicality Contrasted to Signature Art

The distinction between musicality and a painterly sensibility is important in understanding events. Performance art is signature art. The creator realizes performance personally, and without the artist, the work is no longer itself. Only Beuys could do a Beuys performance. The same was generally true of happenings. Only Vostell could do a Vostell happening. Some Fluxus artists, Knizak and Higgins among them, created happenings as well as events. Their event scores are open to all. Their happenings were essentially restricted to creation under their personal guidance.

Another important aspect of the event is its philosophical basis. One may perform an event, realize it, and follow through a notation to develop physical objects and processes or, perhaps, just think about it. Each of these avenues of realization and perception is equally valid. Each has its unique rewards and benefits. In annotated, contemplated form, you can carry a great many concerts and exhibitions in your pocket. In realized, physical form, you can turn a few notes and scores into an evening of meditation, an evening of entertainment, or even a museum filled with physical projects. The event structure allows for all these.

Working from Scores

The idea of musicality in visual art and intermedia implies several issues. It means that a work begins as an idea that is transmitted through a score. It means that the work resides in the idea, in the score and in the realized project — equally present in each. It means that a realized project is only one interpretation. Moreover, it means that any work may have several valid interpretations.

The process of scoring, of notation, was rooted in music, but the score offered a way to transmit non-musical art forms, a system for encoding, recording and transmitting art forms that wandered across the boundaries of music, theater, daily life and visual art, sometimes summed up under the term intermedia. For some artists, this system of transmitting work became a standard working method, through editions and multiples, collections of scores, festival working sheets and other documents. Early definitions of concept art stressed the idea-based foundation of the work. This, in turn, suggested the issue of musicality, and the artists who worked in intermedia and concept art in the early 1960s understood this. The score became a prime characteristic of their work.

The score offered a useful framework for many divergent ways of making art. By the end of the 60s, the term concept art was conflated into and obscured behind the term conceptual art. The single-genre visual art background of most conceptual artists also obscured the intermedia background and musical involvement of the artists who had been engaged in this kind of work since the late 1950s and early 1960s. The process of scoring, of musical notation, was a common feature linking the work of these artists.

From its basis in music in the strict sense, the idea of score in its extended form gave rise to the issue of musicality in an extended sense. This extension has important implications. The first of these implications is that the work may exist as work in several forms:

- as an idea

- as a score

- as a process of realization

- as an object

Each of these forms has value and meaning. The idea is pure, simple, and inexpensive. It is easy to store, but difficult to preserve. Ideas are subject to change, to memory loss, to message failure and to interference. Ideas requre a physical medium for transmission, even if only a voice, a pen or a telephone.

The score reduces the possibility of change, memory loss, message failure, and interference, while remaining cost effective. Even so, storage creates physical requirements as the price of preservation. While a score may be preserved exactly, the challenge of interpretation remains open, and with it, the possibility of multiple interpretations or even of misinterpretation.

The process of realization offers yet another way of understanding works. In orchestral music, theatrical or time-based arts, experiencing the process of realization in live enactment or recorded performance is the preferred way to experience the work. The experience of live or recorded enactment offers the most complete possible realization of an interpretation. The disadvantages of this process are linked to time-bound features. Before the age of recordings, no experience could be repeated. Even in the age of recordings, the ability to experience several aspects of a piece at once or in comparison remains difficult, made possible only by expensive equipment. In contrast, ideas, scores, or objects may easily be compared and considered at the same time.

Creating live performance is time-consuming and often expensive. Creating and storing the process of realized enactment in recorded form is expensive and capital-intensive. This brings the challenge of recording and playback media into focus. Individual recordings with storage and playback units are generally no problem in the industrial world. Making them, however, requires the kind of advanced technological society that can spread investment and effort over thousands of financiers and industrialists, millions of producers and billions of consumers. Logistics, transportation, storage, presentation, and related issues provide their own difficulties for art forms not traditionally seen as time-based. These include the forms of object making and presentation now summed up under terms such as process art and arte povera.

The object is another form. We all understand objects or we think that we do. Many feel that the interpretation frozen in an object is the interpretation chosen by the artist. On another level, any object obscures the myriad possibilities that are rejected when the object takes final form. The object suggests an aura of permanence. It hides the process of its own making and it evades the issue of process that it requires to find its final shape. Storage, transportation, and physical change remain problems. This is also true of objects left behind by the process of realization through enactment, such as recordings.

Implications of the Score

Many artists now use scores in works that reflect the spirit of musicality. Many find these basic implications acceptable. I believe that musicality has richer and deeper implications.

To understand the potential of score-based work, it’s useful to consider how music is transmitted and performed. The composer creates the score. When the score leaves the composer’s hand in published form, the composer has little control over the way the music is realized or interpreted. During the period covered by copyright, anyone has the right to perform the music with proper notification and on payment of fees and royalties. Not even that much is required after the copyright expires.

To compose is to give up certain rights. One right that a composer loses is the right of absolute control over the use and interpretation of the work.

In score-based work, the artist must naturally give up a certain element of control. Certain issues fall under the scope of moral rights in copyright jurisdiction or art law. Barring violation of those rights, score-based work inevitably opens a wide opportunity for variant interpretations. The only right that cannot be stripped away is the right of authorship. While the creator may wish to disavow badly realized work from time to time, the work must be acknowledged even if only to acknowledge a bad realization as a bad realization.

Interpreting Events

Many events can be realized or experienced in all four ways, as idea, score, process, and as object. My own events emerge from the twin dialect of reflection and involvement. I came to join Fluxus when Dick Higgins and George Maciunas saw in what I was doing a sensibility akin to their own. What I had been doing up to that time were ‘events’, that is, physical events or actions in time and space. I had not done them as an artist, but in response to ideas and situations. The idea of the event has a rich history in human culture going back several millennia. It is possible to trace the lineage of the idea and to offer early cognate examples of events from many cultures. Jerome Rothenberg does this in his monumental anthology, Technicians of the Sacred. The event goes back thousands of years in human history and considerations of the event will be taking place for at least a few years into the future. This article, however, will soon end. I will close with four examples from my own work.

These events move from physical realizations to evanescent ideas. The first is an object, the second a process, the third a score, and the fourth idea.

Light Table works especially well as an object. It erases the boundaries between art and life when used at dinner.

Light Table

Set a table with many candles of different kinds… thick, thin, tall, short, votary candles, candelabra, and more.

(c) Ken Friedman, 1965

My first event, Scrub Piece, was a process event. I first realized it as a youngster. At the time, it was life, and not part of the idea of art that I was to begin working with a decade later.

Scrub Piece

On the first day of Spring, go unannounced to a public monument. Clean it thoroughly.

(c) Ken Friedman, 1956

(First performed at the Nathan Hale Monument. New London, Connecticut. Spring 1956.)

My contribution to the Biennale of Paris in 1971 was a score that works especially well as an intermedium between process and idea was.

The Distance from this Sentence to Your Eye is My Sculpture.

Produce a surface or an object bearing the text.

The distance from this sentence to your eye is my sculpture.

(c) Ken Friedman, 1971

This work was first realized at the VII Biennale of Paris as a sign posted on a wall. It may be inscribed in or on any kind of surface. Since 1971, it has been executed in numerous versions, appearing in exhibitions, publications, and broadcast, as well as in the form of rubber stamps and prints.

Here, we reach the idea.