1) Canada, 2) Geoffrey Hendricks, 3) Archives, 4) Artist and Critics
Never seem to catch up with my email. Been working on a book. Fitful,
sluggish, terrible process.
Samuel Johnson once said, "No one but a blockhead ever wrote, except for
money." I believe it to be true, and I have concluded that I am a
blockhead, since the kinds of things I write deal with ideas and rarely
make money.
Several questions and notes recently posted call for answers. Here are four
short answers:
1) I was in Canada in 1972. Spent three or four months altogether. First,
six weeks in Vancouver with the Image Bank people before Western Front
existed. Did an exhibition at Vancouver Art Gallery titled Ken Friedman and
Friends in Process. Spent six weeks at University of Saskatchewan at Regina
as visiting artist in the post of something titled "Special Substitute
Sessional Lecturer." Finished the manuscript of my first book, The
Aesthetics, later published in a more elegant edition by Beau Geste Press.
While at Saskatchewan, also completed the first global edition of the
Fluxus and Friends mailing list and directory.
The list began in 1966, when Fluxus West began publishing lists of the
people with whom we had contact. By 1972, it included over a thousand names
and addresses around the world, published in an edition entitled An
International Contact List of the Arts. During the 1970s, that list was the
starting point of projects such as Giancarlo Politi's Art Diary and it was
used for the first editions of FILE Magazine. We also provided information
to reference books and research projects. Among the well-known reference
books that drew on our research were Who's Who in America, Who's Who in
American Art, Contemporary Artists and several others.
By 1978, the list contained over 5,000 individuals in many fields of art
but it no longer focused on Fluxus and intermedia. By the early 1980s, so
many people were publishing lists and creating information services that I
saw no need to continue.
During that time, I introduced many the people in Canada to other people in
the Fluxus network. They knew some already, of course, at least by mail.
The people at Western Front fell in love with Robert Filliou. His easygoing
style and charming, intelligent work suited them beautifully.
An entirely different group of Canadian artists in Quebec has been working
with Dick Higgins, Eric Andersen, Alison Knowles, and others in a regular
series of festivals, performances, exhibitions and so on. I'm not well
acquainted with them, though I'd often hear from Dick that he was going to
or coming from Quebec. Dick died while attending one of those festivals. He
was very fond of Quebec and his Canadian friends.
2) Terrence Kosick probably means Geoffrey Hendricks.
3) According to Webster's an archive is "a place where public records or
historical documents are preserved." The Greek root of the word emphasizes
its public and official nature, descended from the Greek word archeion
meaning "government house" and related to the Greek word "arche" for rule
or government. The archon was the chief magistrate of ancient Athens or a
presiding officer. An archive was a repository of documents and rulings.
In the early days of mail art, many artists became aware of Hanns Sohm's
fabulous Archiv Sohm, and they liked the idea of an archive. It became the
custom among mail art practitioners to label their personal collection of
correspondence an archive. Most artists do not understand the distinction
between a collection and an archive, or between their personal papers and
an archive.
This distinction lies in three issues. First, an archive generally involves
a rather massive collection developed over time. Second, an archive is
generally collected or organized according to some principle. Third, an
archive is generally organized with the intention of permitting research or
historical scholarship of some kind.
Some artists have collected and organized archives, not merely of their own
work, but of groups of artists with whom they interact. The papers of
Something Else Press and later Dick Higgins's papers constituted such an
archive. It should be noted that Dick welcomed scholars and gave free
access to this material to scholars who visited him to work with or copy
these papers.
Fluxus West had an extensive archive. While not as well organized as
Dick's, our holdings were massive. These are now distributed to several
museum and university archive collections, primarily to the Alternative
Traditions in Contemporary Art at University of Iowa. For various reasons,
we also made substantial gifts of books to the Whitney Museum of American
Art, Portland College of Art, several foreign universities. We also gave
collections of books and papers to the Tate Gallery Archives, Franklin
Furnace Archive (now housed at the Museum of Modern Art), and to Archiv
Sohm (now housed at Stadtsgalerie Stuttgart) and to the Archives of
American Art. During much of the 1960s and early 1970s, we also acquired
large stocks of material that Hanns Sohm requested for Archiv Sohm, not
only in Fluxus, but intermedia, happenings, American art, beat culture,
underground press, and other counterculture areas. We also made substantial
gifts of art books and reference books to a number of additional colleges
and universities, generally the kinds of material that were valuable to
small art schools or colleges that would merely duplicate the resources of
the great art library at Iowa. This included such things as complete or
nearly complete runs of American art magazines, widely published art books,
standard reference books and the like.
In addition to archival documents, research materials and books, there were
extensive collections of art that now belong to Alternative Traditions and
the University of Iowa Museum of Art, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth
College, the Tate, the Henie Onstad Art Center in Hovikodden (Norway) near
Oslo, and a few others.
To give an idea of the extent of the archival holdings, over the years we
probably had nearly 10,000 volumes of books, boxed, shelved, stored, and
stacked everywhere. The archival collections, properly organized, now
consume many dozens of archival shelf-feet.
Scholars occasionally came to visit, but they were generally bewildered by
the lack of organization. I was never good at filing, and papers just
rather flowed everywhere. Even so, the archives provided basic research
resources for a number of research projects and books. Visiting scholars
and experienced librarians or archivists loved to visit. On the other hand,
museum directors and curators used to seeing things organized well would
just lave shaking their heads. Unable to see the treasures beneath the
chaos, they often seemed to think that I was merely an eccentric pack rat.
Then, too, that's what people often said of the well-organized Hanns Sohm
or equally well structured Jean Brown.
Jean Brown is a great example of a true archivist collector. She was
trained as a librarian. She and her husband Leonard were long interested in
modern art. They had a wonderful collection of paintings, drawings, and
multiples by major modern artists from Duchamp, Picabia, and Ernst to
Pollock and Christo. They began to collect archival materials and
publications of Dada with her husband Leonard after Leonard's heart attack.
In the early 70s, she made Hanns Sohm's acquaintance and anted to know more
about Fluxus. Hanns sent her to me. I went to stay with her during the
summer of 1972 and got her started on what became a significant Fluxus
collection. I also introduced her by telephone to George Maciunas. George
became her dear friend and close colleague. She used the big Fluxus list
diligently and developed one of the truly fine archival collections, now
housed at the Getty Institute for the Arts and Humanities.
Some artist's papers are massive enough to constitute archives, but often
lack the organizational structure (even the loose structure we had) or the
accessibility to scholarship. These are not, properly speaking, archives,
but collections.
The word has somehow taken on its own meaning when used by artists today.
At one point in the 1970s, a scholar who had made a tour of what artists
had termed their archives, suggested that "some artists seem to think that
an archive is any collection of documents larger than a row of books and a
draw in a file cabinet."
Many important artist collections do become archives. This is the case with
Buster Cleveland's papers at Iowa, with Carolee Schneemann's papers at the
Getty and with many other similar collections.
The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection is one of the few archives
of Fluxus and intermedia still in private hands. It fulfills all criteria
of archival preservation while also constituting a major collection of art
works. Jon Hendricks's books and catalogues are a record of the collection
and a compilation of some of the archived resources.
4) To respond briefly to the question, "is this a list for artist or art
critics?" The answer is both. Moreover, it is a place for critical and
theoretical reflection. People are free to do as they will, but those who
founded the list some years ago did so with critical and historical
reflection in mind as well as the idea of sharing artwork.
Like Something Else Press, Fluxus, and Fluxus West, one idea of Fluxlist
was that it should be a place of documentation and archival preservation as
well as a place of presentation. It was intended as a forum of thought and
critical reflection as well as a place of enactment.
Ken Friedman
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