Edizioni Conz

Eric Andersen, Ina Blom, Ken Friedman, Ludwig Gosewitz, Dick Higgins, Jean Sellem, Various artists, Dress and Photo Performance, 1992, B&W prints on postcards, cardboard case, paper envelope, 11.5 × 16 × 0.5 cm

Courtesy of Archivio Conz, Berlin

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• Eric Andersen (b. 1940 in Antwerp, Belgium, lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark) is a Danish artist frequently associated with Fluxus, working in performance and Intermedia art. Andersen studied music in his childhood and, as early as 1960, began defining numbered pieces with the recurring title Opus, a series of compositions and open-ended work instructions, played in the paradox of the interaction between the artist and the audience. Andersen has been a promoter of Intermedia experiments and events, as well as an active contributor to mail art, engaging in complex experiments involving digital technology. With Francesco Conz, he worked on several ambitious editions, such as The Banner, which, at fifty meters long, is the longest screen-print in the world. The remarkable portable Crying Stone materializes the itinerant installation Crying Space, developed by Andersen in the 1960s and since then activated worldwide. Original Opus scores are now in numerous private and public collections, including the Silverman Collection, New York and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. Andersen continues to perform in institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2014), the Seoul Museum of Art (2016), the Nikolaj Kunsthal in Copenhagen (2014), and the Fondazione Mudima in Milan (2019).
• Ken Friedman is a design researcher and artist associated with Fluxus. From 1966 onwards, although very young at the time, he was involved by George Maciunas in numerous collaborations with Fluxus, eventually becoming head of Fluxus West and General Manager of Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press in the early 1970s. Conceived as one of the four branches of the Fluxus organizational structure envisioned by Maciunas, Fluxus West, directed by Friedman, linked together artists from the western United States and soon became a prolific and emblematic reality. In 1967, Friedman purchased a Volkswagen bus later named Fluxmobile, with which Fluxus West began touring across the United States, giving lectures, performing concerts, and disseminating leaflets. Shortly after, through the collaboration with Mike Weaver, Friedman founded the international Fluxshoe, a traveling exhibition active for a whole year between 1969 and 1970. Spontaneously and with great involvement, many artists participated with performances and graphic works mailed to Friedman. The eponymous catalog published in 1972 collected interventions by Ay-O, Joseph Beuys, George Brecht, Ugo Carrera, Henri Chopin, Robert Filliou, and many others. Parallel to his active contribution to Fluxus through 1992, Friedman held prestigious academic positions. He graduated from San Francisco State University in 1971 and received a doctorate from the United States International University in San Diego in 1976. A thinker and innovator, Friedman was Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Contemporary Art in San Diego. As a professor, he has taught in Oslo and Copenhagen, was chair of the Faculty of Design at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, and currently teaches at Tongji University in Shanghai. In 2007, he received an honorary doctorate from Loughborough University in the United Kingdom. Friedman is also a prolific author and writer. His numerous articles in international journals and anthologies, such as The Fluxus Performance Workbook (1990) and A Fluxus Reader (1998), are indispensable sources for a historical and theoretical understanding of Fluxus. Friedman’s scores, correspondence, and papers are preserved in major museums worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, and the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.
• Dick Higgins was an influential artist, poet, editor, and—more than anything else—a prolific theorist of experimental arts. His relentless inquisitiveness and nurtured enthusiasm made him one of the most distinctive personalities of the avant-garde movements. He studied at Yale and then Columbia University, where he earned his BA in English (1960), and later received his MA in English Literature from New York University (1977). He also attended the Manhattan School of Printing, followed by studies at The New School in New York, where, like many of his contemporaries, he was mentored by John Cage and influenced by Dada. Higgins was an instigator of Happenings and a co-founder of Fluxus, together with George Maciunas, George Brecht, Jackson Mac Low, and his wife Allison Knowles. Among his musical experiments, the Danger Music scores series investigates an extreme concept of music which, by its harsh expression, holds potential danger for both the performer and the audience. His Twelve Metadramas (1987), composed of minimal emotional and narrative statements, challenges the pragmatism of traditional scores and contributes as humorous experimentation in the fields of literature and performance. In 1963, Higgins founded Something Else Press, a publishing house responsible for promoting and disseminating the works of highly acclaimed artists and writers of the twentieth century, including Gertrude Stein, Ray Johnson, and Dieter Roth. With the first issue of the Something Else Press Newsletter in 1965, Higgins coined the term “intermedia” as a possibility of naming artistic approaches that did not limit their field of operation to a question of artistic media but rather tended to elude established norms and categories. With the short and affordable publication series A Great Bear Pamphlet, designed for wide circulation, he promoted the writings of many significant Fluxus artists. Higgins also made remarkable contributions to educational institutions as a faculty member of the California Institute of Arts in Valencia and a panel member of the New York State Council on the Arts. He received a DAAD scholarship for a sojourn in Berlin (1981–82) and a Pollock-Krasner grant (1993). A substantial retrospective was held at the Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter (1995) in Høvikodden, Norway. His works can be found in numerous private and public collections, including those of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien in Vienna.

Artworks (4)

• Eric Andersen
  Pianist Hide-Away, 1985
• Eric Andersen, Ina Blom, Ken Friedman, Ludwig…
  Dress and Photo Performance, 1992
• Eric Andersen
  The Portable Crying Stone, 1989
• Eric Andersen
  The Banner, 1989/90