Ken Friedman: event, idea and inquiry

Opportunity and chance led Ken Friedman to become an artist. The nature of his art challenges the sense of art as a fixed and single vocation. Friedman never had formal art training. Rather, George Maciunas gave him the title of artist in 1966, stating that the creative activities Friedman had pursued since childhood could be categorized as art. Friedman's youthful experiments with objects and situations intersected with a key impulse of European and American vanguard art since the early twentieth century. This was the will to reduce art to provocative ideas and gestures. Material form often came into play, but for radical artists the ideas behind the image, object, text, or activity were increasingly the most important issue, particularly in their capacity to interrogate the world.