1. Motifs come from text, from history, from recorded events.
2. Visual art is always a translation or repetition of meaning: culture in the anthropological and social sense.
3. Any object that embodies useful meaning can be a work of art.
4. There is no boundary between art and life that needs to be erased.
5. The key principle of Fluxus announces that high art is dead if it excludes all human experience.
6. The second key principle of Fluxus is that the avant-garde is dead for the same reason.
7. The third key principle of Fluxus is that ideas such as mass-manufactured art, thematic variation, the inclusion of life themes such as humor, myth, sex or religion in art are liable to develop the most interesting objects.
8. Single or unique objects, poetic objects, romantic objects, jewelry, clothing, flags, maps, intelligent objects, and stupid objects have all been produced under the Fluxus label. The purpose of experimental art is neither to appear to be avant-garde nor to set art apart from other experience. The purpose of experimental art is to grow and to learn. A bad experiment can be valuable as a learning tool. A good experiment can be repeated as it continues from the experimental stage into useful daily experience.
9. My purpose at Arabia is to unite these principles. I am here to create works of art that have large scale. The earliest Fluxus works were designed for the international public market. The early and middle 1960s were the wrong era for a vast art market for manufactured objects. We lacked properly organized production facilities and we had no access to capital.
Arabia has appointed me artist-in-residence to develop the Fluxus Mythologica project. Arabia is supporting the creation of a production workshop and an experimental studio facility in the context of a modern industrial facility. It is now 25 years after the birth of Fluxus in 1962. It is 21 years since I came to Fluxus with my own ideas about cultures. Now we have the opportunity here in Finland to test the theories of Fluxus in industrial design production. Fluxus Mythologica is an opportunity to examine Fluxus in the international forum of large-scale cultural engagement.
Helsinki
1987
From the Fluxus Workshop at Arabia
Documented in Milman, Estera. 1999. “Ken Friedman: Art[net]worker Extra-Ordinaire.” 1999. Subjugated Knowledges and the Balance of Power. Estera Milman, ed. Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa Museum of Art.
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