Ken Friedman: I loved the work and wanted to make it visible — a conversation with Hanna B. Hölling, Aga Wielocha and Josephine Ellis

In this interview, Fluxus artist, theorist and scholar Ken Friedman unpacks Fluxus’s myriad forms of persistence while also speculating on the possible futures of his own works. As a keen historiographer of Fluxus himself, Friedman is acutely aware of the power that collections and archives hold over which historical narratives are shared and how—and, by the same token, what gets left behind. From the canonical Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection at the Museum of Modern Art—revolving, as it does, mostly around the figure of George Maciunas—to the University of Iowa, which currently holds part of Friedman’s personal Fluxus archive, Friedman touches on the intimacies of institutionalization, with all its potentials and frustrations. But beyond art institutions, crossing the threshold to conservation in an expanded sense, Friedman also shares his perspective on the importance of younger generations of artists in perpetuating the Fluxus legacy. Friedman also offers an elaboration of the concept of activation and speculates as to what it might mean to hold a Fluxus festival today, and whether storytelling could function as a form of Fluxus conservation.