Keeping together’ Prague and San Francisco: networking in 1960s art

Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research Volume 7 Number 3 © 2009 Intellect Ltd

Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/tear.7.3.275/1

‘Keeping together’ Prague and San Francisco: networking in 1960s art

Marian Mazzone College of Charleston

AbstractIn the mid 1960s two artists associated with Fluxus, Milan Knížák and Ken Friedman, began corresponding about the possibilities for conceptual and material exchange through the new media, or intermedia, of actions and corre-spondence art. To make connections across the geographic and political barrier between Eastern Europe and the West, they used flexible media within a distrib-utive cognitive network to communicate about living and working counter to conformity and inertia in both places. Their use of intermedia reveals a pattern of international information exchange that distinguishes contemporary art and experience from the modern.

If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suit-able form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?

(McLuhan 1964: 61)

Boundary states in ecological systems give rise to interesting life forms. Transition times in history give rise to interesting cultural forms.

(Friedman 1998: 241)

The political barrier between the East and the West, metaphorically encoded in the term Iron Curtain, was made literal by the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Cutting through the city of Berlin, the Wall came to symbolize to the western imagination a barrier closing off Eastern Europe, leaving its population trapped behind in a gray socialist gulag. In the Cold War era, ‘Eastern Europe’ became a political term to designate all those on the other side of the Wall from the West, living under the sway of the Soviet Union and state socialism. If people in the West thought much about artists in Eastern Europe, it may have seemed that their lives would now be a choice between conformity to the state strictures of socialist realism, or precarious living on the fringes of dissidence. In reality, for artists in the countries of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, Romania and Bulgaria, the situation was never so starkly black and white. During the 1960s, in varying degrees throughout the region, artists, writers and other intellectuals had the freedom to create, provided they were willing to forego official state support. Although most of the Eastern European

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KeywordsMilan KnizakKen FriedmanfluxusintermediaPragueEastern Europe

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1. I have corresponded extensively with Ken Friedman, and Milan Knížák also graciously answered a number of my questions. For access to primary materi-als, two collections were most helpful to this researcher: the Ken Friedman Collection housed in the Mandeville Special Collections Library, Geisel Library of the University of California, San Diego, and the Ken Friedman Archive and Collection, part of the Alternative Traditions in Contemporary Arts (ATCA) holdings at the University of Iowa libraries, special col-lections.

2. Cognitive scientists are especially inter-ested in exploring the perceptual processes of form cognition, which is not my focus in this article. There are a variety of ways art historians might apply recent work in cognitive science. For example, David Freedberg is currently exploring cognitive science as a means to analyze form and its emotional effects in art. See Freedberg, D. and Vittorio, G. (2007), ‘Motion, emotion and empathy in esthetic experience’, TRENDS in Cognitive Science, 11: 5, pp. 197−203. For a number of inter-esting essays dealing with cognitive science and art see Turner, Mark (ed.) (2006), ‘The artful mind: cognitive science and the riddle of human creativ-ity’, Oxford: Oxford University Press. The essays were the result of a year of collabora-tive research at the Center for Advanced

nations suffered under political quislings who dominated official life throughout the 1950s, the process of de-Stalinization had lessened restric-tions and persecutions to the degree that many citizens still hoped for genuine political change from within the socialist system well into the 1960s. The Soviet Union’s crushing of political reform in Czechoslovakia during the spring of 1968 would finally mark the end of such hopes throughout the region.

In this article I focus on two artists who were working on opposite sides of the political divide of the East and the West during the Cold War, Milan Knížák in Prague and Ken Friedman in San Francisco, in order to explore the idea that media choice in contemporary art is bound up with an artist’s interest in connecting disparate places through cognitive and material exchange and collaboration. I began this research with some basic ques-tions, including how and why Friedman and Knížák maintained contact for several years, ultimately collaborating on a variety of projects. What would prompt the relationship, and what of value for each compelled them to continue it, even against the odds? What sort of common artistic language did they find? The solutions the artists developed may be of interest to all who consider how contemporary artists traverse distances and cultures to communicate.

Knížák and Friedman are most often associated with Fluxus, but I will discuss them more broadly as early practitioners of new media, including events and actions, mail art, performance, and other activities outside the realms of painting and sculpture. Both Friedman and Knížák are prolific theorists and writers about their own art and that of others, and both are proactive about explaining their ideas and intentions. My preparation for this study included corresponding with the artists, visiting archives and col-lections to see and read original materials, and carefully examining the published writings of the artists.1 To help answer my questions, I chose to use the concept of a distributive cognitive network to explore how and why these artists were able to create and collaborate across substantial physical, political, and cultural barriers. Their activity is representative of a paradigm shift; an indicator more clearly seen because of the considerable political and cultural barriers they overcame in terms of exchange and com-munication.

Cognitive science continues to discover more about how human beings and their brains link physical form to cognition through visual perception. More recently, those involved in cognition studies have begun to seriously consider the role of art within human cognition.2 Given that art is universal among humans yet unique to our species, art is critical to understanding the evolution, both biological and cultural, of human cognition. I chose cogni-tive psychologist Merlin Donald’s (2006) discussion of the links between cognitive evolution and art as a means to analyze how Friedman and Knížák were able to create the collaborative paths necessary for their artistic exchange. Culture, according to Donald, is a distributive system or network with the purpose of linking minds, distributing knowledge through the net-work, and structuring ideas (2006: 4). ‘Art’, claims Donald, ‘is always created in the context of distributed cognition’ (2006: 4). Culture is determinant in the processes of distribution and structuring, because it provides the frame-work of possibilities and limitations that shape the world and mind of both


277‘Keeping together’ Prague and San Francisco: networking in 1960s art

Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and has an accom-panying website at http://theartfulmind.stanford.edu There is an historical prec-edent for this interest among art historians in the work of Rudolf Arnheim.

3. See Friedman, Ken (2005) ‘The wealth and poverty of networks’, and ‘Building cyberspace: information, place and policy’ (1998), in Ess, C. and Sudweeks, F. (eds), Proceedings: cultural attitudes towards communica-tion and technology ’98, Sydney: University of Sydney, pp. 51−78. Friedman links the idea of information tools to the shaping of how humans think (his source is The Axemaker’s Gift), and discusses telecom-munications and information technol-ogy as means for humans to externalize and distribute knowl-edge. I am examining his art production in exchange with Knížák for the specifics of how such interchange can work through the concept of a cognitive network. Higgins, H. (2002), Fluxus experience, Berkeley: University of California Press, approaches Fluxus as a phenomenological and experiential way of information and knowledge exchange.

the artist and the perceiver. According to Donald, artists work with the ‘symbols, images, and other expressive forms’ in the network to preserve, shape and create forms that will function between the various brains in the network. Meaning comes into being in both the forming action on the part of the artist, and in the process of perceiving on the part of the viewer (Donald 2006: 4−5). In essence, it is a process of externalization, storage and distribution of information. Humans have created a variety of tools to do this, including art, writing, developing symbolic languages such as mathematics, and encoding data with computers. The shared communica-tion, idea exchange, and knowledge gained are the products of the collab-orative process of the network. As Donald puts it: ‘Monkeys and apes solve the world alone; we do not’ (2006: 14).

Of course, the idea of a network was a compelling cultural trope in the 1960s, from the computer networks of the burgeoning information age, to the development of the first mail art networks between artists. In the Cold War period, information and defense networks were deemed critical for national survival. With US government interest in building these systems, research funding and support flowed into universities and corporations to develop the necessary information and computational systems. In the 1960s this tendency to conceptualize the world as an information system would move out into mainstream culture, from the cybernetics of Norbert Weiner to Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Network for the communal-based hippies of late 1960s counterculture (Turner 2006: 15). The idea of a ‘net-work’ became a metaphor for both the closed and secretive world of national defense systems, and the counterforce of open and free inter-change of information across nascent computer links in the California of Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. The network became a conceptual frame-work to help model and apply information exchange within cultures and populations. Ken Friedman has himself written several essays on the importance of the concept of networks, citing numerous examples from contemporary culture, media and art.3 According to Friedman, the ability to revolutionize the relationship between idea and material exchange can be traced back to artists such as Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell and Dick Higgins, starting in the late 1950s (Friedman 2005: 411). A critical tool for the development of new networks between art and non-art, and between the physical world and the digital world, was intermedia (Friedman 2005: 412−13). The term is Higgins’, and refers to new forms of creation that cross and fuse media boundaries among the arts, and between the arts and non-arts. Intermedia became a critical means of conceptualization and creation for people involved in Fluxus. Or as Higgins himself put it, we should understand ‘the arts as the research branch of communications sci-ence’ (1969: 89−90). Intermedia helped Friedman and Knížák develop the tools necessary to establish and maintain their networks. Intermedia can help us explain and understand how artists can reprogram a network, make new forms to plug into a network, or expand the capabilities of what is already in a network. Intermedia forms can be a model for network change and interchange.

There are several components of a shared network that I can identify preliminarily here. First, a vast multimedia communications network was established between the West and the East to forestall the possibility of


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4. The information theo-rist Abraham Moles wrote the essay for the 1965 exhibition. The seminar in 1968 included an impres-sive list of scholars and practitioners of computing and computer art. All of the New Tendencies exhibitions had a cor-responding catalogue that contains scholarly essays, reproductions of some of the works, and lists of all works exhibited. Much of the catalogue was frequently translated into English as well. The Croatian scholar Darko Fritz is currently producing interesting scholarship on the New Tendencies phe-nomena, including a recent exhibition at the Landesmuseum, Graz, on the 1968 seminar and show on computer art.

5. For the texts of all of Knížák and Aktual’s actions, manifestos, and projects see Knížák (2000). All the texts are available in English. The book was produced in cooperation with the artist, so I am relying upon these texts as the most accurate. A number of Knížák’s texts are also available elsewhere in English and German transla-tions. I will be noting alternative locations for various texts in the notes. Knížák writes in Czech, English and German.

mutual destruction during the Cold War. The ‘hotline’ between Washington and the Kremlin was the best-known example of this, but underneath there was an entire web of both clandestine and public means of communicating with the other side. For artists, this was the age when mail art networks began, and Eastern Europeans were primary par-ticipants. Of course, the mail was slower and lower-tech, but it did allow a dependable means of connection and communication, textually and artistically. In the art world, a considerable amount of exchange and travel was possible, depending on where an artist or institution was based. For example, artists from Yugoslavia were free to travel to the West and take part in international exhibitions, and western artists could visit Yugoslavia, as well as relatively more open nations such as Hungary and Czechoslovakia. For example, in Yugoslavia the relative lack of cultural control imposed by the state meant that an institution such as the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb could create an extensive series of exhibi-tions, seminars and publications in their New Tendencies series, exploring all contemporary media. In Zagreb they produced a 1965 show on cyber-netics and art, and in 1968 they held a seminar on computers and art that was simultaneous with the now-famous Cybernetic Serendipity show held in London.4 A small number of artists in both the East and the West were experimenting with creations that were more like actions, or living, and less like art. Friedman and Knížák are key representatives of this activity. The artists linked their work to the desire to live differently, against the grain of their current political and cultural context. They frequently dis-cussed ‘living otherwise’ as a shared goal, despite the geographic and political distance between them. To follow how this played out, we can now turn to Knížák in Czechoslovakia.

In the early 1960s in Prague, Milan Knížák and his group Aktual (original members included Knížák, Jan Mach, Vit Mach, Sona Svecova and Jan Trtílek) began creating actions and correspondence art. As he articulated in his manifestos and statements, Knížák intended in such work to communicate with his fellow Prague citizens by engaging them in active rites of contact and interchange.5 Knížák and other Aktual members appeared in public in altered clothing, and performed strange or unexpected actions in the mid-dle of public spaces, in order to engage the attention and interaction of people as fellow participants (Figures 1 and 2). The public response varied, just as it would in any urban centre. Often members of the public were cas-ually indifferent, a few times hostile to the overtures, and sometimes enthu-siastic in their collaboration. For example, one of Knížák and Aktual’s actions was a mail piece of 1965 called Letters to the Population, containing a series of perverse instructions mailed to 1,000 recipients, selected randomly from the phonebook (Crane and Stofflet 1984: 69). We cannot know if anyone actually followed these commands, as diverse as walking for 24 hours on Prague’s main avenue Národni Trída, or having sex with someone publicly in a city square − but it is possible. Some of the commands were more tax-ing than others (masturbate continuously for eight hours, do not drink at all for three days, etc.), but all are obviously meant in a spirit of perversity, humor, and the urge to disrupt the humdrum rhythms of public life. Most of the prescribed actions are familiar routines, just taken to illogical extremes. Often funny, always unpredictable, they are part of Knížák’s



technique to make his fellow citizens ‘live otherwise’, counter to the grain of routine, and to lead what Aktual considered more fully human lives. Such actions are intermedia combinations of daily activities marked out, elabo-rated and extended with materials in time to become art. Knížák selected random names from the phone book, making all the citizens of Prague an equal pool of participants and fellow communicators with Knížák and Aktual. The action is a transference of information within a cognitive net-work, manifest in a series of prescriptive commands that the recipient elects to follow or not. His or her choice of action/inaction is a person’s means of communication via the art, and results in either case in an experience. Transference is initiated, information is processed and exchanged, and communication between people attempted.

Figure 1: Milan Knížák and Aktual, Untitled Action, 1964, Collection of the artist.


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Knížák and Aktual would produce a number of like works throughout the early to mid 1960s to establish connections with a broad range of peo-ple within Prague. Some were solo actions by Knížák, such as Demonstration for One of 1964 (Figures 3 and 4). Wearing one of his altered clothing ensembles with a hand-lettered sign on his back: ‘I beg those walking by, if they can, to crow while passing this place’, Knížák attempted to get his fellow citizens to break routine, and crow like a rooster in public. Documentary photographs of this event suggest that people in Prague were curious, but largely puzzled or discomfited. A number of other works from the 1960s, A Walk Around New World: A Demonstration for all the Senses, Game of War (Figure 5), Make a Big Paper Dart and others, were group actions with voluntary participation, requiring a series of activities and shared experiences over time and within a certain physical locale. Time and space shared, and information exchanged and communicated were the primary elements of this kind of activity, which was more suc-cessful because of the voluntary participation in establishing the cognitive network. People elected to take part, and thus were invested in creating some meaning via the experience. The choice of real-life materials like paper, wood, or buckets was a deliberate move to avoid art materials, and to engage viewer/participants in real activity in time and space with actual

Figure 2: Milan Knížák and Aktual, A Walk Around New World: A Demonstration for all the Senses, 1964, Collection of the artist.



Figure 4: Milan Knížák, Demonstration for One, 1964, Collection of the artist.

Figure 3: Milan Knížák, Demonstration for One, 1964, Collection of the artist.


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objects. Given this goal, such actions had to take place out in the world, not in a gallery setting.

This early activity is indicative of the type of work that Knížák and the others were developing to engage their viewers/participants by new means, and to radically change what art and the experience of art could be. The larger goal was to urge their fellow Prague citizens to engage physi-cally and temporally with the work, and share a new experience − in other words, to plug new forms of art into the cognitive network of their fellow citizens. It was only through such activity that the artists believed they could inject a new way of thinking and being into their fellow Czechs.

A correspondence work in 1966 received the most documented public feedback that is now available for analysis. Knížák and Jan Mach mailed anonymous packages to random residents of an apartment building at No. 26 Václavkova Street, and left everyday objects such as coats, paper gliders, books, and pieces of furniture in the hallways without permission (Hoptman and Posipszyl 2002: 120−21). The residents complained to the police, who were eventually sent in to mediate in a public forum between the artists and the building’s residents. Aktual’s version of this forum is a hilarious conver-sation between all the participants, with half of the residents irritated or

Figure 5: Milan Knížák and Aktual, Game of War, November 1, 1965, Collection of the artist.



confused by the actions, and the other half angry. One woman demands to know how they have the time or money for this, and what they were trying to prove; an older lady complains about having to clean up their mess, and Knížák expresses some frustration and complains that ‘No one understood, wanted to understand, could understand that this is what I do’. An army major living in the building complains the loudest, and eventually cows the other residents into silence. The meeting ended without resolution.

Sometimes the cognitive network between the artists and the viewer/participants fails, and interchange and communication is not of the quality desired by the artist. As Knížák would state elsewhere, there is always the possibility of ‘a confrontation of reality and the reality just created’ (Knížák 2000: 78), such that some participants do not comprehend or accept what is being offered. It can also be interpreted as an instance of new creation that overshot the cognitive capabilities of the network it was intended for, and one could argue that Knížák’s later turn to more projects with self-selecting participants and other artists was an adjustment necessitated by this problem. What was different about this project was that it was launched on a group of people unaware of it as art, and unwilling and/or unprepared to meaningfully share and understand the experience as intended. This is not a failure on the participants’ part, but instead the result of a cognitive mismatch between artist and others in the network. Knížák would later explain that his art activity was inspired by a desire for a life led truly and justly in contrast to the dishonest socialist system of Czechoslovakia:

I wanted people to live richly every millimeter of their everyday life […] Look, I was very influenced by the Communist ideal. We lived in it. Even if I was never a Commie, never. But I was very much influenced by the idea that life is important, that we have to make life very rich, we have to live really and deeply. We have to trust in justice. They said these things but they never did it. We were taught at school about fantastic stuff and there was a great contrast between this and the reality. I always thought about revolutions, changes in life. That is at the base of my being. I was taught that revolutions brought something new and important. I didn’t want to make social revolu-tion, I wanted to make revolution in everyday life.

(cited in Stiles 1998: 299−301)

This quote is important because it reveals the framework of Knížák’s think-ing about the values and goals of what he does as an artist. Professing the influence of communist ideology, Knížák takes as his primary concern changing the lives of people through revolution. What he decides is that revolution has to occur in art, rather than through the failed politics of state socialism, and that art has to be intimately connected to people’s everyday lives. He deliberately set about making art that would achieve this purpose, and thus believed that art had to be more like a social action rather than an aesthetic object. Knížák is more apt to link what he does to religious schis-matics (this is, after all, the Bohemia of Jan Hus), or the heroic shock labour teams of 1950s socialism, than to previous artists. In Cold War-era Czechoslovakia, the political and social culture was perceived by Knížák to be increasingly morally bankrupt. The work was a counter to the bland and banally repressive effect of the state on the people, hence Knížák and


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Aktual’s focus on living otherwise − or living in truth, to borrow a phrase from Václav Havel.

What this point of view did not translate into was open political dissi-dence. The group largely avoided politics, because politics was seen to be the corrupted domain of the ruling authority, of any ideological stripe. Artists are not politicians; but knowing this context allows us to perceive the point of the ethical and humanist position in the work of Knížák and Aktual. What they were against was the conformity imposed by a failed state ideology, and the way to contest that was to act and express other-wise. This meant communicating a vision of a different kind of human life, exchanging information about what that could be, and perhaps trans-forming the everyday life of their fellow citizens by establishing a network counter to the prevailing ‘normal’ one. Their choice of materials and locales for art making were directly linked to their social goals, and their humanist ideals were the impetus for developing any new intermedial means that they could to reach their fellow Czechs. Living otherwise also meant living otherwise as artists, thus the search for different materials outside the traditional realms of painting and sculpture was less an artis-tic revolt, and more a social and cultural rejection of traditional media as compromised.

The Czechoslovak political situation would go into precipitous decline after 1968, when Soviet tanks crushed the reformist hopes of politicians and citizens in Czechoslovakia, and throughout Eastern Europe. The actuality of Soviet violence ended speculation about the Kremlin’s willingness to allow their satellites to experiment with the forms of state socialism. Knížák was visiting the United States in August of 1968, but returned despite the reality of limited circumstances he faced. Partly this can be explained as the desire to return home, no matter the conditions. Additionally, there is a long cultural tradition in Eastern Europe that sets it as a duty of writers and others members of the intelligentsia to take a public stance both on mat-ters of culture and politics. The tradition exists because of the political con-trol exerted from outside against these nations through the last several centuries of European history. However, I do not want to leave the reader with the impression that this humanist vision was only focused on the overtly politicized context of Czechoslovakia. Many artists and writers in Eastern Europe were no more convinced that western capitalist democra-cies of the kind existing were a panacea for all the world’s ills. Some of the conditions may be disparate, but as Knížák would express it, most societies were none the less alike in their tendency to repress freedom, just by different means:

In the USA you have to raise hell before you stir up any undue reprisals − but in the CSSR it is sufficient to say a simple word. And vice versa. And almost without exception, the other way around. And that is why so many similar things/similar in their structure/turn up so many different results.

(Knížák, 1974)

In a text written in 1967−68, Knížák was even more politically explicit, and directly expressed his understanding of human values versus those of any state:



6. This connection has been well argued in conjunction with the Soviets and the Russian avant-garde in Groys, B. (1992), The total art of Stalinism: avant-garde, aesthetic dictatorship, and beyond, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

All societies so far have had and still have one common characteristic − ANTIHUMANITY. Societies create enormous social institutions for the protec-tion of man and at the same time, from the very beginning, they destroy him by absolutely annulling the basic requirements of his humanity − respect for him as an individual with a unique nature and unique opinions. Society always respects only those individuals and opinions that suit the monetary notion of the ruling minority […]. It is unfortunate and sad that there is so little difference between the capitalist and the socialist states. The socialist petty bourgeoisie is in no way different from the capitalist (except perhaps a bit poorer). This is possibly because the socialist revolutions that resulted in the transformation of half the world are incapable of transforming people’s mentality.

(Knížák 1968: 740)

As we will see below, Knížák on his trip to the United States was careful to compare between the East and the West, finding the United States had its share of social problems and official lies, too. Knížák was also interested in the idea of urging people to live richly every millimetre of their everyday lives, which meant focusing on where they were, and dealing with what was going on around them. The utopic vision of communism developed under Lenin and Stalin had no interest in the messiness and actuality of the quotidian, only in the purity of the grand vision. Nor, for that matter, does the modern notion of an artistic avant-garde allow for the messiness and hybridity of new media or intermedia. The avant-garde vision is one of purity, rightness, and the drive for a better future,6 not paying attention to the actuality of what is here today, or merely working with the materials at hand. Therefore, substituting one political system for another was not going to change all things for the better, and finding the one perfect way of making art was no longer of interest as a goal. The exchange of information Knížák experienced on his trip and in correspondence with American art-ists, revealed to him the similarities and differences between the regions in vivid terms. Knížák did not merely reflect back to the West its perception of the abject eastern artist, toiling in the shadow of socialist state oppression. Eastern European artists understood their position and identity in more complex ways, and Knížák did not see himself as an inverse mirror to the freedom and creativity of the artist in the West. Rather, he was communi-cating and collaborating from his own position, not the collective one of the disadvantaged, the backward, or the behind the Wall. Knížák had knowl-edge to contribute, valuable experience with social and economic strictures to share, and a stake in the future to communicate − thus his willingness to connect and correspond with artists anywhere. He had important informa-tion to contribute to the cognitive network.

One of the most fruitful of Knížák’s relationships with fellow artists was his correspondence in the 1960s with Ken Friedman, a Fluxus practitioner based in California. At the time (1967−68), Friedman was teaching at the Experimental College of San Francisco State College (now University), where he taught the first course to ever be offered on intermedia. The two artists began exchanging letters in 1967, and immediately hit upon the idea of coordinating actions that would occur in the same month in both Prague and San Francisco, to be called Keeping Together Manifestation, or KTM,


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7. Author’s corre-spondence with Ken Friedman, 29 November 2006. There is also a very helpful typescript document in the Friedman Collection in Iowa written by Friedman, called ‘Chronology of Fluxus West, 1966−1970’, which contains numerous dates and facts. Aktual USA was the branch of Aktual in the United States set up by Friedman.

8. Letter in the Ken Friedman Collection postmarked 14 March 1967, Box 2, Folder 6, Mandeville Special Collections Library, UC San Diego.

9. Box 8, Folder 4, small mimeo book Aktual/ USA, page 4,

Mandeville Special Collections Library, UC San Diego.

10. These are listed in English in Knížák (2000: 130−133). One of the typescripts that Knížák sent Friedman about KTM events is housed in the Friedman Archive at ATCA, University of Iowa. It contains more suggestions and pos-sibilities for actions than appear in the published version.

which they hoped to make an annual event.7 Knížák wrote excitedly to Friedman in March of 1967: ‘Dear Ken, I love you for your activity. We must keep together more places on the globe! To want to live – otherwise. To live otherwise. I’m shaking with your hands for basing of Aktual USA. Right Idea!’8 Or, ‘Remember not to forget that you are all AKTUAL, and that we must all KEEP TOGETHER AKTUALLY to determine our right to do what we wish to do, and prove the self-direction of sentient life on this planet.’9 To paraphrase, for Knížák KTM was a global manifestation of commonality and human solidarity, and a new connection in the network.

Although most of this material could be described as correspondence in the sense of letter exchanges, what is necessarily missing from my textual account is the number of drawings and graphic additions that Knížák included in the correspondence, making it highly visual as well as textual. Knížák and Friedman also collaborated on art projects via the mail. For example, the Paper Bird project included text by Knížák and score by Friedman, developed through postal exchange on a series of cut-out paper birds. Simple paper objects were used a number of ways by Knížák, includ-ing paper birds and airplanes handed out randomly to Prague citizens at various times, paper hats and weapons used by participants in the work War Games, and many more examples. This choice of materials is both practical and ideological. Paper is an inexpensive, everyday, widely available, and highly portable medium. It can quickly be folded into a hat or sent halfway across the globe in the mail, and provides a surface for all means of textual and visual information. Books, manuscripts, and letters by Knížák invariably include numerous graphic additions, such as drawings, hand-lettered poems and manifestos, and coloured pigments, sometimes professionally printed, at other times aggressively applied by hand. They are a hybrid of the literary and visual arts, rather than illustrated letters. It is clear from reading the messages from Knížák to Friedman in this period that Knížák understood his correspondence and activity as a conduit to interact with artists all over the world, to exchange information, and as an important means by which to link activity and work for greater human freedom. Partly we can attribute this to the spirit of the 1960s, steeped as it was in the rhetoric of change and libera-tion. But it is important to note that a resident of Czechoslovakia, a socialist state, and Friedman in the United States, are sharing this rhetoric. Their goals and the shared language of liberation are not bound by geography, or eco-nomic or political systems. Knížák recognizes that there are some differences on the ground, such as his not being able to own printing equipment or produce publications, but insists that Aktual continues to function even under such restraints. This is reminiscent of the networks being established in California in the 1960s, equally low-tech, but nonetheless focused on lib-eration, freedom, and shared access.

One of the partner actions for KTM was Keeping Together Day, which was simple in plan but eloquent in its whimsy and desire for connection between the artists and the public. Keeping Together Day was on the first Sunday after the first day of spring in March. The Manifestation of 1967 was of multiple parts, with Knížák first urging everyone to create their own personal mani-festation in the month of March and send a description to Aktual at their Prague address, and then listing out a series of possible actions that could be followed by all, including himself.10 Friedman’s ‘Keeping Together’ actions



11. Friedman’s ‘Fluxlist: Seven Telephone Events’ is available at The Mail Archive fluxlist, at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg03097.html.

12. From letter in Box 7, Folder 82, Mandeville Special Collections Library, UC San Diego.

13. Paik was commis-sioned to write the

essay in 1974 for the Rockefeller Foundation, it was first published in German in 1976. A reprint in English is available in ‘The electronic super highway − travels with Nam June Paik’ (1995), Cincinnati: Carl Solway Gallery, pp. 39−47.

in 1967 included a work entitled Telephone for Steve Abrams, that Friedman described thus:

Take a standard desk telephone with you in a car. Drive up to people, handing the phone out the window, saying, “It’s for you.” This piece may also be per-formed using a suitcase or briefcase in unexpected situations, in an elevator, on a street corner, in a restaurant, etc.11

On Keeping Together Day in 1968, artists were urged to put a dining table out in front of their house, have a meal, and invite people passing by to join them (Figure 6). Knížák, in his letters to Friedman, articulated what he hoped these actions would accomplish: ‘in Prague, New York, San Francisco and other places we will once again gather to prove and demonstrate the right of human beings to live completely and fully human lives’.12 The pri-mary motivation of these kinds of actions is connection, and to share with the public the possibility of a life lived more freely − and an everyday activ-ity like having a meal was the best material means by which to do that. As artists shifted from the more traditional physical forms of painting and sculpture to creating new material manifestations in intermedia such as mail, actions, and Fluxus activity in the 1960s, the Wall could not be a suc-cessful barrier. The model for communication here is similar to the one invoked by members of Fluxus, who emphasize the possibilities of flux, flow and interchange via intermedia, and Nam June Paik’s concepts of the broadband communication network and electronic super highway, first published in his essay ‘Media Planning for the Postindustrial Society’ in the early 1970s.13 As McLuhan (1964) suggested in the quote cited at the begin-ning of this article, if the city was one step in human evolutionary growth (and the city as the epitome of experience of the modern is a familiar trope), then the next step is the dematerialization and exchange of information on the level of global consciousness. Such exchanges and transferences can-not be stopped by physical limitations such as walls, either actual or politi-cal. As we identify connections across the Wall, then we recognize contemporary art as shared information and exchange on a global model. Such connections mark contemporary art out as different from the modern, enveloped as the modern was in its physical unit of the city, and its eco-nomic, political and national divisions and barriers. The human activity of artists, especially in their use of a diversity and hybridity of materials and actions, are critical to charting a shift from modern to contemporary art.

In 1968 George Maciunas invited Knížák to come to the United States, and Knížák was able to secure the necessary passport to do so (Williams and Noel 1998: 175). Maciunas, Knížák says, had first asked him to visit the United States in 1965, and Allan Kaprow had included Knížák’s work in his landmark 1966 publication Actions, Environments & Happenings; thus Knížák was well known to American artists involved in Fluxus and actions in this period. While in the New York area, Knížák produced two events: the Lying [Down] Ceremony at Rutgers University (Hendricks 2003: 113−14) and A Difficult Ceremony, both of which had been performed before in Prague, and relied upon participants to co-create the experience with Knížák. In these versions, he was able to draw upon the student body at several area colleges. The most extraordinary thing produced by Knížák during his time


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Figure 6: Milan Knížák and Aktual, Keeping Together Day, 1968, Collection of the artist.



14. Photocopy of typed manuscript sent to the author by the artist.

in the United States, however, is an unpublished manuscript entitled ‘Trip’, which is Knížák’s version of his travels and adventures in the New World, narrated in his unique and often hilarious way (Knížák 1968−70).14

Knížák’s text reads in part as a travelogue, a critical reaction to the art scene in New York, and a personal journey through experiences often fuelled by drugs and drink. It was, after all, 1968. Much of the text is per-sonal reminiscences about encounters with women, gossip about various artists at home and in the United States, and Knížák’s reactions to what he was experiencing. There are some valuable nuggets of information about the art scene in the United States at this time, too, told from Knížák’s point of view. In his text, Knížák reports meeting all the ‘names’ in New York, including Kaprow, Dick Higgins, John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, La Monte Young, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, etc. He is not always complimentary, nor is he immediately intimidated or impressed by what he sees. Knížák is penetrating in his criticism; this is not the reaction of a ‘rube’ from the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, come to marvel at the advanced situation in the United States. He does note that being especially big and expensive marks most work in the United States, but this is a wry observation, not a compliment. What Knížák does note is that art is little ‘noticed in enormous and corn-filled America’ (Knížák 1968−70: 6) and in comparison to what was being produced in Czechoslovakia, comparatively predictable and stale. Thus Knížák reports enjoying the ride up and down escalators in big department stores or observing the events around the presidential election of 1968 − they provide far more interest and excitement than the various art actions being produced in New York, he opines (Knížák 1968−70: 5).

Knížák travelled extensively while in the United States, visiting most of the geographical regions, an impressive list of states, and Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. He also went to California to see Friedman in the spring of 1969, enticed by an invitation to give lectures at some of the universities there. He spent most of his time experiencing California: hanging out at various apart-ments and communes drinking beer, smoking pot, meeting girls, and travel-ling around in Friedman’s VW bus, the ‘Fluxmobile’. He also enjoyed Friedman’s parents’ home in San Diego, complete with a swimming pool. California, Knížák states, is more like the Czech scene than is New York. He was used to hanging out in people’s apartments, drinking beer, and talking about art − that is what artists at home did, too, because most young artists did not have studios out-side of their apartments. The communal atmosphere felt familiar. Knížák was not just a recipient in the cognitive and material network of this scene. In a fel-low intermedial artist such as Friedman, Knížák found a collaborator.

In an interview in the 1990s, Knížák would confirm that it was a global desire for community and connection that motivated Friedman, Kaprow, and Maciunas to reach out to their fellow artists, wherever they were. I include this lengthy quote because it contains the essence of his artistic philosophy, and how he perceived his artistic and cognitive network:

Most artists are searching for humanity; they are looking for something that con-nects people. In the early 1960s there were about 20 artists in the whole world that worked on those subjects. I grew up with these people, even though I was here and they were there. When somebody found somebody else, then everybody was happy. In the beginning we didn’t know much about each other. When they


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found out I was here, they sent me materials and published my stuff, it was so nice, you can’t imagine. I was so happy. I felt very isolated in Czechoslovakia. Everybody was laughing at my work, they thought it was very bad.

(cited in Smith 1991: 63)

Knížák understood that he had found fellow artists, and a community of peo-ple creating like work, even if they were scattered across the globe. What he was able to do was to cross boundaries, and defeat isolation by hooking into an artistic network. The isolation he felt in Czechoslovakia, including that of being a minority neither understood nor appreciated, was paradoxically the condition shared by most members of this contemporary art community, whether they were in the United States, Western Europe, or Eastern Europe. To some degree they shared a cultural condition: that of being contemporary artists working in the new media, experimenting with changing roles and functions of art in the new information age. This condition was nowhere bet-ter identified and explored than among those artists involved in Fluxus.

Ken Friedman, as well as being an artist, has become one of the more prolific writers from the Fluxus group, taking on the difficult task of elucidat-ing the history and methods of this non-movement. In one of his primary texts, Friedman links Fluxus’ beginnings to the profound historical and cul-tural shift from the domination of a colonialist, imperialist West, to a global, flexible and diffuse culture supported by electronic engineering and compu-tation science (Friedman 1998: 237−247). The Fluxus concept of intermedia, he believes, is the development of the right approach and material form for this new era, and one developed by artists focused not on the latest techno-logical advancement, but instead driven by ‘humanistic’ concerns and a desire to connect with life. In his text, Friedman posits that democratic condi-tions are a necessary context for this change, in order to allow the freedom of all people to achieve their potential. In this same democratic spirit, artists should guard against becoming too constrained by the dictates of the physi-cal media used, and instead seek to manipulate (or liberate) themselves from medium constraints through intermedia, which are constantly changing and evolving (Friedman 1998: 237−38). ‘Just as the telefax redefined the way peo-ple communicate, new media will once again transform our way of sending and receiving messages’ (Friedman 1998: 240). According to Friedman, Fluxus has always been committed to the principle of globalism:

It embraces the idea that we live on a single world, a world in which the boundaries of political states are not identical with the boundaries of nature or culture […] It’s not simply that borders no longer count, but that in the most important issues, there are no boundaries.

(Friedman 1998: 244−45)

There are striking parallels between Friedman’s description of the new con-temporary culture and its means of information communication, and Marshall McLuhan’s media theory. McLuhan identified artists as the receivers who pick up advance knowledge of cultural and technological shifts ahead of the rest of us, and through their work give us the ‘exact information of how to rear-range one’s psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties’ (McLuhan 1964: 65−66). McLuhan uses literacy and the



written word as his medium/technology example, and takes that material through its changes from paper, to telegraph, to telephone, etc. Contemporary art is instantiated in a local context (it exists somewhere), but also means to be exchanged or shared, spread from its moment and place to another − communicated, in a word. The key to information, says McLuhan, is not so much its material manifestations, because those will change with technolog-ical advancements, but the action of the translation of information from point to point, and the transformation via that process of all the players involved: the information, the receiver, and the sender (McLuhan 1964: 89−90). Unlike traditional art forms, information is not defined by its material existence in a particular medium. Instead its data (informational and sensory) is arranged in the best form to be transferred and exchanged. This sharing takes place between the artist and the elements of time/space/materials, between the artist and the audience, and from one artist to another. It can also be exchanged/shared across political, economic, or geographic divides, and this is its key difference from the modern. McLuhan outlines a fundamentally dif-ferent transference pattern in his theory. Rather than from the centre to the margins or periphery (the classic pattern of the modern period, best exempli-fied in the methods of colonialism), McLuhan describes a global village, wherein information flows instantly through space/time, in a manner more like an implosion or interfusion (McLuhan 1964: 92−93). As he notes, ‘Margins cease to exist on this planet’ (McLuhan 1964: 91). And to extend the meta-phor even further, the cognitive scientist Merlin Donald (2006) describes a similar pattern of transference, in which ‘distributed cognitive networks, involving the linking of many minds’ are the cultural and cognitive networks in which artists modify and engineer ‘expressive forms’ (Donald 2006: 4). The next step for cognitive science’s understanding of art, and a topic as yet beyond the scope of this essay, is to understand precisely how certain form characteristics result in specific cognitive outcomes.

This art activity that flourished in the 1960s marks a paradigm shift from the modern to the contemporary, and to art that uses hybridized media for exchange and collaboration around the globe. The Berlin Wall proved to be a straw wall against the material and cognitive connections that could be estab-lished through it. Given the tools and technology available to them, and their shared goals, Friedman and Knížák were able to breach barriers of distance and political context, and create the means necessary to communicate through their network. Ultimately each had as a goal the cognitive restructur-ing of the world around them, such that freedom and the opportunity to live otherwise could be available to all humanity. Perhaps post-war Eastern Europe was a last, failed attempt at dividing up the world, before the shift into a dif-fused international pattern of decolonization and global information exchange. If so, this early period of collaboration between Knížák and Friedman is a telling glimpse into a situation undergoing tremendous change.

ReferencesCrane, Michael and Stofflet, Mary (1984), Correspondence art: source book for the net-

work of international postal art activity, San Francisco: Contemporary Arts Press.

Donald, Merlin (2006)‚ Art and cognitive evolution’, in M. Turner (ed.), The artful mind: cognitive science and the riddle of human creativity, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 3−20.


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Freedberg, D. and Vittorio, G. (2007), ‘Motion, emotion and empathy in esthetic experience’, TRENDS in Cognitive Science, 11: 5, pp. 197−203.

Friedman, Ken (2005), ‘The wealth and poverty of networks’, in A. Chandler and N. Neumark (eds), At a distance: precursors to art and activism on the internet, Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 409−422.

Friedman, Ken (1998), ‘Fluxus and company’, in K. Friedman (ed.), The fluxus reader, West Sussex: Academy Editions, pp. 237−253.

Hendricks, Geoffrey (ed.) (2003), Critical mass; happenings, fluxus, performance, inter-media and Rutgers University 1958−1972, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

Higgins, Dick (1969), ‘Against movements’, in D. Higgins (ed.), Foew&ombwhnw: a grammar of the mind and a phenomenology of love and a science of the arts as seen by a stalker of the wild mushroom, New York: Something Else Press, pp. 71−93.

Hoptman, Laura and Posipszyl, Tomás (eds) (2002), Primary Documents: a sourcebook for eastern and central european art since the 1950s, Cambridge: MIT Press for the Museum of Modern Art.

Knížák, Milan ([1968]1996), ‘Aktual univerzity: ten lessons’, in K. Stiles and P. Selz (eds), 1996. Theories and documents of contemporary art: a sourcebook of artists’ writings, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 740−41.

Knížák, Milan (1974), Aktual schmuck Czechoslovakia, London: Beau Geste Press.

Knížák, Milan (1968−1970), ‘Trip’, unpublished manuscript, pp. 1–35.

Knížák, Milan (2000), Actions: for which at least some documentation remains, 1962–1995, Praha: Gallery.

McLuhan, Marshall (1964), Understanding media: the extensions of man, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company.

Smith, Valerie (1991)‚ King of the dwarfs: a conversation with Milan Knížák’, Arts Magazine, May, pp. 61−64.

Stiles, Kristine (1998), ‘Uncorrupted joy: international art actions’, in R. Ferguson (ed.), Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979, London: Thames and Hudson for MOCA−Los Angeles, pp. 227−329.

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Suggested citationMazzone, M. (2009), ‘‘Keeping together’ Prague and San Francisco: networking in

1960s art’, Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research 7: 3, pp. 275–292, doi: 10.1386/tear.7.3.275/1

Contributor detailsMarian Mazzone is an associate professor and chair of the art history department at the College of Charleston. She teaches modern and contemporary art history, and has curated several exhibitions of contemporary art. Her areas of research and publication include Eastern European art, and Russian and Chinese art of the 20th century forward.

Contact: Department of Art History, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC 29424-0001, USA.FAX: 843 953 8212Phone: 843 953 8285E-mail: [email protected]


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Keeping together’ Prague and San Francisco: networking in 1960s art

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