Dear Clive,

Thanks for your reply.

Again, I agree with much of this. I wasn’t criticizing Robert Filliou or George Brecht. I was simply distinguishing the nature of their great contributions as artists, thinkers, and human beings with the specific work George Maciunas did to build, develop, and maintain networks. I agree with your high estimation of their artistic contributions. George was also a great artist, but I wasn’t writing about art. My post focused on networks and the work different people did inbuilding, developing, and maintaining them.

Thanks for the correction about Jos Tilson. It isn’t always clear to me when people are writing about Joe Tilson or Jos Tilson.

No worries about the re-biography. As I mentioned in an earlier note, W.O.R.K.S. remains one of my favorite network projects. You’re right about the strange chasm of what it took to generate networks and the frustration of bridging the gap between the organic and the administrative. This is one reason that Fluxus networks were both unfunded and free, at least administratively. I like your term “self-exploitation.” Dick Higgins once described the arts as the only field in which producers subsidize consumers.

What I don’t know much about is the situation for artist networks in Australia, especially not in the 1960s or 1970s. I lived in Scandinavia from 1987 to 2008, and before that in North America. I did not come to Australia as an artist, but as a dean at a research university focused on science and technology. That was my day job for five years. Now I’m a research professor, and this gives me time to think about art as well as about design, science, and technology.

My one mild disagreement with your note is the notion that I romanticize political and economic history. These fields have great value and serious uses. That these studies can be abused or misused is also true. The Canadian economist Harold Innis was a predecessor and mentor to Marshall McLuhan, whose work on media was fundamental to many of the ideas that shaped the thinking Fluxus people did on networks. Economists such as Fritz Machlup, Hal Varian, Michael Spence, andJoseph Stiglitz made major contributions to how we understand information and the networks that make information accessible to us.

Robert Filliou was trained as an economist. While he turned his back on the field as it was in the 1960s, he might have had a different perspective were he to read some of the work being done today. This involves not only in information economics, butrelatively new fields that examine the issues that are crucial to robust networks. These include such fields as behavioral economics, the economics of increasing returns, and the interdisciplinary field of complex adaptive systems. An understanding of how systems work, and how networks function is as useful to those of us interested in networks as to anyone else. Without claiming thatartist networks would have worked had more people understood these issues, I don’t see how we could have done worse than we did with people establishing networks after a far more narrow diet of readings and information. But who read Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Ludwig Wittgenstein without understanding them also managed to wreak social havoc. It is impossible to understand Foucault without knowing history; Foucault himself was Professor of the History of Systems of Thought at the College de France. And it is nearly impossible tounderstand what Derrida was about without knowing Plato.

Philosophy and theology have also wrought social havoc. If art historians have not yet managed to wreak social havoc, it is not because their motives and ethics surpass those of economists, philosophers, or theologians, but because they have fewer opportunities.

Then again, art history has yet to produce an Amartya Sen or an Elinor Ostrom. Any artist who wishes to build functioning networks of individuals who collaborate for common goals has something useful to learn from Sen, Ostrom, and Daniel Kahnemann.

One reason I went back to school to get a PhD in 1973 was a very practical question: most of the projects, networks, and systems that artists try to build fail. I wanted to know why, and how to do better. This led me to questions in human behavior,sociology, and economics. I found general history and world history useful in examining how people have addressed different kinds of issues at other times and places.

If one takes seriously the idea that there is no boundary between art and life, the issues that interest us can be seen in the lives and times of other human beings. History is one place to examine these issues. My interest in such fields ashistory and economics flow from an interest in human behavior rather than aromanticized view of political history or economic history.

Yours,

Ken

Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] | Mobile +61 404 830 462 | Home Page http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design/people/Professor-Ken-Friedman-ID22.html<http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design>

Guest Professor | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China