Carl Solway Gallery mourns the loss of Ben Patterson. The gallery published two editions with the artist and included him in numerous exhibitions over the years. In 2015, Michael Solway included Patterson in By This River, an exhibition he curated for the Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati. Below is an obituary from ARTnews.
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BEN PATTERSON, CORNERSTONE OF FLUXUS AND EXPERIMENTAL ART,
DIES AT 82
Ben Patterson, the artist, composer, and double bassist who
played with classical orchestras, helped found the Fluxus movement, took a
nearly 20-year break from performance to live what he termed “ordinary life,”
and returned to art-making as an assemblage artist, died on Saturday at his
home in Wiesbaden, Germany, according to friends and collaborators. He was 82.
In the early 1960s, Patterson was among a small group of
outré artists, including La Monte Young, John Cage, and Yoko Ono, who pushed
music and performance to profound, radical extremes. His 1960 Paper Piece
called for audience members to fold, rip, and wave paper through the air. The
score for his Lick Piece (1964) read simply, “Cover shapely female with whipped
cream / lick / … topping of chopped nuts and cherries is optional.” “He was
writing scores that were Fluxus-like, before Fluxus,” the artist Geoffrey Hendricks
told me today.
One his most infamous and most photogenic pieces, Variations
for Double-Bass (1962), called for a solo performer to “agitate strings” of the
instrument with a comb and corrugated cardboard, and balance it upside-down on
its scroll while rubbing a rubber object against its strings. A typed version
of the score for that work is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art
in New York as part of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection.
Asked about the impetus for those early radical works years
later, Patterson told an interviewer, “There was a great protest, let’s say,
against the materialism of the art market and buying and selling and so forth
was not what we, as young idealists who wanted to change the world, thought was
the purpose of art—it was to change the way people think, or to open their
thinking.”
Benjamin Patterson was born in Pittsburgh in 1934, and
graduated from the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, in 1956 with a degree
in music. Like many his brethren in the Fluxus and experimental music movements
of the 1960s, his interest in ostensibly simple, vanguard composition betrayed
his talent in traditional techniques. He was a virtuosic double bassist but
could not find a job in the United States because he was black, and so he
played with various orchestral groups in Canada, including the Halifax Symphony
Orchestra and the Ottawa Philharmonic Orchestra (as principal bassist).
It was in Halifax that he fell in with people involved with
the government-funded electronic music center, which eventually led to a letter
of introduction to Karlheinz Stockhausen, whom he met one evening after a
performance in Germany in 1960. Patterson was rather put off by the maestro’s
notorious haughtiness, but the next evening had the chance to catch a show with
John Cage and David Tudor performing. “I was quite, let’s say, astonished,” he
recalled later, adding, “I thought to myself, this is what I had had in the
back of my mind as to how music could be made but never thought that anyone
would take it seriously or that I could even produce it. So here it was.” After
the concert, he introduced himself to Cage, who asked him, “Would you like to
perform with us tomorrow night?” He did.
Patterson quickly fell in with the new-music crowd and went
on to perform throughout Europe in the coming years, helping George Maciunas
stage the first Fluxus International Festival, in 1962, in Wiesbaden, Germany.
But around 1970 Patterson stopped regularly performing and releasing new work,
instead working as a reference librarian (he had obtained a master’s in library
science from Columbia University in 1967), a concert manager (forming his own
company, Ben Patterson Ltd.), and in other arts-related positions.
This Duchampian departure from the art scene was, in fact,
motivated by practical concerns, Patterson told Interview magazine in 2013.
“Family was coming along, and papa needed to earn money,” he said. “If any
Fluxus works were being sold at that point, it was for a penny or dollar per
piece, so there was not much money to be made. I maintained my interest and
followed what was going on, and from time to time would create small pieces,
but it wasn’t a full-time occupation. Eventually [my] children grew up,
finished university, and then it was possible to devote 100 percent of my time
to artwork again.” He is survived by three children, Ennis, Barbro, and Tobias,
and two grandchildren.
Around 1987, he did indeed return to art, creating witty
assemblages out of found objects, performing, and staging participatory
artworks. (In the 1960s he had also made visual art, like what he called
“puzzle poems,” collages that could be pieced together by participants.) In
2010 the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston staged a retrospective of his work,
“Benjamin Patterson: Born in the State of Flux/Us,” which traveled to the
Studio Museum in Harlem and the Nassauischer Kunstverein in Wiesbaden. That
show was “long overdue,” Hendricks said, adding, “My gut feeling is that Ben’s
contribution to the whole movement is greater than is recognized, and I suspect
there’s a touch of racism in all of that.”
Once he returned to making art full time, Patterson worked
intensely, frequently staging performances and shows around the world. “I say
artists are like old cowboys; they die with their boots on,” Patterson said in
that Interview piece. “I hope to continue until the last day. I certainly have
no intentions to sit on the sofa and watch television for 10 hours a day.”
Explaining his work, he said later in the article, “What I try to do is open
people’s minds, ears, and eyes, not necessarily with shock technique, but with
surprises and unexpected things so they become more aware and sensitive to the
world around them.”
Discussing his Fluxus days, Patterson emphasized in another
interview that he and his compatriots made work that resisted commodification.
“It was something you experienced, and that was it,” he said. “You couldn’t
take it away.”
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