INTERIORS//EXTERIORS//OTHER ROOMS
May 11
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“In his essay in Dan’s book Steven Holt had this observation: “As Friedman began to pursue projects of personal meaning rather than professional interest at the end of the 1970’s, his life increasingly took on the dimensions of an experiment rather than a career.”Nowhere was this more obvious than in his apartment, a nondescript, one-bedroom on the 15th floor of Two Fifth Avenue. For over a decade, beginning in the late 70’s, he transformed, almost daily, this domestic space into a laboratory for experimentation with color, form, materials and meaning. One Sunday morning in 1978 I picked up the NY Times Magazine and there he was. In the article Dan explained it this way: “I have for many years used my home to push modernist principles of structure and coherency to their wildest extreme. I create elegant mutations, radiating with intense color and complexity, in a world that is deconstructed into a goofy ritualistic playground for daily life.” For me, these incredible environments are among his most remarkable work, spawning ideas for screens, furniture and assemblages. His inspirations were the trash structures encountered on his trips with his buddies to the Caribbean and the deep memory of Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau environments from the 20’s. These influences seemed to tap into the deeper cultural shift being felt at the beginning of the 80’s from neat to messy, from newness and originality to appropriation and transmutation. Mining the detritus of New York streets, he made old stuff new, and like Duchamp before him he endowed dumb objects with new meanings and turned trash in to tribal objects of domestic utility. Like Picasso and Braque, he employed the art of assemblage, a trusty Modernist device for managing visual diversity and altering meaning through bizarre juxtaposition.” AN EDITORIAL TRIBUTE TO THE WORK OF DAN FRIEDMAN, PRODUCED BY MYSELF AND FELIX BURRICHTER AND PHOTOGRAPHED BY BELA BORSODI IS NOW ON NEWSSTANDS; PHOTOGRAPHS BY BELA BORSODI FOR PIN-UP MAGAZINE ISSUE SIX; TEXT TAKEN FROM A PIECE ORIGINALLY WRITEN FOR A 2005 YALE RETROSPECTIVE BY CHRISTOPHER PULLMAN

“In his essay in Dan’s book Steven Holt had this observation: “As Friedman began to pursue projects of personal meaning rather than professional interest at the end of the 1970’s, his life increasingly took on the dimensions of an experiment rather than a career.”

Nowhere was this more obvious than in his apartment, a nondescript, one-bedroom on the 15th floor of Two Fifth Avenue. For over a decade, beginning in the late 70’s, he transformed, almost daily, this domestic space into a laboratory for experimentation with color, form, materials and meaning. One Sunday morning in 1978 I picked up the NY Times Magazine and there he was. In the article Dan explained it this way: “I have for many years used my home to push modernist principles of structure and coherency to their wildest extreme. I create elegant mutations, radiating with intense color and complexity, in a world that is deconstructed into a goofy ritualistic playground for daily life.”

For me, these incredible environments are among his most remarkable work, spawning ideas for screens, furniture and assemblages. His inspirations were the trash structures encountered on his trips with his buddies to the Caribbean and the deep memory of Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau environments from the 20’s. These influences seemed to tap into the deeper cultural shift being felt at the beginning of the 80’s from neat to messy, from newness and originality to appropriation and transmutation.

Mining the detritus of New York streets, he made old stuff new, and like Duchamp before him he endowed dumb objects with new meanings and turned trash in to tribal objects of domestic utility. Like Picasso and Braque, he employed the art of assemblage, a trusty Modernist device for managing visual diversity and altering meaning through bizarre juxtaposition.”

AN EDITORIAL TRIBUTE TO THE WORK OF DAN FRIEDMAN, PRODUCED BY MYSELF AND FELIX BURRICHTER AND PHOTOGRAPHED BY BELA BORSODI IS NOW ON NEWSSTANDS; PHOTOGRAPHS BY BELA BORSODI FOR PIN-UP MAGAZINE ISSUE SIX; TEXT TAKEN FROM A PIECE ORIGINALLY WRITEN FOR A 2005 YALE RETROSPECTIVE BY CHRISTOPHER PULLMAN

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