In Search of Benjamin Patterson: An Improvised Journey

Benjamin (Ben) Patterson. Born 1934 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

I wish I knew Ben Patterson. In a way, I’ve been searching for him all my life, even though he was always and already there. I’ll explain that in a moment, but I should say at the outset that the work being performed by this article somewhat exceeds my original intent to examine Patterson’s work in terms of contemporary ideas about improvisation.

There’s a long tradition in jazz of referring to musicians by their first names, shortened first names, or nicknames. Insiders—musicians and listeners but not necessarily the general public—refer confidently to Miles and Duke and Hawk and Bud and Trane. Although Ben Patterson’s life and work did not have much to do with jazz, at least according to the standard portrayals, Fluxus narratives also asserted first-name familiarity with alacrity. The stories always seemed to invite you to imagine (or wish) that you yourself had been on the Fluxus scene.

There was another Ben—Ben Vautier—whose e-mail listserv I was on for years. I have no idea who put me on his list, but as a longtime denizen of several experimental music scenes, I enjoyed being able, on an irregular basis, to keep up with the doings of George and Shigeko and Emmett and Alison and so on. These e-mails presented lots of stories, more than a few complaints, and a strong, celebratory sense of community.

So many Fluxnarratives—like the narratives of its predecessor movement, the Beats—trade on the familiar: personal stories and histories, sometimes with a point or edge, sometimes not. During my early years in New York, the mid-1970s, I would sit placidly—by turns mystified, fascinated, nonplussed, and here and there a bit bored—as older artists who knew the principal players in the drama—or, as I found out later, were players themselves—told Fluxus stories that never made the books but that “everyone” somehow knew. I was flattered to be there since I’m considerably younger than the Fluxus originators, and I don’t think they’re taking on new members—or rather, we want our own clubs and our own names anyway.

George Maciunas’s 1967 mapping of Fluxus and its relationship to the avant-garde presented the exoskeleton of a socio-artistic network concerned with the production of knowledge—oral, written, graphic—about itself.¹ This epistemologically centered identity-formation project is central to many art movements, but the degree to which Fluxus publicly articulated this kind of networked affinity consciousness is particularly noteworthy. It is this sense of affinity that produces art, movements, and genre membership, and the oral histories I absorbed in those bar and backstage sessions not only constituted valuable preparation for the textual histories and collegial connections I encountered later, but also whetted my appetite for actually meeting this mysterious black figure, Ben Patterson.

A later reason why I wanted to get to know Patterson in some way—at least historically, if not personally—is that a fair amount of my current scholarly direction casts a critical, contextualizing eye upon the frequent discrepancies between scholarly and popular histories of experimentalism and what artists actually experienced in and around those experimental art worlds. This isn’t quite the same thing as reading a history of the period and complaining, “That’s not the way it happened”; rather, what is of concern here is an analysis of mediation, critically examining differences between what James Scott would call “public” and “private” transcripts.

Another reason why I wanted to get to know Patterson is more personal. I’ve been associated for many years with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, an influential African American musical avant-garde that is roughly contemporaneous with Fluxus. As I noted in my book on this musical collective, “AACM musicians updated and revised a model pursued by black classical composers, an important group of creative music-makers who, I maintain, have been all but ignored by the major black cultural critics and public intellectuals who have come to prominence...