An Audience Is Divided: Benjamin Patterson, Clifford Owens, and the Politics of Representation

Scored on the horizon of the Voting Rights Act, Benjamin Patterson’s 1964 First Symphony begins with a vote that divides the audience as it opens representational democracy to unexpected outcomes. As the only black Fluxus artist, Patterson’s approach to representation as both a political and artistic problematic proves foundational for Clifford Owens’s 2011/12 living anthology of African American performance at MoMA PS1.