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Image of Seven States of Openness

Howard Fried

American, b. 1946

Seven States of Openness
1969-2004

Mixed media
21 x 81.375 in.
Gift of the Marie Eccles Caine Foundation
2004.61

An open letter to everyone who was nice to me before I came to San Francisco. An open letter to everyone who was nice to me after I came to San Francisco. These sentiments, expressed in The First State of Openness, appear on unfolded envelopes positioned in a corner of two frames that are the shoulder width and height of the artist. Such an indexical relationship to the body was among his strategies to make objective decisions.

Howard Fried, a Bay Area conceptual artist, began The Seven States of Openness during graduate school at the University of California, Davis. The series of sculptures, with accompanying charts, takes as its subject the envelope—a single sheet of material manipulated into different forms or serially repeated. The shadow cast by the angled envelope in The Third State of Openness nods to the legendary Slant Step, a found oddity that had inspired many art homages and a canonical moment in UC Davis art history.

From the page to the mail slot, The Seven States of Openness suggests the movement from the site of authorship to the site of reception. Exhibitions are both delivery vehicles and opportunities for further development. The individual pieces solve problems that arose between the time of their inception and the time of their installation, or in the adaptation from one exhibition context to another. Fried later incorporated certain details originally made in relation to the particularities of a space. Other pieces visibly registered the unavailability of a given material. The overall work thus reflects moments of self-repair and self-documentation. In retrospect, Fried feels that these seven operations encompass all the processes he would deal with throughout his career, likening this early installation to the DNA of his thought process.

Tanya Zimbardo

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