The chapter, “Extended Play, Radical Preservation and the Politics of Silence: Ken Friedman’s Zen for Record,” takes Friedman’s apparently simple 1966 proposition—“a phonograph record with no sound on it”—as the starting point for a much broader argument about sound, silence, materiality, iteration, temporality, and preservation. Its central claim is that Zen for Record cannot be adequately understood as a stable physical object. Rather, it is a work whose identity persists through its capacity to change media, material form, technological support, and historical context. The chapter begins with the author’s own experience of receiving and playing a 1982 Slowscan edition of the work. Although the record contains no intentionally recorded sound, playing it produces an unexpectedly rich sonic experience: the stylus, grooves, turntable, scratches, surrounding environment, and act of listening all generate sound. Silence therefore becomes not an absence but a means of heightening auditory attention. Listening oscillates between the work and its environment until the distinction between them begins to dissolve. Historically, Zen for Record originated in 1966 when Friedman encountered an apparently soundless manufactured record while working at ESP-Disc in New York. He treated it as a readymade and showed it to George Maciunas, although Maciunas did not regard the phonograph record as an established Fluxus medium. The idea subsequently appeared as an event score—“Produce a phonograph record with no sound on it”—and was physically realized by Slowscan in 1982. The chapter emphasizes that the work subsequently proliferated conceptually into other potential recording technologies, including piano rolls, wax records, music boxes, Dictaphone bands, wire recordings, audiotape, and compact discs. This mobility leads to one of the chapter’s major ontological questions: where exactly is the work? Different manifestations do not simply reproduce an original object. An empty record jacket, an overpainted record, a playable silent record, and an unrealized silent CD produce fundamentally different sensory and temporal conditions. Particularly important is the distinction between versions that can be played and those that suppress playback: an overpainted record, for example, paradoxically “conserves” its potential sound beneath the paint while making its actualization impossible without destroying the intervention. Drawing particularly on Christoph Cox’s sonic materialism, the chapter argues that noise should not be treated as an accidental contaminant of an otherwise silent work. Instead, noise constitutes the work's sonic ontology. The sound of the stylus moving through the grooves, the apparatus itself, and ambient sound reveal an uninterrupted “sonic flux.” Zen for Record therefore demonstrates that silence cannot simply be equated with the absence of sound: its supposed silence actually makes audible the material and technological conditions normally suppressed in listening. The argument then expands from sonic ontology into a theory of the virtual and the actual. Drawing on Deleuze and Bergson, the chapter proposes that the work exists virtually as a multiplicity of possible actualizations. A vinyl record, piano roll, audiotape, or CD need not resemble one another materially to belong to the same work. Through Wollheim’s type/token distinction and André Lepecki’s thinking about reenactment, Zen for Record emerges as an ongoing performance of a concept rather than a fixed object: each material manifestation is simultaneously an artwork and a document of one particular actualization. Exemplification provides another way of describing this structure. Drawing on Nelson Goodman, Catherine Elgin, Sherri Irvin, and especially Dick Higgins’s “Exemplavist Manifesto,” the chapter proposes that individual realizations of Zen for Record are examples of a field of possibilities rather than definitive embodiments of an original. For Higgins, Fluxus works generate experiences rather than simply represent something, and their realization remains fundamentally open. Thus the relationship among realizations—and between actual and unrealized possibilities—is more important than any single manifestation. The chapter situates this structure historically within Fluxus concretism, particularly Maciunas’s idea that an artwork can establish conditions through which form develops independently of the artist. Zen for Record does not symbolize silence; its creaking, apparently empty record is concretely what it is. Its genesis as a found object also introduces bricolage, contingency, play, and indeterminacy into its ontology. A substantial section then places Friedman in a genealogy of postwar experiments with silence, emptiness, and perceptual attention, especially John Cage’s 4′33″, Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film, and Robert Rauschenberg’s White Painting. All four works demonstrate that apparent emptiness is actually productive: Cage reveals ambient sound, Paik’s blank film accumulates dust and projection artifacts, Rauschenberg’s white canvases register changing light and shadows, and Friedman’s silent record reveals the sounds of playback and environment. Rather than representing nothingness, these works intensify attention toward normally overlooked phenomena. The chapter also complicates their association with Zen. Although Zen became influential within Western avant-garde circles through figures such as D. T. Suzuki and Cage, neither Paik nor Friedman can straightforwardly be described as making “Zen art.” Friedman himself sometimes approached Zen humorously. Nevertheless, the simplicity, withdrawal, receptivity, and attentiveness produced by Zen for Record retain affinities with Zen aesthetics: apparent emptiness becomes a condition for intensified perception. Friedman’s work is further situated alongside Ben Vautier’s Disque de Musique Total, Milan Knížák’s Destroyed Music, and Christian Marclay’s Record without a Cover. These works similarly destabilize the record as a fixed carrier of predetermined content. Scratches, destruction, environmental exposure, playback, and chance become productive rather than merely damaging forces, making the material carrier itself participate in generating the work. The chapter culminates in the concept of “radical preservation.” Conventional conservation might preserve the original vinyl, jacket, turntable, and historical technology under controlled conditions. But doing so could paradoxically destroy something fundamental about the work by immobilizing and “silencing” it—turning an active sonic proposition into a museum relic. Zen for Record therefore exposes a tension between preserving an object's materials and preserving its capacity to act. The alternative proposed is preservation through variation, translation, and change. Because the score and concept can migrate between media, the work can survive the obsolescence or disappearance of particular technological carriers. Preservation consequently ceases to be something performed externally on the artwork. Instead, preservation becomes intrinsic to the work's ontology: “preservation is not external to the work but indeed, it is the Work itself.” The capitalized “Work” names a larger structure capable of sustaining itself through different formats, technologies, and historical moments. This is what the chapter calls radical preservation: persistence liberated from the demand for continuous authentic material substance. The final move pushes the argument beyond Zen for Record itself. Friedman’s work, Paik’s Zen for Film, Cage’s 4′33″, and Rauschenberg’s White Painting can be understood as participating in a broader continuity of gestures, forms, substances, textures, and noises. What persists, therefore, may be larger than an individually authored artwork. The chapter ultimately proposes an ontology of preservation based on continuity through difference: a work survives not despite transformation but, potentially, because of its capacity to transform. In one sentence: the chapter uses the paradox of a “silent” record to argue that artworks need not persist through material fixity; Zen for Record demonstrates a form of radical preservation in which the Work endures through sonic activation, technological migration, iteration, and difference rather than through the permanence of any single material object.
Hanna B. Hölling (2026) studied this question.