Ben’s Bar - Why People Attend Bars: To Be Heard, To Be Seen, To Be There (Installation View)

The installation was originally constructed in 1990 for a group show at Salvatore Ala Gallery in Soho, NY called "Fluxus Closing In". Almost twelve years later in 2002, the installation would travel from a storage space in New York City and “reincarnate” (BP) into the environment Ben’s Bar, located at the Social Headquarters for the Friends of Fluxus here in Wiesbaden, since 2007 the Bar is insatlled at Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden. Ben’s Bar was an idea Benjamin Patterson conceived as a meeting place for people who were interested in Fluxus. When the piece Why do People Attend Bars arrived from New York, the idea conjoined with the 2002 Fluxus citywide exhibition Forty Years: Fluxus and Followers curated by René Block and Regina Bärthel. Ben Patterson’s installation is located in the entrance of the exhibition space. In aggregate, it is a room that appears to be a reenactment of a once ritzy bar partially done in a rococo style, or so it seems.