Henry Flynt was born in 1940 in Greensboro, NC. His biography as an artist is unusual, because he was interested in contributing as an artist decades before he began making works for gallery display and before he had a long-term dealer.
He began making drawings while at Harvard in 1958. These would be the pilot projects for a large painting and a triptych he showed at the end of the 1980s. c. 1961 he would do his first expressly modernist painting, Aleatoric Painting. It did not survive because he had made no provision to protect it from dust. (Intentionally, there was raw turpentine and linseed oil on the surface. Chance dictated that some paint went off the face of the canvas.) When he remade Aleatoric Painting as a series, beginning in 1988, the first step for each painting was to make the shadow box in which the finished canvas would be lodged for storage.
Flynt left Harvard to write an iconoclastic philosophical monograph, Philosophy Proper. It has to be mentioned, because it intimated a critique of logico-mathematical truth. (By this point, logic and mathematics had considerably been merged, something the non-expert may not be aware of. Flynt didn’t distinguish them. For him, the structure common to them was the proof or derivation.) It all prefigured Flynt’s subsequent initiative in art, concept art.
Flynt visited New York in December 1960 to meet La Monte Young. He was captivated by Young’s word pieces, and in 1961, began composing word pieces which asked for visual or tangible realizations that intellectually challenged the proof concept. In June 1961, he wrote a prospectus for a visual art which, again, challenged the proof concept, per Philosophy Proper.
The label he chose: concept art.
In September 1961, Flynt assembled some works he had at the time in a document which Tony Conrad duplicated for distribution: Anthology of Non-Philosophical Cultural Works. (Nicknamed “Little Anthology.”) It was the first publication of two concept art works.
An Anthology, ed. La Monte Young, is usually dated 1963. Flynt had a section in that anthology, prepared well before publication, which—together with the 1961 document—outlined where concept art was at that point.
In 1982, Flynt did events at Backworks, including an exhibition of pieces from the 1961 period, some of them remakes of destroyed word pieces. There was an offset catalog: Fragments and Reconstructions from a Destroyed Oeuvre.
In 1987, Flynt was given the opportunity to show old and new work at Avenue B Gallery. Photostats of the pages from An Anthology were displayed. At the same time, Flynt made new concept art pieces, now in formats for gallery exhibition. This commenced the phase in which he regularly participated in exhibitions. Initially, it was centered on concept art, but now there was a pronounced shift from the 1961 agenda. From short instruction pieces to what could be called apparatus or installations or dedicated rooms. (Logically Impossible Space; Nothing Written Here.)
In 1987, Flynt made and displayed Tritone Monochord, a monochord with bridge, on a large wood sheet on which is inscribed the geometry of the tritone. The work received its first gallery exhibition at Loughelton Gallery, New York, January 1988.
At Emily Harvey’s invitation, Flynt joined her gallery in 1988. She first showed new concept art silkscreens in France in the summer of 1988.
When Flynt was showing with Emily Harvey in New York, he prepared a brochure which continued to make the case for concept art: Concept Art Before 1967. 1990/1994.
At the 1990 Venice Biennale, Flynt continued second-phase concept art with the first of his pieces requiring a dedicated room, Logically Impossible Space. (At the Venice Biennale, the room was shown incomplete. Later exhibitions included a completed room.)
During this second phase, Flynt considerably broadened his range as an artist. There were perceptually challenging pieces that were not exactly concept art: Interior Boundary Painting (1993).
Poem 4 and Grey Planes came back from 1958 as large acrylics.
There was an oil on linen, Peruvian Chord.
There were:
The Seminar: documentation of a seminar (held in an apartment in SOHO) in 28 photos hung as an array. With paper items in a vitrine.
Photos of Women, 10 photos.
One true sentence, a concept art text for kitchen wallpaper.
Shadow Painting, a painting that was a shadow on canvas (that could be turned off).
Flinx in Flux., a found paperback, framed.
Wandering Painting, a piece for a dedicated room that employed a recorded hypnotic induction to cause a viewer, lying on a rug, to see a streak on a canvas, mounted on the ceiling, move.
Flynt drew large-format cartoons, Spirit-World Paintings (1993).
There was The New Genius, a color Xerox montage, from 1993.
Flynt made several abstract films. The exposition of Flynt at ZKM in 2013 included a dedicated screening room in which the series of films was shown continuously. He selected stills from his films to become an installation, Future of the Image.
Visual works were made for print publication, such as Spiral Translation.
(Ausgabe, 1995).
Show in Advance of Its Existence—proposed as a site-specific, time-specific intervention at Mudima—was rejected—and ended as published documentation.
Voids (2009).
Mobile 03 (2014).
Flynt’s SAMO© Graffiti Portfolio, shot in 1978-9, comprised an entire exhibition in 1991—premiered at Emily Harvey in 1991—that traveled to a number of venues.
Flynt continued second-phase concept art with pieces like:
Counting Stands
Nothing Written Here
Flynt showed at some large institutions:
Venice Biennale, 1990
Stedelijk, Amsterdam, 1990
SAIC Mclean, Chicago, 2012
Kunstverein, Düsseldorf, 2012
ZKM, Karlsruhe, 2013
He had a major solo exhibition at the Box in LA. 2017-8.
Elaborations of concept art’s theory appeared in:
Blueprint for a Higher Civilization (1975)
Io #41: Being = Space X Action (1989)
About Transformations (2024)
Flynt has authored a number of books, some of which delve into art:
Henry Flynt 2011 Concept Art 50 Years (Grimmuseum, 2011)
On art: published by Joao Simoes:
Three Essays on Spirituality and Art (2020)
About Transformations (2024)
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The Emily Harvey Foundation (EHF) is open to artists throughout the world, offering a residency program in Venice, Italy, a city where the arts have been honored and fostered for over a thousand years, and a vibrant program of performances, events and exhibitions in New York City, which is also the seat of the historical Collection inherited from the Emily Harvey Gallery. At its New York base, the EHF has developed an ambitious and comprehensive art/event program that draws on its rich history, art collection, and archive grounded in Fluxus, Concept Art, Mail Art, and Performance Art. Artworks from the EHF collection are regularly lent to temporary exhibitions worldwide. The EHF art program concerns itself with supporting ideas resistant to frameworks of easy legibility. Its emphasis is on giving voice, and momentary material form, to discursive and process-based practices. In this historical moment, much of what we do would be impossible, and unfeasible at almost any other site. Show by show, we aim to nurture experimental, collaborative and cross-disciplinary approaches, while generating a spectrum of alternatives to other more solid contexts for contemporary practice.
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