Henry Flynt: About Transformations

Friday, September 19th at 8pm, ISSUE Project Room and The Emily Harvey Foundation are honored to present a rare public appearance by artist, philosopher, and composer Henry Flynt, in conjunction with the 2025 Brooklyn Book Festival. In this special engagement, Flynt will revisit his seminal 1961 Concept Art work, Transformations, offering a deep, contextual study of the piece and its varied guises over time. Rather than rushing toward an explanation—such as that published in An Anthology (ed. La Monte Young, 1963)—Flynt will situate Transformations within a wider philosophical and artistic framework.

He will fully explore Transformations as:

• a diversion from absurdist computationalist music
• a diversion from the derivations of exact science
• a cognitive nihilist object-lesson for exact science regarding derivations

Through this lens, Flynt will address the foundational questions that shaped his early work and their implications for radical art and thought. 

Notes on Concept Art and Transformations: 

Henry Flynt introduced concept art in 1961, and it has had expositions in major venues and print publications. But the art world has not situated concept art accurately in their panorama. One reason has to be that concept art is not exclusively art. It is situated on a dividing line between art and the exact sciences—and its view of the exact sciences is iconoclastic.

Another reason has to be that the later Conceptual Art (why are the names similar?) did gain the enthusiasm of the art public, allowing the public to assume that concept art is only an incident in this well-known genre.

Beginning in 1962, Flynt abandoned contributing to art and began to assail fine art (he called it ‘serious culture’), and science, across the board: for reasons of principle. That was the period of his attack on serious culture, documented, for example, in décollage Nr. 3 and in the unpublished From Culture to Brend.

Having offered the defining concept art pieces in 1961, Flynt returned to his genre in 1987. After that, he produced many pieces for exhibitions in the genre. 

Flynt will reprise all of the above. He will then speak on Transformations, one of the original concept art pieces from 1961.

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. [Full bio here]