Background
Henry Flynt’s work devolves from what he calls cognitive nihilism; a concept he developed and first announced in the 1960 and 1961 drafts of a paper called Philosophy Proper. The 1961 draft was published in Milan with other early work in his book Blueprint for a Higher Civilization in 1975. Flynt refined these dispensations in the essay Is there language? that was published as Primary Study in 1964.
In 1961 Flynt coined the term concept art in the Neo-Dada, proto-Fluxus book An Anthology of Chance Operations (published by Jackson Mac Low and La Monte Young) that was released in 1963. An Anthology of Chance Operations contained seminal works by Fluxus artists such as George Brecht and Dick Higgins. Flynt's concept art, he maintained, devolved from cognitive nihilism, from insights about the vulnerabilities of logic and mathematics. Drawing on an exclusively syntactical paradigm of logic and mathematics, concept art was meant jointly to supersede mathematics and the formalistic music then current in serious art music circles. Therefore, Flynt maintained, to merit the label concept art, a work had to be an object-critique of logic or mathematics or objective structure." It has nothing to do with concept art as the term is used to describe a form of illustration in the realm of the digital arts.
In 1962 Flynt began to campaign for an anti-art position. Thus he demonstrated against cultural institutions in New York City (such as MOMA and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts) with Tony Conrad and Jack Smith in 1963 and against the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen twice in 1964. Flynt wanted avant-garde art to become superseded by the terms of veramusement and brend - neologisms meaning approximately pure recreation. Flynt read publicly from his text From Culture to Veramusment at Walter De Maria's loft on February 28, 1963 - an act which can be considered performance art.
From about 1980, Flynt has given a great deal of time to two endeavors which did not achieve the notoriety of the early actions: his concepts of meta-technology and personhood theory. In 1987 he revived his "concept art" for tactical reasons; and spent seven years in the art world. Following that period, Flynt began to publish recorded but unreleased musical compositions. Over 10 audio CDs have appeared as of 2007.
Flynt's writings on a wide variety of subjects are available on his website: Henry Flynt: Philosophy
Read more about this topic: Henry Flynt
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