Flash Art - History

History

1967

The first issue of Flash appears in Rome, edited and published by Giancarlo Politi as a newspaper in tabloid format. This very first issue, with its journalistic tone and emphasis on information, clearly distinguishes the new publication from all other art magazines in Europe and the United States. Italian artist Piero Gilardi publishes the first of a series of reports from New York and European art capitals. This is the first European discussion on Joseph Beuys and a few American artists such us Bruce Nauman and Eva Hesse. Germano Celant’s Arte Povera Manifesto – entitled Notes for a Guerrilla War – engages political issues with the art of Michelangelo Pistoletto, Mario Merz, Giulio Paolini, Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Luciano Fabro and Jannis Kounellis among others. On the verge of 1968 Flash Art registers and anticipates the ideologization of culture. Encounters and collaborations with Joseph Beuys and Hans Haacke – at that time the most effective creators of art with a direct impact on socio-political reality – are soon to follow.

1970

Flash Art becomes even more international, concentrating on foreign artists and publishing direct reports from the artists’ native country. Texts are frequently printed in the authors’ native language. The informative nature of Flash Art consolidates and goes hand in hand with the avant-garde’s now predominant ideas on the end of interpretive criticism.

1971

An issue with a cover by Joseph Kosuth and Carl Andre including a statement – written by the former devoted to the so-called ‘Conceptual Art’ – is out. The text accompanies a picture of the Italian version of Joseph Kosuth’s Seventh Investigation (Art as Idea as Idea) Proposition One; the project – displayed in three different places (a billboard in New York Chinatown, an advertising space in the Daily World and a large band in Turin) – is afterwards exhibited during the “Information” show at New York’s MoMA. Art & Language and Vito Acconci make their first appearance on the cover of an art magazine. Flash Art is more and more devoted to the artists' texts: Gino De Dominicis’s Letter to Immortality, Robert Smithson’s Cultural Confinement and Sol LeWitt's Sentences on Conceptual Art are just a few examples. The magazine’s headquarters shifts from Rome to Milan.

1972

On the occasion of Documenta V, the magazine dedicates an entire issue, with a cover by Hans Haacke, to this large-scale exhibition. Already mixing art and marketing, Flash Art makes an appearance during Documenta, distributing T-shirts reproducing the faces of the artists who at the moment were most discussed, such as Joseph Beuys, Joseph Kosuth and Sol LeWitt.

1973

Flash Art starts to publish its German edition Heute Kunst confirming a particular attention to the new tendencies in the country, from conceptualism to a painter like A. R. Penck, who at that time was still living in East Germany and known only to a very few specialists. Sol LeWitt designs the cover for Flash Art: a work somewhere between a masthead and a post-Minimalist drawing.

1974

Flash Art acquires a magazine format. At this moment the magazine – published in three languages: Italian, English and French – is divided in two main parts: on the one hand its international side is continuously updated with several sections called Flash Art Italia, England, France, USA and Eastern Europe edited by selective correspondents; on the other hand the editorial staff tries to engage artists in the realization of the magazine. Francesco Clemente, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Annette Messager, Chris Burden, John Baldessari, Edward Ruscha, Gordon Matta-Clark, Rebecca Horn and many others are invited to compose pages for the magazine. Always provocative never predictable, Flash Art anticipates the myth of persona within the art community; entire pages are dedicated to snapshots – taken during several art opening all over the world – of emerging artists, critics and dealers such us Joseph Kosuth, John Baldessari, Daniel Buren, Vito Acconci, René Block, Germano Celant, Bruno Bischofberger, Ileana Sonnabend and many others in a way somewhere between a net blog, a celebrity gallery and an artwork of Christian Boltanski.

1978

In the ages of postmodernism and poststructuralism, the magazine adapts its nature with an increasing attention to the American intellectual scene: Could Leonardo da Vinci make it in New York today?, by artists Olivier Mosset and Gregor Müller, alongside RoseLee Goldberg’s interview (part of Helena Kontova’s Flash Art Performance editorial section), just to name a pair. In 1977 the Committee for the Visual Art and the Artists Space in New York host the exhibition “Picture”. On this occasion Flash Art publishes texts by Douglas Crimp (a that time managing editor of October and organizer of the show at the Artists Space) and artists Thomas Lawson and David Salle, highlighting the birth of the Picture Generation: Robert Longo, Jack Goldstein, David Salle, Sherrie Levine, Thomas Lawson, Matt Mullican, and later Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman, are recognized for their artworks created by the linguistic deconstruction of preexistent imagery.

1979

Flash Art splits into two editions: Flash Art International and Flash Art Italia. The result of this separation is an incisive intervention into both the international and the Italian scenes, which represents tow different realities that a single publication found difficult to fulfill. The first issue of Flash Art International features the seminal text "The Italian Transavantgarde" by Achille Bonito Oliva, whose ‘Ideology of the Traitor’ introduces the art of Enzo Cucchi, Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia, Mimmo Paladino, Nicola De Maria, Marco Bagnoli and Remo Salvadori.

1980

Jeffrey Deitch – at that time Vice President of Citibank where he spent nine years developing and managing the bank’s art advisory and art finance businesses – becomes a regular columnist of the magazine and the first U.S. editor of Flash Art International. In his articles Deitch analyzes the figure of the artist neither as a solitary creator nor as a single-role-identity but as one of the several players of the ‘art system’ among dealers, gallerists, museum directors, art critics and collectors. It is due to these reasons that the editorial board gives increasing attention to the New York art scene: Thomas Lawson reviews on David Salle at Larry Gagosian Gallery / Nosei-Weber / The Kitchen as well as the famous "Three Cs" (Chia, Clemente and Cucchi) at Sperone Westwater Fisher – that decisively puts the central figures of the Transavanguardia on the New York map – are just a few examples. "Gallery Talk," a new regular column with conversations and presentations of major art dealers (published as a supplement and accompanied by a picture) is soon to follow. Yet Flash Art International investigates the most challenging philosophical instances through a series of texts, essays and interviews dedicated to thinkers like Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Félix Guattari, Julia Kristeva, Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio.

1981

Greater attention is being turned to German artists like Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz, Per Kirkeby, Markus Lüpertz, Jörg Immendorff, Rainer Fetting as much as to the graffiti artists and the shift of Painting to other media such as performance and conceptualism.

1983

Flash Art International covers – mostly accompanied by long interviews – record an emerging group of superstar artists: Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, David Salle and Keith Haring (who makes dresses-as-artworks for Grace Jones and Madonna) are the protagonists of changes in the art field; their success has been realized with such a great speed and on so vast a scale in the annals of contemporary art. At the same time the art world grows to unheard-of dimensions: news no longer comes exclusively from New York and a few European centers, but also from many places like Los Angeles and Chicago in the States as well as from Japan and the Soviet Union. Flash Art Edition Française and Flash Art Edición Española are soon to follow.

1986

Flash Art International asks artist and socio-cultural theorist Peter Halley to write an essay on Frank Stella called "Frank Stella and the Simulacrum." In this essay Halley melts his knowledge with a very straight style of writing figuring out the master of modernism as an oxymoron, balancing materialism and bureaucracy under the name of hyperrealization and simulation. After that Halley becomes known also as the author of essays – regarding the relationship between his work and the thoughts of intellectuals like Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault and Guy Debord – and for Index Magazine (founded in 1996 with Bob Nickas), which investigates the tenuous power of photographic representation. Neo-Geo means everything and nothing. It seems to be an attitude towards the flow production instead of a way to make art. Flash Art International decides to invite these artists (Jeff Koons, Peter Halley, Ashley Bickerton, Sherrie Levine, Haim Steinbach and Philip Taaffe) for a panel moderated by Peter Nagy, artist and co-owner of small but significant East Village, Manhattan Gallery Nature Morte. Accompanied with a text by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Flash Art International comes out with Gino De Dominicis on the cover, simultaneously with Artforum. In fact this coincidence between the two non-speaking leading magazines has to be considered as an act of ubiquity, one of the most utopian of the artist efforts.

1987

Among the neo geo artists, Jeff Koons is the most radical to embody such new ideas. Flash Art International invites him for a conversation with the staff of the magazine. Paul Taylor interviews Andy Warhol for the last time before his unpredictable death while brand new critic Jérôme Sans talks to Jean-Hubert Martin about his exhibition “Magiciens de la terre”. Although the aim of the show is to spotlight art from all over the world, in fact it marks a totally Western-centric behavior towards cultural differences nevertheless, provoking many skeptical responses, which are considered as the first examples of the contemporary African art criticism. In Post-Feminism, Dan Cameron describes women artists as more subversive than their colleagues. Consequently Flash Art International features three female icons on the cover: Rosemarie Trockel, the champion-user of female-based practice as tools for the realization of a hidden self-emancipation, Sherrie Levine, whose algid attitude towards art-making recognizing her as an undeniable protagonist of the contemporary art scene, and Barbara Kruger; her unforgettable mottos I shop therefore I am (sampled from René Descartes's "Cogito ergo sum") displayed through billboards and posters goes ‘outside’ via an unforgettable sardonic language enriched by an ironic flavor, emblematic of the current decade. Meanwhile thousands of people sanctioned the end of the cold war – by destroying the Berlin Wall – Flash Art International captured the state of the art in Russia with a special supplement entirely dedicated on it.

1988

Flash Art News is the new creature of the magazine. Published in a newspaper format and paper, this supplement is made as a compendium; speed news, short interviews with artists and dealers – as well as art facts from the art centers – are put together as a source for the readers ever more needy for information from the increased art system. The Spotlight is another regular column in the magazine. Shorter than a feature, longer than a review the Spotlight is one page for one shows. On the occasion of a spotlight – dedicated to Jeff Koons and Christopher Wool – Koons starts to develop his mission for the artist’s control of the media field, substituting the critic text with a full-page Wool pattern (Untitled, 1987) accompanied by the sentence “this painting remember me of a wall in a summer cottage,” signed by himself. This strategy will find a fulfilled realization in the famous "Ads Series." "During the 1988-89 art season, Koons and his galleries put their money where their mouth was. A series of full-page advertisements was purchased in the major trade magazine of the time: Artforum, Flash Art, Arts, and Art in America. In the center of each highly theatrical tableau, Koons presided over the scene smiling smugly at the camera, impeccably groomed, obviously airbrushed."

1990

Flash Art International is more than ever engaged by giving space to the artists. Its new section Flash Art Project is one of the first examples of an editorial artist project. Later on this relationship is more than ever evident by asking them to give their own interpretation of the cover magazine. Several artists, such as Gerhard Merz, Mark Kostabi, Michael Majerus, Pierre Huyghe and Gian Marco Montesano, are selected to contribute.

1991

Talented, alternative and updated: these are the common qualities of the ever-changing Flash Art International contributing editors: from then Cologne-based artist and musician Jutta Koether to writer and musician Dan Cameron, from future Palais de Tokyo directors Nicolas Bourriaud and Jérôme Sans to globe-trotting interviewers Paul Taylor and Hans Ulrich Obrist, from Documenta 2012 artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev to Klaus Biesenbach founding director of Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art and the Berlin Biennale and currently chief curator at large at the Museum of Modern Art and director of MoMA PS1.

1992

In 1986 the magazine publishes an interview with underground director Wim Wenders conducted by Italian New York-based painter Francesco Bonami. In 1992 Bonami has been appointed head of the U.S. Editorial Desk inaugurating a series of features focused on the most brilliant and challenging artist of the Nineties: from Damien Hirst to Elizabeth Peyton, from Charles Ray to Doug Aitken. Meanwhile, anticipating the passage from the figure of the coordinator to the birth of the curator’s practice, Flash Art International registers “Post Human” (or Posthuman) – curated by former U.S. Editor Jeffrey Deitch – as a "Brave New Art" exhibition. The show – defined a "manifesto trumpeting a new art for a new breed of human" – is one of the first examples where the artworks displayed, mostly selected from Greek collector Dakis Joannou purchases, are chosen and selected to illustrate – together with additional magazines and science images – a curatorial project which aim is to “begin looking at how these new technologies and new social attitudes will intersect with art.”

1993

In 2004 London-based publishing house Phaidon Press presents “Vitamin P: New Perspective in Painting” with an introducing-essay by poet and former Flash Art International former editor Barry Schwabsky. This book, the first in a series devoted to all the art medias, is directly inspired by the eponymous essay written by Francesco Bonami for the magazine. This is not the first time: in 1987 Flash Art International published an omni-comprehending essay entitled Arte Povera 1976-1987 by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, featuring well compiled profiles of Pino Pascali, Gilberto Zorio, Mario Merz, Luciano Fabro, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Alighiero Boetti, Emilio Prini, Jannis Kounellis, Giuseppe Penone and Giulio Polini. Christov-Bakargiev will be consequently haired by Phaidon Press for the Arte Povera book, part of the series “Themes & Movements.” Flash Art International cover is an indicator of success: Damien Hirst, Gabriel Orozco, Maurizio Cattelan, Vanessa Beecroft and Matthew Barney, just to name the most recognizable artists who ‘have to pay’ their dues to the magazine. All the artists just named take part to Aperto '93, the Venice Biennale section focused on the new generation of artists. For that edition, coordinator Helena Kontova invites a curatorial team composed by Francesco Bonami, Jeffrey Deitch, Nicolas Bourriaud, Benjamin Weil, Bob Nickas and Frieze Matthew Slotover among others. The result is memorable. Back to the covers, it happens that Flash Art International has to fight against cultural censorship, like in the case of Larry Clark’s cover, refused by the current U.S. distributor and consequently substituted.

1995

The success of Aperto '93 as one of the most important contemporary art overview and the uninterrupted discovery of artist from Africa and Asia are on the base of Aperto, Cityscape and Global Art, the new regular columns of Flash Art International. The first is a sort of exhibition on paper – published in the form of an article – that captures what is going on geographically or thematically; the second consists in a series of interviews with the chosen city-based artists, curators and museum directors while the third is a one-page feature where writers and curators from all over the world, like Octavio Zaya and Hou Hanru, are invited to discuss the practice of and later only one work by a contemporary artist.

1996

In February, the Center for Contemporary Art in Stockholm hosted the show “Interpol”, curated by Jan Äman and Russian curator Viktor Misiano. During the opening artist Alexander Brener destroyed Wenga Du’s project, a 20-meter long tunnel of human hair. The performance is legitimized by Misiano as a “completely new experience.” Further on, Flash Art editorial staff receives a reclaim letter – signed by artists, critics, curators and Äman himself – which will be published accompanied by Misiano’s response and Giancarlo Politi’s opinion. Again, a few months later, Politi will return to defend Bremer – arrested after his action consisted of spraypainting the symbol of the American Dollar on Kazimir Malevich White Cross on Gray, on view at the Stedelijk Museum, – asking the magazine’s readers to write letters for Brener’s freedom. With "Ambivalent Witnesses," Hou Hanru drives the reader in the unexplored and soon-to-exploding state of the contemporary art in China.

1997

Flash Art International is the most updated keeper of the new voices in curating with several pages dedicated to various but still unforgettable blockbuster shows like Chinese situation “Cities on the Move” (curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Hou Hanru), Young British Artists’ triumph “Sensation” (curated by Charles Saatchi and Norman Rosenthal), the 1997’s ‘merry-go-round’ (Venice Biennale, Documenta and Skulptur Projekte Münster) as well as for the new biennials’ ‘roller coaster’ with reports from Cuba, Sydney, Gwangju, Taipei and many other cities. In 1999, the New York Magazine publishes an article titled The "Mob Squad." Author Phoebe Hoban writes that: “The new painting achieved a sort of critical mass last May, when Cecily Brown, a 29-year-old British artist who moved to New York in 1994, sounded a clarion call in an article she published entitled "Painting Epiphany: Happy Days Are Where, Again?" in Flash Art.” This ‘squad’ (Cecily Brown, Damian Loeb, John Currin and others) mostly coached by (again) fellow dealer Jeffrey Deitch is captured in an ironic iperrealistic Flash Art International’s cover project made by Loeb.

1998

Gathering the attention of art world, the 1st Berlin Biennial (directed by Klaus Biesenbach and curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Nancy Spector) is a sort of celebration of the German capital as a new art center, swarming of alternative spaces and headquarters of a generation of artists. Flash Art International investigates Berlin, publishing a 16-pages supplement dedicated to the city and its protagonists: Monica Bonvicini, Olafur Eliasson, Frank Ackermann, Pipilotti Rist just to name a few. Another ritornello, which distinguishes Flash Art International is its love for challenging parallelisms. While Jan Avgikos underlines common elements between the practice of the porno-star Ilona Staller (a.k.a. Cicciolina) and her beau Jeff Koons, Paul Groot compares Bill Gates’ empire with Andy Warhol modus operandi. Finally, future U.K. Editor Gea Politi dedicates one of her first regular columns “Gea's World” to the several reminders of Björk in Mariko Mori’s show at the Prada Foundation.

1999

On the rise of the new millennium, Flash Art International distinguishes itself from the other publications for an ever increasing interest in interdisciplinary. Because of this, the magazine maintains a high cultural profile without denying its own cuttin’ hedge philosophy through interviews with several ‘archistars’, such as Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry (ironically portrayed by Mark Kostabi alongside Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s Thomas Krens), Peter Eisenman and ‘liquid architect’ Marcos Novak, fashion designers like Vivienne Westwood (interviewed by fashion 'system distorter' Sylvie Fleury with a cover by Inez van Lamsweerde) and Azzedine Alaïa – alternated by fashion’s interventions coordinated by Flash Art fashion editor and artist Iké Udé –, reviews of art-field movies like Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat or Velvet Goldmine, and MTV videoclip’s presentations.

2000–2001

Forty curators, more than two hundred artists: the 1st Tirana Biennale is the dream-come-true of Flash Art Giancarlo Politi and Helena Kontova. Supported by visionary artist and Tirana mayor Edi Rama, the Tirana Biennale is the first example of an art event organized with unfounded budgets. A new adventure, that confirms the role of the magazine’s editors as cultural entrepreneurs; besides the ever more importance of curating as a fundamental element within the contemporary art landscape is underlined by asking contemporary artists like Maurizio Cattelan and Vanessa Beecroft to curate a section for the biennial. September 11’s tragedy completely sticks the whirl within the big apple. Flash Art reaction to the aftermath is a collection of testimonies coordinated by 26-year old former Flash Art Italia Massimiliano Gioni just appointed brand new U.S. editor.

During his tenure as Flash Art U.S. Editor Gioni started to collaborate more and more with Maurizio Cattelan. Indeed Gioni was the artist's ghost writer and the 'press officer' of the 6th Caribbean Biennial, a project conceived by Cattelan together with curator and Flash Art contributor Jens Hoffmann. The project – supported by Fundación/Colección Jumex and accompanied by a catalogue edited by Bettina Funcke – consisted of a 'artist's vacation' featuring biennial habituées Vanessa Beecroft, Douglas Gordon (who couldn't make it), Mariko Mori, Olafur Eliasson, Elizabeth Peyton, Gabriel Orozco, Tobias Rehberger, Pipilotti Rist and Rirkrit Tiravanija. "The biennial was over and even if there wasn't any art, there would be reruns of the experience – in the form of a six-page spread in Italian Vogue and a catalogue that Maurizio and Jens would create as a souvenir of the trip. As for the artists, it seemed to me that they did what they probably would have done at any other biennial – compare ideas, share resources, strengthen relationships and inspire one another.". A series of full-page advertisements was purchased in Artforum, Flash Art and Frieze, which reviewer Jenny Liu called the Caribbean Biennial a "splendid failure: slightly wonderful but doubtlessly cynical; kudos for the conceptual playfulness but let’s just ignore the flawed execution."

2003

Art-star and amphitryon Maurizio Cattelan continues his special relationship with Flash Art International in a series of sardonic interviews with young and promising artists like Martin Creed, Verne Dawson, Piotr Uklanski and then Dana Schutz, Seth Price, Matthew Mohanan, Guy Ben-Ner, Christian Holstad, Paul Chan, Tino Sehgal and chef Ferran Adrià. “It happens in Prague,” is the new motto of the magazine: leaving Tirana, the new ‘mission impossible’ is to run a contemporary art organization in the Czech Republic capital, former residence of the editor Helena Kontova. Under the slogan “Peripheries Become the Center” – taken from the book Empire written by globalization analysts Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt – Prague Biennale 1, co-produced in collaboration with Prague National Gallery director Milan Knížák is described by Giancarlo Politi as a "low-cost show."

2005

As usual Flash Art International is apart from any other publication; premièring anyone, the magazine starts to publish panels and discussions around painting. Masters such as School of Leipzig's Neo Rauch and Matthias Weischer and Cluj-Napoca leaders Victor Man and Adrian Ghenie as well as John Currin, Luc Tuymans, Wilhelm Sasnal, Peter Doig and Marlene Dumas are fully featured. Meanwhile U.K. Editor Gea Politi makes her new exploit: "Fresh Start" is a column that serves as a compass to navigate territories in art, collecting interviews with make up artists, musicians, actors and a series of new creatures generated by the culture system such as musicians Chicks on Speed, makeup artist Feride Uslu and fashion designer Bernhard Willhelm. Prague Biennale continues, and its second edition is accompanied by two main themes: painting and political art. If on the occasion of Prague Biennale 1, the return of painting is announced as a resurrection with the “Lazarus effect” section, this year is the turn of the massive art critic Rosalind Krauss, whose text “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” is reprinted and borrowed for the section curated by Giancarlo Politi and Helena Kontova titled “Expanded Painting.” On the other side there’s “Acción Directa,” an overview on the ‘guerrilla invasion’ of the Latin American artists, captured by Marco Scotini. Confirming Prague Biennale as an essential event is the coming out of the second volume of the indispensable contemporary art vademecum Art Now, published by Taschen. In the preface, editor Uta Grosenick writes: “the art scene has changed dramatically in recent years – notably with a return to figurative painting and an increase in political topics.”

2007

In the era of participation, Flash Art International doesn’t miss the chance to involve the readers in a series of collective interviews with art system protagonists Francesco Clemente, Maurizio Cattelan, John Currin and Franz West. After Flash Art Russia, the brand new Czech and Slovak Republic edition of the magazine underline the former URSS satellite as the new epicenter of Flash Art Eastern Europe activities. A survey concerning the relationship between artists and artistic centers and a diary of a road trip around Kosovo, Estonia, Bulgaria and other spots – compiled by News Editor Aaron Moulton – serve as a foreword for the third edition of Prague Biennale, a 22-sections exhibition fruit of debates around keywords like glocalism, nomad and outsider. On this occasion Flash Art International publishes a triple interview with the ‘Modern Nomads’ Marina Abramović, Vanessa Beecroft and Shirin Neshat organized by Helena Kontova and conducted by Abramović on skype between Milan, New York and Los Angeles.