Anton Vidokle is an artist who captures the attention of 70,000 people each day through
e-flux (
www.e-flux.com), as well as unitednationsplaza, Martha Rosler Library, and other traveling projects. Yet comparatively few members of this audience consider him an artist, despite the fact that he has publicly identified himself as such for over a decade and has exhibited in museums and galleries across the world. The contributors to this book emphasize two aspects of his artistic practice that are partly responsible for this disparity. The first characteristic is the self-effacing nature of his endeavors. Not only are many of his projects subsumed under an anonymous-sounding corporate identity, e-flux, but they are also nearly always collaborative. The second quality is his relative freedom from the network of institutions that is generally believed to confer legitimacy upon individual artistic practices. Vidokle, through e-flux, is able to produce, disseminate, and critically interrogate the ideas that animate his practice. He can also display the fruits of this process publicly and convene friends and collaborators to discuss and refine them. Vidokle doesn't shun conventional artistic institutions, but e-flux is a robustly healthy ecosystem that grants him the opportunity to engage them selectively.
See also
e-flux – The Best Surprise Is No Surprise and
e-flux journal.
