The cover of this issue of
Flash Art portrays Tony Conrad, an avant-garde filmmaker, pioneering musician, artist, theorist, philosopher, committed teacher, and activist. On the occasion of Conrad's traveling retrospective, soon on view at the MIT List Visual Arts Center and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, we dedicate a twelve-page dossier to this unique figure in the recent history of arts and culture. An essay by Nora N. Khan considers Conrad's vast creative output, the result of his dedication to challenging the boundaries between artistic categories. “Nearly every piece in Conrad's oeuvre shows evidence of a shifted frame, from the instruments made from rusty Band-Aid boxes, coke bottles, tin foil, copper tubing, wire, scraps of wood, and tape, to the many hours of rangy, hysterical, buoyant, and strange video works,” Khan writes. “Creating new taxonomies by pushing the frame was a political act: not only the literal frame, but any attempt to frame, to position, to establish criteria that go unexamined… The choice of a frame was the moment of creating meaning.” Along with Khan's text, musician and artist Charlemagne Palestine pays homage to Conrad's memory by recounting their musical partnership — fifty years of what he calls “aural symbiosis.”
This issue includes also the “CCCO (Cultural Capital Cooperative Object) License Agreement,” a document drafted by artists Nikita Gale, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Candice Lin, Nour Mobarak, Blaine O'Neill, and
Patrick Staff, working as the Cultural Capital Cooperative (CCC). The licensing agreement, which the cooperative drafted in dialogue with lawyer Daniel McClean, provides an answer to questions about how to collectively produce works of art, and moreover, how the cooperative as a model of mutual ownership might envision the future sale and transfer of works. In CCC's words, “[it] seeks to counter the contemporary art market's usual focus on the individual isolated artist.” In doing so, the license agreement is a legal mechanism available to other artists — “as an instrument, as a proposition… and with a knowing possibility for its further unauthorized reproduction or adaptation.”
Flash Art is a contemporary art and culture magazine (and a
publishing platform) founded in 1967. Within a decade, it became an indispensable point of reference for artists, critics, collectors, galleries, and institutions. In 2020,
Flash Art became a quarterly publication, at the same time increasing its trim size and updating its graphic identity. The magazine offers a fresh perspective on the visual arts, covering a range of transdisciplinary approaches and fostering in-depth analyses of artist practices and new cultural directions. Today,
Flash Art remains required reading for all who navigate the international art scene.
Flash Art is known for it covers featuring artists who subsequently become leading figures in the art world. The magazine includes photoshoots, productions, critical essays, monographic profiles, conversations with emerging and established artists, and a range of ongoing and thematic columns that change every few years. The long history of the magazine is also highlighted by pivotal texts from the archive that are included in the publication time to time. Finally, every issue offers a highly curated selection of the best institutional exhibitions on the global scene.
See also
Flash Art Volumes.
