About Henry Flynt

Henry Flynt was born in 1940 in Greensboro, NC. He is a philosopher, musician, anti-art activist and exhibited artist, whom unsympathetic reviewers often link to Fluxus. In 1960, with the first draft of "Philosophy Proper," he arrived at what he would later call cognitive nihilism, the basis of his contributions. The work proposed to refute analytic philosophy and logical positivism with their own means. In 1961, he coined the term concept art to refer to "an art of which the material is concepts, as the material of for ex. music is sound." Concept art's first appearance in a book was in An Anthology, ed. La Monte Young. In 1962, Flynt announced his anti-art position in connnection with "general acognitive culture," later "veramusement," finally "brend." Flynt's early texts achieved only scattered publication unitl they were collected in his book Blueprint for a Higher Civilization (Milan, 1975) . Flynt launched a unique critique of the fine arts as a phase of his critique of art. In February 1963, he picketed two museums and Lincoln Center with Tony Conrad and Jack Smith. In conjunction with his indictment of classical music as a Eurosupremacist objectivist ideology, he and George Maciunas picketed Stockhausen twice in 1964. Much later, when his friend La Monte Young brought Pandit Pran Nath to New York, Flynt took classes and private lessons from him. Flynt's "new American ethnic music" is documented by numerous CDs published by Recorded and Locust. Flynt was a graduate student in Economics at the New School in the Seventies, studying with Thomas Vietorisz and Michael Hudson. He successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation on socialist economic allocation in April 1978, but in a characteristically eccentric gesture, never graduated. In Stockholm in 1979, Flynt coined the term meta-technology for a technology which acts transformatively on consensus determinations of reality. It was a label for an entire range of his investigations into contradiction, reality-classification of perceptual gestalts, and perceiver-percept interdependence. Meta-technology can be compared to an intellectual attack on civilization from outer space. It proved unpopular because the orientation of those who are attracted to instrumental reality-pictures (science) is careerist and mercenary. In 1980, Flynt concluded that existential phenomenology needed to be redirected to become a devolutional non-intellectual epistemology. It would allow the explication of "high-level affections, or qualities," such as dignity. Personhood theory is envisioned to support meta-technology in addressing the interplay between the reality-picture and the whole person that allows the instrumental knowledge of one civilization to seem insane to another civilization. Flynt began to show as an artist in 1987 to revive genuine concept art in a more realized form. He showed Logically Impossible Space at the Venice Biennale in 1990, and his photographic portfolio "The SAMO(c) Graffiti" at the Lyon Biennale in 1993. Currently, Flynt publishes archive recordings and writes speculatively on a variety of topics, including dignity. Source: http://www.henryflynt.org/overviews/henryflynt.htm