About Henry Flynt

Henry Flynt was born in 1940 in Greensboro, NC. He is a philosopher, musician, anti-art activist and exhibited artist.

Flynt’s work devolves from what he calls “cognitive nihilism,” first announced in the 1960 and 1961 drafts of Philosophy Proper. (The 1961 draft was published with other early work in his book Blueprint for a Higher Civilization, Milan, 1975.) He refined these dispensations in the “Is there language?” trap, published as “Primary Study” in 1964. In 1961, Flynt coined the term concept art. Concept art’s first appearance in a book was in An Anthology, release date 1963. In 1962, Flynt began to campaign for an anti-art position. He demonstrated against cultural institutions in New York in 1963 with Tony Conrad and Jack Smith, and against Stockhausen twice in 1964. He wanted art to be superseded by “veramusement” and “brend,” neologisms meaning approximately pure recreation.

From about 1980, Flynt has given a great deal of time to two endeavors which did not achieve the notoriety of the early actions—"meta-technology" and "personhood theory." In 1987, he revived concept art for tactical reasons; he spent seven years in the art world. After that, Flynt began to publish recorded but unreleased musical compositions; over a dozen CDs have appeared as of 2007. Because of his friendship and collaboration with George Maciunas, Flynt sometimes gets linked to Fluxus by unsympathetic reviewers.

Early years, 1940-1957
Henry Flynt was born in Greensboro, NC in 1940. His father was a portrait photographer and his mother was a schoolteacher. His older half-brother Harold worked as a photographer for many years. Flynt attended two public schools in Greensboro, the first being the school at which his mother taught. He was perceived as excessively studious as a child, dividing much of his free time between libraries and classical music institutions. In senior high school, he achieved several youthful distinctions, being inducted into Torchlight (NHS), becoming concertmaster of his High School orchestra, receiving an honorary scholarship to Harvard. However, he was also “difficult”—for example, he quit the orchestra after one semester as concertmaster to practice solo exclusively. Flynt recruited himself as a devotee of Rudolf Carnap in 1957, and became notorious in Greensboro for his announced atheism.

The intense years, 1957-1963
Flynt entered Harvard College at age 17 and attended for two and a half years. For the first time, Flynt had teachers who were (or were considered) world-class. At the same time, Flynt met peers who would be intellectual companions in succeeding years, such as Tony Conrad and John Alten. While taking Israel Scheffler’s philosophy of science course, Flynt began to radicalize empiricism to draw the obvious conclusion that natural science did not satisfy empiricist strictures. At this time, Flynt was also imitatively composing “serious modern music.” Conrad placed Flynt in contact with La Monte Young in 1959. Flynt’s grades were poor; he treated Harvard as an opportunity to sample the most formidable offerings (Quine on set theory, Tate on algebraic varieties, La Drière on literary theory) rather than to build an acceptable academic record.

By the beginning of 1960, Flynt was on academic probation. He concluded that academe had nothing more to offer him as to intellectual leadership, and that he needed to devote his full time to creative endeavors. He withdrew from Harvard, devoting himself first to the monograph Philosophy Proper, which was concerned to refute analytic philosophy and logical positivism with their own means. Completing the first draft in 1960, Flynt thereby announced the “cognitive nihilism” that would give impetus to all of his work.

In December of 1960, Flynt traveled to New York and met La Monte Young in person. This was a tremendous stimulus to Flynt.

In 1961, Flynt continued to reinvent himself, and produced a body of work which gave direction to everything he did subsequently. He appeared in the series of concerts at Yoko Ono’s loft curated by La Monte Young. He arranged an “avant-garde” concert at Harvard at the end of March—for which Young, Richard Maxfield, and Robert Morris traveled to Cambridge to participate. He finished version 3 of Philosophy Proper (the version published in 1975). Flynt gave a private lecture at La Monte Young’s apartment at the beginning of June 1961 in which he argued that a work cannot have newness as its primary value. Later that month, Flynt 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.” As the essay “Concept Art” made clear, this definition was not the whole story. Concept art 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 music circles. Therefore, to merit the label concept art, a work had to be an object-critique of logic or mathematics or objective structure.

Flynt wrote a script for private experience, “Exercise Awareness-States,” later reconstructed and pubulished as “Mock Risk Games.” (The original text was ultimately retrieved and published.) He presented a selection of current work in lecture-like appearances at George Maciunas’ AG Gallery in July 1961.

Here a misrepresentation needs to be addressed. Concept Art has, had as one of its tributaries Young's "Little Pieces" or "Word Pieces." Flynt's label was immediately appropriated as a synonym for word pieces, which it is not. That denied Flynt the right to say what his own label meant. Other developments contributed to the practice of using Concept Art as a synonym for word pieces.

Resuming with 1961, Flynt created “Energy Cube Organism” (recast decades later as “The Choice Chronology Project”). Flynt’s projects were “cognitively nihilistic” and interdisciplinary. Meanwhile, Flynt had gone through a musical reorientation which brought him to ethnic music, or rather its refinement, as the ideal of music.

In January 1962, Flynt visited New York for a benefit for An Anthology. While in the city, he recorded duets with Young, and read “Energy Cube Organism” to Young and Morris. He followed up by recording new ethnic violin performances, heavily influenced by Young’s piano playing in their duet rehearsals.

All the while, Flynt ceased to consider art-making a justifiable activity. In 1962, he began to criticize art wholesale, in the name of absolute subjectivity of taste—wanting no part of the socially regimenting function of art. In all fairness, the cessation of art had already been proposed by Cage and Wolff (prominently by Wolff in Die Reihe 5 in 1960), but when Flynt turned in this direction two years later, they reverted to the defense of art. Flynt began to give lectures assailing art to avant-garde artists, including a June 1962 lecture in an apartment in Manhattan attended by a number of today’s notables. Art was to be replaced with “general acognitive culture,” later “veramusement,” finally “brend.”

As a student at the end of the 1950s, Flynt had entered the orbit of earth-shattering discoveries in hard science, and absurdism in the arts, to acquire his education. Flynt now proposed to vault over everything that was called “advanced,” and to deliver civilization-obsolescing results. Flynt rounded off his extremism by propounding the “civilization in one mind.”

Flynt’s direction led him to increasing isolation. (As he acknowledged in essays that he circulated at the time, but which do not survive). Searching for a way out, he availed himself of a series of opportunities to learn more about the Marxist Left. On the one hand, there was a global resurgance of the Marxist Left in the 1960s; on the other hand, Flynt quickly concluded that his utopian perspective of culture would be credible only in the sort of utopia Marx promised. (When Marx’s “1844 Manuscripts” became readily available in 1963, Flynt found support for his views in them.)

Sectarian Left, 1963-1967
Late in February 1963 (the second anniversary of his performances in Yoko Ono’s loft), Flynt visited New York for a pilot campaign against the cultural institutions and the art world. Already in the periphery of the doctrinaire Left, he got his idea of a public campaign from them. He picketed two museums and Lincoln Center with Tony Conrad and Jack Smith. The next day he lectured against art in Walter De Maria’s loft. By that point, Flynt had convinced himself that he did not need his own “acognitive compositions,” and he destroyed most of them—In hindsight, he considers this a mistake.

In May 1963, Flynt moved to New York to be closer to the sectarian Left. Shortly afterward, An Anthology, which included Flynt’s “Concept Art,” was released. (The 1963 printing, which was actually the second printing.) For five years, Flynt would be a minor activist in the sectarian Left. His contributions included articles on inflamed situations in Africa. In summer 1966, he appeared on Florynce Kennedy’s radio program with the Zambian Ambassador to the UN.

All the while, Flynt continued to explore his core ideas. Philosophy Proper became the “Is there language?” trap, published in 1964. Flynt wrote “1966 Mathematical Studies” to unfold concept art and other 1961 interdisciplinary projects. His critique of art was reshaped to become a scathing critique of the official Left’s cultural policy. He assailed official Communism’s depreciation of African-American music in particular. In conjunction with his indictment of classical music as a Eurosupremacist ideology, he and George Maciunas led demonstrations against Stockhausen in 1964. Participants in one or the other demonstration included Ben Vautier, Tony Conrad, Marc Schleiffer, and Japanese artists recruited by Maciunas.

Influenced by Maciunas’ interpretation of early Soviet positions, Flynt called for a Communist “contraction” of art. (Rodchenko and Vertov were precedents.) Flynt and Maciunas issued their manifesto “Communists Must Give Revolutionary Leadership in Culture” in 1965.

Flynt embodied his views on music in new ethnically-based recordings. He recorded “Acoustic Hillbilly Jive” at the end of 1963. In 1966, the tracks now available on the Locust CD I Don’t Wanna were recorded. The sculptor Walter De Maria supplied essential support for this project. At about the same time, Flynt was recording characteristic solo violin pieces.

In September 1966, Flynt played violin with the Velvet Underground as a sstand-in for John Cale for two weekends (four days) at The Dom in the East Village. The notice in the Village Voice, 29 September 1966, referred to "the screeching electric violin."

Late Sixties
By mid-1967, Flynt felt the need for employment more reliable than pick-up jobs. At the same time, he happened to attend Marcuse’s March 1967 lecture at the SVA in the company of anarchist Benn Morea. That led him to read Marcuse’s Soviet Marxism, and he rapidly became disillusioned with the “barracks” model of Communism promoted by the hard Left. Flynt entered NYU as a transfer student, hoping to make himself employable. Simultaneously he dissociated himself from the sectarian Left. He found himself once again in the social position of a college student, but this time he accepted the role for specific tactical reasons. In the next few years, he would give his anti-art case its final shape, and achieve publication for individual texts created earlier in the Sixties. He began the long process of disconnecting his analysis of social being and his ideas about a hypothetical Communism from Marxist doctrine.

Seventies
Graduating from NYU in 1970, Flynt worked briefly for an economic consulting firm near the Stock Exchange, then entered the New School as a graduate student in economics. He would be granted a Lehman Fellowship. Aside from taking advantage of the opportunity for expedient reasons, Flynt used his eight years at the New School to re-examine and sharpen the impressionistic positions on economics which had been thrust on him by the sectarian Left. The question of whether an advanced industrial society which was not capitalist was possible was one which had never been answered—or asked—not even in theory. The public’s impression that Marx and his followers had some magic formula in this connection was one of the greatest hoaxes in history. Flynt wanted to answer the question (which he thought would involve abstract technical issues reaching all the way into foundations of science) in insulation from political bandwagons.

At the New School, Flynt’s dissertation supervisor was the planning economist Thomas Vietorisz; he also studied with Michael Hudson, the renowned critic of international financial arrangements. He successfully defended his Ph. D. dissertation on the theory of socialist economic allocation in April 1978, but, eccentric as ever, he never graduated.

Flynt had met the Swedish mathematician, composer, and artist C.C. Hennix at the beginning of the Seventies through La Monte Young. Partly because of dialogue with Hennix and partly because he was immersed in graduate school, Flynt began to try to confront the conventional wisdom with more conventionally researched presentations. Given that his goal was to obsolesce the civilization, it was a formidable, long-term project. Flynt sought to distill irreducible intellectual novelties, and then position them where they could be registered, at least in principle, by conventional thought.

Flynt’s early texts achieved only scattered publication until many of them were collected in his book Blueprint for a Higher Civilization (1975).

The Seventies were the main years of musical activity for Flynt. Once La Monte Young had brought Pandit Pran Nath to New York, Flynt took classes and private lessons with him. To Flynt, Pran Nath was the musician of musicians. It capped off all his thinking about ethnic culture and the project of art—and inspired pieces Flynt would record, some while Flynt was taking Hindustani vocal lessons. (E.g. “Graduation,” 1975.) In 1975, he headed a rock band devoted to his compositions, Nova’billy. Some of his compositions for band have been released, and more are expected. Many of the Flynt tracks which have been released in the twenty-first century were recorded in this period.

1979 was a key year. In February, Flynt and Hennix presented a concert at the Kitchen in New York of pilot projects for illuminatory sound environments, the so-called HESEs or ISEs. Then, in October, Flynt was invited to give one in a series of soirees in an apartment in Stockholm. At his soiree, Flynt presented his perspective as a consummation of the sort of skepticism that had been the bête noire of classical philosophy (Decartes and Hume). Flynt then announced the label "meta-technology" for the instrumental phase of his new modalities. “Meta-technology” means a technology which acts transformatively on shared determinations of reality (presupposing the scientific civilization and high cognitive standards), and embraces the entire spectrum of Flynt’s investigations into contradiction, reality-classification of perceptual gestalts, and perceiver-percept interdependency. In ambition, meta-technology is like an intellectual attack on civilization from outer space.

In 1980, Flynt concluded that existential phenomenology needed to be radicalized to become a devolutional non-intellectual epistemology, which he called "Personhood Theory." It would allow the explication of “high-level affections or qualities” such as dignity. Personhood theory is evisioned to support meta-technology in addressing the interplay between the reality-picture and the whole person that allows one civilization to employ instrumental knowledge which seems insane to another civilization.

Eighties
In the early 1980s, C. C. Hennix and Flynt's niece, Libby Flynt, moved to a residence near Woodstock NY. What was expected was that the Woodstock location would be the site of a cultural collective of which they would be the core. Pandit Pran Nath and A.S. Yessenin-Volpin visited the house. The expectations went far beyond the results. Libby Flynt returned to Greensboro after a year an a half, and when she returned to the north in 1987, it was to Manhattan. The main result of this decade of activity was a more intense dialogue between Flynt and Hennix, which brough Flynt to a much sharper confrontation with academic science, as refracted through Hennix’s involvement with Yessenin-Volpin. Music was also a part of the Flynt-Hennix collaboration, and several live sessions were recorded. The “New Paltz” years had one tangible result in particular, the publication of Io #41, ed. Charles Stein, a book mainly devoted to Hennix with a long section on Flynt.

In the art world, 1987-1993
In 1987, in consultation with Hennix, Flynt made the decision that concept art needed to be revived and promulgated for tactical reasons; Flynt felt it was the only avenue by which to get a body of significant work on the public record. Flynt resumed making and showing concept art as a tactical move. In fact, the works he made at this time unfolded concept art, or fulfilled its promise, in a way the 1961 pieces had not. Without this second chapter, even a sincere student would have had little chance of grasping what concept art was about.

Flynt joined the Emily Harvey Gallery on Broadway and began to live as a career artist. The Emily Harvey Gallery was basically devoted to Fluxus. Flynt’s decision to show there was a difficult descsion, given that he had been mis-labeled Fluxus in the past.

At the Venice Biennale in 1990, Flynt showed a concept-art room, involving no text, namely “Logically Impossible Space.” Later that year, Flynt and Hennix appeared together at the Fodor Museum in Amsterdam. Flynt showed his photographic portfolio “The SAMO© Graffiti” in Donguy Gallery in 1991 and at the Lyon Biennale in 1993. The portfolio can be seen on Flynt’s web site.

In conjunction with his dialogue with Hennix, Flynt intensified his efforts to engage academic science. He visited the mathematical physicist John Baez in Cambridge and New Haven—both to be tutored, and for dialogue.

After 1993
Flynt continued refining his challenge to academic science. In 1999 and again in 2005 he would receive informal tutoring from logician Graham Priest and physicist Jacques Mallah. The exchanges were quite valuable to Flynt. The bridge Flynt was trying to build to “authorized content” had one visible success; Priest mentioned Flynt in “Perceiving Contradictions,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, December 1999.

Flynt’s decision to approach the question of a post-capitalist economy in insulation from political bandwagons saved him from following the Left to its present intellectual fate. All the while, Flynt announced that a socialist utopia which could give meaning to the Left’s critique of the status quo was not the order of the day. (Flynt’s Internet musings aside, no proof has been published that such a utopia is possible .) Workers could not be the protagonist of history, Flynt now avowed; the notion of a workers’ economic system, a system issuing from the consciousness of the shop floor, was nonviable syndicalism. By this time, Flynt had little respect remaining for Marxism.

Flynt always meant to bring social-objectivism or social reality within the range of his extremism. That led to the proposal of the enchanted community in personhood theory, and to texts such as "The Abolition of the Universe and Time."