FLYNT, Henri
About Transformations

I have chosen, in this study, to go deeply into my 1961 Transformations, to note the guises in which it appeared, to identify its issues and to sort them out.
I will not rush toward an explanatory description of the piece . . . I prefer to establish its context and to explore correlative issues. I want to explore fully how Transformations is positioned:.

i as a diversion from absurdist computationalist music
.ii as a diversion from the derivations of exact science
.iii as a cognitive nihilist object-lesson to exact science regarding derivations

In this extensive essay Flynt returns to where so much began: his 1961 work Transformations, originally published in An Anthology of Chance Operations in 1963, helping to establish the blueprint for “Concept Art” and many of the ideas that would guide the emergence of Fluxus. Exploring the development of the work itself, as well as many of the ideas the underscored it, it’s arguably the most historically illuminating and fascinating text from Flynt to date.

Readers of Flynt’s previous publications (Three Essays on Spirituality and Art and Ruinous Spirituality) will be well aware of the complex networks of thinking and description that define his texts. While About Transformations is not exactly the easiest text to navigate, perhaps because it is specifically centred around a single work and the process that led to the generation of “Concept Art”, it brings the reader into an intimate proximity with Flynt himself, offering unprecedented access to the personality and thinking of the man himself, and the “logical positivism” that underscores much of what has historically perceived as “cognitive nihilism”: the value that Flynt places on the process of human thought itself, vs the byproducts that it might produce. In other words, what the book might be seen to tell us, is that within all of the social, institutional, and creative critique that has come to be seen as emblematic of Fluxus, there is simply a pure celebration of the human mind.

[publisher's note]

Published by João Simões, 2024
Art Theory / Artists' Writings / Conceptual Art