Category: Website
Nationality: Russian, Mexican, American
Last Year: Reentry (99 in 2004)

e-flux began in 1999 with an email announcement about a small exhibition in a Holiday Inn hotel room – a sort of prototypical artist-run space – in New York’s Chinatown; by 2002 it had become the artworld’s central broadcasting network for everything and anything related to the visual arts, and perhaps more importantly, it had become economically self-sustaining. From this platform, artist Anton Vidokle and various collaborators, in particular artist Julieta Aranda and writer Brian Kuan Wood, began a set of projects related to their interests; now a decade on, and not exactly art collective (e-flux itself), nor school (unitednationsplaza; Night School), nor archive (e-flux video rental; Martha Rosler Library), nor activist group (The Next Documenta Should Be Curated By an Artist), but all of these things and none of them at once, Vidokle’s organisation has become the centre of a body of work – real work and artwork – at once avant-garde and possibly instrumental to the renewal of artistic practice as such. ‘Artists’ initiatives these days from the start mimic existing institutional and commercial structures: incorporate, establish a board of directors, sell memberships, produce benefit auctions and market editions, sell artworks, etc’, Vidokle told Hans Ulrich Obrist a couple of years ago. ‘To think that this has no effect on their programming or the content they generate would be naive. There is virtually no period of experimentation before this type of “normalised” behaviour sets in.’ The only cloud on the e-flux horizon is that for coming generations their behaviour, no matter how random and unpredictable, is now a kind of institution in its own right, and might, therefore, become the new norm.