Anton Vidokle is an artist who captures the attention of 70,000 people
each day through e-flux, as well as unitednationsplaza, Martha Rosler
Library, and other traveling projects. Yet comparatively few members of
this audience consider him an artist, despite the fact that he has
publicly identified himself as such for over a decade and has exhibited
in museums and galleries across the world. The contributors to this book
emphasize two aspects of his artistic practice that are partly
responsible for this disparity. The first characteristic is the
self-effacing nature of his endeavors. Not only are many of his projects
subsumed under an anonymous-sounding corporate identity, e-flux, but
they are also nearly always collaborative. The second quality is his
relative freedom from the network of institutions that is generally
believed to confer legitimacy upon individual artistic practices.
Vidokle, through e-flux, is able to produce, disseminate, and critically
interrogate the ideas that animate his practice. He can also display the
fruits of this process publicly and convene friends and collaborators to
discuss and refine them. Vidokle doesn't shun conventional artistic
institutions, but e-flux is a robustly healthy ecosystem that grants him
the opportunity to engage them selectively.
This book focuses attention on the implications of this singular
undertaking: Can one be an artist without making anything that is easily
defined as art even at a moment when nearly everything can be so
designated? Can one play down one's own contributions to diverse
projects and still be recognized as the point of convergence that
unifies them?
**Contributors
**Media Farzin, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Maria Lind, Monika Szewczyk,
Jan Verwoert
Interview with Martha Rosler by Bosko Blagojevic
