Born in 1940 in Greensboro, North Carolina, Henry Flynt studied mathematics at Harvard University while pursuing what would become his life-long work in philosophy, new music and radical politics. After meeting La Monte Young in 1960 and through his exposure to Indian classical music (including studies with vocalist Pandit Pran Nath), Coltrane and country blues, Flynt began producing solo fiddle pieces that embody his revolt against the clinical modernism of Cage and Stockhausen (against whom he demonstrated in 1964 with Fluxus artist George Maciunas), and his allegiance to what he calls "new American Ethnic music." This was the music of the south of his childhood whose traditions he reshaped according to his own vision of an ecstatic, trance-inducing sound.
In 1961, 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.” Originally published in in An Anthology (ed. La Monte Young), this text appears in Blueprint for a Higher Civilization (Milan, 1975) a collection of Flynt’s early writings that includes the first draft of his Philosophy Proper (1960), an attempt to “refute analytic philosophy and logical positivism with their own means.”
In the late 70s, Flynt resumed his studies at the New School for Social Research where he produced a dissertation on socialist economic allocation. He has continued to write speculatively on a diverse range of topics (mathematics, musicology, psychedelics, meta-technology, revolutionary politics, acognitive culture, and dignity, to name just a few), with many of these texts available on his website: www.henryflynt.org.
Flynt has performed and exhibited his work internationally. His Logically Impossible Space was exhibited in the 1990 Venice Biennale and his photographic portfolio The SAMO(c) Graffiti appeared in the 1993 Lyon Biennale. In addition to releasing archival recordings of his music (including You Are My Everlovin'/ Celestial Power (2001) and Hillbilly Tape Music (2003), available through Recorded, Ampersound and Locust Music), Flynt’s current activities include live dance performance, visual/text-pieces produced under the title The Aesthetics of Eerieness, and a series of “abstract cinemas” that combine fast-paced imagery and motion-dependent illusions using an approach Flynt calls “cinact.”
Henry Flynt’s visit is made possible through the collaboration of the UCSD Music Department, Visual Arts Department, University Libraries, Weird Shadow, and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles. All events are free and open to the public.
Wednesday, January 10, 3:00 pm
Lecture on Musicology, Erickson Hall, UCSD,
Thursday, January 11, 7:00 pm
Dignity, a Lecture, Visual Arts Performance Space, UCSD
Friday, January 12, 3:00 pm
Lecture on Musicology, Erickson Hall, UCSD,
Saturday, January 13, 6:00 pm
Screening and Discussion of Abstract Cinemas
MAK Center at the Schindler House, 835 Kings Road, Los Angeles
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