Publishers Noted: in which our publisher reviews the building of another publisher.
Since I first signed up for e-flux about six years ago, the publishing platform has graced my inbox to the tune of about ten emails a day. Over the course of a few days this June, I received emails inviting me to exhibition openings in Stuttgart, Houston, San Francisco, Weimar, Maryland, and Tokyo; announcing the beginning of biennials in Beijing and Helsinki; calling for pitches for art to be displayed in Bodø, a Norwegian town just north of the Arctic Circle; asking for proposals for a book to be published by a gallery in the Czech Republic; announcing the opening for applications to a master’s program in painting and digital art in Como, Italy, and two containing critical essays. Given this evocation of the rootless cosmopolitan, it surprised me that e-flux has an office at all, much less deep roots in New York City. Its founder, Anton Vidokle, arrived in Lower Manhattan as a child, when his family left the Soviet Union, and stayed put until very recently, when he moved to Brooklyn.
e-flux effectively began in New York in 1998, at a Chinatown Holiday Inn. A few artists, including Vidokle, had booked a room in order to stage a one-night art show that would open to the public at about 10 p.m. and close the following morning at about 9. Instead of taking out an advertisement or printing invitations, they turned to a new medium: email. The digital invitation went out to, by Vidokle’s estimate, thirty or forty people. Hundreds showed up. “After that,” he told me, “I just thought, my God, this really worked so well. Maybe we should try to develop it into some kind of platform that others could also use. Other curators, artists, galleries—anyone that needs to communicate their programs or events but does not have access to the kind of advertising budgets that would enable them to advertise in art magazines.” It was no coincidence, in Vidokle’s view, that the global art world’s listserv should originate with artists in New York. Unlike artists in Europe, who can jump on a train to a dozen major cultural centers, in his view New York’s artists are hemmed in by high rents, great distances, and a lack of easy transportation options. Email gave them a firm connection to the larger art world.
Vidokle says the first idea he had for the platform’s name was “quite horrible.” “Everything was i-something,” he says, so, naturally, he wanted to call it “i-vite.” Because the domain name was already taken, he settled on e-flux as “a generic corporate name,” a shorthand for Electronic Flux Corporation. Vidokle learned later that the name picks up the legacy of the international art collective Fluxus. The name was coined by the artist George Maciunas, who had also come to New York with his family after fleeing the Soviet Union, and described at times a publication, a movement, concerts, and even a real estate cooperative for artists in SoHo.
In a similar spirit, e-flux now hosts events, stages exhibitions, and even publishes books and a journal. To cover their costs, they charge about $700 per email announcement, each of which is crisply formatted, copy-edited, and archived on their website. In 2004, e-flux got its first real estate when it moved from Vidokle’s living room into a storefront at 57 Ludlow Street. The storefront doubled as his art studio and a space for exhibitions and “strange art projects,” including an art video rental shop and a library of 20,000 volumes that originated with the personal collection of conceptual artist Martha Rosler. In 2009, e-flux moved around the corner to a deeper storefront at 49 Essex Street and, in 2010, to 311 East Broadway, a narrow, three-story walk-up that used to be a settlement house. In 2021, the team left Manhattan for Brooklyn, lured to 172 Classon Avenue by a long-term pandemic-rate lease.
While their spaces changed, the three-part functionality remained constant: each of their locations had a space for videos, a space that served as a library, and an office for some of the approximately thirty people on staff. At Classon Avenue, each of those spaces is a spacious room, cut from a single, former bottling plant by dry wall and dark heavy curtains.
Vidokle does not aim to conquer the world with e-flux. The site does not have cookies or track open rates. He remains the sole owner and does not have a succession plan. And while the audience is large, he is not seeing “geometric growth.” Nor does he expect it: “The content is quite demanding. A lot of it is very theoretical. It’s not friendly reading for while you drink your coffee.”
On a recent Thursday night, I joined a crowd of about fifty at 172 Classon to see the 2022 film Sada [regroup] and discuss it with one of its creators, the Iraqi artist Rijin Sahakian and the Middle Eastern professor Dina Ramadan.
The gathering embodied the global promise of e-flux: Ramadan teaches at Bard; Sahakian grew up in California; the film is about an online art school she developed and ran for artists in Baghdad; and it was produced and originally screened for the fifteenth edition of the art fair Documenta, which takes place in Kassel, Germany. The conversation, timed to mark the twentieth anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq, was a politically charged critique of American imperialism. One member of the crowd mentioned having first met Sahakian in Beirut; another asked her about an incident last year at the Berlin Biennale, where Sahakian led a walkout of Iraqi artists.
The gathering also embodied how, for all its scale and reach, e-flux’s email list (now at about 100,000) is still doing what it did in 1998: putting people into rooms, there together for the art.