Flash Art #354: Relevance

It’s understood that humans are visual creatures, navigating the world primarily through encountered images. Visual stimulus can function as a warning, as evidence, or as a trigger for some long-lost feeling of a bygone era. The spring issue of Flash Art, “Relevance,” explores such fleeting temporalities of representation. It begs the question: What does a memory, a TV show, or a feeling look like when it’s not viewed through the eyes but recreated through the hazy lens of retrospective remembering? The artists in this issue warp media through cheeky rearrangement and sly facsimile, speaking to the persistence of vision long after its affect has engaged the retina.

The issue begins in Luc Tuymans’s Antwerp studio. Photographed by means of Juergen Teller’s humble iPhone, Tuymans meets Daniel Merritt mid-cigarette and leads him into a conversation on American artists’ involvement in the CIA during the mid-twentieth century; the technical benefits of painting with a mirror; and the memories from which he conjures his paintings.

In Porto, at Fundacao de Serralves, Anne Imhof stands at the edge of a sixty-foot-long steel swimming pool, part of her installation “Fun ist ein Stahlbad.” She’s captured by Tyler Mitchell, who, in conversation with the artist, revisits formative diving-board memories from childhood, discusses how such memories find their way into one’s practice, and considers the Kafka short story that inspired Imhof’s piece.