Every day e-flux reaches 50,000 people around the world with three or four emails announcing exhibitions, publications, discussions and events related to contemporary art. But this enormous announcement digest – with an online archive stretching back to its inception in 1999 – is just a part of the story. In a symbiotic operation, e-flux manages a number of special projects for art and publications, both online and at two physical locations in New York and Berlin. Karl Lydén visited the e-flux office on Essex Street in New York to talk with its founder, Anton Vidokle.

What are the objectives of e-flux?

e-flux is an independent, self-financed artist run project. The ambition is to develop a space for art outside certain power structures related to funding or reasons of legitimation. The idea is to use this space for ourselves as artists and also share it with others. Independent spaces for art are shrinking. For example, a few years ago I applied for funding for the unitednationsplaza project in Berlin, and from the questions on the application form it was pretty obvious that the main function of the funding organization was to create local jobs. These are economic/political interests that don’t have much to do with art, but when they are imposed on a project they do affect its formation. While e-flux was started largely accidently, it was soon evident that its emerging structure was creating new conditions for production and circulation of art that were a bit less alienating than existing models. So I wanted to develop this as much as I could.

And how did it take its current form?

The email announcements started in 1999 and since 2001 we have developed and produced numerous projects. At first the projects appeared on the website – like the Next Documenta Should Be Curated By An Artist or the Utopia Station poster project – and later on they appeared at various physical locations, like the e-flux video rental from 2004, a collection of over 700 film and video works freely available to publics to view at home. The project circulated and visited places like Frankfurt, Seoul, Istanbul, Canary Islands, and Austin, Texas, as a free art video screening and rental. Most recently, the e-flux journal was started as both a discursive space and a site for actual art production.

So, the emails are the economic engine, right? How does the selection of the announcements work? Are there any criteria?

We prioritize public institutions, museums, biennials, publications and non-profit spaces. Art fairs are also included for their significance as international gathering spaces. But we are also selective within this public category. There are no official criteria; basically it has to be relevant in terms of our artistic interests and the interests of our readers. The process is simple: you contact us when you want to announce a new exhibition, lecture or a publication, and if we think it’s interesting, we include it in the e-flux announcements for a fee.

How much is the fee?

The fees are different for public, corporate and commercial institutions. If you have a specific project you want to disseminate through our network, you should email us with a description of what it is. If we decide to work with you, we will send you all the pertinent information.

How many people work for e-flux?

Seven.

How big is e-flux in economical terms? What is the approximate yearly turnover?

Are you kidding me?

No. I’m from Sweden, a country where all information like that is public.

But I guess you’re talking about public institutions; e-flux is a private entity.

Actually, it’s all public information. But we’re in the United States, so I don’t blame you for not answering.

But would you ask that question when interviewing an artist, say Seth Price?

Probably not, since he is a single person… well, he probably has a lot of assistants and a…

Exactly. He or any – I don’t mean to single out Seth – commercially successful artist probably makes as much or more money than e-flux. But if he only made $50,000 a year, some people in the art world wouldn’t take him very seriously, while if he was making $5 million, others would think he became too commercial. Similarly, if I give you a specific number now, some will think it’s too little while others will think it’s too much – it will not clarify anything. Big public corporations release their revenue figures and profits because they want to attract shareholders to increase their capital and grow bigger – that’s capitalism in a nutshell. On the other hand, for us the only thing that is financially important is that we can pay our rent, receive basic salaries and medical insurance, and have something left to develop and produce projects, which so far we have been able to do.

Of course. But I’m not asking to gossip or even to know how much money you make per se. Rather, since the self-financing aspects of e-flux appear to be of fundamental significance – to a point where the political, economical and artistic seem impossible to distinguish – I think asking just how independent you are, and how much you’re actually able to do are relevant questions.

But then you just have to look at what we are actually doing. What does it cost to publish a monthly journal? What does it cost to rent and renovate a small space like this or to produce a book? You see, if you really want to know, it’s all right there.

Actually, that sort of speculative counting only makes me more curious. But of course I’m aware that exact figures are very delicate things. We can move on.

No, it is an interesting question, and this is an interesting discussion. I don’t think simple dollar figures explain much – independence is largely contingent on your needs: the specifics of what you want to do. For us the point is to maintain an independent, self-financed space for art that is not shaped by national interests or market agendas. This means not depending on private or public patrons and not being involved in the art market. You know, how you do things matters. We have seen non-profit and artist-run spaces reproduce structures identical to those of commercial galleries or big institutions: creating boards of wealthy trustees who are usually collectors or others buying and selling art, local politicians, government bureaucrats, etc.; producing editions and marketing them; having all sorts of sales and auctions. Naturally this affects everything they do, since they can’t exist outside this economic network, which is the frame that shapes all of their activities. So they might be non-profit, but they don’t provide a very different model to the existing ones. We try to do things differently and at least try to gain some autonomy from these mechanisms.

Is e-flux a work of art? Is it a company?

Everything can be a work of art, including a company: in its totality, e-flux is a work of art that uses circulation both as form and content. I would not claim sole authorship. I suppose I started it, but I do not see myself as the author in a traditional sense – it has always been a collaboration, a series of collaborations with a very large group of people. Julieta Aranda shaped a lot of what e-flux is, and now Brian Kuan Wood is further re-shaping it through the journal. So it’s not some object you can display in a museum alongside a wall label with my name and date – it’s a very different model of an artwork.

Not many of your senders use the email format in any specific way. The only example I can think of was an announcement for a Jan Verwoert talk at unitednationsplaza, which made use of the temporality of the inbox for a pun: the subject field asked “Why are conceptual artists painting again?”, and the first line of the email answered “Because they think it’s a good idea.”

What can I say? Jan Verwoert is one funny guy…

He certainly is. Have you ever…

Announced imaginary events? Yes, once. It was when Albert Heta announced the “Kosovar Pavilion at Venice Pavilion 2005,” a non-existent national pavilion (Kosovo was not a state then and did not have a pavilion) at the Venice Biennale. At the time we felt it was an interesting project designed specifically for e-flux as medium.

When I started to think about e-flux as an archive, I realized that all your projects could be seen as archival practices. The video rental, the online instructions for conceptual artworks in DO iT, the Martha Rosler Library… you collect information and you archive it.

Yes, I realized that too at some point. Of course one can think of it like that. But it wasn’t something that we actively tried to achieve. Personally I do not like archives and the kind of logic they represent. Archives are tools of power and while they always seem to start in a fairly benign fashion, they inevitable relegate everything outside the archive to the status of unimportant or irrelevant. I also particularly don’t like the aestheticized archives as artworks of which there seems to be more and more everyday.

I think archives are interesting. They seem like the perfect analogy for so many things: memory, knowledge, discourse… In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida says that every archive shapes its content. Would you say this is true for e-flux in any way?

Yes, to some extent. We try to be careful not to develop an oppressive, authoritative presence. Rather, we want to provide something useful and educational. Exhibitions of art are some of the most ephemeral of situations in which groups of people and objects are brought together for a short period of time only to disperse forever. Most exhibitions are not documented by a book or anything, so it’s important to have some place to look at what others have done. Nevertheless, when it comes to curatorial practice, you can notice a certain normative effect in this archive of ours: people copy each other. They use the same concepts, themes, titles or entire lineups of artists. I guess this is inevitable.

Has anybody tried to copy e-flux?

Yes. A lot of people have, and for reasons that don’t make much sense to me, psychologically, economically or otherwise. Sadly, these people always miss the whole point: e-flux is interesting and effective because we did not borrow an existing model, but tried to develop a new one. We have been working on it from scratch for a decade now, figuring things out as we go along, improvising. That’s the real pleasure of it.

Note: This interview was made in connection to an essay entitled “E-flux, Derrida and the Archive” published in SITE Magazine, issue 25.