About the Work
Clever as usual, Jonathan Monk took a Flash Art magazine cover and “remade” its title with collage to read as something more unseemly. The cover depicts a Polaroid that French artist Pierre Huyghe used for his 2002 documentary, Block Party, about the early hip-hop movement in New York City. Guessing at the identity of the person in the portrait, the inscription “Flash?” sits under DJ Grandmaster Flash’s visage, a founding father of hip-hop. Monk’s simple alteration plays on a word, skewing the context and the meaning of this unique, of-the-moment cover.
About the Artist
British-born artist Jonathan Monk often appropriates ideas, works, and strategies from Conceptualist and Minimalist artists of the '60s and '70s. With photographs, sculpture, film, installation, and performance, his works recontextualize and rework these quotations, often infusing them with Monk’s personal history and working-class family upbringing. These aspects add a humanizing and down-to-earth sensibility to the original works' utopian ideals and notions of artistic genius. Monk's extensions and reinterpretations of seminal works by John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, and Sol LeWitt, among others, challenge authenticity, authorship, and value in art with quirky humor and wit.
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