And You Will Know Us by Our Flags

And You Will Know Us by Our Flags

A time capsule from 1988 surfaces in 2025 – here's how we’d want it remembered in the 2060s.

A time capsule from 1988 surfaces in 2025 – here's how we’d want it remembered in the 2060s.

Keith HaringUntitled, from Gran Pavese – The Flag Project, 1988. Editions & Works on Paper New York

 

In 1988, a small manmade island off the Dutch coast came to worldwide attention with a monumental outdoor contemporary art exhibition – a grand assembly of 2x3 meter screen-printed flags waving in the North Sea breeze. The project was envisioned by the Gran Pavese Foundation, led by Thérèse Legierse, Peter van Beveren, and Ralph van Hessen. Fifty international artists were invited to design their own interpretation of a flag, with no thematic concept to unite them all beyond the medium, size, and freedom to apply their own imagery and methodology to the project.

As we look back with renewed hindsight at some of these works from nearly four decades ago – a period of great change, ushering in today’s complexities – we imbue their collective perspectives with the lessons we can collate today, palmed together like a snowball of then and now, for a future rediscovery, maybe even four decades from 2025.

To the Martians of tomorrow reading, beaming, or neural streaming this: most of us dreamed of peace. 

This can be taken as optimism if things work out or dejection that they didn’t; we can’t really seem to decide on what we want at the moment. We do, however, have a few guiding notes on who we were, what we felt, and how these artists embodied these notions, all wrapped up in flags. 

 

We knew fun was at the heart of being human

Left: Ronnie Cutrone, Birdland, from Gran Pavese – The Flag Project, 1988. Editions & Works on Paper New York. Right: Robert Longo, Untitled, from Gran Pavese – The Flag Project, 1988. Editions & Works on Paper New York.

“Flags are capable of reinforcing symbolic content, provided that they are rightly designed.” – Ronnie Cutrone

"I've been dealing with these epic images, and I realized all of a sudden that I grew up in the age of epics." – Robert Longo

 

And so were severity and incoherence 

Left: Hans HaackeApartheid, from Gran Pavese – The Flag Project, 1988. Editions & Works on Paper New York. Right: William N. Copley, Flag of the political prisoner, from Gran Pavese – The Flag Project, 1988. Editions & Works on Paper New York

“The lower part of my flag, which is in a knot and cannot fly freely, has the colors of the flag of the Republic of South Africa. As long as it is used by the current apartheid regime, it represents racism in South Africa.” – Hans Haacke

“As I understood it, there were two aspects of reality: the public or social one that we are taught where everything has a name, the reality we must communicate with; and the private reality that is the reality to us alone, which needs poetry and above all metaphor to communicate. This is super-realism. And it made sense.”  – William Copley 

 

Uncertainty sent many of us inward

Left: Lawrence WeinerDrapeau for a community, from Gran Pavese – The Flag Project, 1988. Editions & Works on Paper New York. Right: Vito Acconci, Untitled, from Gran Pavese – The Flag Project, 1988. Editions & Works on Paper New York.

“The only art I’m interested in is the art I don’t understand right away. If you understand it right away, it really has no use except as nostalgia.” – Lawrence Weiner

"What keeps me living is this: the idea that I might provide some kind of situation that makes people do a double-take, that nudges people out of certainty and assumption of power." – Vito Acconci

 

While others sought the world 

Left: Keith Haring, Untitled, from Gran Pavese – The Flag Project, 1988. Editions & Works on Paper New York. Right: Bridget RileyUntitled, from Gran Pavese – The Flag Project, 1988. Editions & Works on Paper New York.

“I don’t think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further.” – Keith Haring

“To me flags have always seemed to be a very beautiful way of telling people that something is happening. ” – Bridget Riley

 

Both camps knew: these distinctions were in our hands

Left: Hanne Darboven00-99, from Gran Pavese – The Flag Project, 1988. Editions & Works on Paper New York. Right: Annette MessagerUntitled, from Gran Pavese – The Flag Project, 1988. Editions & Works on Paper New York

“I like the least pretentious and most humble means, for my ideas depend on themselves and not upon material; it is the very nature of ideas to be non-materialistic.” – Hanne Darboven

“Mostly, I believe an artist doesn't create something, but is there to sort through, to show, to point out what already exists, to put it into form and sometimes reformulate it.... I didn't invent anything, I indicated.” – Annette Messager

 

Because distinctions didn’t define us when we were together, and together we didn't need distinctions

Left: Alighiero BoettiUntitled, from Gran Pavese – The Flag Project, 1988. Editions & Works on Paper New York. Right: Ben VautierVive la différence, from Gran Pavese – The Flag Project, 1988. Editions & Works on Paper New York.

“Do you know why dates are important? Because if you write ‘1970’ for example on a wall, it looks like nothing much, nothing at all, but in thirty years’ time with every day that goes by, this date becomes more beautiful.” – Alighiero Boetti

“My definition of art is: astound, scandalize, provoke, or be yourself, be new, bring, create.” – Ben Vautier

 

And then there was Kenny Scharf 

Kenny ScharfFlag for All, from Gran Pavese – The Flag Project, 1988. Editions & Works on Paper New York

We determinded that in order to be out there, we needed to be out there, and no flag felt more appropriate, no artistic vision felt more compatible with space and the worlds beyond our own than Kenny Scharf's. And if this smirking red figure reaches that little red planet, then it's art that unifies us better than any heraldry. 

 

 

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