e-flux publications includes both the e-flux journal and e-flux journal reader series. The monthly art publication e-flux journal features essays and contributions by contemporary artists and thinkers. The e-flux journal reader series was initiated in 2009 as a joint imprint with Sternberg Press.
History
In 2009, e-flux began distributing the printed version of the journal as a PDF-to-print edition designed by Adam Florin that can be found at bookshops and art spaces around the world through a network of distributors. The first issue of e-flux journal was published in December, 2008. Shortly after The Building, Berlin, presented the e-flux journal as exhibition as part of their public programming, producing issues 0, 1, 2 and 3 in the space over the course of the year. As the editorial collective explained, "(t)his first presentation of e-flux journal in Berlin (was) a prototype for what a small art space such as The Building can do with this system."
In 2014 Mark Sladen wrote "e-flux journal focuses primarily on long-form texts, with little effort to style the reading environment or to employ complex audiovisual elements. It could be argued that the journal's simplicity is its strength, as the publication's lack of formatting—and lack of large audiovisual files—means that it flows with greater ease across a multitude of devices. But it does this by making text its unchallenged king."
Since 2010, e-flux journal has regularly produced thematic issues, often guest edited by writers and thinkers such as Irit Rogoff, Boris Groys, Anselm Franke and Carlos Motta. These issues are often accompanied by symposia and events at e-flux on the same theme.
Reader series
In 2009 e-flux journal began publishing a series of paperback readers under a joint imprint with Sternberg Press.
e-flux journal reader 2009: The selection of essays included in the e-flux journal reader 2009 sought to highlight ongoing topical threads that ran throughout the first eight issues of e-flux journal in order to give a sense of the varied concerns and urgencies engaged at the time of its publication. The compilation is edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle, with essays by Boris Groys, Hito Steyerl, Liam Gillick, Monika Szewczyk, Luis Camnitzer, Raqs Media Collective, Sean Snyder, Tom Holert, Irit Rogoff, Dieter Roelstraete, Marion von Osten, Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza, Michael Baers.
What Is Contemporary Art? (June 2010): This book began as a two-part issue of e-flux journal devoted to the question: What is contemporary art? Critics, curators, artists and writers were invited to contribute include: Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Boris Groys, Raqs Media Collective, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Hu Fang, Jörg Heiser, Martha Rosler, Zdenka Badovinac, Carol Yinghua Lu, Dieter Roelstraete, and Jan Verwoert.
Boris Groys' Going Public is the third in this ongoing series of books published by e-flux journal with Sternberg Press. The text questions the role of art in a world where all things are understood to be sources of aesthetic experience. Considering the position of the producer, rather than spectator, Groys upends stale aesthetic and sociological analysis of art instead posing the epistemological question of why art exists in the first place.
Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art (June 2011): This publication is a collection of texts from e-flux's online and print journal edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle with contributions from Antke Engel, Hito Steyerl, Liam Gillick, Tom Holert, Irit Rogoff, Marion von Osten, Diedrich Diederichsen, Lars Bang Larsen, Keti Chukhrov, Franco Berardi, Precarious Workers Brigade. As Eva Kenny explains in her review " Something that comes across strongly from these texts is the notion that capitalism, whiles very enthusiastic and hardworking, is perhaps not particularly imaginative. Can it think up its own forms of subjugation or does it rely heavily on someone else to do this? A theoretical but nonetheless dramatic standoff is one of the outcomes of this shortcoming: while capitalism in its current incarnation cuts arts funding and starves artists out of their old neighborhoods, watching them fight like gladiators the better to learn even more strategic and cut-throat ways of surviving hard times, art is at the same time pulling the wool over capitalism's eyes with its ridiculous and inexplicable approaches to absolutely everything."