Synopsis
Although it is more than sixty years since Georges Bataille undertook his philosophical development of the term informe, only in recent years has the idea of the "formless" been deployed in the theorizing and reconfiguring of twentieth-century art. In Formless: A User's Guide, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss present a rich and compelling panorama of the formless. They chart its persistence within a history of modernism that has always repressed it in the interest of privileging formal mastery, and they assess its destiny within current artistic production. In the domain of practice, they analyze it as an operational tool, the structural cunning of which has repeatedly been suppressed in the service of a thematics of art. Neither theme nor form, formless is, as Bataille himself expressed it, a "job." The job of Formless: A User's Guide is to explore the power of the informe. A stunning new map of twentieth-century art emerges from this reconceptualization and from the brilliantly original analyses of the work of Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Lucio Fontana, Cindy Sherman, Claes Oldenburg, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Smithson, and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others.
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About the Author
Yve-Alain Bois is Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Professor of Modern Art at Harvard University. Rosalind E. Krauss is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University. They are both editors at the journal October.
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Formless: A Users Guide
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Formless : A User's Guide
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Zone Books New York, NY, 1997
ISBN 10: 0942299434
ISBN 13: 9780942299434
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296 pp.; 28.5 x 19 cm.; sewn bound; black-and-white & color; edition size unknown; unsigned and unnumbered; offset-printed Critical theory / exhibition catalogue published in conjunction with show held at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, May 22 - August 26, 1996. Includes bibliographical references and index. Originally published in France as 'L'Informe: mode d'emploi' by Editions du Centre Pompidou, 1996. Text in English. Fine. As issued in Fine dust-jacket. Due to large size and weight additional shipping charges may be required for international orders. Seller Inventory # 33848
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Formless: A User's Guide
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