Output details

Défaire l'image: de l'art contemporain

‘In collaboration with’ Jean-Claude Bonne (École des hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris), an art historian who specializes in Matisse and Mondrian. J-C B contributed art-historical knowledge on Matisse and Duchamp in Chs 2 & 3.

Both the scale and the scope of this output are equivalent to more than two single outputs by virtue of: the collection and analysis of a considerable body of materials in the case studies of artists; the generation of an extensive thesis; and the presentation of critical insights that are dependent upon the completion of a lengthy period of investigation, of art since the 1960s, in particular.

Undoing the Image: Of Contemporary Art is the final volume in a triptych, conceived as Case Studies for a Critique of Aesthetics. (Volumes 1 & 2 were submitted in RAE2008.) The book centres on Matisse’s and Duchamp’s opposing ruptures with the aesthetic image, and their ‘environmental’ and ‘conceptual’ heritages, respectively (Chs 2 & 3). Setting out from a philosophical critique of the contemporary restoration of the aesthetic image, to which it opposes a diagrammatic regime of art, it begins and ends with case studies on Ernesto Neto (Ch.1) and a series of artists from the 1960s (Chs 4 & 5).