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Title: Formless: A User's Guide by Yve-Alain Bois, Rosalind Krauss ISBN: 0-942299-44-2 Publisher: Zone Books Pub. Date: 28 August, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.67 (3 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Form and Content
Comment: Georges Bataille was a provocative thinker. Associated freely with the Surrealists, playing around with the fascists, Gnostics, psychoanalysis and eroticism, he managed to create a highly explosive cultural blend which proves influential in our times, like a real time-bomb should. Was he really that quasi-Postmodern thinker some interpreters try to make him look? Anyway, he wrote some of the most intellectually challenging texts and supplied exquisitely enjoyable concepts which present-day artists still can not truly exhaust. The book "Formless" provides an equally provocative reading of Bataille projected against some Modern and Postmodern artifacts, which the French thinker never really saw. It is anachronistic, it is puzzling, sometimes quite enjoyable. Problem is, it does not add to our understanding of neither Bataille, nor, for example, Andy Warhol. It shows that Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois can write complicated and intricate pieces on virtually anything, citing from Bataille and/or the so-called "French theory" to interesting effect. But this is not an art history book, it is rather a kind of artifact of its own right. Personally I do not regret that I bought it, but I can imagine people who would be disappointed.
I think in Thomas Pynchon's "V" there is a passage where two thugs planning to steal Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" from the Uffizi go to the museum and stare at the painting. They see a nude woman, a maid who is trying to cover her up with a cloak, and an excited male god at the left who is trying hard to blow the cloak away and keep Venus nude. Well, this does not add to our understanding of Botticelli, but provides amusing reading and serves Pynchon's point nicely. Something similar happens with "Formless": it is entertaining but tells us mostly about personal excitements and idiocyncrazies of the two intellegent people who wrote this collection.
Rating: 1
Summary: Formeless - Useless
Comment: One should re-name this book: Useless - a Form Guide.
Rating: 3
Summary: "puffed up with rhetorical noise and wind"
Comment: This book claims to introduce a whole new perspective of 20th- century art which has so far been repressed. We are led to believe that it is necessary to add a third and foreign element into the conceptualization of art. The basis on which this whole endeavour is anchorred is the philosophical "Informe" of Georges Bataille. However, the arguments presented by the authors are weak as the whole book is stuffed with analyses purporting to reveal the operational tool of "informe". Any attempt at explaining the original intentions of Bataille's "informe" is so brief and convenient so as to get the reader lost in its adjectival superfluity. There is never any attempt to explain the introduction of "informe" into art and its necessity. The authors make claims to be liberating our thinking from the semantic and that this project is only the beginning. I am only too happy to wish for a clearer and thoroughly convincing argument the next ti! me.
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Title: The Optical Unconscious by Rosalind Krauss ISBN: 0262611058 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 25 July, 1994 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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Title: The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths by Rosalind Krauss ISBN: 0262610469 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 09 July, 1986 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century (October Books) by Hal Foster ISBN: 0262561077 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 1996 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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Title: Bachelors (October Books) by Rosalind Krauss ISBN: 0262611651 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 28 August, 2000 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age (Technologies-Studies in Culture and Theory) by Joanna Zylinska, Joanna Linska ISBN: 082645903X Publisher: Continuum Pub. Date: June, 2002 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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