Bøker av Eric Alliez

How one of the leading artists of Neo-Concretism Hélio Oiticica presaged the unique trajectory of Brazilian contemporary art with his intensive color-architectures.“The IMAGE-grip is dislocated and a more fundamental element emerges: in short, IMAGE is not the work’s supreme motive or unifying end.”—Hélio Oiticica  At the turn of the 1950s–1960s, one of the leading artists of Neo-Concretism, Hélio Oiticica, presaged the unique trajectory of Brazilian contemporary art with his intensive color-architectures. In the wake of this vivência of “time-color,” which subordinates the aesthetic to the sensorimotor powers of color, Oiticica’s transcategorial, transmedia works critically and clinically undermine physical and social architecture, while semiotically subverting the forms of domination exerted by the image. In this culmination of their reassessment of the relation among art, philosophy, and the contemporary, Éric Alliez and Jean-Claude Bonne show how these works are exemplary not only of a truly diagrammatic thought and practice, but also of the South’s resistance against the coldly indifferent globalism endemic to the pacified institutions of contemporary art. Oiticica’s tropicalization of the commonplaces of sixties art signals the latent potential of a marginal dissidence from both the aesthetic form of art and the conceptual form of anti-art.

An "operating manual for contemporary art" that addresses the work of Daniel Buren, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Günter Brus.The late 1960s saw a radical undoing of the image in—and of—art, as the questions of art began to be posed in entirely new terms. In this critical and clinical examination of the post-conceptual condition’s negotiations with the image, the body, capitalist semiotics, and the built environment, Éric Alliez and Jean-Claude Bonne trace the trajectories of three artists, three key entries in the lexicon that are also entryways into contemporary art understood as a ‘diagrammatic regime’ inextricably related, in particular, to architecture.  Daniel Buren systematically deconstructs all the forms of autonomy of art, through a tenacious in situ critique at once pragmatic and ontological operated by his "visual tool," traced here from its origins to recent major museum installations; Gordon Matta-Clark’s anarchitectural operation across site and non-site strikes at the functional foundations of architectural structuring, physical, social, and semiotic—a dis-organization and disorientation relayed by his photographic documentation of his projects. Viennese actionist Günter Brus’s action drawings/drawing actions and "stress tests" recircuit markmaking, representation, and corporeality, producing wordless "electroglyphs" that render visible the inscription of relations of force within the body. This "operating manual for contemporary art," richly illustrated and based throughout on close readings of the artists’ works, writings, and actions across their entire careers, is an indispensable diagram of the lines of flight opened up by contemporary art, as well as the omnipresent threat of its capture by anesthesia and dematerialization, spectacle, the dogma of “site-specificity,” and absorption into the neoliberal experience economy.

A detailed examination of the motivations and precise coordinates of Duchamp's break from painting into the field of the linguistic sign.Matisse and Duchamp seem to incarnate ideal poles of the tension internal to modern art as it plunged into crisis the idea of the image—a polemical operation that opened the way to contemporary art's auto-problematization of experimental constructivism. Where Matisse subverted the aesthetic regime by bringing painting out of itself to invest its environment in a Bergsonian energetics of color, Duchamp cuts it off from the plastic arts through a reversal of Bergson's in-the-making. The readymade captures a literalized signifier of this perspective. Duchamp Looked At is an extraordinarily rich philosophical study that offers a startling new account of the dis/continuity between the problems of contemporary art and the new articulations Duchamp fabricated between image and idea, science and art, painting and language. Alliez and Bonne's meticulous archaeological survey rediscovers the real problems and motivations of "Duchamp-thought” through a close analysis of his entire oeuvre: from the Nudes in which the problem of representing movement is gradually displaced into the realm of the virtual, the image disqualified in favor of the diagram, to the pataphysical sciences of chance and the particular, the readymades, the Large Glass and Étant donnés—and beyond, as the artist carbonizes the gallery with 1200 Sacks of Coal and ties it up with Miles of String, in installations that take Duchamp beyond Duchamp.

Time is money, Benjamin Franklin once said, and in a reading of European philosophy, this text shows how true this adage is. A history of philosophy of time, this work attempts to unravel the theoretical frameworks that have given time its shape in Western civilization.