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Formless

Front Cover
6 Reviews
Zone Books, Oct 15, 1997 - Art - 296 pages
In a work that will become indispensable to anyone seriously interested in modern art, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss introduce a new constellation of concepts to our understanding of avant-garde and modernist art practices. Formless: A User's Guide constitutes a decisive and dramatic transformation of the study of twentieth-century culture. Although it has been over 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 the field of twentieth-century art. This is partly because that field has most often been crudely set up as a battle between form and content; "formless" constitutes a third term standing outside that opposition, outside the binary thinking that is itself formal.

In Formless: A User's Guide, Bois and 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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Review: Formless: A User's Guide

User Review  - Bjorn - Goodreads

used this book writing my BA thesis, it is very insightful. both authors are experts on both modern art and philosophy. Read full review

Review: Formless: A User's Guide

User Review  - RJ Myato - Goodreads

Indispensable text for rethinking modernism and the avant-garde. Highly recommended. Read full review

All 6 reviews »

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Contents

Preface
9
Qualities Without
169
Sweats of the Hippo
180
Copyright

5 other sections not shown

Other editions - View all

Formless: A User's Guide
Formless: A User's Guide
Yve Alain Bois,Rosalind E. Krauss
No preview available - 1997

Common terms and phrases

aesthetic animal Architecture art informel artist attack Barthes base materialism Bataille's body Breton Caillois canvas Carl Einstein castration Centre Georges Pompidou Claes Oldenburg College of Sociology color critical dictionary culture D.A.F. de Sade d'Art Denis Hollier dialectic Didi-Huberman Documents Dubuffet Duchamp Encyclopaedia Acephalica entropy essay example excremental Fautrier fetish figure film Fontana formless Freud function Genet Georges Bataille Gestalt Giacometti Gordon Matta-Clark heterology horizontal human Ibid idea inches informel issue Jacques Jean Jeu Lugubre kitsch Krauss Lacan Liquid Words Manet mark means Michel Leiris mirror Modern modernist movement Museum negation object Oeuvres completes Oldenburg Olympia operation painting Paris photograph Picasso Piero Manzoni Pollock Press produce published pulse Ray Guns relation repression reprinted resemblance Robert Smithson Rosalind Ruscha scatological sculpture sexual space Surrealism surrealist term tion trans transposition uncanny unconscious vertical viewer Visions of Excess visual Warhol writes York Yve-Alain Bois

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References from web pages

FORMLESS: A USER'S GUIDE / Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss ...
Formless: A User's Guide, maps out a third area betwen the traditional dichotomy of form. and content in the visual arts as originally suggested by the ...
www.arlisna.org/ artdoc/ vol17/ iss2/ 17.pdf

Formless: A User's Guide - Questia Online Library
(2) The translated edition of the catalogue, Formless: A User's Guide, provides an English-speaking audience with an important and accessible resource for ...
www.questia.com/ PM.qst?a=o& se=gglsc& d=5001358672

Formless - The MIT Press
Formless: A User's Guide constitutes a decisive and dramatic transformation ... In Formless: A User's Guide, Bois and Krauss present a rich and compelling ...
mitpress.mit.edu/ catalog/ item/ default.asp?ttype=2& tid=7439

Institute for Advanced Study: Faculty and Emeriti: Bois
Yve-Alain Bois ART HISTORY Professor School of Historical Studies. A specialist in 20th-century European and American art, Bois is recognized as an expert ...
www.ias.edu/ about/ faculty-and-emeriti/ bois

Other Voices 2.2 (March 2002), Victor Grauer "Formless: A Review"
Review of Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User's Guide, MIT Press, ... Formless: A User's Guide is the catalog of an exhibition held at the ...
www.othervoices.org/ 2.2/ grauer/ index2.html

JSTOR: To Introduce a User's Guide
Formless: A User's Guide, Excerpts* To Introduce a User's Guide YVE-ALAIN BOIS Perhaps Manet's Olympia is not the "first" modernist painting, this legendary ...
links.jstor.org/ sici?sici=0162-2870(199623)78%3C21%3ATIAUG%3E2.0.CO%3B2-V

j09-22-1-revs 136..142
Formless: A User's Guide by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, New York: Zone ... Formless: A User's Guide orchestrates a meeting between modern art and ...
www.blackwell-synergy.com/ doi/ abs/ 10.1111/ 1467-8365.00144

thingreviews Article
FORMLESS : A USER'S GUIDE Curated by Rosalind Krauss and Yves Alain Bois Centre Georges Pompidou May 22 - August 26 Paris. This sprawling exhibition is ...
old.thing.net/ ttreview/ septrev.05.html

Formless: A User's Guide - short hope
イヴ＝アラン・ボワ、ロザリンド・クラウス、Formless: A User's Guide再読。というか、 通読したことがなかったので一度挑戦してみようと暇を見つけてはちまちま...
d.hatena.ne.jp/ kebabtaro/ 20070813/ p1

Bois Yve-Alain, Krauss Rosalind: Formless Formless: A User's Guide ...
Formless Formless: A User's Guide a User's Guide. Joint author: Rosalind E. Krauss. Zone Books , 1997 Hardcover, 304 stran Velikost: 291x189 mm ...
www.bookfayre.cz/ books/ item/ 9780942299434.html.cs

About the author (1997)

Yve-Alain Bois studied at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes under the guidance of Roland Barthes and Hubert Damisch. A founder of the French journal Macula, Bois is currently a professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ.

Rosalind E. Krauss, University Professor at Columbia University and an editor and cofounder of October magazine, is the author of The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985), The Optical Unconscious (1993), The Picasso Papers (1999), and Bachelors (1999), all published by the MIT Press, and coauthor (with Yve-Alain Bois) of Formless: A User's Guide (Zone Books, 1997).

Bibliographic information

QR code for Formless
TitleFormless
AuthorsYve Alain Bois, Rosalind E. Krauss, Centre Georges Pompidou
EditorsYve Alain Bois, Rosalind E. Krauss
Editionillustrated, reprint
PublisherZone Books, 1997
Original fromthe University of Michigan
Digitized11 Jan 2008
Length296 pages
Subjects ›  › 

Art / Criticism & Theory
Art / History / General
Art / History / Modern (late 19th Century to 1945)
Art, Modern
Art, Modern/ 20th century/ Exhibitions
Design / General
  
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