Formless

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by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss

Zone Books

Due/Published October 2000, 304 pages, paper

ISBN 0942299442

New in paper (F00)

Both Krauss and Bois are editors of October and here they introduce a new set of concepts to our understanding of avant-garde and modernist art practices. The formless sounds familiar enough, but as a concept that really stands outside of the opposition between form and content--a relation that is itself formal--formlessness remains a bit strange. The authors chart the persistence of the formless within a history of modernism that has always repressed it in the interest of privileging formal mastery and they assess its place within current artistic production. Neither theme nor form, formless is, as Bataille expressed it, a "job." The job of this book is to explore the power of what Bataille, sixty years ago, was talking about when he undertook his philosophical development of the term informe. The result is a new map of twentieth-century art that emerges from this reconceptualization and from terrifically original readings of Pollock, Warhol, Twombly, Fontana, Sherman, Oldenberg, Dubuffet, Smithson, Matta-Clark and others. With 93 illustrations, 16 in color.

Review

This is a very impressive and ambitious study that introduces new concepts to our understanding of modern and avant garde art. The authors use Bataille's notion of informe as a springboard to examine a panorama of modern works with the idea of the "formless" in mind. One of the more startling implications of this, is that it calls into question the form/content binary that has been so dominant in both the visual arts and in criticism. Like Bataille, the authors are interested in the "slippage" of the form/content binary. In writing about Bataille's opinion of Manet's Olympia, the authors claim, "So it is neither the 'form' nor the 'content' that interests Bataille, but the operation that displaces both of these terms." The authors use the notion of the formless to reread the works of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Cindy Sherman, Claes Oldenburg, Jean Dubuffet, and Robert Smithson, among others, in very interesting and worthwhile directions. Dividing the book into four large parts (Base materialism, Horizontality, Pulse, Entropy) and 26 smaller parts (i.e., chapters beginning with each letter of the alphabet), the authors excellent job of sustaining their argument and providing a coherent and convincing framework to understand modernist art truly sets apart from many if not most recent works of art criticism.

For other recent titles by Rosalind Krauss.