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.
