Formless: A User's Guide

by Yve-Alain Bois, Rosalind E. Krauss

Although it is more than 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 twentieth-century art. In A User's Guide, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind 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 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.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Art History, Theory, Essays, History

296 pages, Hardcover

First published October 15, 1997

Reviews

[Lauren Klotz · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is basically my bible.

[Michael Braithwaite · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's hard enough to understand l'art informel when fucking Bataille talks about it, but it's even more difficult to get it here. I'm not convinced that Bois himself understands what the formless is. It's definition is everything thing that it is NOT, to the point that the formless seems to in fact be nothing other than a vague impression of the potentiality for some sort of subversion or declassification...

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actually, it's by Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss. Modern art reassessed thru Bataille. The book borrows the fake-dictionary form used in Bataille's avant-garde journal Documents: half of the entries are by Krauss, half are by Bois. I like Krauss's way better. Lots of overlap w/ Krauss's The Optical Unconscious, but not in a bad way.

[Sari]

Great for referencing in historical & critical studies essays to clear up argumentation, need to remember to look back into this one come dissertation time.

[Barry Pierce · Rating 3 out of 5]

Used this book a lot in my history of art dissertation, which was based around Bataille's theory of the formless but I applied it to Young British Art. You really cannot get any better than Bois and Krauss on this subject, even if at some points of this book you wonder whether even they fully understand what Bataille was talking about.

[Ami Furness · Rating 5 out of 5]

read 2 chapters this morning (liquid words and uncanny) in relation to eltit and errázuriz. really fantastic- want to go back and read more on salcedo, and just in general on the concepts explored to do with art & debunking of modernism etc. a la Bataille, post-exams.

[Lisetta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Per chi ama l'arte contemporanea, questo libro sar�� esemplare di una condizione artistica che procede verso l'informe, la forma non forma. In funzione di una messa in discussione delle sue stesse fondamenta radicate in una tradizione che non c'�� pi��......

[Jeremy Wineberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

bataille, the base, and the horizontal . . . oh, my. this is the most intriguing dictionary i own and a constant source of devious enlightenment.

[Garek Druss]

college book, still use it as a reference though.
totally dirt

[Colby · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

[Egor xS · Rating 5 out of 5]

You say tour de force, I say insane, hilarious, seditious. If the authors worked on this some fifteen years, they must have had a lot of fun.

[RJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

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