Formless: A User's Guide | 
 enlarge | Authors: Yve-alain Bois, Rosalind E. Krauss
Publisher: Zone Books
Category: Book
List Price: $42.95
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Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 159547
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 296
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.5
Dimensions (in): 11.1 x 7.2 x 1.4
ISBN: 0942299434
Dewey Decimal Number: 709.04007444361
EAN: 9780942299434
ASIN: 0942299434
Publication Date: October 15, 1997
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Product Description
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. iFormless: A User's Guide/i 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 iinforme/i, 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 iFormless: A User's Guide/i, 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 iFormless: A User's Guide/i is to explore the power of the iinforme/i. 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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| Customer Reviews:
 Form and Content April 29, 2002
Alexei Kourbanovsky (Champaign, Illinois United States)
21 out of 22 found this review helpful
Georges Bataille was a provocative thinker. Associated freely with the Surrealists, playing around with the fascists, Gnostics, psychoanalysis and eroticism, he managed to create a highly explosive cultural blend which proves influential in our times, like a real time-bomb should. Was he really that quasi-Postmodern thinker some interpreters try to make him look? Anyway, he wrote some of the most intellectually challenging texts and supplied exquisitely enjoyable concepts which present-day artists still can not truly exhaust. The book "Formless" provides an equally provocative reading of Bataille projected against some Modern and Postmodern artifacts, which the French thinker never really saw. It is anachronistic, it is puzzling, sometimes quite enjoyable. Problem is, it does not add to our understanding of neither Bataille, nor, for example, Andy Warhol. It shows that Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois can write complicated and intricate pieces on virtually anything, citing from Bataille and/or the so-called "French theory" to interesting effect. But this is not an art history book, it is rather a kind of artifact of its own right. Personally I do not regret that I bought it, but I can imagine people who would be disappointed.brI think in Thomas Pynchon's "V" there is a passage where two thugs planning to steal Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" from the Uffizi go to the museum and stare at the painting. They see a nude woman, a maid who is trying to cover her up with a cloak, and an excited male god at the left who is trying hard to blow the cloak away and keep Venus nude. Well, this does not add to our understanding of Botticelli, but provides amusing reading and serves Pynchon's point nicely. Something similar happens with "Formless": it is entertaining but tells us mostly about personal excitements and idiocyncrazies of the two intellegent people who wrote this collection.
 Formeless - Useless September 27, 2001
10 out of 39 found this review helpful
One should re-name this book: Useless - a Form Guide.
 puffed up with rhetorical noise and wind July 19, 1998
44 out of 60 found this review helpful
This book claims to introduce a whole new perspective of 20th- century art which has so far been repressed. We are led to believe that it is necessary to add a third and foreign element into the conceptualization of art. The basis on which this whole endeavour is anchorred is the philosophical Informe of Georges Bataille. However, the arguments presented by the authors are weak as the whole book is stuffed with analyses purporting to reveal the operational tool of informe. Any attempt at explaining the original intentions of Bataille's informe is so brief and convenient so as to get the reader lost in its adjectival superfluity. There is never any attempt to explain the introduction of informe into art and its necessity. The authors make claims to be liberating our thinking from the semantic and that this project is only the beginning. I am only too happy to wish for a clearer and thoroughly convincing argument the next ti! me.
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