Theoreticism, antitheory, fashion, antiformalism, sociopolitical demand, asymbolia: those are the forces at work within the field in which I move, the various vectors that map the territory to which I belong. At least, those are the forces I am able to recognize and that I regard as the most lethal, the forces against which I target my labor, albeit always implicitly.
Bois, Yve-Alain.
I do not quite know what to make of the Museum of Modern Art's renewed insistence, ever since it reopened, on revisiting the nineteenth century. Holding onto a security blanket as it dives further into the confusing medley of contemporary art?
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Georges Seurat: The Drawings." in: Art Forum. Vol. 46, No. 8, 2008, p. 359. (English).
Nothing could be more welcome at (what is still) the beginning of the twenty-first century, and nothing could yield more puzzling surprises, for the curriculum ends up being not only about the origins of modernism but also in some ways about its entire development.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Georges Seurat: The Drawings." in: Art Forum. Vol. 46, No. 8, 2008, p. 359. (English).
In the geometric faceting of Seurat's small drawings in graphite from 1880-81, one could recognize a certain kind of Cubism ...
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Georges Seurat: The Drawings." in: Art Forum. Vol. 46, No. 8, 2008, p. 359. (English).
There is never, in fact, any real precursor of any sort. The concept is utterly useless, and what artist would ever set his or her sights on being a forerunner--of whom? of what? Yet more than useless, the concept is toxic: To consider someone a precursor, noted the brilliant epistemologist and historian of science Alexandre Koyre, "is the best way to preclude the possibility of understanding his [or her] work." And, I would add, the possibility of doing it justice.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Georges Seurat: The Drawings." in: Art Forum. Vol. 46, No. 8, 2008, p. 359. (English).
Color had been the underdog, the dispensable supplement, ever since the academic theorizations of the seventeenth century, and modernism, in great part, consisted in turning the tables. But cliches are solid, and for years an expression like "Impressionist drawing" was considered an oxymoron.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Georges Seurat: The Drawings." in: Art Forum. Vol. 46, No. 8, 2008, p. 359. (English).
What is it about Matisse the sculptor that he should be forever haunted by the specter of Matisse the painter?
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Address Unknown: The Sculpture of Henri Matisse." in: Art Forum. Vol. 45, No. 9, May 2007, p. 330. (English).
I have never been keen on this principle of mutual inclusion.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Address Unknown: The Sculpture of Henri Matisse." in: Art Forum. Vol. 45, No. 9, May 2007, p. 330. (English).
There is something in common between the dislodged shoulder of the Italian and the utter enucleation of Jeannette V, just as similarities can be found between the dead gaze and goiter of Sarah Stein (whose faceted facial features surge toward the viewer like a genie escaping its bottle) and the sinister "in your face" presence of the "Jeannette" series as a whole.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Address Unknown: The Sculpture of Henri Matisse." in: Art Forum. Vol. 45, No. 9, May 2007, p. 330. (English).
I cannot find any significant relationship between the cutouts and the sculptures--and even these two connections are not particularly convincing. For one, modeling clay is a very sensual, quasi-sexual act (as sculptor William Tucker emphasized at a related symposium in Dallas). The clay is soft, wet, and tender to the touch. Cutting paper is harsh, dry, and, in fact, not direct (remember the scissors?). Furthermore, the numerous works on paper presented in the show, many of them never exhibited before and on the whole excellently chosen, would tend to cast some doubt on the notion that drawing did not intervene between the artist and his material.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Address Unknown: The Sculpture of Henri Matisse." in: Art Forum. Vol. 45, No. 9, May 2007, p. 330. (English).
No, Matisse's sculptures are all about volume and about what, in volume, exceeds our purely visual and intellectual understanding and summons our bodies.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Address Unknown: The Sculpture of Henri Matisse." in: Art Forum. Vol. 45, No. 9, May 2007, p. 330. (English).
Matisse elaborates two pictorial strategies to derail our gaze, to make us lost: either excess of color saturation and size, or "decorative" excess that compels us to look at everything at once, so that we are forced to rely on our peripheral vision and lose control over the field of the canvas. Neither kind of excess is involved in Matisse's sculpture. However, the will to blind us remains--blinding in the sense of preventing us from mastering the work we behold, from having a clear and consistent view of it as something we can ever fully grasp.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Address Unknown: The Sculpture of Henri Matisse." in: Art Forum. Vol. 45, No. 9, May 2007, p. 330. (English).
But "Undercover Surrealism" was not just a brilliant gathering of objects and documents related to Bataille's magazine. It also endeavored to explain the journal's enterprise and, in particular, to expose the role images played in its war against "civilization."
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Reviews: Undercover Surrealism." in: Artforum International. Vol. 45, No. 2, October 2006, p. 259. (English).
Other chapters were more traditional: "Georges Bataille and the Cabinet of Medals," which contained mainly textual and photographic documents, along with ancient archaeological objects, reinforced the schizophrenic image of the writer forged by Breton in his diatribes (by day a bookish librarian, by night "the excremental philosopher"), while "Homage to Picasso" simply gathered paintings that were reproduced and commented on in the journal.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Reviews: Undercover Surrealism." in: Artforum International. Vol. 45, No. 2, October 2006, p. 259. (English).
Bataille's negative aesthetic is a very sharp instrument for sabotaging the modernist tradition.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Reviews: Undercover Surrealism." in: Artforum International. Vol. 45, No. 2, October 2006, p. 259. (English).
I remember the Satyajit Ray movie, The Music Room, which was extraordinary. I think it was one of the most beautiful movies made.
Bois, Yve-Alain and Jane de Almeida (Interviewer). "Interview." in: Jane de Almeida. July 2, 2005. (English).
For me Mondrian was one of the first artists I liked, when I was 14, and the one who made me discover art ... But Lygia totally changed my mind aboutthis kind of approach.
Bois, Yve-Alain and Jane de Almeida (Interviewer). "Interview." in: Jane de Almeida. July 2, 2005. (English).
Well, not only the American students whom I met at that time quoted all these thinkers as a whole, as if these writers had one common voice, but they also felt that it was their obligation to quote this huge textual mass, that no paper would do without zillions quotes from this vast and complex series of texts which they had read much to quickly to fully digest. It was pure fetishism, a kind of invocation without necessity.
Bois, Yve-Alain and Jane de Almeida (Interviewer). "Interview." in: Jane de Almeida. July 2, 2005. (English).
The obituary is full of filth, and I do not have the energy to rebut it point by point. Derrida would have: he always hoped against hope that stupidity could be countered by patient analysis, that, in the end, philosophers would win against the boeotians--even if it meant that philosophers, from Socrates on, often had to die during this age-long battle.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Letter By Yve-Alain Bois to the New York Times on Jacques Derrida's death." in: New York Times. October 10, 2004. (English).
My long familiarity with the art of Piet Mondrian, on which I spent a considerable amount of time and energy, taught me that nothing better enhances the perception of differences than having to deal with a deliberately reduced pictorial vocabulary.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "On Two Paintings by Barnett Newman." in: October. Vol. 108, Spring 2004, pp. 3-27. (English).
In short, Newman’s agony is to be taken seriously, and it indeed explains in great part his fixation on anteriority. He was alone when he painted Abraham, and courageous, too, in surmounting his fear. Having a whole string of predecessors would take this “emotional content” away from the painting; it would empty it. He was alone, like Abraham during the interminable three and a half days of his journey with Isaac to the sacrificial site on the mountain, without anyone to whom he could confide his unprecedented ordeal—an immense solitude that Kierkegaard underscores throughout his book.23 Newman was trembling in front of the unknown.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "On Two Paintings by Barnett Newman." in: October. Vol. 108, Spring 2004, pp. 3-27. (English).
In forcing us to be attentive so that we come gradually to perceive the blacker zip emerge from the surrounding field, the closeness of value undermines spatial/geometric relations and leads us to have an experience of time.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "On Two Paintings by Barnett Newman." in: October. Vol. 108, Spring 2004, pp. 3-27. (English).
The optical effect of a halo is extremely volatile—it is an apparition whose evanescence is crucial if the goal is to give the beholder an actual sensation of time. One has to be patient to perceive it; in a sense one has to have faith, one must beexpectant—it requires one’s sustained presence, and this presence is based on faith ...
Bois, Yve-Alain. "On Two Paintings by Barnett Newman." in: October. Vol. 108, Spring 2004, pp. 3-27. (English).
In its unhallowed brazenness Waters's Visit Marfa calls for a reconsideration of Judd's enterprise and, by extension, Minimalism as a whole. Its multiple assaults could be addressed, even rebuked one by one. Still, the allusion to Judd's bed should not be overlooked, particularly in light of the recent "Minimalist-art tour" of Manhattan offered by the Guggenheim's curators.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Specific objections: Yve-Alain Bois on Donald Judd in London and minimalism in New York and Los Angeles." in: Art Forum. 2004. (English).
Sean Connery as Judd? Kirk Douglas as Andre? Fred Astaire as Morris? Frank Sinatra as Leo Castelli? Far from absurd, if you give it some thought. All that's lacking is a script to set the actors in motion, and that's precisely what I missed all along.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Specific objections: Yve-Alain Bois on Donald Judd in London and minimalism in New York and Los Angeles." in: Art Forum. 2004. (English).
Few funerals have been as indecorous as the one held for painting in the early '80s. Was the deceased truly dead, and, if so, in whose name could the death certificate be signed?
Bois, Yve-Alain et. al. "The Mourning After - Panel Discussion." in: Art Forum. March 2003. (English).
The "death of painting" had come up too frequently in the course of twentieth-century art merely to have been a cranky inference based on the theory of mathematical permutations.
Bois, Yve-Alain et. al. "The Mourning After - Panel Discussion." in: Art Forum. March 2003. (English).
I arrived in America in 1983 and was immediately struck by the strangely hypertrophied hold that what was then called "French theory" already had in academic discussions and was beginning to have in the art world. The same was true of "poststructuralism," a word that I had never heard before.
Bois, Yve-Alain et. al. "The Mourning After - Panel Discussion." in: Art Forum. March 2003. (English).
I was amazed by the gross misconceptions surrounding the so-called poststructuralist corpus, which I immediately witnessed in graduate seminars. The fashion-driven pressure to transform complex texts into sound bites was so strong that even the b est translation could not have prevented the hodgepodge that became the lingua franca of the art world for a few seasons.
Bois, Yve-Alain et. al. "The Mourning After - Panel Discussion." in: Art Forum. March 2003. (English).
Basically, the argument I was making is very similar to that of Thierry: The death of painting has been on order since Manet, and the task of every modern artist is to try to achieve it. That is what modernism as I know it is all about.
Bois, Yve-Alain et. al. "The Mourning After - Panel Discussion." in: Art Forum. March 2003. (English).
I never thought Baudrillard was that interesting--I saw him as a kind of Dave Hickey of theory (good lines, good tunes)--and illustration is not really my cup of tea.
Bois, Yve-Alain et. al. "The Mourning After - Panel Discussion." in: Art Forum. March 2003. (English).
Nakov's catalogue raisonn provides an excellent Ariadne's thread to orient ourselves in this confounding labyrinth.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Back to the Future: The New Malevich." in: Book Forum. Winter 2003. (English).
When a new ("additional") element is introduced into the artistic body, it is usually rejected by antibodies, but occasionally the infection is strong enough to develop into a long and lethal affliction whose only cure will be the emergence of a new art.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Back to the Future: The New Malevich." in: Book Forum. Winter 2003. (English).
Reading Malevich's account of the agonizing paralysis of one of his students after he had prescribed him an overdose of the additional element of Cubism (and such painterly lab reports abound in his writings), one feels compelled to agree with Galvez: At least this explanation of Malevich's late style is more in keeping with his uncompromising nature than the often-invoked mere abdication under the pressure of Stalinist terror.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Back to the Future: The New Malevich." in: Book Forum. Winter 2003. (English).
The saddest observation to be made at the recent Guggenheim show was provided by a comparison between the paintings that had miraculously remained untouched over the years and those (particularly the ones lent by moma) whose texture had been all but flattened out, at a time when conservators were far less cautious and much more interventionist, by a heavy-handed relining.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Back to the Future: The New Malevich." in: Book Forum. Winter 2003. (English).
The absence of technical data in Drutt's Guggenheim catalogue (as well as in the wall labels in the exhibition) was particularly frustrating, especially with regard to the works that had belonged to Khardzhiev, most of which were in pristine condition.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Back to the Future: The New Malevich." in: Book Forum. Winter 2003. (English).
The first to remark on the lack of geometrical determination in Malevich's oeuvre and notably that his squares were never square or parallel to the picture's edges were Donald Judd and Mel Bochner on the occasion of the painter's retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1974 (Judd in the March/April 1974 issue of Art in America; Bochner in the June 1974 Artforum). Since then, Malevich's constant, deliberate affront to the rationality of geometry has become a staple of the Malevich literature (to the point that when a drawing is too neatly geometric, it is enough for Nakov, in his catalogue raisonn, to discard it as produced by one of his pupils, Lissitzky, for example).
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Back to the Future: The New Malevich." in: Book Forum. Winter 2003. (English).
With the nearly constant stream of new documents being unearthed and put into circulation, we become ever more conscious of the extent of our ignorance and of the complex challenges that lie ahead: all in all, a healthy state of affairs.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Back to the Future: The New Malevich." in: Book Forum. Winter 2003. (English).
Abuse of power and indiscretion: These are the marks of all photographs, according to Calle, and they are among the topics she consistently explores. Dotting her "i"s has involved some risk-taking.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Character Study: Sophie Calle." in: Art Forum International. Vol. 38, No. 8, April 2000, p. 120-131. (English).
Although Calle never claimed Guy Debord as her ideological mentor, she might be the only artist in recent years who has found a way to carry out the poetic principle of the Situationist derive. No doubt she'll move on, the eternal wanderer.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Character Study: Sophie Calle." in: Art Forum International. Vol. 38, No. 8, April 2000, p. 120-131. (English).
Kinetic art suffered the unhappy fate of a flash in the pan.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Force Fields: Phases of the Kinetic." in: Art Forum. Vol. 39, No. 3, November 2000. (English).
The qualities that define movement (slow/fast; continuous/discontinuous; regular/irregular; accelerating/decelerating; etc.) are shared by every object or being that produces and expends energy. This very universality, which is an abstract quality, makes of movement an ideal metaphoric switchboard: Every work exhibited in "Force Fields" alludes to either the organic, the mechanic, or the cosmic--in all cases concepts of energy that we, as human beings, have learned to apply in our daily life without a second thought.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Force Fields: Phases of the Kinetic." in: Art Forum. Vol. 39, No. 3, November 2000. (English).
Though three neighboring early '30s Calder mobiles are in no way insignificant, the Vantongerloo ensemble steals the show and sets the tone for the rest of the exhibition.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Force Fields: Phases of the Kinetic." in: Art Forum. Vol. 39, No. 3, November 2000. (English).
Brett reminds us that Soto was once as inventive as Piero Manzoni (most prominently represented by several polystyrene-pellet Achromes) and Lucio Fontana (the dark, punctured, glitter and sand Concetto spaziale is one of the best I've seen), who in fact greatly admired the Venezuelan.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Force Fields: Phases of the Kinetic." in: Art Forum. Vol. 39, No. 3, November 2000. (English).
Sometimes an artist is given a whole room: Takis, whose magnetic fields pulse in an astounding variety of ways (producing sound, making balls bounce, asynchronically jolting the needles of compasses on a sci-fi dashboard), is an example; another is Gego, whose metallic spiderwebs, spanning the immaculate white cube, make consenting prey of us.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Force Fields: Phases of the Kinetic." in: Art Forum. Vol. 39, No. 3, November 2000. (English).
Source: European Graduate School (EGS)
