Formless: A User's Guide [Paperback]

Yve-Alain Bois (Author), Rosalind E. Krauss (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 28, 2000

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 Formless: 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 Formless: 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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A challenging and possibly seminal discussion of meaning in creative production."
—Creative Review



"A marvellous book."
—Richard Pickup, Art Book

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Zone Books (August 28, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0942299442
• ISBN-13: 978-0942299441
• Product Dimensions: 11 x 7.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,672,659 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Form and Content, April 29, 2002

By 

Alexei Kourbanovsky (Champaign, Illinois United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Formless: A User's Guide (Paperback)

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.
I 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.

49 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars "puffed up with rhetorical noise and wind", July 18, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Formless: A User's Guide (Hardcover)

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.

10 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Formeless - Useless, September 27, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Formless: A User's Guide (Paperback)

One should re-name this book: Useless - a Form Guide.