Read more
Jaleh Mansoor provides a counter narrative of modernism and abstraction, showing how art and abstraction resist modes of production at the level of process and form rather than representation.
List of contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction 1. Toward a Materialist Formalism 1
Introduction 2. Modernism’s Aesthetic Economy: An
Art History of Labor’s Subsumption 25
1. Georges Seurat’s Muses, Abstracted: Abstract Anonymous Labor and the Beginnings of Aesthetic Abstraction 51
2. Francis Picabia’s Real Abstraction and the Beginnings of Futurist Cyborgs: The Prefigurative Avant-Gardes 78
3. The Future of the Futurists: The Young-Girl; En/gendering Real Abstraction 104
4. The [Young-Girl] Worker as Equipment: Yves Klein’s Living Paintbrushes 133
5. Surplus Bodies: Santiago Sierra’s Exploitive Remuneration 157
Conclusion 177
Notes 197
Bibliography 213
Index 225
About the author
Jaleh Mansoor is Associate Professor of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory at the University of British Columbia and author of
Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia, also published by Duke University Press.
