Papers by Valerie Mindlin
The Brooklyn Rail, 2024
Soledad Sevilla's retrospective at the Reina Sofia Museum opens with a series of abstract paintin... more Soledad Sevilla's retrospective at the Reina Sofia Museum opens with a series of abstract paintings and drawings under the collective title "Mondrian" (1973). A self-explanatory nod to the Dutch Neoplasticist and his project to, in Yve-Alain Bois's memorable summation, eradicate the figure, the center, and the discreet ground from the established compositional order, the works do not so much resemble any Mondrian painting in particular (although they come closest to the New York period) as adopt his modular approach to leave the viewer confronted by the grid-in this case, an oblique polygonal one-as pure shape. For his part, and despite his best efforts, Mondrian would in time arrive to see that "man's eye is not yet free from his body. Vision is inherently bound to our normal position." Emerging from the peer group of Spanish artists whose work was defined by its adherence to the dogma of geometric abstraction (politically, as much as aesthetically driven by Spain's contemporaneous tumultuous political climate and its emerging orthodoxy of new figuration), Sevilla metabolized this lesson early on: the entirety of her oeuvre is threaded through with conviction of the inherent inseparability of phenomenology and pareidolia from the myth of "pure" abstraction. The inescapable formal context (explicitly acknowledged by Sevilla herself in the work included in her exhibition Variaciones de una línea, 1966-1986) here is that of the 1960s minimalist invention of the line as pictorial element fully stripped of any suggestion of either expressionistic (as in Abstract Expressionism's trade of the narrative space for the implication of the purity of an artist's interiority) or illusionistic (as in classical art's "window" model) intention, leaving the painting's support untransformed by any suspicion of underlying metaphor. (I am indebted for this insight to Rosalind Krauss's canonical essay in Line as Language: Six Artists Draw.) That project, too, reached its logical conclusion in the acknowledgment of phenomenology's undeniability-with Krauss's "'Specific' Objects," Sol LeWitt's wall drawings, et alia.
November, 2023
Yve-Alain Bois is a professor emeritus of art history at the School of Historical Studies at the ... more Yve-Alain Bois is a professor emeritus of art history at the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Studying with Roland Barthes, Bois received an M.A. from the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 1973 and a Ph.D. from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 1977. He has held appointments at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; Johns Hopkins University; and Harvard University. His books include Ellsworth Kelly: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Reliefs, and Sculpture: Vol. 1, 1940–1953 (2015) and Vol. 2, 1954–1958 (2021); Matisse in the Barnes Foundation (2015); Art Since 1900 (with Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, and Rosalind Krauss, 2004); Matisse and Picasso (1998); Formless: A User’s Guide (with Rosalind Krauss, 1997); and Painting as Model (1990).
Bois’ most recent tome, An Oblique Autobiography (2022), collects some of his published essays and revolves around his treasured opportunities to “steal the codes” from “chosen affinities,” such as Lygia Clark, Hubert Damisch, and Jacques Derrida. The publication of the book felt like a serendipitous occasion to speak with him—as Formless: A User’s Guide, once influenced me to put aside my French Vogues and choose an affinity with the discipline of art history that has in time become my profession and main occupation in life. The conversation took place in February 2023 over Zoom.
November, 2022
What is the difference for you between music and sound? I was thinking specifically about that gr... more What is the difference for you between music and sound? I was thinking specifically about that great 1984 essay by Chris Cutler, Technology, Politics and Contemporary Music: Necessity and Choice in Musical Forms, which outlines the specific path the development of this form necessarily takes, but then the way he does it brings up a lot of concepts that are incredibly relevant to sound and that you often invoke as key as well. I am talking in particular about the way Cutler describes the medium of musical transmission and perpetuation as memory, and, by extension, the oral tradition and improvisation, and how notation enters that sphere to fundamentally restructure the very nature of the musical form into the written, externalized textural document that is settled into a singular specific configuration and is also turned into a commodifiable property. This transmutation of the aural into the scopic form of composition, also, in addition to just a broader criticism of music as pre-established cultural form as such, which is at the heart of Cage's criticism of music, for example, often appears in your discussions of sound vis-à-vis music, as well. It's tricky to make any kind of sharp distinction between music and sound or music and sound art. But I do think there's a useful distinction to be made. As Edgard Varèse put it, music is organized sound, sound organized according to certain principles and rules that are embedded in historical, cultural, and social traditions and contexts. But
Fashion Theory, 2020
Abstract Despite a number of recent developments in broadening of the discipline, the field of Fa... more Abstract Despite a number of recent developments in broadening of the discipline, the field of Fashion Studies at large to date has been largely predominated by a pair of prevailing paradigms. One of them is to address fashion as a monolithic phenomenon internally undifferentiated by diversity of creators, variety of production and distribution methods, and the evolving aesthetic tendencies. The other is to deny individual seasonal collections presented both in course, and outside the realms of, the international fashion week circuit, the agency to express complex concepts and sophisticated cultural critique through the encompassing medium of a fashion show or presentation in a manner such agency is readily granted to art exhibitions, dance and music performance, or literature. This article departs from both of the former tendencies by specifically addressing a unique seasonal fashion collection and the philosophical and critical questions developed within it. It will analyze the Spring/Summer 2018 Collection by Rodarte, presented as part of the Paris Haute Couture week on July 2, 2017, in the context of Georges Bataille’s thesis of the imperative of complimentary dialectic between homogeneity and heterogeneity. Developing this subject, the following text will also approach the broader interrelated issues of eco fetishism and paradoxically co-existing socio-cultural discourses of valorization and denigration of femininity as they were addressed in the collection and its presentation.
Artforum International, 2022
Life communicates itself to us through convention and through the parlor games and laws of social... more Life communicates itself to us through convention and through the parlor games and laws of social life," observed Gerhard Richter. "Photographs are ephemeral images of this communication-as are the pictures I paint from photographs. Being painted, they no longer
Frieze, 2021
Watching Oleg Tselkov's round, affable face in Tselkov Walk (2017), the documentary that accompan... more Watching Oleg Tselkov's round, affable face in Tselkov Walk (2017), the documentary that accompanies the artist's mini retrospective at Moscow's Multimedia Art Museum, I couldn't help noticing that all but of the 16 works on display depict anonymous, bald men who bear more than a passing resemblance to the late Russian artist. But these flattened, disk-shaped faces are much more than self-portraits. As the film's narrator, the actress Isabelle Adjani, recounts: 'In 1960, in Moscow, a young painter had just portrayed a man's face when he realized that he had unintentionally depicted something else: the face of The Man. Not just a human being, but all of humanity.'
November, 2021
is an Italian curator and art historian. Christov-Bakargiev is best known for her paradigmatic di... more is an Italian curator and art historian. Christov-Bakargiev is best known for her paradigmatic direction of the 13th documenta in 2012 and for her key role in shaping the scholarship of Arte Povera. She currently serves as the director of Castello di Rivoli Musei d'Arte Contemporanea and Fondazione Francesco Federico Cerruti in Turin, Italy. In 2019 she was the recipient of the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence. In addition to asking her for thoughts on the informe and art history, I wanted to speak to Carolyn because of her idiosyncratic approach to curatorial practice as facilitating the emergence of "thought forms"-as connected, but not subordinated to, theory, and whose operative force may be allowed to emerge through the act of curation. Carolyn's exhibitions, to me, perfectly embody what Michel Serre once described as an "intention to body the reader/viewer into the rhythm of the global intuition." This interview was conducted in March 2021.
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Papers by Valerie Mindlin
Bois’ most recent tome, An Oblique Autobiography (2022), collects some of his published essays and revolves around his treasured opportunities to “steal the codes” from “chosen affinities,” such as Lygia Clark, Hubert Damisch, and Jacques Derrida. The publication of the book felt like a serendipitous occasion to speak with him—as Formless: A User’s Guide, once influenced me to put aside my French Vogues and choose an affinity with the discipline of art history that has in time become my profession and main occupation in life. The conversation took place in February 2023 over Zoom.
Bois’ most recent tome, An Oblique Autobiography (2022), collects some of his published essays and revolves around his treasured opportunities to “steal the codes” from “chosen affinities,” such as Lygia Clark, Hubert Damisch, and Jacques Derrida. The publication of the book felt like a serendipitous occasion to speak with him—as Formless: A User’s Guide, once influenced me to put aside my French Vogues and choose an affinity with the discipline of art history that has in time become my profession and main occupation in life. The conversation took place in February 2023 over Zoom.