This book addresses the relationship between
artistic practice and theory. It explores the ways in which some of the leading
exponents of American conceptual art, including Mel Bochner, Douglas Huebler,
Robert Morris and Lawrence Weiner, have borrowed and utilized concepts drawn
from the fields of philosophy, ethnology, psychology and epistemology. Anaël
Lejeune focuses on the interest these artists took in Continental – especially
French – theory, which, beginning in the 1960s, increasingly influenced the
American cultural and academic world. Michel Foucault, Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Jean Piaget and Ludwig Wittgenstein, for instance, provided the inspiration for
various modes of questioning and analytical models that informed and shored up the
artists’ practice as well as their own forays into theory. The author then
turns to the nature of the transformations inevitably wrought by such transfers
and traces the elaboration of a form of artistic problematization or “theory at
work”, particularly through assimilation, appropriation and, concomitantly, differentiation
from certain disciplines in the humanities.
Author: Anaël Lejeune
Graphic design: Charles Mazé & Coline Sunier
Published in 2017
In French
15.5 x 22.7 cm
192 pages
ISBN: 978-2-93066-715-7
EAN: 9782930667157
