Down and dirty

ArtForum, Summer, 1996 by Lauren Sedofsky

The show's cocurators are Rosalind Krauss, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History at Columbia University, and Yve-Alain Bois, Joseph Pulitzer Jr. Professor of Modern Art at Harvard. If their credentials are academic, their loosing of the informe on artistic practice, discernible in their work for a number of years, is decidedly not. From Passages in Modern Sculpture to The Optical Unconscious, from her contributions to Artforum in the '60s and '70s to the founding and stewardship of October, Krauss' repudiation of Clement Greenberg's formalist line has permitted her to observe the evolution of contemporary art, to nab it and tag it, with a Darwinian precision and intelligence. Her rereading of Modernism in its reciprocal relations with contemporary production, especially via the paradigm of "the photographic," has made her contemporary art criticism's principal force to contend with. Carrying commensurate European intellectual baggage of the post-Structuralist/October variety, Bois has been more closely associated with the austere regions of abstraction: Constructivism, Mondrian, Barnett Newman. Yet the vision of painting's capacity to induce thinking expressed in his Painting as Model no doubt explains the resilience with which he has encountered Lucio Fontana's expressionism, or with which he has passed from abstraction to the issue of noncomposition. Both Krauss and Bois have indicated that Bataille's informe surfaced in their work at first because of its heuristic interest. With "L'Informe: mode d'emploi," it now designates a corpus, as well as a grid for reading it. - LS

LAUREN SEDOFSKY: You've chosen as the title of your show "L'Informe." The word is untranslatable, indefinable, opaque. Is this a form of provocation?

YVE-ALAIN BOIS: In a way it is. The word's untranslatable, but you can find approximations: formless or formlessness. But it's not a concept. Indeed, it's an anticoncept. Were you to define it as a concept, it would be the concept of undermining concepts, of depriving them of their boundaries, their capacity to articulate the world. It's provocative in the sense that we wanted to undo some categories, and we recognized the capacity of the informe to do the job.

ROSALIND KRAUSS: The informe is a historical marker, like using terribilita if you're talking about Michelangelo. Certain foreign words plug into pieces of art history or the history of ideas. It's a liberty one can take. We wanted not only to plug the informe into a certain place in 20th-century French philosophical thought, but also to mark the exhibition as beginning in the '20s. This is a historical exhibition that sweeps over a time roughly cosynchronous with High Modernism and is to be thought of as an alternative to High Modernism - not the lately fashionable alternatives such as iconography and content, or narrativity, but this other very powerful, rich alternative that took endlessly Protean guises: in the '20s, Marcel Duchamp's rotoreliefs, Picasso's trash collages, Jean Arp's torn papers, Giacometti's horizontal sculptures; in the '60s, Cy Twombly's graffiti, Robert Morris' threadwaste, Warhol's shoe paintings. The informe is not about a form or a style but rather this Protean quality. We wanted to plug all this into a word with its own particular conceptual weight - Georges Bataille's - and to give the exhibition a certain historical spin.

LS: You're making an ambitious effort at declassification, which plays on the prestige of Bataille's antiproject. A brief description of his "antiproject" would be useful.

Y-AB: In the late '20s Bataille was defining his "philosophy" in opposition both to Surrealism, which he perceived as a disguised idealism, and to Western metaphysics in general. The Socratic opposition to anything that cannot have a form in the sense of eidos, or concept, is plugged into the Surrealists' almost religious interpretation of the marvelous. In Bataille's project, which he calls "atheological" or "scatalogical," the informe is something like a first principle that defines what is excluded from Western metaphysics. The informe is understood as something that's going to undo categories.

LS: There's also the aspect of the incompleteness of Bataille's own work.

Y-AB: That's part of it, too. Bataille spent his life thinking the antiproject: how to undo man, undo utopia, humanism, rationalism, systems. One way to undo the system is by not making one. So none of his works were finished. He was someone who constantly undermined the possibility of -

LS: - the possibility of that closure?

Y-AB: Yes. And even the ambitious undertaking of the review Documents [edited by Bataille over its two-year existence from 1929-30], in which the text on the informe appeared, was partly planned to be unfinished.

RK: It was left unfinished not just because Georges Wildenstein, the patron, got bored with it, or found it too outrageous, but because Bataille had reached the end of the possibility of art's positing the kind of critique he saw as necessary. The last text he published in Documents, "L'Esprit modern et le jeu des transpositions" [The modern mind and the play of transpositions], is a farewell to Documents, a way of saying he was going to have to move on to another field of protest.