The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations and Confrontations

 
03.02.2014
 
School of Arts and Cultural Heritage

As a part of a series of Open Research Seminars of the Art History Department there was the lecture by professor Sarah Wilson, Courtauld Institute, University of London

Sarah Wilson directs research on postwar and contemporary art in Europe and Russia at the Courtauld Institute, University of London. She has published extensivly on European art and collaborates frequently with the Centre Geroges Pompidou, Paris.  She was invited Professor at Paris-Sorbonne IV, from 2002-4. She curated Paris, Capital of the Arts, (London and Bilbao) in 2002 and Pierre Klossowski  (London, Cologne, Paris, 2006-7), and will publish "The Visual Word of French Theory: Figurations" with Yale University Press in 2010.

This lecture focuses on a remarkable series of encounters between the protagonists of "French theory"  - Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault,  Félix Guattari,  Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida and the Paris-based artists they met and wrote  about  in the 1960s and 1970s who are  are relatively unknown outside the French-speaking world. The lecture restores the lived context of artistic production, where political engagements on the left was manifested in different forms of French Communism, Maoism and other  and neo-Marxisms: in these instances linked with debates on humanism and  realism, The texts illuminate  the production of the philosopher-writer concerned,  just as much as the work of the artist. What Bourdieu called `cultural competence’ is seen to be essential for these philosophers in the wake of Jean-Paul Sartre’s writings on art from the 1940s to the 1970s. The impact of Solzhenitzyn, post-1968 melancholy and the oil crisis mark the end of this period, with an exhibition called "Guillotine and Painting" (1977).