Wartość użytkowa bezformia
The Use Value of “Formless”

Summary/Abstract: The introduction to the book Formless: A User’s Guide, co-authored with RosalindKrauss, Bois begins from Georges Bataille’s term and devices employed in themagazine Documents to develop the concept of “formless” (informe) as a declassifying,desublimatory activity that undermines the semantic economy of modernism with itsassumption that a work is always a coherent whole, whose meaning should be revealed– coherently and completely – in the act of reception. Formless is not a matter of themeor style but a feature that can appear in art surreptitiously and marginally. Originallyaccompanying an exhibition at Centre Pompidou in 1996, the text attempts to revisethe discourse of art history, albeit – as in Bataille’s work – the main object of attack hereis idealistic humanism and the modernist order that builds on it .

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