Catalogo / Undoing Art

«Here is, we think, the point. It doesn’t matter for what reason the writer or painter or lover destroys the creation: the real point is that destruction itself, like a gigantic statement. It is, in fact, something of an excitation, a stimulation to further thought: what is this ACTION about?»

EN. What do Stéphane Mallarmé, Antonin Artaud, Meret Oppenheim, Asger Jorn, Yoko Ono, Tom Phillips and Martin Arnold have in common? Whereas a wealth of critics have diagnosed contemporary art’s preoccupations with madness, depression and self-abuse as well as its tendency to cultivate an (anti-)aesthetics of the negative, the excremental and the abject (say, from the Vienna Action Group to Serrano, McCarthy or Delvoye), much less attention has been paid to how modern and contemporary artists and public have thrived on the destruction, disfiguration and obliteration of work by the artists and/or by that of others. From Artaud’s «terminal» notebooks to the recent upsurge in «erasure poetics», the history of «undoing» art deserves to be recounted in a positive mode and rescued from popular narratives of the decline and death of the avant-garde.

IT. Cos’hanno in comune Stéphane Mallarmé, Antonin Artaud, Meret Oppenheim, Asger Jorn, Yoko Ono, Tom Phillips e Martin Arnold? Se un gran numero di critici ha definito le preoccupazioni sull’arte contemporanea con termini come follia, depressione e abuso di sé, come anche la tendenza a coltivare un’(anti)estetica del negativo, l’escrementizio e l’abietto (dal Vienna Action Group a Serrano, McCarthy o Delvoye), ci si è soffermati molto meno su come artisti moderni e contemporanei e il loro pubblico abbiano prosperato su distruzione, deturpazione e annientamento dell’opera degli artisti e/o di quella di altri.
Dai taccuini Terminal curses di Artaud alla recente ondata di «poetiche del disfare», la storia dell’undoing art merita di essere raccontata in chiave positiva e sottratta alle narrazioni popolari che la etichettano come declino e morte dell’avanguardia.

Mary Ann Caws works on the relations between literature and art, and is the editor of Manifesto: A Century of Isms (2001). Her publications include Pierre Reverdy (2013), the Modern Art Cookbook (2014), Surprised in Translation (2006), Surrealism (2004), and Blaise Pascal: Miracles and Reason (2017). She is a distinguished professor of English, French, and comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the past president of the Modern Language Association and the American Comparative Literature Association, the editor of the Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, and the translator of André Breton, René Char, Robert Desnos, Paul Eluard, Ghérasim Luca, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Tristan Tzara.