Beyond Piety

Beyond Piety examines several fundamental questions regarding the work of art and such aesthetic issues as pleasure, beauty and completeness, especially as it functions within the contexts of discontinuity, deferral, displacement and multiplicity. This collection offers a reassessment of the relationship between the art work (or any object considered as something to be looked at) and argument. Engaging the work of art with the discourses of the body, history and textuality, the book offers, moreover, an approach to contemporary art through a novel application of French theory, which is used to reopen questions that have, in both conservative and avant-garde circles, generally been considered to be resolved.

• Examines contemporary art through application of French theory, thereby reopening debates previously thought to have been resolved • Examines fundamental questions about the work of art and how it functions within the contexts of discontinuity, deferral, displacement and multiplicity

Part I. Representation, Nonrepresentation, Pleasure: 1. Edouard Manet and the Pleasure Problematic; 2. The Impressionist revolution and Duchamp’s myopia; 3. Seriousness and difficulty in criticism; 4. Vision’s resistance to language; 5. Irreconcilable similarities: The Idea of Nonrepresentation; 6. Nonrepresentation in 1988: meaning-production beyond the scope of the Pious; Part II. The Immediate Past: 7. Unmade in America; 8. Diebenkorn’s ambivalence; 9. James Hayward: nonrepresentation which doesn’t represent; 10. Irwin in the sixties: expression, LINES, DOTS, DISCS, LIGHT; 11. Andy as auntie; Part III. Theory In Soho: 12. From reading to unreading, Barthes’ challenge and Derrida’s truth; 13. Van Gogh, Schapiro, Heidegger, and Derrida; 14. Beyond absence; 15. Baudrillard’s aestheticism and the art world’s politics; 16. Peter Halley’s writing: The Quest for the Veil; 17. Where do Pictures Come From? Sarah Charlesworth and the sexual development of the sign; Part IV. Praxis, Practice: 18. A forest of signs; The Price of Goodness; 19. Roni Horn; 20. Christian Haub and the extremities of the surface; 21. Painting movement; 22. Jab/panic; 23. Frank Gehry’s Rebecca’s; Part V. Clothes, Masks, Bodies: 24. A thigh-length history of the fashion photograph: an abbreviated theory of the body; 25. The Beach Party and the Parties of Power (summer’s content, winter’s discontent); 26. Hey Baby, Where’d You Get That Hat?; 27. Fashion’s revenge; 28. Mask/masque; 29. Moist attraction: observations on an advertisement which appeared in Vogue (US), May 1992; Part VI. Place and Placelessness: 30. Locus, locale, region, régime; 31. Sculpture as everything else: twenty years or so of the question of landscape; 32. House blown apart; 33. Intersections; 34. The end of whose century?; 35. Born to be mild.