The Enigmatic Body
The Enigmatic Body
Paul Smith
$48.00
USDThis volume presents for the first time in English the work of one of the most important French theorists of today. The selection represents the whole of Schefer's career, from the 1960s, when he was influenced by structuralism, to his more lyrical and autobiographical essays of the 1990s, which meditate on the role of the spectator in relation to art practice. Schefer considers the nature of art, film and writing through his close examination of artists as diverse as Uccello, Poussin and Cy Twombly, and writers such as Paul Valéry and Roland Barthes. These provocative essays register the writer's direct confrontation with these media in a way that stands as a corrective to the formal traditions of interpretation and criticism. Schefer's work offers some of the most original interpretations of art available today.
- First English-language collection covering whole of Schefer's career
- Includes introduction by the translator and explanatory forewords to each essay
- The illuminating foreword by Schefer himself was written specially for this collection
Product details
November 1995Paperback
9780521378253
212 pages
244 × 170 × 11 mm
0.35kg
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction Paul Smith
- Foreword Jean-Louis Schefer
- 1. Split Colour/Blur
- 2. On the object of figuration
- 3. Thanatography/skiagraphy
- 4. The plague
- 5. Light and its prey
- 6. Someone writing
- 7. Roland Barthes
- 8. Cinema
- 9. On La Jetée
- 10. Cy Twombly: uncertainty principle
- 11. What are red things?
- Notes
- Selected bibliography
- Index.
