Entretiens sur l’art — Une Lignée Brésilienne : Oiticica, Neto — Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard — Lecture — Slash Paris

Past: Friday, March 7, 2014 at 7 PM

Patrick Javault invites Eric Alliez, philosopher, accompanied by Lorenzo Benedetti, director of De Appel arts centre Amsterdam.

With Undoing the Image, Eric Alliez explores a contemporary art-thought with the regime of the diagram as a driving principle. The author put together a collection of essays, or boxes, with his masters and sources of inspiration Deleuze and Guattari. Using Matisse-Duchamp as an “arc of forces”, these texts subject the contemporary to an archeological study and perform a genealogy of practices, including theoretical practices (Buren, Brus, Matta-Clark, Oiticica).

This experimental book aims to position itself “in between Art and philosophy” and oscillate between the two, in an attempt to answer abstraction’s century-old challenge to philosophy. Rather than reviewing all the boxes, we thought it wiser to choose as an entry point the Brazilian lineage of a work that starts with a study of Leviathan by Ernesto Neto and concludes with an essay on Helio Oiticica.

Eric Alliez is tenured professor of the chair of Philosophy and Contemporary Art at University Paris 8, and teaches French philosophy at the Kingston University, London.

Lorenzo Benedetti is an art critic and curator. He is director of De Appel arts centre Amsterdam.