Simon Pleasance
Biographic Data
| ID | 1022707 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Simon Pleasance |
| GIVEN NAMES | Simon |
| FAMILY NAME | Pleasance |
| SIGNATURE | PLEASANCE S |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 4 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1972 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
John Akomfrah
John Akomfrah at his London studio, 2016 © Smoking Dogs Films. Courtesy Smoking Dogs Films and Lisson Gallery. Photographer Jack Hems At the 56th Venice Biennial, titled All the World’s Figures (and directed by Okwui Enwezor, 9 May – 22 November 2015), the art public discovered, in the central pavilion, a colour video installation presented on three large screens and lasting 48 minutes. Vertigo Sea: Oblique tales on the aquatic sublime proposed a…
New York, Rio, Moscow
Reception on the occasion of the 5th Congress of the AICA, Naples, in attendance of James Johnson Sweeney (President) and of Simone Gille-Delafon (General secretary), 1957 © Publifoto, Naples. Fonds AICAI. President James Johnson Sweeney, FR ACA AICAI PRE SWE008, INHA-Collection Archives de la critique d’art Travel as a subject is no trifling matter, as shown by there being such an abundance of documents in the archives of art critics: letters wi…
Online Art Criticism and its Economy
If this editorial had been written a year ago, its opening words would undoubtedly have been different. After a yearlong pandemic, which has seen video meetings, virtual exhibitions, online conferences and live discussions on Instagram, questioning the place and form of the critical discourse on western digital platforms perforce takes on a quite different dimension. A year ago, such platforms already had a central place 1 in the art network, 2 b…
Michel Thévoz
Michel Thévoz, 2020 © Katia Furter, avec l’aimable autorisation de l’auteur Il est des pensées qui troublent et parfois agacent tout autant qu’elles stimulent. Celle de l’historien de l’art, conservateur de musée, commissaire d’expositions et essayiste Michel Thévoz est de celles-ci, en ce qu’elle fait de l’indiscipline et du contre-pied des principes moteurs, une méthode. A la question « L’Art Brut existe-t-il ? » que lui pose Laurent Gervereau …
Revealing Norms and Sowing Confusion
A Belgian Tale
This summer, at the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles in Paris, there was an exhibition organized by the Muses royaux des beaux-arts de Belgique, which was first put on view in Brussels
Obscurities of Colour
For those who enjoy venturing into history’s layers to experience both the obscurity released therefrom, and, on the contrary, the futility of dreams of updating a clear and distinct sense, there is no doubt that colour will be a favourite subject—colour, its representations and denominations, a vast field of language where there is an intersection of the most wavering of meanings, clichés and commonplaces produced by indefinable mixtures of expe…
Landscape
The discovery of landscape, according to Georg Simmel, was above all the experience of a twofold separation: separation of subject and world, on the one hand, and separation of landscape and nature, on the other. Double separation or double extraction, typically modern, which reflects a movement towards the individualization of forms of interior and exterior life. It is in the withdrawal of the human being from his/her worldly involvements, and i…
On Interviews
“The interview”, notes Walter Benjamin in his “Conversation with Gide”, “that form that has been adopted by diplomats, financiers and film people, does not, at first glance, form the terrain where one will discover what is most unusual about and specific to living writers. But on closer inspection, things are different. Dialogue, like a stroke of light, reveals Gidean thinking”. Written 80 years ago, these lines turn out to be remarkably topical.…
Art and Poetics Around May '68
The commemoration of May ’68 gave rise to a raft of publications, some of which have the merit of specifying and/or reminding us of the relations struck up between artists and the Events. This is so with the catalogue Les Affiches de mai 68, and with Jérôme Duwa’s book (1968, année surréaliste). The issue of the links between art and politics is also set forth in three books devoted to Narrative Figuration, but without making this movement the on…
Bridget Riley
Give or take the odd exception, French art circles have hitherto remained somewhat aloof from the rediscovery that Bridget Riley has been enjoying for a good ten years now, making her one of the rare survivors from that last generation of modernist abstraction. Even though she is not a perfect stranger either—far from it—the joint publication of a collection of her writings and interviews, under the title L’Esprit de l’oeil, and the catalogue tha…
Francis Picabia
The “re-reading” of Picabia’s œuvre proposed by the City of Paris Museum of Modern Art, 27 years after the last retrospective devoted to this artist at the Grand Palais, in Paris, links up with recent art historical debate on the limits of modernism. With the goal of “permitting a more objective appreciation going beyond a stereotyped part-reading”, the exhibition and its catalogue champion above all a re-balancing of the corpus which, over and a…
Forty Years of Fluxus
Ten-year Fluxus commemorations and anniversaries have been the rule since 1972, but this is the first time that they have been so geographically widespread, for France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Great Britain and the United States have all paid tribute to Fluxus. From the exhibition in the Genoa Museum, focused essentially on the works, to the show in Madrid, focused on live art and film, by way of Wiesbaden, where the exhibition was dispersed throu…
With Views on the Image
As the keyword of all connection with the visible world, image occurs in the titles of books with very different areas of concern, attesting both to the dispersed range of approaches attaching to the idea of image, as well as to the persistence of a defiant attitude towards it. Serge Tisseron and Marie Jose Mondzain nurture a defence of the image that is theoretical, in the face of the suspicion of dangerousness refuelled by the contemporary doxa…
Architecture between Myth of Progress and Disenchantment
Between the wars, architects were anything but sparing when it came to producing polemical and theoretical writings, and that period has already given rise to several anthologies. The merit of Jean-Claude Ludi’s book, Pionniers de l’architecture moderne : une anthologie, is that it offers French-speaking readers writings by several foreign architects (Erich Mendelsohn, Hannes Meyer, Rudolf M. Schindler, Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud, Giovanni Miche…
Criticism and Oblivion
For Baudelaire, art criticism was in part bound up with what makes half of art itself (the other half being its eternal part): “the transitory, the fleeting, the contingent”. The fact is that for some thirty years he have lost oblivion, for if we retain its psychological faculty, our computer-like memories–flexible extensions, no less–do store things. How is criticism possible when oblivion no longer is? It is possible thus to formulate the crisi…
What History of Sculpture in the 20th Century
Titles delivered in 2002 confirm the sustained interest in studies on sculpture. From the viewpoint of the consolidation of knowledge, we now have a fine catalogue raisonné of the sculpted work of Fenosa (1899-1988), a protégé of Picasso and Cocteau, author of the Tempête pourchassée par le beau temps (1957), set in the Boulevard Saint-Jacques in Paris in 1978-1979, and of the Monument à Pau Casals (1976-1977) erected in Barcelona in 1982. His ph…
Animated Images Listed as Art
The history of the avant-garde, or “experimental”, cinema is not well-known in France. So there is good reason to welcome the translation of the major reference work about its development in the United States, almost three decades after its original publication: Le Cinéma visionnaire : l’avant-garde américaine 1943-2000. P. Adams Sitney was the first to attempt to put forward a typology–which has stayed the course–by formulating various aesthetic…
Images of Stalinist Power
The issue of Socialist Realism-in other words the culture of the USSR- as well as the bulk of the art produced in the Communist bloc countries, has become both a topic of research and the subject of a body of publications since the 1980s. For all this, we have had to wait until the 1990s, perestroika and the fall of the Berlin Wall, for the first exhibitions to put on view, in the West, the art policy of the Stalinist period. The earliest books a…
David's Studio
In his second book, devoted to “David”s studio”, Thomas Crow admits to “having more keenly felt what an intellectual community is”. In it, and in a spirit of sound interdisciplinarity, art history marshals a store of information -as is evident from the bibliography and the copious notes-which is at once historical and literary (about Sedaine’s entourage, Sedaine being a mu
Surrealism
In other words, the comparison of two books that are totally unrelated, except for a common denominator of their respective titles, beyond which, thanks to an eloquent alternative, two irreconcilable approaches to Surrealism emerge: on the one hand, an historical fresco (Dorozoi), on the other, the exploration of experimental terrain (Fleig). After thirty years of discussion about the death of Surrealism, Durozoi begins to draw up an assessment o…
Ethnic Survivals and the Modern Shift
Research into the psychological characteristics of a people in the context of its so-called literary production has been frequently criticized, and not without good reason. In an article published in the Revue de Psychologie des peuples, Mr. Brossaud of the Center for the Study of Civilizations at Nanterre-a department under the direction of Professor Guy Michaud-has emphasized the difficulties presented by the literary approach in the field of e…
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Ethnic Survivals and the Modern Shift
Research into the psychological characteristics of a people in the context of its so-called literary production has been frequently criticized, and not without good reason. In an article published in the Revue de Psychologie des peuples, Mr. Brossaud of the Center for the Study of Civilizations at Nanterre-a department under the direction of Professor Guy Michaud-has emphasized the difficulties presented by the literary approach in the field of e…
Images of Stalinist Power
The issue of Socialist Realism-in other words the culture of the USSR- as well as the bulk of the art produced in the Communist bloc countries, has become both a topic of research and the subject of a body of publications since the 1980s. For all this, we have had to wait until the 1990s, perestroika and the fall of the Berlin Wall, for the first exhibitions to put on view, in the West, the art policy of the Stalinist period. The earliest books a…
David's Studio
In his second book, devoted to “David”s studio”, Thomas Crow admits to “having more keenly felt what an intellectual community is”. In it, and in a spirit of sound interdisciplinarity, art history marshals a store of information -as is evident from the bibliography and the copious notes-which is at once historical and literary (about Sedaine’s entourage, Sedaine being a mu
Surrealism
In other words, the comparison of two books that are totally unrelated, except for a common denominator of their respective titles, beyond which, thanks to an eloquent alternative, two irreconcilable approaches to Surrealism emerge: on the one hand, an historical fresco (Dorozoi), on the other, the exploration of experimental terrain (Fleig). After thirty years of discussion about the death of Surrealism, Durozoi begins to draw up an assessment o…
Francis Picabia
The “re-reading” of Picabia’s œuvre proposed by the City of Paris Museum of Modern Art, 27 years after the last retrospective devoted to this artist at the Grand Palais, in Paris, links up with recent art historical debate on the limits of modernism. With the goal of “permitting a more objective appreciation going beyond a stereotyped part-reading”, the exhibition and its catalogue champion above all a re-balancing of the corpus which, over and a…
Forty Years of Fluxus
Ten-year Fluxus commemorations and anniversaries have been the rule since 1972, but this is the first time that they have been so geographically widespread, for France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Great Britain and the United States have all paid tribute to Fluxus. From the exhibition in the Genoa Museum, focused essentially on the works, to the show in Madrid, focused on live art and film, by way of Wiesbaden, where the exhibition was dispersed throu…
With Views on the Image
As the keyword of all connection with the visible world, image occurs in the titles of books with very different areas of concern, attesting both to the dispersed range of approaches attaching to the idea of image, as well as to the persistence of a defiant attitude towards it. Serge Tisseron and Marie Jose Mondzain nurture a defence of the image that is theoretical, in the face of the suspicion of dangerousness refuelled by the contemporary doxa…
Architecture between Myth of Progress and Disenchantment
Between the wars, architects were anything but sparing when it came to producing polemical and theoretical writings, and that period has already given rise to several anthologies. The merit of Jean-Claude Ludi’s book, Pionniers de l’architecture moderne : une anthologie, is that it offers French-speaking readers writings by several foreign architects (Erich Mendelsohn, Hannes Meyer, Rudolf M. Schindler, Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud, Giovanni Miche…
Criticism and Oblivion
For Baudelaire, art criticism was in part bound up with what makes half of art itself (the other half being its eternal part): “the transitory, the fleeting, the contingent”. The fact is that for some thirty years he have lost oblivion, for if we retain its psychological faculty, our computer-like memories–flexible extensions, no less–do store things. How is criticism possible when oblivion no longer is? It is possible thus to formulate the crisi…
What History of Sculpture in the 20th Century
Titles delivered in 2002 confirm the sustained interest in studies on sculpture. From the viewpoint of the consolidation of knowledge, we now have a fine catalogue raisonné of the sculpted work of Fenosa (1899-1988), a protégé of Picasso and Cocteau, author of the Tempête pourchassée par le beau temps (1957), set in the Boulevard Saint-Jacques in Paris in 1978-1979, and of the Monument à Pau Casals (1976-1977) erected in Barcelona in 1982. His ph…
Animated Images Listed as Art
The history of the avant-garde, or “experimental”, cinema is not well-known in France. So there is good reason to welcome the translation of the major reference work about its development in the United States, almost three decades after its original publication: Le Cinéma visionnaire : l’avant-garde américaine 1943-2000. P. Adams Sitney was the first to attempt to put forward a typology–which has stayed the course–by formulating various aesthetic…
A Belgian Tale
This summer, at the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles in Paris, there was an exhibition organized by the Muses royaux des beaux-arts de Belgique, which was first put on view in Brussels
Obscurities of Colour
For those who enjoy venturing into history’s layers to experience both the obscurity released therefrom, and, on the contrary, the futility of dreams of updating a clear and distinct sense, there is no doubt that colour will be a favourite subject—colour, its representations and denominations, a vast field of language where there is an intersection of the most wavering of meanings, clichés and commonplaces produced by indefinable mixtures of expe…
Landscape
The discovery of landscape, according to Georg Simmel, was above all the experience of a twofold separation: separation of subject and world, on the one hand, and separation of landscape and nature, on the other. Double separation or double extraction, typically modern, which reflects a movement towards the individualization of forms of interior and exterior life. It is in the withdrawal of the human being from his/her worldly involvements, and i…
On Interviews
“The interview”, notes Walter Benjamin in his “Conversation with Gide”, “that form that has been adopted by diplomats, financiers and film people, does not, at first glance, form the terrain where one will discover what is most unusual about and specific to living writers. But on closer inspection, things are different. Dialogue, like a stroke of light, reveals Gidean thinking”. Written 80 years ago, these lines turn out to be remarkably topical.…
Art and Poetics Around May '68
The commemoration of May ’68 gave rise to a raft of publications, some of which have the merit of specifying and/or reminding us of the relations struck up between artists and the Events. This is so with the catalogue Les Affiches de mai 68, and with Jérôme Duwa’s book (1968, année surréaliste). The issue of the links between art and politics is also set forth in three books devoted to Narrative Figuration, but without making this movement the on…
Bridget Riley
Give or take the odd exception, French art circles have hitherto remained somewhat aloof from the rediscovery that Bridget Riley has been enjoying for a good ten years now, making her one of the rare survivors from that last generation of modernist abstraction. Even though she is not a perfect stranger either—far from it—the joint publication of a collection of her writings and interviews, under the title L’Esprit de l’oeil, and the catalogue tha…
Revealing Norms and Sowing Confusion
John Akomfrah
John Akomfrah at his London studio, 2016 © Smoking Dogs Films. Courtesy Smoking Dogs Films and Lisson Gallery. Photographer Jack Hems At the 56th Venice Biennial, titled All the World’s Figures (and directed by Okwui Enwezor, 9 May – 22 November 2015), the art public discovered, in the central pavilion, a colour video installation presented on three large screens and lasting 48 minutes. Vertigo Sea: Oblique tales on the aquatic sublime proposed a…
New York, Rio, Moscow
Reception on the occasion of the 5th Congress of the AICA, Naples, in attendance of James Johnson Sweeney (President) and of Simone Gille-Delafon (General secretary), 1957 © Publifoto, Naples. Fonds AICAI. President James Johnson Sweeney, FR ACA AICAI PRE SWE008, INHA-Collection Archives de la critique d’art Travel as a subject is no trifling matter, as shown by there being such an abundance of documents in the archives of art critics: letters wi…
Online Art Criticism and its Economy
If this editorial had been written a year ago, its opening words would undoubtedly have been different. After a yearlong pandemic, which has seen video meetings, virtual exhibitions, online conferences and live discussions on Instagram, questioning the place and form of the critical discourse on western digital platforms perforce takes on a quite different dimension. A year ago, such platforms already had a central place 1 in the art network, 2 b…
Michel Thévoz
Michel Thévoz, 2020 © Katia Furter, avec l’aimable autorisation de l’auteur Il est des pensées qui troublent et parfois agacent tout autant qu’elles stimulent. Celle de l’historien de l’art, conservateur de musée, commissaire d’expositions et essayiste Michel Thévoz est de celles-ci, en ce qu’elle fait de l’indiscipline et du contre-pied des principes moteurs, une méthode. A la question « L’Art Brut existe-t-il ? » que lui pose Laurent Gervereau …
Art (13 works) · History (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Visual arts (8 works) · Art history (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Literature (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Sociology (6 works)