Jaleh Mansoor
Biographic Data
| ID | 1601436 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jaleh Mansoor |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jaleh |
| FAMILY NAME | Mansoor |
| SIGNATURE | MANSOOR J |
| AFFILIATIONS | JALEH MANSOOR is an assistant professor in the Department of Art, Art History, Critical Curatorial Studies, and Theory at the University of British Columbia. |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8747-7885 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 12 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
“And What About Class?”
This roundtable focuses on the connections between art or culture and class, and on the multiple forms this connection takes today. Even as class distinctions have evolved over the years, and even as the role played by social class in contemporary struggles for social justice and recognition has been obscured, class remains formative of late capitalist subjectivity and continues to have a significant, if mostly unacknowledged, impact on our lives…
From Fetish to Totality
This essay argues that the artwork’s opacity and purposively purposeless quality are a tacit refusal of the compulsory division between intellectual and manual labor, which afford the artwork a unique capacity to access an otherwise occluded totality. By analyzing conceptual work by the artist duo Claire Fontaine—who deploy Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s notion of market exchangism in their work—in relation to twentieth-century intellectual debates around …
Universal Prostitution
This essay argues that the diagram and mechanomorph, those idioms for which Francis Picabia is most known in the history of the avant-garde, pushed past representation on the one hand and aesthetic abstraction on the other to access and articulate the historical specificity of the emergent proletarian subject position. Split between human labor bearer and source of abstract labor, the worker becomes both appendage and analog to productive technol…
On the Home Front
Militant Landscape
In 1844, the year of Marx's Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts, J.M.W. Turner presented Rain, Steam, and Speed: The Great Western Railway, the first landscape painting to both articulate the ontological shifts brought about by new modes of extraction and production, but also to suggest concomitant transformation in perception. In this way, it collapsed the dialectical relation between perceiving subject and external landscape, suggesting the …
Readymade or Made [to be] Ready, Replicant or Surplus
The artist may be one of the last subject-positions within capitalism to determine their own labour under the sign of “creativity,” and to be held at an oblique angle to value productive labour; they are dialectically “free” to be creative (Adorno, Vishmidt, Stakemeir, Beech). But since 1973 if not 1915, artists mark this creative capacity as a process whereby reification has migrated from that of the object to that of the subject, to the artist-…
Marshall Plan Modernism
Focusing on artwork by Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, and Piero Manzoni, Jaleh Mansoor demonstrates and reveals how abstract painting, especially the monochrome, broke with fascist-associated futurism and functioned as an index of social transition in postwar Italy. Mansoor refuses to read the singularly striking formal and procedural violence of Fontana's slit canvasses, Burri's burnt and exploded plastics, and Manzoni's "achromes" as metaphors o…
Occupy Response
Occupation as a revolutionary tactic has a long history, from the factory takeovers in post-World War I Italy, to the Sorbonne in May 1968, to Tahrir Square in 2011. The use of "Occupy" as a rallying cry is of more recent origin, however. In December 2008, students at the New School barricaded themselves inside a student center that had been slated for demolition, demanding the university president's resignation. In the aftermath of their evictio…
A Spectral Universality
July 01 2010 A Spectral Universality: Mona Hatoum's Biopolitics of Abstraction Jaleh Mansoor Jaleh Mansoor JALEH MANSOOR is Assistant Professor in the School of Art at Ohio University. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled “Marshall Plan Modernism: The Matrix of Monochrome Painting in Italy.” A second project focuses on biopolitics and biopower in contemporary art. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Aut…
Communities of Sense
Communities of Sense argues for a new understanding of the relation between politics and aesthetics in today's globalized and image-saturated world. Established and emerging scholars of art and culture draw on Jacques Rancière's theorization of democratic politics to suggest that aesthetics, traditionally defined as the "science of the sensible," is not a depoliticized discourse or theory of art, but instead part of a historically specific organi…
Fontana's Atomic Age Abstraction
May 01 2008 Fontana's Atomic Age Abstraction: The Spatial Concepts and the Television Manifesto Jaleh Mansoor Jaleh Mansoor Jaleh Mansoor is currendy a Term Assistant Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is preparing a book manuscript entitled “Marshall Plan Modernism: The Monochrome as Matrix of Fifties Abstraction” that investigates die return of the monochrome, and attendant historical and political issues in abstraction, in …
Ed Ruscha's One-Way Street
January 01 2005 Ed Ruscha's One-Way Street Jaleh Mansoor Jaleh Mansoor Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Jaleh Mansoor Online Issn: 1536-013X Print Issn: 0162-2870 © 2005 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology2005 October (2005) (111): 127–142. https://doi.org/10.1162/0162287053148139 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Vi…
Kurt Schwitters' 'Merzbau
several images of Schwitters' Merzbau can be found here.From 1919 until a night in early October 1937, when Allied bombing destroyed the Merzbau, Kurt Schwitters continuously composed and manipulated this assemblage [Fig.1].The project, variously categorized as an architectural undertaking, 1 as "Schwitters' most important collage project," 2 or as a performatively elaborated sculptural program, 3 entailed the ceaseless manipulation of the artist…
A Spectral Universality
July 01 2010 A Spectral Universality: Mona Hatoum's Biopolitics of Abstraction Jaleh Mansoor Jaleh Mansoor JALEH MANSOOR is Assistant Professor in the School of Art at Ohio University. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled “Marshall Plan Modernism: The Matrix of Monochrome Painting in Italy.” A second project focuses on biopolitics and biopower in contemporary art. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Aut…
Kurt Schwitters' 'Merzbau
several images of Schwitters' Merzbau can be found here.From 1919 until a night in early October 1937, when Allied bombing destroyed the Merzbau, Kurt Schwitters continuously composed and manipulated this assemblage [Fig.1].The project, variously categorized as an architectural undertaking, 1 as "Schwitters' most important collage project," 2 or as a performatively elaborated sculptural program, 3 entailed the ceaseless manipulation of the artist…
Ed Ruscha's One-Way Street
January 01 2005 Ed Ruscha's One-Way Street Jaleh Mansoor Jaleh Mansoor Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Jaleh Mansoor Online Issn: 1536-013X Print Issn: 0162-2870 © 2005 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology2005 October (2005) (111): 127–142. https://doi.org/10.1162/0162287053148139 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Vi…
Fontana's Atomic Age Abstraction
May 01 2008 Fontana's Atomic Age Abstraction: The Spatial Concepts and the Television Manifesto Jaleh Mansoor Jaleh Mansoor Jaleh Mansoor is currendy a Term Assistant Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is preparing a book manuscript entitled “Marshall Plan Modernism: The Monochrome as Matrix of Fifties Abstraction” that investigates die return of the monochrome, and attendant historical and political issues in abstraction, in …
Communities of Sense
Communities of Sense argues for a new understanding of the relation between politics and aesthetics in today's globalized and image-saturated world. Established and emerging scholars of art and culture draw on Jacques Rancière's theorization of democratic politics to suggest that aesthetics, traditionally defined as the "science of the sensible," is not a depoliticized discourse or theory of art, but instead part of a historically specific organi…
A Spectral Universality
July 01 2010 A Spectral Universality: Mona Hatoum's Biopolitics of Abstraction Jaleh Mansoor Jaleh Mansoor JALEH MANSOOR is Assistant Professor in the School of Art at Ohio University. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled “Marshall Plan Modernism: The Matrix of Monochrome Painting in Italy.” A second project focuses on biopolitics and biopower in contemporary art. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Aut…
Occupy Response
Occupation as a revolutionary tactic has a long history, from the factory takeovers in post-World War I Italy, to the Sorbonne in May 1968, to Tahrir Square in 2011. The use of "Occupy" as a rallying cry is of more recent origin, however. In December 2008, students at the New School barricaded themselves inside a student center that had been slated for demolition, demanding the university president's resignation. In the aftermath of their evictio…
Readymade or Made [to be] Ready, Replicant or Surplus
The artist may be one of the last subject-positions within capitalism to determine their own labour under the sign of “creativity,” and to be held at an oblique angle to value productive labour; they are dialectically “free” to be creative (Adorno, Vishmidt, Stakemeir, Beech). But since 1973 if not 1915, artists mark this creative capacity as a process whereby reification has migrated from that of the object to that of the subject, to the artist-…
Marshall Plan Modernism
Focusing on artwork by Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, and Piero Manzoni, Jaleh Mansoor demonstrates and reveals how abstract painting, especially the monochrome, broke with fascist-associated futurism and functioned as an index of social transition in postwar Italy. Mansoor refuses to read the singularly striking formal and procedural violence of Fontana's slit canvasses, Burri's burnt and exploded plastics, and Manzoni's "achromes" as metaphors o…
Militant Landscape
In 1844, the year of Marx's Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts, J.M.W. Turner presented Rain, Steam, and Speed: The Great Western Railway, the first landscape painting to both articulate the ontological shifts brought about by new modes of extraction and production, but also to suggest concomitant transformation in perception. In this way, it collapsed the dialectical relation between perceiving subject and external landscape, suggesting the …
On the Home Front
From Fetish to Totality
This essay argues that the artwork’s opacity and purposively purposeless quality are a tacit refusal of the compulsory division between intellectual and manual labor, which afford the artwork a unique capacity to access an otherwise occluded totality. By analyzing conceptual work by the artist duo Claire Fontaine—who deploy Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s notion of market exchangism in their work—in relation to twentieth-century intellectual debates around …
Universal Prostitution
This essay argues that the diagram and mechanomorph, those idioms for which Francis Picabia is most known in the history of the avant-garde, pushed past representation on the one hand and aesthetic abstraction on the other to access and articulate the historical specificity of the emergent proletarian subject position. Split between human labor bearer and source of abstract labor, the worker becomes both appendage and analog to productive technol…
“And What About Class?”
This roundtable focuses on the connections between art or culture and class, and on the multiple forms this connection takes today. Even as class distinctions have evolved over the years, and even as the role played by social class in contemporary struggles for social justice and recognition has been obscured, class remains formative of late capitalist subjectivity and continues to have a significant, if mostly unacknowledged, impact on our lives…
Art (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Art, Politics, and Modernism (6 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Abstraction (4 works)