Yve-Alain Bois
Biographic Data
| ID | 306948 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Yve-Alain Bois |
| GIVEN NAMES | Yve-Alain |
| FAMILY NAME | Bois |
| SIGNATURE | BOIS Y |
| AFFILIATIONS | Institute for Advanced Study |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 55 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 38 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 55 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1976 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Period Pieces: On Jean Clay
The three texts by Jean Clay presented here were all recently gathered in an anthology of his essays from 1967 to 1983 entitled Atopiques: De Manet à Ryman that I co-edited with Thierry Davila and Ginette Morel, published in France last year. I wrote a sizable preface for it in which I attempted to give a full account of Clay's long career and evolving positions as a critic, insisting on the division of his production into two distinct ensembles—…
Wartość użytkowa bezformia
B y moe Olimpia Edouarda Maneta nie jest pierw- szym modernistycznym obrazem; to zaszczytne miejsce przyznaje si zwykle niadaniu na trawie.Bya ona jednak -jak pisze Georges Bataille -"pierwszym arcydzieem, na widok ktrego tum cakowicie straci panowanie nad sob", a ten bezprecedensowy skandal nada mu z czasem si
Serra and Us
Yve-Alain Bois discusses and describes the many essays that October editors and contributors have written about Richard Serra, particularly Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Yve-Alain himself, Leah Dickerman (most recently), and Hal Foster (most abundantly). The article begins: "I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that no artist can be more immediately identified with October than Richard Serra, particularly during the journal's fir…
Штука по 1900 роцi: Модернізм. Антимодернізм. Постмодернізм
A Conversation with Manuel Borja-Villel
One could argue that Manuel Borja-Villel fuses the position of the melancholic museum director, mourning the loss of the emancipatory projects of the recent past, with that of the activist utopian museum director, elaborating, if not enacting, the urgently needed changes necessary for a different future of institutional and cultural practices to be achieved. Since his initial appointment at the Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona in 1990 and continuin…
Narration / abstraction: Réflexions croisées entre médiévistes et contemporanéistes
International audience
Angels with Guns: A Memoir on Guy Brett (and David Medalla)
In this memoir-which is part diary, part scrapbook-Yve-Alain Bois sifts through his nearly half-a-century correspondence with the British art critic Guy Brett to recount their friendship and evoke the numerous exhibitions the latter curated as well as the many books and catalogues he wrote, from his publications on Kinetic art and Helio Oiticica in the 1960s to his pioneering forays into contemporary art in the global South from the 1970s on. (Fo…
Letters from Paris
From 1957 to 1964, Annette Michelson wrote over seventy-five columns and reviews from Paris for the International Herald Tribune, Arts Magazine, and Art International. As Yve-Alain Bois demonstrates, Michelson's subject matter as an art critic during this time was varied, but her tone remained consistent and inimitable, characterized by erudition, irony, and attention to formal detail. Bois quotes from her self-confident appraisals of contemporar…
In Memoriam: Hubert Damisch (1928–2017)
Entrevista com Rosalind Krauss
Nesta entrevista, realizada em 2012 e originalmente publicada no jornal The Brooklyn Rail, Rosalind Krauss debate com Yve-Alain Bois os principais argumentos presentes em seu livro Under Blue Cup [Sob a xícara azul], lançado em 2011. A severa crítica feita pela autora, do fenômeno internacional das instalações de arte, é defrontada com a própria experiência crítica de Bois, a partir do trabalho de determinados artistas que, segundo ela, importam …
Tough love
O texto a seguir apresenta a contribuição de Yve-Alain Bois ao colóquio "Hubert Damisch, l'art au travail", organizado em homenagem ao autor de Théorie du nuage, em Paris, pelo Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art, nos dias 8 e 9 de novembro de 2013. O relato rememora o convívio de Bois com Hubert Damisch e Roland Barthes, autores cujos seminários ele frequentou no início dos anos 1970
Homenagem a Hubert Damisch
Texto escrito por Yve-Alain Bois para ser lido na cerimônia fúnebre de Hubert Damisch. O teórico francês morreu em 14 de dezembro de 2017, e a cerimônia fúnebre ocorreu no dia 20 desse mesmo mês, no crematório do Cemitério Père-Lachaise, em Paris
Formalismo de quem
Lançando mão de uma refutação meticulosa dos que o "acusam" de um formalismo de tipo greenberguiano, o autor replica a seus "acusadores", declarando suas conexões profundas a linhagens históricas do formalismo, cujas origens remontam a Alois Riegl, ao formalismo russo e ao estruturalismo - a milhas de distância, ele sublinha, da busca idealista de Greenberg por uma ideia sublimatória de forma. Ao longo do artigo, Yve-Alain Bois declara de modo en…
Fake News and Alternative Facts: Three Antidotes from History
Yve-Alain Bois introduces three historical texts-Heinrich von Kleist's "Primer of French Journalism" (1821), Bertolt Brecht's "On Restoring the Truth" (1934), and Alexandre Koyré's "The Political Function of the Modern Lie" (1943)-that address the age-old but still urgent question of how to address blatant political lies
On Forensic Architecture: A Conversation with Eyal Weizman
Yve-Alain Bois, Michel Feher, Hal Foster, and Eyal Weizman discuss "forensic architecture," the practice of treating common elements of our built environment as entry points through which to interrogate the present. Forensic Architecture is also the name of a research agency established by Weizman to undertake independent investigations in the context of armed conflicts, political struggles, and environmental transformation. Participants discuss …
Kobro and Strzemiński Revisited
An introduction to Katarzyna Kobro and Władysław Strzemiński's 1932 treatise on sculpture, Composing Space/Calculating Space-Time Rhythms, this piece discusses how these authors carry the essentialism and historicism typical of geometric abstraction of the interwar period to unprecedented levels. Includes critical remarks about the authors' omissions (of Rodin, of Hildebrand, of Cubist sculpture) and their connection to Russian Constructivism
François Morellet/Sol LeWitt: A Case Study Revisited
Resuming his examination of pseudomorphism from October 154, Yve-Alain Bois argues that the striking resemblances between works by François Morellet and Sol LeWitt are the result of structurally different notions of systems. They each arrived at results that might look similar, but only from a superficial, morphological point of view. Very early on, Morellet set out to purge elements of personal taste-which seemed to him akin to the worst aspects…
On the Uses and Abuses of Look-alikes
Panofsky defined pseudomorphosis as: "The emergence of a form A, morphologically analogous to, or even identical with, a form B, yet entirely unrelated to it from a genetic point of view." The phenomenon of look-alikes across geographically and historically distant cultures fascinated archeologists, art historians, anthropologists, and linguists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The two competing explanations they proposed (the per…
Abstraction, 1910–1925: Eight Statements
January 01 2013 Abstraction, 1910–1925: Eight Statements Yve-Alain Bois, Yve-Alain Bois Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Masha Chlenova, Masha Chlenova MASHA CHLENOVA is Curatorial Assistant at the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, where she worked with Leah Dickerman on the exhibition “Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925.” Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Sc…
Two Perspectives on Barnett Newman's The Wild: An Introduction
The Wild and Company
January 01 2013 The Wild and Company Yve-Alain Bois Yve-Alain Bois Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Yve-Alain Bois Online Issn: 1536-013X Print Issn: 0162-2870 © 2013 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology2013 October (2013) (143): 95–125. https://doi.org/10.1162/OCTO_a_00134 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Views Arti…
Julian Schnabel's Miral: An Exchange
A relevância de Klein hoje
Para se aproximar do trabalho de Yves Klein, o autor reproduz alguns argumentos de Theodor Adorno sobre a música de Wagner, formulados em dois momentos - em 1937-1938, sob a experiência do fascismo, e em 1963, com 30 anos de "distância". No primeiro texto, Adorno mostrava, na obra de Wagner, os aspectos que traíam a gestação do fascismo. No segundo reconhecia que, com o novo momento histórico, outras camadas vinham à baila naquela obra; ela havia…
To Sing Beside
August 01 2009 To Sing Beside Yve-Alain Bois Yve-Alain Bois Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Yve-Alain Bois Online Issn: 1536-013X Print Issn: 0162-2870 © 2009 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology2009 October (2009) (129): 133–142. https://doi.org/10.1162/octo.2009.129.1.133 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Views Art…
An Interview with Mark Wallinger
Let's begin with State Britain, now on show at Tate Britain.I know you have talked about it as a kind of memorial or an elegy to Brian Haw's antiwar manifestation outside the Houses of Parliament, most of which was removed by the police.In the Tate literature too-I don't know how much of a hand you had in that-it is quite clearly presented as being a work of art about protest rather than a reenactment of that protest.How do you see the politics o…
On Forensic Architecture: A Conversation with Eyal Weizman
Yve-Alain Bois, Michel Feher, Hal Foster, and Eyal Weizman discuss "forensic architecture," the practice of treating common elements of our built environment as entry points through which to interrogate the present. Forensic Architecture is also the name of a research agency established by Weizman to undertake independent investigations in the context of armed conflicts, political struggles, and environmental transformation. Participants discuss …
A Conversation with Hubert Damisch
Denis Hollier: How would you define yourself? Historian of art? Anti-historian of art? Theorist of art? Philosopher of art? How would you define your field? Hubert Damisch: It's a field with three poles, and here my early training with Merleau-Ponty played a decisive part: question of unconscious; question of history (which I would put in third place); and something I don't know whether to call form or structure. I guess I'd say, using Wittgenste…
A User's Guide to Entropy
Conceptual Art and the Reception of Duchamp
Benjamin Buchloh: Having seen the Robert Morris exhibition one more time, yesterday, and having seen the Cardfile piece, I was confirmed in an earlier assumption which I couldn't really verify before, since I didn't then have access to the detailed contents of the piece: namely that Morris's work is constitutive for the beginning of Conceptual art in the American context. On every level, it anticipates-in the same way incidentally, as the I-Box d…
"A Picturesque Stroll around "Clara-Clara
Smithson went to see Shift, Serra tells us, spoke of its picturesque quality, and I wasn't sure what he was talking about (p. 181).' This incomprehension is quite comprehensible, at least if one sticks to early definitions of the picturesque, all of which go back to the etymological origin of this word, that is to say, the sphere of painting. For the pictorial is one of the qualities that Serra would like to banish completely from his sculpture. …
El Lissitzky: Reading Lessons
Then a voice which seemed to come from the sky rather than from the cock's throat cried, Student, be seated. Pluck a quill from the cock's tail and with it write the book of books, containing all the patres et matres lectionis, the book that even the greatest genius must have studied before the age of five. In one word, the most perfect book of all, with the longest title: Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz (although we may abbreviate: Abc ...). Write th…
Abstraction, 1910–1925: Eight Statements
January 01 2013 Abstraction, 1910–1925: Eight Statements Yve-Alain Bois, Yve-Alain Bois Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Masha Chlenova, Masha Chlenova MASHA CHLENOVA is Curatorial Assistant at the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, where she worked with Leah Dickerman on the exhibition “Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925.” Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Sc…
Two Perspectives on Barnett Newman's The Wild: An Introduction
An Interview with Mark Wallinger
Let's begin with State Britain, now on show at Tate Britain.I know you have talked about it as a kind of memorial or an elegy to Brian Haw's antiwar manifestation outside the Houses of Parliament, most of which was removed by the police.In the Tate literature too-I don't know how much of a hand you had in that-it is quite clearly presented as being a work of art about protest rather than a reenactment of that protest.How do you see the politics o…
Ideologias da forma
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A Conversation with Jean-Louis Cohen
Rosalind Krauss: In his catalogue essay for the recent Guggenheim exhibition Premises, Joseph Abram implies that in the last two decades there has been an important connection between exhibitions and the pressure for architectural change in France, particularly through the role they've played in promoting young architects.1 He mentions the effect of IFA [Institut FranCais d'Architecture], giving as an example a 1990 exhibition that promoted forty…
Nostalgia of the Body
Shortly after Lygia Clark's death in 1988, I was asked to write her obituary, and, despite my initial acceptance, given immediately and without the slightest hesitation, Ifound it impossible to do. Once again asked to write a short critical article on her work five years later, and despite my feeling that, should Ifail to do so, I would somehow be shirking a duty, I cannot find a way of doing it. For the time being it is impossible to don my prof…
Piet Mondrian, 'New York City
Painting as Model
A Conversation with Hans Haacke
Haacke: No, there's another precedent, aside from the paintings I did before I turned to three-dimensional work in the early '60s. For a show in Montreal in 1983, I made what I called a Painting for the Boardroom, an industrial landscape. It is a somewhat impressionistic aerial view of the Alcan aluminum smelter in Arvida, Quebec. I painted it after a photograph that I found in an Alcan P.R. pamphlet. It is a cheerful, sunny picture. Into the bri…
Ryman's Tact
The question-despite its rhetorical flavor-must be asked at the very outset: why is it so hard to write about Robert Ryman's work? Aren't his paintings themselves-preeminently anti-illusionist, flatly literal-all the explanation the viewer or critic needs to penetrate their ineffable silence? Don't they reveal what they're made of, proudly, with a kind of routine generosity, thereby cutting short any attempt at associative readings? Simply, don't…
The Sculptural Opaque
The fiction of a diachronic/synchronic opposition, introduced by Saussure, is like all those other binary pairs for which our metaphysics is simultaneously the guarantee, product and originator. And like them, once its theoretical foundations are questioned, it ceases to function. The skirmish between theories of structure and theories of history that had been the revelation (from the exterior) of the 1960's, has come to appear as a simple misund…
EL L. didactiques de lecture
El Lissitzky: Reading Lessons
Then a voice which seemed to come from the sky rather than from the cock's throat cried, Student, be seated. Pluck a quill from the cock's tail and with it write the book of books, containing all the patres et matres lectionis, the book that even the greatest genius must have studied before the age of five. In one word, the most perfect book of all, with the longest title: Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz (although we may abbreviate: Abc ...). Write th…
Ryman's Tact
The question-despite its rhetorical flavor-must be asked at the very outset: why is it so hard to write about Robert Ryman's work? Aren't his paintings themselves-preeminently anti-illusionist, flatly literal-all the explanation the viewer or critic needs to penetrate their ineffable silence? Don't they reveal what they're made of, proudly, with a kind of routine generosity, thereby cutting short any attempt at associative readings? Simply, don't…
The Sculptural Opaque
The fiction of a diachronic/synchronic opposition, introduced by Saussure, is like all those other binary pairs for which our metaphysics is simultaneously the guarantee, product and originator. And like them, once its theoretical foundations are questioned, it ceases to function. The skirmish between theories of structure and theories of history that had been the revelation (from the exterior) of the 1960's, has come to appear as a simple misund…
Writer, Artisan, Narrator
"A Picturesque Stroll around "Clara-Clara
Smithson went to see Shift, Serra tells us, spoke of its picturesque quality, and I wasn't sure what he was talking about (p. 181).' This incomprehension is quite comprehensible, at least if one sticks to early definitions of the picturesque, all of which go back to the etymological origin of this word, that is to say, the sphere of painting. For the pictorial is one of the qualities that Serra would like to banish completely from his sculpture. …
Francis Picabia: From Dada to Petain
Biographers are fixated on their heroes in a very peculiar manner. They frequently select the hero as the object of study because, for personal reasons of their own emotional life, they had a special affection for him from the very outset. They then devote themselves to a work of idealization, which strives to enroll the great man among their infantile models, and to revive through him, as it were, their infantile conception of the father. For th…
A Conversation with Hans Haacke
Haacke: No, there's another precedent, aside from the paintings I did before I turned to three-dimensional work in the early '60s. For a show in Montreal in 1983, I made what I called a Painting for the Boardroom, an industrial landscape. It is a somewhat impressionistic aerial view of the Alcan aluminum smelter in Arvida, Quebec. I painted it after a photograph that I found in an Alcan P.R. pamphlet. It is a cheerful, sunny picture. Into the bri…
Painting as Model
The Antidote
Kahnweiler's Lesson
Research Article| April 01 1987 Kahnweiler's Lesson Yve-Alain Bois, Yve-Alain Bois Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Katharine Streip Katharine Streip Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Representations (1987) 18: 33–68. https://doi.org/10.2307/3043750 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter …
Piet Mondrian, 'New York City
Painting as Model
Conceptual Art and the Reception of Duchamp
Benjamin Buchloh: Having seen the Robert Morris exhibition one more time, yesterday, and having seen the Cardfile piece, I was confirmed in an earlier assumption which I couldn't really verify before, since I didn't then have access to the detailed contents of the piece: namely that Morris's work is constitutive for the beginning of Conceptual art in the American context. On every level, it anticipates-in the same way incidentally, as the I-Box d…
On Matisse: The Blinding: For Leo Steinberg
Nostalgia of the Body
Shortly after Lygia Clark's death in 1988, I was asked to write her obituary, and, despite my initial acceptance, given immediately and without the slightest hesitation, Ifound it impossible to do. Once again asked to write a short critical article on her work five years later, and despite my feeling that, should Ifail to do so, I would somehow be shirking a duty, I cannot find a way of doing it. For the time being it is impossible to don my prof…
To Introduce a User's Guide
A User's Guide to Entropy
A Conversation with Hubert Damisch
Denis Hollier: How would you define yourself? Historian of art? Anti-historian of art? Theorist of art? Philosopher of art? How would you define your field? Hubert Damisch: It's a field with three poles, and here my early training with Merleau-Ponty played a decisive part: question of unconscious; question of history (which I would put in third place); and something I don't know whether to call form or structure. I guess I'd say, using Wittgenste…
Cezanne: Words and Deeds
A Conversation with Jean-Louis Cohen
Rosalind Krauss: In his catalogue essay for the recent Guggenheim exhibition Premises, Joseph Abram implies that in the last two decades there has been an important connection between exhibitions and the pressure for architectural change in France, particularly through the role they've played in promoting young architects.1 He mentions the effect of IFA [Institut FranCais d'Architecture], giving as an example a 1990 exhibition that promoted forty…
Galaxy
April 01 2004 Galaxy Yve-Alain Bois Yve-Alain Bois Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Yve-Alain Bois Online Issn: 1536-013X Print Issn: 0162-2870 © 2004 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology2004 October (2004) (108): 28–34. https://doi.org/10.1162/octo.2004.108.1.28 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Views Article content…
On Two Paintings by Barnett Newman
April 01 2004 On Two Paintings by Barnett Newman Yve-Alain Bois Yve-Alain Bois Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Yve-Alain Bois Online ISSN: 1536-013X Print ISSN: 0162-2870 © 2004 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology2004 October (2004) (108): 3–27. https://doi.org/10.1162/016228704774115690 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Linke…
Le Toucher Juste
July 01 2005 Le Toucher Juste Yve-Alain Bois Yve-Alain Bois Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Yve-Alain Bois Online Issn: 1536-0105 Print Issn: 1526-3819 © 2005 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology2005 Grey Room (2005) (20): 90–94. https://doi.org/10.1162/1526381054573569 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Views Article conten…
Tough Love
When the editors of the Oxford Art Journal asked me to speak about Hubert Damisch, they told me I should feel free ‘to concentrate on whatever issues have been important for my own work.’ Easy enough, I thought, but then when trying to come to terms with the assignment, I realised what I knew in theory but had never quite experienced so vividly – that the debt to one's mentor can never be ascertained. Not only because one's intellectual horizon i…
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