Criticism in the Face of the Anthropocene

Man is in search of a new language about which no grammarian, in any language, will have anything to say." Whether this is a new visual or theoretical language, this searchreferred to here by one of the founding fathers of art criticism, Guillaume Apollinaire, in his Calligrammes-needs bright minds, cheeky enough to cross accepted boundaries, summon up doubt in the face of certainties, and question the plural phenomena of these jolting contemporary worlds. Faithful to this idea, the magazine Critique d'art now includes the heading "Theory & Criticism", conceived as a deliberately free space, rich in variations of tones. Because far from posing as "grammarians", it behooves us to open a door to the draughts (of time), the better to give free rein to other voices of criticism in the making. These voices belong to winners of the art theory and criticism prize, awarded once a year by the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP). Among the class of 2013 we must salute the "contemporary archaeology" proposed by Damien Airault in his research dedicated to the reconstruction of the exhibition Science Fiction which Harald Szeemann organized in 1967 at the Museum of Decorative Arts. For her part, concerned with going beyond Western peripheries, Mildred Duran has, thanks to this grant, embarked on an investigation into the semiological adventures of action-art which she has located in today's Asia, Africa and South America. To launch this heading, we have invited Vincent Normand to have his say, in order to introduce the theoretical perimeter of his current research. Because he gives pride of place to one of the component factors of criticism: the history of exhibitions. Because he is bold enough to enter through the door of epistemology, from the angle of the anthropological hypothesis of the Anthropocene. Somewhere between erosion and

Aesthetics · Anthropocene · Art · Criticism · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Literature · Social science · Sociology · Climate Change Communication and Perception · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · History · Philosophy

• The Birth of the Clinic

  Michel Foucault•Birth of the Clinic•2012

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