Beginning with the instance in 1912 when Marcel Duchamp wrote in a note to himself, "No more painting, get a job," Thierry de Duve reviews in Pictorial Nominalism the implications of the readymade for art and representation. Arguing that the readymade belongs to that moment in the history of painting when both figuration and the practice of painting become "impossible," de Duve presents a psychoanalytically informed account of the birth of abstraction. Differing considerably from such thinkers as Clement Greenberg and Peter Burger, de Duve demonstrates that the readymade is the link between...

Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Yves Klein, and Marcel Duchamp form an unlikely quartet, but they each played a singular role in shaping a new avant-garde for the 1960s and beyond. Each of them staged brash, even shocking, events and produced works that challenged the way the mainstream art world operated and thought about itself.Distinguished philosopher Thierry de Duve binds these artists through another connection: the mapping of the aesthetic field onto political economy. Karl Marx provides the red thread tying together these four beautifully written essays in which de Duve treats each artist...

Parachute was founded in 1975 by Chantal Pontbriand and France Morin. Following the previous three Parachute volumes, this last title of the Parachute anthology focuses on painting, sculpture, installation and architecture. These topics are approached from several perspectives: from new theories of aesthetic production, especially painting, to the expansion of the art world to other artistic territories during the 1980s and 1990s (Russia and South America, for instance), from the -lessons- of postmodernism to the proliferation of installation art. The essays discuss works...