An "operating manual for contemporary art" that addresses the work of Daniel Buren, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Günter Brus.
The late 1960s saw a radical undoing of the image in—and of—art, as the questions of art began to be posed in entirely new terms. In this critical and clinical examination of the post-conceptual condition's negotiations with the image, the body, capitalist semiotics, and the built environment, Éric Alliez and Jean-Claude Bonne trace the trajectories of three artists, three key entries in the lexicon that are also entryways into contemporary art understood as a '"iagrammatic regime" inextricably related, in particular, to architecture.
They consider Daniel Buren's systematic deconstruction all the forms of autonomy of art; Gordon Matta-Clark's anarchitectural operation across site and non-site; and Viennese actionist Günter Brus's action drawings/drawing actions and “stress tests.” This “operating manual for contemporary art," richly illustrated and based throughout on close readings of the artists' works, writings, and actions across their entire careers, is an indispensable diagram of the lines of flight opened up by contemporary art, as well as the omnipresent threat of its capture by anesthesia and dematerialization, spectacle, the dogma of “site-specificity,” and absorption into the neoliberal experience economy.
