Jonathan Fardy: Material Thought, Gebunden

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Material Thought recovers the legacy of 'formalist' art and theory of the mid-20th century, t aking as its point of departure François Laruelle's project of 'non-standard aesthetics.'

Carrying out what Laruelle names a 'mutation' of formalism, recovering its radical politics whilst dismantling its reified façade, Jonathan Fardy operationalises a radical flattening of the division between making and thinking which he then applies to the work of select artists and critics: Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, Julia Margaret Cameron, Giulio Paolini, Mario Merz, and Pino Pascali. Tending to works that both predate and postdate the high-water mark of formalist art and theory, he recovers and renews a theoretical impetus that proceeded the idealist tendency of 'high formalism' - i. e., the drive to incarnate a materialist aesthetics that took the materiality of art as its critical point of departure.

Through his attention to what he calls this 'materialist-formalism,' Fardy restores to 20th-century formalism a vital theoretical and political significance that has been hitherto overshadowed by 'pure' formalism and its depoliticised abstractions.