Universal Prostitution and Concrete Abstraction: Biopolitics of Abstract Art, 1888–2008
Join us for a scholar lecture by Jaleh Mansoor, associate professor of Art History at the University of British Columbia.
Professor Jaleh Mansoor is a historian of modern and contemporary cultural production, specializing in twentieth-century European art, Marxism, Marxist feminism, and critical theory. Her first book, Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia (2016), explores procedural violence in the work of Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, and Piero Manzoni. This talk dwells on the matrix of gender and class at the origin of “aesthetic” abstraction through a reading of Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and Grundrisse. Modern and contemporary practices from Georges Seurat to Santiago Sierra and Claire Fontaine become a response to “real” abstraction, a form of capitalist realism.
This event is presented as part of the exhibition Propositions on Revolution (Slogans for a Future). Sponsored in part by Frances P. Rohlen Visiting Artists Fund/College of Fine + Applied Arts, School of Art + Design Visitors Fund, and Krannert Art Museum
