Formless experience - a revisited link between the modern and the postmodern in the visual arts

Abstract

Based on Walter Benjamin’s experience of “shock” as a synthetic structure of modern European sensibility, one which draws from contextual transformations and its modes of representation, we seek to examine how this specific contact with reality is later linked to affections, observed in the second half of the 20th century, connected to the aporetic and ambiguous experience identified here as a “formless”. For this, besides the Benjaminian “shock”, the theory of “traumatic realism” by Hal Foster, as well as the notions of batailean formlessness and Foucauldian desubjectivation, are all mobilized as ways of disturbing an organized subjectivity sustained, at the time, mainly by phenomenology. To think of such link between between works of art produced in the late 19th century, on the one hand, and in the mid-1960s, on the other, aims, in addition to contributing to their morphogenetic investigation, to articulate their repositioning in relation to the exaltation or suppression of the experience they seek to promote.