Where to re-start? How to re-orient? How to explain?
I think you are creating straw man Chuck. Actually I'll call him mirror man Chuck. So I won't argue with myself as Other. It gets too confusing.
This link btw performs the same mirror game and or concept art it supposedly critiques:
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/015_02/2489
Here is the part of the review that does not play with linguistic fetishes:
``The heart of the narrative is elsewhere, though. A chapter on “The Seventies” gathers up the scattered anecdotes about how various French thinkers made connections with the American counterculture, such as the interest of Tel Quel in Allen Ginsberg, visits by Deleuze and Guattari with the Black Panthers and Patti Smith, and numerous other cross-marginal encounters. Later sections treat the migration of poststructuralist concepts, or at least buzzwords, into the world of artistic practice of the 80s (the profitable misunderstandings between Baudrillard and neo-geo, for example) and the emergent cybersphere a little later...''
Here is a clip from shag you referred to:
``Dewds! I'm quite excited by this book, Francois Cusset's _French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual LIfe of the United States_. It is not as fantabulous as Janet Halley's _Split Decisions_, but it is nonetheless a terrific intellectual history of French theory as it was taken up in the United States. I totally think Chuck Grimes might like this book because of his interest in art. So much of the early rise of French theory had to do with the co-mingling between scholars of French literature and language, artists, writers, activists, musicians, and various academic types from the humanities, mostly English, who would stumble over some translation in a dog-eared mimeographed copy that was passed from person to person...''
The exchange between US art and french and continental themes in the history of ideas has been going on since the 18thC. I've got the slides, lectures and reading list on all of this ... well in my head at least.
So I totally agree, Shag and you are right, I should get this book.
Picking up with the above quote. Here is the sequence in my art life. I tried doing art with existentialism in both abstract expressionism and its later bleed into the minimal in the early 60s. I developed my version of minimal following the structuralists in the late 60s. Next I followed the post-minimal with the early post-structualists in mid-70s. Then I followed the mirror game of later post-structuralist with concept art from the early 70s and on simultaneously. This latter development now goes under the general rubric of postmmodern, or postmodern turn. I always dabbled in pop art but didn't much care for it. It did turn me on to using industrial materials and methods which were cheaper than art materials. Now oddly art materials are cheaper than current industrial materials and methods in photography and digital, so I've switched back.
I should qualify the above by explaining that I was reading the literature associated with all these theory movements, and trying to link them with visual art. It started off at the intuitive level and eventually rose to thought out methods and approaches. This started as something intuitive at first with reading Sartre's Nausea in 1962, and making figurative expressionist drawings based on Goys's Disasters of War and photographs from the extermination camps, as well as occasional references to Brady's Civil War photos, news photos of 1920s lynchings. This was all simultaneous with civil rights, black power and the news stories I was reading or watching daily.... and so on from there to today, always theory-practice...
So I am currently sitting in a room with most of these books, a whole several shelves of PM or PS, most of which I've read. On the walls are a few examples of the art, the long list of theory-practice has inspired.
There's one omission in this discussion. The weirdest inspiration of many of the later minimal and post-minimal came from mathematics. Math the bete noir of nearly everyone. And yet, going back through all the way back you can find the math links and trace them. While I was in my existential phase, I was also trying to teach myself set theory and learning about Venn diagrams. I was playing with early 20thC abstract art. Set theory was all the rage as the `new math'. It was also a French import via Bourbaki. But as I later found out, 60s new math was just a re-enscription of developments in math and art going back to the turn of century. Russell, Frege, ... Malevich, Picasso, ... It was in turn pick up by Cassirer, who I started reading about the same time... In the minimal school it was again re- enscribed in a new permutation.
Here is the funny part. The reason I am and am not your straw man is that I have always been a little to a lot doubtful about art and philosophy. It's fun to do, but I really am not sure the rest of the world cares or is much effected by either. Then again, I switch and say to myself don't be a fool, some of this stuff has changed the world.
``We have movements to build and a world to win. We were busy reading De la grammatologie when we should have been occupying factories!..''
All I can say is in the most exciting times of my life I was doing both. Occupying the factory by day and reading things like grammatologie at night, or going to studio to get it all down in paint. Well and so were frenchies.
CG