A meditation on a painting--and on the history of memory, imagery, and culture.

The Deluge, the Plague: Paolo Uccello (The Body, in Theory)

Arts & Photography

Schefer, Jean-Louis

Individual Artists

Univ of Michigan Pr

Architecture and the city are at the heart of Sarah Sze's work. In both the materials she uses and the forms she constructs, her installations are a dizzying metaphor for the urban fabric's shifting and improvised nature. Her flowing structures consist of a litany of small-scale household items--for the most part relics discarded by industrial civilization, or modest, domestic objects such as brushes, screws, and toothpicks--that respond to and infiltrate the surrounding architecture. The interplay between individual components and overall structure allows Sze to explore the boundaries between art and everyday life. She offers us a world where neither emptiness nor saturation dominates, where chaos is as relevant as order, and where the common is as important as the extraordinary. Sze's highly inventive and mature output has aroused enormous inter-national interest. Here, for the first time, is an entire record of Sze's extraordinary body of work since her first highly acclaimed show in New York in 1996. Distributed on behalf of the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain. 80 color illustrations.

Sarah Sze

Sans, Jérôme

Sze, Sarah

Sculpture

Thames&Hudson

This volume presents for the first time in English the work of one of the most important French theorists of today. The selection represents the whole of Schefer's career, from the 1960s, when he was influenced by structuralism, to his more lyrical and autobiographical essays of the 1990s, which meditate on the role of the spectator in relation to art practice. Schefer considers the nature of art, film and writing through his close examination of artists as diverse as Uccello, Poussin and Cy Twombly, and writers such as Paul Valéry and Roland Barthes. These provocative essays register the writer's direct confrontation with these media in a way that stands as a corrective to the formal traditions of interpretation and criticism. Schefer's work offers some of the most original interpretations of art available today.

The Enigmatic Body: Essays on the Arts (Cambridge Studies in New Art History and Criticism)

Study & Teaching

Cambridge University Press

The first English translation of a foundational work in cinema studies and the philosophy of film.When it was first published in French in 1980, The Ordinary Man of Cinema signaled a shift from the French film criticism of the 1960s to a new breed of film philosophy that disregarded the semiotics and post-structuralism of the preceding decades. Schefer describes the schizophrenic subjectivity the cinema offers us: the film as a work projected without memory, viewed by (and thereby lived by) a subject scarred and shaped by memory. The Ordinary Man of Cinema delineates the phenomenology of movie-going and the fleeting, impalpable zone in which an individual's personal memory confronts the cinema's ideological images to create a new way of thinking. It is also a book replete with mummies and vampires, tyrants and prostitutes, murderers and freaks―figures that are fundamental to Schefer's conception of the cinema, because the worlds that cinema traverses (our worlds, interior and exterior) are worlds of pain, unconscious desire, decay, repressed violence, and the endless mystery of the body. Fear and pleasure breed monsters, and such are what Schefer's emblematic “ordinary man” seeks and encounters when engaging in the disordering of the ordinary that the movie theater offers him. Among other things, Schefer considers “The Gods” in 31 brief essays on film stills and “The Criminal Life” with reflections on spectatorship and autobiography.While Schefer's book has long been standard reading in French film scholarship, until now it has been something of a missing link to the field (and more broadly, French theory) in English. It is one of the building blocks of more widely known and read translations of Gilles Deleuze (who cited this book as an influence on his own cinema books) and Jacques Rancière.

The Ordinary Man of Cinema (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents)

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

Semiotext[e]

Le deluge, la peste, Paolo Uccello (0000)

Reference

Foreign Language Study & Reference

GALILEE

FONDAT CARTIER

L' Homme Ordinaire au Cinéma

Literature & Fiction

Essays & Correspondence

CAH CINEMA

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Books by Schefer, Jean-Louis