Through a selection of texts (sometimes unpublished or translated into French for the first time) and interviews with
Christian Boltanski,
Michelangelo Pistoletto,
Paul McCarthy, Douglas Gordon,
Glenn Ligon, and Pipilotti Rist, the author proposes several clues to better understand and (re)discover the artists who have reinvested in the notion of modernity at the end of the 20th century, and whose research enlightens the beginning of the 21st.
Over five chapters which elaborate texts around the problematics of images and history, the body and language, the object and performance, the reader will encounter the now famous work of artists such as
Mike Kelley,
John Baldessari, and Bruce Nauman, as well as the elliptical paths of
Guy de Cointet or
Larry Bell, that the standards, dogma, and convention of the market have rendered invisible.
Marie de Brugerolle is an art historian, author and curator. Since 1994, she has been working on the development of the history of
performance, from the '60s to its dematerialization or absorption into the society of the spectacle in the 21st century, with exhibitions such as Hors Limites: l'art et la vie, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1994; Bruce Nauman, MoMA, New York, 1995;
Not to Play with Dead Things,
Villa Arson, Nice, 2008; Yvonne De Carlo, MUSAC, León, 2011; and she develops the concept of
Post-Performance Future. She contributes to raising awareness of the
Californian scene and its hidden history:
Allen Ruppersberg, Magasin, Grenoble, 1996;
Guy de Cointet,
MAMCO, Geneva, 2004;
John Baldessari, 2005 and
Larry Bell, 2011, Carré d'art, Nîmes. Editor of
Guy de Cointet's first monograph,
JRP|Ringier, 2011, she is also the author of a large number of texts published in catalogs (
Mike Kelley, Tate Modern, 2025) and magazines: Art Press,
Flash Art,
Artforum. She curated the exhibition
Word is Round, Frac des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou, 2025.
