Art l Philosophy

Que peindre? / What to Paint? Adami, Arakawa, Buren

JeanFrançois Lyotard

Edited and introduced by Herman Parret, Epilogue by Gérald Sfez. Translations by Anthony Hudek, Vlad Ionescu and Peter W. Milne

The most important writings of Lyotard on contemporary art in English for the first time Seven writings assembled in the context of the philosophy of art that JeanFrançois Lyotard developed in the nineteeneighties, at the time of the Differend (1983) and of the ‘Kantian turn’ leading to the Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1992), are here published for the first time in English translation. The texts focus on three artists with widely divergent aesthetic orientations: the colouristdraughtsman Valerio Adami, the conceptual metaphysician Shusaku Arakawa, and Daniel Buren, the ‘pragmatist of the invisible’. These three protagonists share the notion that the interest in art does not lie in the simple denotation of a frame of reference, but in the connotations of material nuances, in flavours, in tones – in one word, the visual that is barely revealed in the anamnesis that guides the visible and provokes the essential inquietude of the aesthetic experience. What to Paint? Not reality or a ‘world’, nor a rich subjectivity, nor even the phantasms of dreams or ideals of beingtogether, but the act of painting itself, and, beyond the performance of the painter, the presence of matters, a presence that in Arakawa’s words is quite obviously blank, elusive.

About the series Jean-François Lyotard: Writings on Contemporary Art and Artists This series collects all of Lyotard’s writing on contemporary art and artists. The volumes include the complete original French texts along with English translations on facing pages.

Previously published n Volume 1: Karel Appel, Un geste de couleur / Karel Appel, A Gesture of Colour € 39,50 / £35.00, isbn 978 90 5867 756 3 Winner of the Flemish Prize for Best Designed Academic Book 2010 n Volume 2: Sam Francis, Leçon de ténèbres / Sam Francis, Lesson of Darkness € 39,50 / £35.00, isbn 978 90 5867 781 5 Winner of the Flemish Prize for Best Designed Academic Book 2011 & selected for the 2012 AAUP Book Show, category ‘Scholarly Illustrated’ n Volume 3 : Les Transformateurs Duchamp / Duchamp’s TRANS/formers € 39,50/ £35.00, isbn 978 90 5867 790 7 n Volume 4: Textes dispersés I & II / Miscellaneous Texts I & II twovolume set € 99,90 / £87.00, isbn 978 90 5867 896 6

Future publication n Volume 6: L’Assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture: Jacques Monory / The Assassination of Experience by Painting: Jacques Monory – Spring 2013 Visit the website www.lyotard.be for an overview of the series. herman parret is Professor Emeritus of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Language at the Institute of Philosophy, University of Leuven.

n € 69,50 / £52.00

n isbn 978 90 5867 792 1 n October 2012 n Hardback, 16 x 23 cm n 512 p. n Illustrated n English/French

n Jean-François Lyotard: Writings on Contemporary Art and Artists 5