Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction

Jaleh Mansoor is Associate Professor of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory at the University of British Columbia and author of Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia, also published by Duke University Press.

• Preface  ixAcknowledgments  xvIntroduction 1. Toward a Materialist Formalism  1Introduction 2. Modernism’s Aesthetic Economy: An Art History of Labor’s Subsumption  251. Georges Seurat’s Muses, Abstracted: Abstract Anonymous Labor and the Beginnings of Aesthetic Abstraction  512. Francis Picabia’s Real Abstraction and the Beginnings of Futurist Cyborgs: The Prefigurative Avant-Gardes  783. The Future of the Futurists: The Young-Girl; En/gendering Real Abstraction  1044. The [Young-Girl] Worker as Equipment: Yves Klein’s Living Paintbrushes  1335. Surplus Bodies: Santiago Sierra’s Exploitive Remuneration  157Conclusion  177Notes  197Bibliography  213Index  225

“Featuring brilliant ideas and sharp theoretical insights, Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction makes a very important contribution to the understanding of key forms and genres in twentieth-century art in general as well as to the more pointed discussion of art’s relationship to the subsumption of life under capital. I know of no other book that traces painterly abstraction and other artistic approaches to abstraction in the broader sense of the term across the longer arc of modern and contemporary art.” - Ina Blom, author of (Houses to Die In and Other Essays on Art) “Drawing on Marx’s passage on ‘universal prostitution,’ Jaleh Mansoor develops an astute analysis of the economic unconscious of modern and contemporary art. Focusing on the dialectics between aesthetic and social abstractions, Mansoor spans an arc from Seurat’s Models to Picabia’s and Tiqqun’s Young-Girls, referring to labor-reflective works by Hito Steyerl, Santiago Sierra, Hannah Black, and others. She guides us through the manifold ways art mediates the imperceptible totality of human life.” - Sabeth Buchmann, Professor of the History of Modern and Postmodern Art, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna