Color, Paint, Labor: Concrete Abstraction in Contemporary [Abstract] Painting
This lecture rethinks the relationship between aesthetic and real abstraction set in place by Karl Marx in the introduction to The Grundrisse through a case study of exemplary instances of contemporary painting and through the discourses on "real abstraction". Through an exploration of the structural and social conditions of abstraction this lecture offers another genealogy of modernist painting, one that traces the motivation of the "abstract" painterly sign in the shifting labour-to-capital relationship and in recomposing "abstract" social relations, across the history of abstract painting.
Jaleh Mansoor is a historian of Modern and contemporary cultural production, specializing in twentieth-century European art, Marxism, Marxist feminism, and critical theory. She received her PhD from Columbia University in 2007 and has taught at SUNY Purchase, Barnard College, Columbia University, and Ohio University. Her first book, Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia was published in 2016.
