(ACLA 2022) The Elemental and The Formless
updated:
Saturday, October 23, 2021 - 6:15pm
Oliver Aas (Cornell University)
deadline for submissions:
Sunday, October 31, 2021
This seminar departs from the idea that we need a clearer understanding of elemental forms—traditional and non-traditional—that are in different stages of becoming formless (loss, disappearance, transmutation etc.). On the one hand, we build up on the critical genealogy of the formless (l’informe), a concept once popularized by Bataille in the surrealist journal Documents (1929-30) and later taken up by Bataille’s readers, most famously by Rosalind Krauss & Yves-Alain Bois (1997) and Georges Didi-Huberman (1995). While, on the other hand, we also welcome proposals that conceptualize the formless through different disciplinary vantage points and bring it to bear on the question of elemental forms.