In answer to a question on the abandoning of cubism, Picasso said: “We [Léger, Braque] were more interested by painting than by cubism. They [Ozenfant, Gleizes] were more interested in cubism than painting”. This remark describes well the uneasy relationship of Guston with his work. When he abandoned abstraction, he didn't return to representation at all, but rather peopled his canvasses with objects – Klu Klux Klan members, recumbent heads, clocks, books, bottles – that the painting brings into existence. Inventing relationships where real space and pictorial space meet and disconnect, his paintings corrode the “prejudice of the serious” of painting at the same time that they seek to produce the conditions for it.
This conference will result in a publication..
Antonia Birnbaum lives and works in Paris. She published Nietzsche, les aventures de l’héroïsme, in the critical politics collection, Payot 2000 and Le vertige d’une pensée. Descartes corps et âme Horlieu, Lyon 2003. Bonheur Justice. Walter Benjamin penseur de la tragédie, appeared in February of 2009, in the critical politics collection, Payot. She also writes reviews in the field of contemporary art, and actively collaborates with artists.
