Description
PRE-ORDER NOW - Published: 10/12/2026
Material Thought recovers the legacy of `formalist' art and theory of the mid-20th century, taking as its point of departure Fran?ois Laruelle's project of `non-standard aesthetics.' Carrying out what Laruelle names a `mutation' of formalism, recovering its radical politics whilst dismantling its reified fa?ade, Jonathan Fardy operationalises a radical flattening of the division between making and thinking which he then applies to the work of select artists and critics: Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, Julia Margaret Cameron, Giulio Paolini, Mario Merz, and Pino Pascali. Tending to works that both predate and postdate the high-water mark of formalist art and theory, he recovers and renews a theoretical impetus that proceeded the idealist tendency of `high formalism' - i.e., the drive to incarnate a materialist aesthetics that took the materiality of art as its critical point of departure. Through his attention to what he calls this `materialist-formalism,' Fardy restores to 20th-century formalism a vital theoretical and political significance that has been hitherto overshadowed by `pure' formalism and its depoliticised abstractions.Binding: Hardback