Body without Organs Body without Image

<b>A close analysis of the work of Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto reveals the fundamental stakes of a contemporary art in the process of undoing the image-form.</b><p>The first volume of &#201;ric Alliez and Jean-Claude Bonne's major work on contemporary art begins by outlining their exploratory and speculative project: not so much to produce a new &#147;philosophy of art&#148; as to enter into a space in-between philosophy and art&#151;between a contemporary philosophy of contemporary art and an art contemporary with contemporary philosophy.</p><p>But what exactly is the &#147;contemporary&#148;? And how can we make ourselves philosophically the contemporaries of works whose problematic nature no longer sits well under the categories of the &#147;aesthetic&#148; inherited from romanticism?</p><p>In these case-studies of an art-thought that is inseparable from the continued construction of the very concept of a &#147;contemporary art&#148; philosophical analysis is continually displaced by the forces of works and practices of creation and reception that herald a new&#151;processual and post-conceptual&#151;configuration of art with Matisse and Duchamp&#151;Matisse-thought and Duchamp-thought&#151;establishing a tension that since the 1960s has been &#147;recharged&#148; by the micropolitical options which have given rise to the critical and clinical problematisation of art.</p><p>Moving through and beyond the thought of Deleuze and Guattari the discovery of a diagrammatic regime of the contemporary synonymous with an undoing of the image of the aesthetic regime of art begins here with the work of Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto as a close analysis of the diagrammatic forces at work in <i>Leviathan Thot</i> Neto's major 2006 intervention in the Panth&#233;on de la r&#233;publique reveals the fundamental stakes of a contemporary art in the process of undoing the image-form.</p><p>Neto's &#147;anarchitectural denunciation&#148; takes on the (Hobbesian) metaphysical enunciation of the Leviathan-state which his monstrous &#147;counter-installation&#148; recalls and reproblematizes by placing all of the Panth&#233;on's physical and metaphysical coordinates into and under tension. Grappling with this foreign body both critically and clinically Alliez and Bonne reveal how the &#147;Neto Operation&#148; engages with nothing less than the image of power in its relation to the power of the image that animates it and endows it with a discursive existence.</p>