"Informe" without Conclusion

Abstract

1. During the time the exhibition Formless: A User's Guide was its planning stage at the Centre Georges Pompidou, a potentially competing project was announced by another Parisian institution under the title From the Informe to the Abject, a title that clearly stated a belief that if the informe has a destiny that reaches beyond its conceptualization the 1920s to find its fulfillment and completion within contemporary artistic production, this is the domain of what is now understood as abjection.I Museum protocols being what they are, however, this latecomer was withdrawn, and the project with the seniority was retained the form of the exhibition for which these texts serve as one section of the catalogue. And yet, that other, unrealized project might nonetheless continue to function terms of an implicit protest against seniority understood by it a wider and more injurious sense of the term: that of supporting the old against the new, of scanting current practice favor of historical precedents, and thereby, of failing to acknowledge what it takes to be the case, namely, that the reason for the currency of present-day interest the concept of the informe is to be found the insistent spread of abjection as an expressive mode. For indeed, this spread is easy enough to document within the cultural manifestations of the last several years. To name only some very recent ones, two respected spokesmen for contemporary art-David Sylvester and Robert Rosenblum -participated Artforum's annual survey of the best and worst exhibitions held 1995 by nominating Gilbert & Georges's Naked Shit Pictures to the top of their lists, comparing this mammoth installation to Renaissance frescoes in which the settings for the groupings of nude figures were not the usual columns and arches but structures erected enlargements of turds, thereby producing their viewers a supposed rush from the scatological to the eschatological.2 Or, as another occasion, there was the