Summary
75
Living Things
Spring / Summer 2012
What strategies are contemporary artists using to “animate the inanimate?” To better understand the complexities of our rapport with things, this issue casts a critical eye on contemporary artistic practices that challenge our common perceptions of the “object” and that invite us to reconsider its nature, status, and various functions. This number takes stock of a current phenomenon that resists the dematerialization of art heralded by new media, a phenomenon that manifests itself in a “return to the object” and in the avid interest of the social sciences in material culture.
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Abstractions
Spring Summer 2025
Yet what about abstraction today? Long confined to formalist and self-referential imperatives, abstraction has gradually freed itself from the modernism yolk to recapture its evocative power. This issue proposes to turn away from the dogma of Abstraction as a historical genre to consider its various plastic and semantic avenues. In this invitation to explore abstractions, we wish to re-establish a dialogue between content and form, between the political and the poetic, by engaging with works that evoke reality differently. Whether they are qualified as abstract, non-figurative, or non-objective, these works certainly tell us stories.