Formes et trajets – Tome 1

About Time and Artists Working with it

This new volume of collected writings by French art critic and theoretician Nicolas Bourriaud is mainly centered on the themes of time and duration, and the many ways artists address them in their works and in relation to society, audiences, and history. Writing about artists he has known since the 1980s for whom time and duration were central issues, Bourriaud also investigates time as a conceptual tool, as something we do together when artists and public are jointly immersed in relational aesthetic experiences, as a rhetorical device in order to push and pull the archeological obsession of some artists active in the 2000s and 2010s, and as a manifold reality for new generations of artists in our globalized world. This volume includes essays on Charles Avery, Braco Dimitrijevic, Subodh Gupta, Bertrand Lavier, Pierre Huyghe, Melik Ohanian, Philippe Parreno, Matthew Ritchie, Franz West, and many others.

French art critic, theoretician, and curator Nicolas Bourriaud (born 1965) was a cofounder and codirector of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2000–2006), Gulbenkian Curator for Contemporary Art at Tate Britain, and director of the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He is currently the artistic director of Montpellier Contemporain, a new institution based in Montpellier, France, and dedicated to the contemporary arts. He is the author of the landmark publication “Relational Aesthetics,” published in 1998, and still inspirational today for many artists, curators, and art professionals worldwide.

The book is part of the Documents series, copublished with Les presses du réel and dedicated to critical writings.