Disordering the Establishment

Lily Woodruff is Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Michigan State University.

“Lily Woodruff's examination of conceptual painting in France is at once timely and long overdue. She offers a satisfying total narrative of the artworks situated in relation to the changing dynamics of both the state and the market as they came to determine culture without losing focus of the specificity of the aesthetic dimension of these interventions. She situates artwork as a vehicle for an intellectual and sensual proposition charged with capacity. I learned a tremendous amount from this book.” - Jaleh Mansoor, author of (Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia) “This extraordinarily lucid book is required reading for anyone wondering how the 1960s-and even ‘democracy’ itself-still matters. As Lily Woodruff demonstrates, the top-down instrumentalization of participation was countered in that decade by an artistic landscape ranging from kinetic painting and wearable objects to handheld props and logos. In beautifully readable prose, she replaces French artistic practice in a geopolitical terrain that negotiates both Soviet and Maoist histories, making those practices once again urgently contemporary.” - Rachel Haidu, author of (The Absence of Work: Marcel Broodthaers, 1964–1976)

• List of Illustrations  viiAcknowledgments  xiIntroduction  11. The Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel's Social Abstractions  312. Daniel Buren's Instrumental Invisibility  913. AndrÉ Cadere's Calligrams of Institutional Authority  1434. The Collectif d'Art Sociologique's Sociological Realism  195Conclusion  257Notes  265Bibliography  293Index  304