Minor Aesthetics

Mieke Bleyen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography, Art and Visual Culture and the Institute for Cultural Studies at the KU Leuven.

'There’s a tiny handful of things on Mariën in English. Mieke Bleyen’s 'Minor Aesthetics: The Photographic Work of Marcel Mariën' is particularly helpful. She reads him in a Deleuzian vein as a ‘minor’ artist, spilling out and past the coherent subjectivities of the poet or the artist.'McKenzie Wark, Public Seminar, January 27, 2016

• Acknowledgements Prologue Part 1 Towards a Minor Photography Minor Literature Deterritorialization Politicization Collectivization The people to come A canon of minor masters and other reflections on the minor Deleuze and Guattari’s Cartography of Art A Minor History of Art? Minor Photography. First Reflections Part 2 Les Lèvres nues. A Minor History of Surrealism A Post War View of Constantin Meunier’s The Docker Invisible monuments A surrealist displacement of monuments Surrealism and its political turn: deconstructing the representation of labor Les Lèvres nues. Continuing the Interwar Project of Paul Nougé Writing as act Poetry as experiment Let us create disturbing objects Between affect and effect: looking for accomplices Re-writing: the fragmentary work of authorial effacement Angèle Laval: a model of minor writing? Les Lèvres nues. A Post War Enterprise Le pas du commandeur: second stanza Lettrist/Situationist texts in Les Lèvres nues Collaboration under the sign of Potlatch Leisure As Battlefield Mariën’s scenario for a global revolution Le Club des Loisirs From production to consumption: leisure as battlefield Surrealist versus situationist ‘tactics’ On (un)mediated activityPart 3 Rhizomatic Readings. Minor Ways Of BeginningDefense and Illustration of the French Language. A Rhizomatic Reading A destabilization of text and image relationships Subverting narrative Traveling the Mariën rhizome Collective assemblage of enunciation Surrealism in Crisis. Or How To Deal With the Apparatus of Capture Toutes ces dames au salon Les corrections naturelles: a critical dissection of a Surrealism in crisis Magritte and Mariën: a mutual betrayal Caught Between the Historical and the Neo-Avant-Gardes A ‘failed’ historical avant-garde versus an ‘empty’ neo-avant-garde Hal Foster’s new genealogies New genealogies, new geographies Mariën and Broodthaers: two ways of dealing with the art institution Mariën’s ambiguous relation with the art market and the art institution Queer Temporalities. The ‘Minor’ Position of Marcel Mariën Minor ways of beginning again Queer temporalities: queer belonging Queering the archive Part 4 Minor Photography. Minor AestheticsWoman Ajar. 100 Photographs of Naked Women Affecting photographies Situating Woman Ajar within feminist theory Surrealist photography 1: molar grids and molecular flows Surrealist photography 2: courtly love and sadism Always in the Middle. Photographic Stuttering and Stammering Art and porn Amateur and professional Private and public L’évidence énigmatique Traps Against Capture. Minor Aesthetics The rugged terrain of humor: humor as surface effect Minor Contexts of Display Private spaces of display Mediating between private house and gallery: photography and the printed page Epilogue Color Section Notes Part 1. Towards a Minor Photography Part 2. Les Lèvres nues. A Minor History of Surrealism Part 3. Rhizomatic Readings. Minor Ways of Beginning Part 4. Minor Photography. Minor Aesthetics Bibliography List of abbreviations References