The myth of vanishing is one of the most lastingly effective strategies of 20th-century visual artistic production, acting subcutaneously since its beginnings. Now it has been examined well into the darkest corners of postmodern arbitrariness. Paul Cézanne and Robert Smithson had their justified doubts about the durability of a classical sujet called the external world. Artists like Yves Klein, Blinky Palermo, and Bas Jan Aader even drew final conclusions from the atomization of the subject inherent in their work and withdrew into self-excavated "zones of the immaterial" or weighed anchor and sailed off toward no-mans-land. As if in a surprise counter-raid, the "field of the possible" (Pierre Bourdieu) shed with tactical "rapidité" its academically cemented and regimented genres, just as it abandoned the externally directed demarcation lines in favor of broad transit zones.

Authors: Stephan Maier
Artists: Gerold Miller

Hardcover (edition galerie)
15 x 20 cm
64 pages
24 color- and 12 b/w illustrations
German/English
available
ISBN 978-3-933257-71-0
20 Euro
2001