Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction
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A01=Jaleh Mansoor
Abstraction
Alfred Sohn-Rethel
Author_Jaleh Mansoor
Category=AGA
Category=JPF
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eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Francis Picabia
Frederic Jameson
gendered labor
Georges Seurat
Hannah Black
Hito Steyerl
Labor
Modernism
Painting
Real abstraction
Reification
Rosalind Krauss
Santiago Sierra
sex work
Tiqqun
Value form
Venice Biennale
Yves Klein
Product details
- ISBN 9781478031758
- Weight: 445g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 23 May 2025
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction, Jaleh Mansoor provides a counternarrative of modernism and abstraction and a reexamination of Marxist aesthetics. Mansoor draws on Marx’s concept of prostitution-a conceptual device through which Marx allegorized modern labor-to think about the confluences of generalized and gendered labor in modern art. Analyzing works ranging from Édouard Manet’s Olympia and Georges Seurat’s The Models to contemporary work by Hito Steyerl and Hannah Black, she shows how avant-garde artists can detect changing modes of production and capitalist and biopolitical processes of abstraction that assign identities to subjects in the interest of value’s impersonal circulation. She demonstrates that art and abstraction resist modes of production and subjugation at the level of process and form rather than through referential representation. By studying gendered and generalized labor, abstraction, automation, and the worker, Mansoor shifts focus away from ideology, superstructure, and culture toward the ways art indexes crisis and transformation in the political economic base. Ultimately, she traces the outlines of a counterpraxis to capital while demonstrating how artworks give us a way to see through the abstractions of everyday life.
Jaleh Mansoor is Associate Professor of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory at the University of British Columbia and author of Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia, also published by Duke University Press.
