Abstract

Contemporary art was born out of the radicalization of a crisis begun by modern art , concerning the twofold sensible identity of art, which involves both its image-form and its aesthetic-form. This crisis led Matisse and Duchamp to « undo the image » inasmuch as it is defined by Form, in a kind of phenomenology of the visible and the invisible . Matisse responds to this with a vitalist energeticism which brings about an expansive constructivism of color-forces which replaces aesthetics with an aesthesis. Duchamp enacts a constructivism of the signifier, in which nominalism and bachelor machinism abolish all effects of being of the sign-image and thus all aesthetic sign-making of the world