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Reading Foucault After Modern Painting: From Object To System’, Tim Stott

Conference Papers

By his own admission, Foucault wrote with great pleasure about painting, feeling little need for polemics or strategic interpretation (DE II, 707). But he also thought through paintings, taking them to be exemplary objects of knowledge, uniquely indicative of transformations and discontinuities in discursive and non-discursive orders. This mixture of pleasure, preference, and analysis leaves us with a diverse body of work that might still assist in our understanding of the development of modern painting. Of particular interest is that during the period in which Foucault wrote, what counted as painting was radically questioned, leading to an expansion that …