HESCAH Lecture | Dr. Jaleh Mansoor "Three Temporalities of the 1960’s Neo-Avant-Garde: Twombly’s Melancholia, Warhol’s Mimesis, Merz’s Portentous Futurism"

Dr. Mansoor’s research on abstract painting in the context of the miracolo Italiano and the international relations of the Marshall Plan era nested within the global dynamics of the Cold War opens up on to problems concerning the labour-to-capital relationship and its ramifications in culture and aesthetics. Her work limns the correlation between real and aesthetic abstraction. While Marx, in the introduction to The Grundrisse, evoked aesthetic abstraction only to bracket it off from concrete abstraction in the realm of production, circulation, and consumption, this talk traces the etiology of capitalist social dynamics symptomatized in aesthetic abstraction. The relationship among technology, media, and reification factors into this etiology, but does not account for the social relations also indexed therein.