The Enigmatic Body: Essays on the Arts

The Enigmatic Body presents the work of an important French theorist. The selection represents the whole of Jean-Louis Schefer's career, from the 1960s, when he was influenced by structuralism, to his more lyrical and autobiographical essays of the 1990s, which meditate on the role of the spectator in relation to art practice. Schefer considers the very nature of art, film and writing through his close examination of artists as diverse as Uccello, Poussin and Cy Twombly, and writers such as Paul Valery and Roland Barthes. These provocative essays all register the writer's direct confrontation with these various media in a way that stands as a corrective to the formal traditions of interpretation and criticism. Autobiographical, yet theoretically informed and historically detailed, Schefer's work offers some of the most original interpretations of art available.