Humanless Art
Though contemporary philosophy, faced with global issues, strives to rethink and decenter man’s place in the world—which has been dominant in modern thinking—art historian Thomas Schlesser brings nuance to the common idea of a strictly anthropocentric relationship between man and the world, visible in artistic creation since the Renaissance. Identifying major moments of rupture at the root of anthropocritical visions in the history of art, he sees within them an expression of a form of leveling out of the importance of mankind on the scale of the living. Human fragility thus constitutes both an artistic motif and cause, particularly within popular culture. By analyzing a “cosmic dilution” of the human figure at the heart of historical avant-gardes and of abstractions, through to the performance and Land Art movements, Schlesser reveals an art racked by the disappearance of the human. Without claiming that art has mainly become a “universe without man,” he opens us up to the idea that the most interesting artists are those who intuitively propose “alter-egocentric” visions of the world.
