A Brasilian lineage: Oiticica, Neto

With “Undoing the Image,” Eric Alliez explores a contemporary art-thought with the regime of the diagram as a driving principle. The author put together a collection of essays, or boxes, with his masters and sources of inspiration Deleuze and Guattari. Using Matisse-Duchamp as an “arc of forces,” these
texts subject the contemporary to an archeological study and perform a
genealogy of practices, including theoretical practices (Buren, Brus, Matta-Clark, Oiticica). This experimental book aims to position itself “in between Art and philosophy” and oscillate between the two, in an attempt to answer abstraction’s century-old challenge to philosophy. Rather than reviewing all the boxes, we thought it wiser to choose as an entry point the Brazilian lineage of a work that starts with a study of Leviathan by Ernesto Neto and concludes with an essay on Helio Oiticica.