Minor Aesthetics

Marcel Marien (1920-1993) was a key figure of Belgian postwar surrealism. He is widely acknowledged for his landmark work on Belgian surrealism and his collaboration with future Situationists including Guy-Ernest Debord in his journal Les Levres nues. Nevertheless, Marien's texts, collages, photographs, film, and art objects have to date remained understudied. This is the first volume devoted to Marien's photographic work. Through a series of close readings, Mieke Bleyen connects the collage and photographic practices of Marien with his wider oeuvre, particularly with his archival and editorial activities. By applying Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of the "minor," this book proposes an alternative reading of the artist's antiaesthetics and focuses on the affective range of his work. The figure of Marien also serves as a case study that offers new perspectives on Belgian Surrealism's relation to mainstream Surrealism and the role of photography within the movement. This volume, moreover, raises a critique of "major" art history's conception of time as linear progression and argues instead for twisted and extended temporalities in the case of Marcel Marien.

'There’s a tiny handful of things on Mariën in English. Mieke Bleyen’s 'Minor Aesthetics: The Photographic Work of Marcel Mariën' is particularly helpful. She reads him in a Deleuzian vein as a ‘minor’ artist, spilling out and past the coherent subjectivities of the poet or the artist.'
McKenzie Wark, Public Seminar, January 27, 2016

KU Leuven-;based scholar Mieke Bleyen succeeds in integrating several important achievements in 'Minor Aesthetics: The Photographic Work of Marcel Mariën'. Within the first study dedicated to the photographic practice of a prolific Belgian Surrealist (1920-;1993), she raises a number of pertinent questions, such as the importance of queer studies and feminist criticism for a better understanding of Surrealist visual arts.Additionally, as the title suggests, Bleyen develops a strong theoretical argument through the notion of minor literature, grounded in the writings of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, to unpack different pressing issues in the scholarship concerned with art history, including its problematic insistence on interpretation and linear progression. Bleyen combines rigorous archival research with a solid critical enquiry to put forward a rich and referential volume that can be engaged with as a valuable source of information and otherwise inaccessible visual material, as well as a welcome instance of a more inclusive approach to the work that is not easily fitted in the existing art historical categories.
Jelena Stojkovic (2015): Minor aesthetics: the photographic work of Marcel Mariën, Visual Studies, DOI: 10.1080/1472586X.2015.1024519

Mieke Bleyen is Researcher at the Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography and the Institute of Cultural Studies at KU Leuven.

Marcel Marien (1920-1993) was a key figure of Belgian postwar surrealism. He is widely acknowledged for his landmark work on Belgian surrealism and his collaboration with future Situationists including Guy-Ernest Debord in his journal Les L

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