Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction
A Counterhistory

Jaleh Mansoor (Author)

9781478031758

Paperback / softback, published 23 May 2025

256 pages, 35 illustrations, including 8 in color
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.445 kg

“Featuring brilliant ideas and sharp theoretical insights, Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction makes a very important contribution to the understanding of key forms and genres in twentieth-century art in general as well as to the more pointed discussion of art’s relationship to the subsumption of life under capital. I know of no other book that traces painterly abstraction and other artistic approaches to abstraction in the broader sense of the term across the longer arc of modern and contemporary art.” - Ina Blom, author of (Houses to Die In and Other Essays on Art) “Drawing on Marx’s passage on ‘universal prostitution,’ Jaleh Mansoor develops an astute analysis of the economic unconscious of modern and contemporary art. Focusing on the dialectics between aesthetic and social abstractions, Mansoor spans an arc from Seurat’s Models to Picabia’s and Tiqqun’s Young-Girls, referring to labor-reflective works by Hito Steyerl, Santiago Sierra, Hannah Black, and others. She guides us through the manifold ways art mediates the imperceptible totality of human life.” - Sabeth Buchmann, Professor of the History of Modern and Postmodern Art, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna

In Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction, Jaleh Mansoor provides a counternarrative of modernism and abstraction and a reexamination of Marxist aesthetics. Mansoor draws on Marx’s concept of prostitution-a conceptual device through which Marx allegorized modern labor-to think about the confluences of generalized and gendered labor in modern art. Analyzing works ranging from Édouard Manet’s Olympia and Georges Seurat’s The Models to contemporary work by Hito Steyerl and Hannah Black, she shows how avant-garde artists can detect changing modes of production and capitalist and biopolitical processes of abstraction that assign identities to subjects in the interest of value’s impersonal circulation. She demonstrates that art and abstraction resist modes of production and subjugation at the level of process and form rather than through referential representation. By studying gendered and generalized labor, abstraction, automation, and the worker, Mansoor shifts focus away from ideology, superstructure, and culture toward the ways art indexes crisis and transformation in the political economic base. Ultimately, she traces the outlines of a counterpraxis to capital while demonstrating how artworks give us a way to see through the abstractions of everyday life.

Preface 
ix
Acknowledgments 
xv
Introduction 1. Toward a Materialist Formalism 
1
Introduction 2. Modernism’
s Aesthetic Economy: An Art History of Labor’
s Subsumption 
25
1. Georges Seurat’
s Muses, Abstracted: Abstract Anonymous Labor and the Beginnings of Aesthetic Abstraction 
51
2. Francis Picabia’
s Real Abstraction and the Beginnings of Futurist Cyborgs: The Prefigurative Avant-Gardes 
78
3. The Future of the Futurists: The Young-Girl
En/gendering Real Abstraction 
104
4. The [Young-Girl] Worker as Equipment: Yves Klein’
s Living Paintbrushes 
133
5. Surplus Bodies: Santiago Sierra’
s Exploitive Remuneration 
157
Conclusion 
177
Notes 
197
Bibliography 
213
Index 
225