The Recurrent Actuality of the Baroqueaf Else Marie Bukdahl

The Recurrent Actuality of the Baroque is a book about visual art. It deals with the broken continuity in time from the historical Baroque to the contemporary one. The text follows a comparative method of study based upon recent research in the fields of art theory and aesthetics. Apart from the hypotheses of Walter Benjamin and the epistemology of Michel Foucault, the book introduces and expands the most important theories about the actual Baroque as they have been devised and developed by Mario Perniola, Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Gilles Deleuze. The problems of passage between visual forms and composition of the images are analysed in terms of simulation, rationality, space, the wildness of artistic intentionality and the folding of matter and meaning. If the text is discreetly haunted by Leibniz, Ancient Rome and the poetry of Baudelaire, its direction of thinking is totally devoted to the understanding of visual art from Bernini and Velázquez to Louise Bourgeois, Mona Hatoum and ORLAN. Special attention is paid to visual artists in Denmark dealing with ìBaroque universalsî from the 1980s up to the present day.