Minor Aesthetics: The Photographic Work of Marcel Marien

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.