In The Poem About Love You Don’t Write The Word Love takes the distinction that French critic Serge Daney made between the “image” and the “visual” as a starting point for a selection of artworks, films, and discussions. Daney’s distinction refers to an “image” that can critically challenge and destabilize predominant models of information, resisting the “purely technical,” that which is nothing other than the verification that something functions. Through various strategies of dislocation or slippage contemporary artists and filmmakers stage unsettling tensions that challenge visual conventions in an increasingly mediated culture. The aim of this book is to provide a theoretical and critical framework for examining how contemporary art and cinema can still hold out against an experience of vision and of the “visual.” Contributions range from philosophers and theorists such as Ernesto Laclau and Thomas Keenan, to art historians such as George Baker and Jonathan Crary, and to artists and filmmakers including François Bucher, Gareth James, John Menick, Mai-Thu Perret, and Keith Sanborn.

This book was co-produced by Artists Space, New York, and accompanied the same-titled exhibition (November 16 – December 22, 2006).