Documents of Contemporary Art: Failure by Lisa Le Feuvre

Book Review.

Failure resists framing. It slips through structures, subverts expectations, and destabilizes certainties. Yet in Failure, Lisa Le Feuvre attempts to capture it—curating an anthology that treats failure as an engine of artistic disruption. Published as part of the Documents of Contemporary Art series—alongside volumes on The Sublime, Memory, and The Gothic—the book situates failure within a broader critical exploration of contemporary aesthetics. Like the other volumes in the series, Failure gathers essays, artist writings, and theoretical reflections to interrogate its central theme. The collection brings together figures such as Paul Barolsky, Gilles Deleuze, and Joseph Kosuth, each engaging failure from different angles—whether as rejection, resistance, or creative misstep.​

The book is structured into four thematic sections, each examining failure from a different lens. “Dissatisfaction and Rejection” frames failure as both involuntary exclusion (artworks dismissed by institutions) and deliberate refusal (artists rejecting norms), with Paul Barolsky tracing failure’s mythologization in modern art. “Idealism and Doubt” explores the tension between utopian aspirations and the inevitability of failure— Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben engage Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, where passive refusal becomes a subversive act. “Error and Incompetence” examines failure as process, where artists like Fischli & Weiss and Julian Schnabel treat mistakes as integral to production. Finally, “Experiment and Progress” presents failure as a generative force, with Russell Ferguson analyzing Francis Alÿs’ embrace of endless rehearsal and unfinished work.

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By organizing failure into these distinct categories, the book makes failure legible, systematic, and ultimately, contained. But can failure be systematized without losing its disruptive edge? Unlike Rosalind Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois’s Formless, which actively questioned the risks of defining the undefinable, Failure does not fully acknowledge the paradox of structuring what it claims to resist. This curation, while valuable, risks neutralizing failure—transforming it into another artistic genre rather than an inherently unstable force.​

Another issue emerges: failure’s politics remain unevenly explored. While Failure acknowledges systemic critique, it largely frames failure as an aesthetic position rather than a material condition with real consequences. Paul Barolsky discusses failure as a literary and artistic trope, and Joseph Kosuth critiques its institutional absorption, but these discussions remain rooted in failure’s representation rather than its structural implications. In this framing, failure often reads as a conceptual tool rather than a lived reality—a critical exercise more than a material crisis. This raises a larger question: if failure is truly uncontainable, why does its theorization remain so discipline-bound?

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Nowhere is this limitation more evident than in the book’s avoidance of disciplines where failure is structural, financial, and deeply social— architecture, for instance. This is not to say Failure is incomplete for not addressing architecture directly—its focus is art—but its omissions highlight a broader tendency in contemporary discourse to aestheticize failure rather than confront its tangible repercussions. Unlike art, where failure can remain speculative or poetic, failure in architecture leaves tangible scars. If failure in art can be subversive or liberatory, failure in architecture often reinforces existing power structures rather than dismantling them.

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By confining failure to artistic discourse, Failure inadvertently exposes the limits of its own premise. Its absence of architecture—and other material disciplines—points to a larger discomfort in engaging with failure’s uncontrollable social and economic dimensions. As the text reverberates through art, architecture, and theory, it invites us to confront our discomfort with instability. But it also challenges us to discern where failure ceases to critique and begins to collude. In art, failure is often framed as productive, even pleasurable; in architecture, failure is never theoretical—it is an event that shapes lives. For architecture, failure remains a paradox: a means of destabilizing norms and a reminder of the stakes of instability. The question, then, is not whether failure is productive, but whether it is ever truly resistant—or merely another iteration of power’s ability to absorb its own critique. This contrast does not diminish the book’s contribution but instead suggests where future inquiries into failure must go: beyond aesthetics, into the structures that produce and sustain crisis.