Soulillou, Jacques

Bio Sketch

Jacques Soulillou (b. 1951, Bordeaux) is a French essayist, philosopher and art critic — docteur en philosophie (Paris 1) — and a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA France, which holds his bibliography). He spent much of his life abroad (Africa, the United States, Europe, Asia) and worked from 1983 in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs' cultural cooperation service, including a posting at the French Consulate General in Hong Kong and Macao (2008). His books centre on the decorative and ornament — Du Décoratif: le paradigme mural / La Société du décor (Éric Fabre, 1980), Le Décoratif (Klincksieck, Collection d'Esthétique, 1990; reissued with a new preface, 2016), and Le Livre de l'ornement et de la guerre (Parenthèses, coll. Eupalinos, 2003) — alongside work on African art and architecture (Douala: un siècle en images, 1989; dir. Rives coloniales, 1993; Contemporary African Art with André Magnin, 1996/2002), L'Impunité de l'art (Seuil, 1995), L'Auteur mode d'emploi (1999) and Esthétiques du détachement (Sémiose, 2014); he was also scientific curator of the exhibition "L'Envers du Décor: dimensions décoratives dans l'art du XXe siècle" (Musée d'Art Moderne de Villeneuve d'Ascq, 1998) and translator of Gottfried Semper's Du style et de l'architecture (2007). "Ornament and Order" (2002, trans. Mark Heffernan) condenses this decorative-arts theorizing into the argument that ornament is the medium of order's appearance and the decorative its spectral double (bio web-verified via jacquessoulillou.net, the AICA France bibliography PDF, archivesdelacritiquedart.org, and Le Monde d'Arthur).

Key Works

*Ornament and Order* (2002/2006) — the philosophical reflection on the crisis of ornament: ornament as the medium of order's appearance through the ground plan of sex and power; the decorative as what escapes order's encoding; the reformers' "rational re-founding" as failed coup d'état (originally in Crime and Ornament, YYZ Books, 2002)
Le Décoratif (Klincksieck, Collection d'Esthétique, 1990; reissued with a new preface, 2016) — the book-length theory of the decorative (predecessor of the essay's ornament/decorative distinction)
Du Décoratif: le paradigme mural / La Société du décor (Éd. Eric Fabre, 1980) — the earlier decorative-arts study (the "mural paradigm")
Le Livre de l'ornement et de la guerre (Parenthèses, coll. Eupalinos, 2003) — ornament and war, published the year after the Crime and Ornament essay
L'Impunité de l'art (Seuil, coll. La couleur des idées, 1995) — on the impunity of art
Contemporary African Art (with André Magnin; Harry N. Abrams / Thames & Hudson, 1996; re-ed. 2002) — the African-art survey; earlier Douala: un siècle en images (L'Harmattan, 1989) and dir. Rives coloniales: architectures de St Louis du Sénégal à Douala (Parenthèses/ORSTOM, 1993)
L'Auteur mode d'emploi (L'Harmattan, 1999) — the author as instruction manual
Esthétiques du détachement (Sémiose, 2014) — aesthetics of detachment
(As translator) Gottfried Semper, Du style et de l'architecture, écrits (1834–1869) (éd. Parenthèses, 2007) — the Semper essays, the theoretical ground of the wiki's cladding lineage (law-of-cladding, interior-as-garment)

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

ornamental-ground-plan — his central analytic device: the ground plan (original matrix) of double polarization — transversal male/female, vertical superior/inferior — sustained by "sexuality and power"
ornamental-excess — the general economy of ornamental expense: kosméō, legitimacy/illegitimacy of excess by status, the excess paradox
free-and-not-free — eleutheros and the genealogy by which the applied/decorative arts inherit the opposition between the free man and the non-free
the-decorative — "that which escapes the encoding that order practices on ornament"; ornament's "eternal double" and invisible mark
architectural-ornament — ornament re-theorized: primary, polymorphous, essentially chaotic, the light in which order appears
call-to-order — "Down with the decorative!"; the denunciation of excess as the power-saturated mechanism of re-founding
the-double — the decorative as ornament's "eternal double," the phantom that "walks in the tracks of ornament"
dual-symbolic-classification — the ornamental encoding of left/right (sex, without hierarchy) and upper/lower (power, with hierarchy)
corporeal-inscription — the ornament that appropriates the individual, imprinting the flesh to assign "a place in a social or cosmic order"

Relevance to the Core Research

Soulillou gives the wiki's ornament cluster its philosophical spine and its strongest theory of the decorative: where the wiki's other sources treat the decorative as a suppressed practice (Taylor & Preston), a trade object (Hope, Eastlake) or a gendered pole (Gordon, Braham), Soulillou defines it structurally — as what escapes order's encoding, ornament's "eternal double" whose stigmatization ("too decorative") is a discourse-internal operation tied to positions of power. His ground plan (the double polarization of sex and power encoded in ornament) connects the dual classification apparatus directly to the gender of the interior and supplies the theory behind the editors' "identification of the female body with the domestic and with the decorative." His coup d'état thesis re-dates and re-motives the wiki's design-reform lineage (the "reformers of the applied arts" whose artifacts he finds "no less weighted with ornament than those that they put on trial") and reframes modernism's anti-ornamentism as a rationalized will to power rather than a reasoned doctrine. For the researcher's ornament debate and interior-design theory interests, he is the source that turns the debate's moral terms (crime, purity, excess) into a political anthropology of order — and his provenance matters: the essay appeared in Crime and Ornament: The Arts and Popular Culture in the Shadow of Adolf Loos (2002), the same anthology as Drobnick's "Volatile Architectures," making the two selections the wiki's direct documents of the Loos-shadow lineage.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

Ornament and Order (2002/2006)