Material as Subtext in Ephemeral Art

Much has been said about the constitutive and generative potential of matter, of its vibrancy, endless productivity and resilience. With its impersonal kind of agency, matter is both a producing force and a relationality. New Materialism, specifically, calls for a refiguration of the question of matter, bringing new approaches to debates on embodiment and interactions among bodies. Finally, the troubled divide between the ‘living’ and the ‘non-living’ is shaken too, as it begins to strike us as increasingly obsolete. Accordingly, the present paper examines encounters with artifactual creatures in artistic practice. In looking at kinetic sculptures of Theo Jansen and U-Ram Choe, as well as Merleau-Ponty concept of ‘the flesh’, it develops an extended notion of interaction whereby organic ‘human’ bodies are invited to participate in the terrestrial biome affirmatively by empathetically responding to that which is non-animalesque and not even biological – artifactual automata. What is foregrounded here is the relative autonomy of artifactual entities, the immersion in environments defined by the presence of artifactual agents, and the possibility of a human-artifactual participatory becoming. Here ‘living’ material bodies are defined in terms of their capacities to generate events and regimes of novelty. A body becomes a meta-stable locale composed of diffuse responsive states opening up toward the entirety of an environment. Here notions of empathetic immersion and participation intertwine to shape a new ecology of interlacing material bodies with their singular forms of interaction and response.

The Explicit Material: Inquiries on the Intersection of Curatorial and Conservation Cultures, 2019

This book brings together a range of perspectives on material transitions, observing and explicating the myriad transformations that works of different kinds may undergo: changing contexts, changing matter, changing interpretations, and display. By making a point of the vibrant materiality of objects— their liveliness, power, and ability to change—the book aims to contribute to the conversation that confounds the continuing assumptions that artworks and artefacts are made of static, inert matter—inactive, stagnant, and passive ‘objects’ of investigation, subordinated to hygienic orders of museum vitrines or of preserved historical sites. Instead, it becomes clear that being material, they exist as complex constructs of material relations. In the words of the cultural historian and geographer David Lowenthal, the notions of ‘material permanence, wholeness, … and original authenticity have been increasingly supplanted by appreciative acceptance of temporal transience, processual transformation, varying contextual circumstances, life-cycle mutability, [and] erosive and corrosive agency’ (see Lowenthal, ‘A sea-change rich and strange’ in this volume). Most importantly, a close study of these internal material relationships, often through the trained eye of the conservator, curator, or other specialist offers a more nuanced reading of cultural artefact, which may lead to fundamental rethinking of the aesthetic and formal interpretations it is given, not to mention issues of authorship, authenticity, and permanence.

Journal of Visual Art Practice, 2002

Relevant seminars and conferences on art, art theory, and feminism, were regularly attended at which work was often presented (see below); art exhibitions were visited for the purposes of both art historical research and an awareness of contemporary development in art practice. Several papers were prepared for public presentation and/or publication and artwork was regularly exhibited. Problem: Gender Bias in Response to the Medium of Painting In Chapter Two I argue that Frankenthaler's innovative use of the medium developed during the malcing of her painting Mountains and Sea attracted a response from the critics that reflected values In accord with a culturally specific male position. Until recently, Frankenthaler's paintings have been overlooked in the canon.^ In 1952 she invented a technique known as soaked-in stain during the making of Mountains and Sea. Interpretations of this work, and its subsequent arthistorical positioning, have been limited by formalism, the dominant mode of criticism during the high modernist period. This is a view that centres fixedly on the demands of the medium, and as a result emphasis has been given to the technical aspect of Frankenthaler's innovation rather than the specific qualities of space she created through her use of materials. Her art-historical positioning is largely obscured through readings which consider the working methods she used to create Mountains and Sea as providing a basis for future developments in painting rather than responding to the work in its own right. Generally, Mountains and Sea is regarded as germinal. It is looked upon as a bridge between Abstract Expressionism and Colour Field painting. This positioning can, in part, be attributed to the critic Clement Greenberg, whose theories, alongside those of Harold Rosenberg, provided the theoretical framework for Abstract Expressionism. Greenberg's formalist view of painting is one that goes against both the sensory and expressive dimension of painting, concentrating instead on the pure physical properties of the medium. It was this approach that led him to pare down painting and remove all aspects of the medium that he considered extraneous to the pictorial issues that were its rightful concern. At a later date Greenberg's stance was closely associated with Colour Field painting and the work of Jules Olitsky, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, and Larry Poons, a group some degree set apart from the ^cultural gaze'. Working in near darkness seemed to *jam' sight as a means of orchestrating the emerging image. I also found that working in very little light enforced a more continuously sensory, and tactile, engagement with the medium. For example, in the darkroom it is not always possible to see one's own hand. The edges of the body become apparent only when they are brought into contact with the textures of things such as liquid, paper and so on. Intuitive artwork made in these conditions forms in relation to the body of the maker, whose sense is of being, intermittently, merged or subsumed into darkness. This engenders a fluid interchange on a material level of artist, materials and theory. Engagement in artistic processes in the darkroom may allow fragmented thought, and this may permit sensations and emotions derived from the unconscious to emerge. The scene that is set -a low level of light and isolation -functions somewhat similarly to the traditional setting, in that it serves to dissociate the artist from language and visual objectivity. My practice text in Chapter Six compares the two disciplines in order to explore my own use of alternative darkroom processes. In making Photoworks, I channelled unfamiliar perceptions of space and body into a material form. The artwork grew out of an unfolding relation between my body, Irigaray's text, liquids and burning. I had intended to enter into a process of formal decision-making that was deliberately squeezed towards an alliance with the body, gesture and touch. This would be different to, for example, Greenberg's version of formalism, because he had favoured sight. I wanted to discover whether formal decisions could perhaps operate as a topology that bore reference to the body of the maker. Here, suppression of the specular gaze was necessary as a means of'unfixing' or dislocating the feminine. Traces of the feminine associated with women's specific corporeality are, as I attempt to show in Chapter Five, generally subsumed into material processes at an invisible and structural level. I suggest that the use of alternative processes in the isolation of \ Plate 1 Helen Frankenthaler. Mountains and Sea. 1952 Oil on canvas (86 x 117 inches)

Technoetic Arts, 2016

The classification presented here will condense into five categories the adjectives, concepts, artworks and topics of discussion that are related to ‘post-materiality’, understood here to mean those art practices that are related to artistic physicality in some shifted way by being objectless artworks or works beyond physicality. I present several elements that are related to the history and theoretical background of this question. The immateriality, dematerialization and non-materiality of art will be considered in the context of digital art and culture. We can follow artistic concepts related to immateriality in the late 1950s, discussions on dematerialization of art in the late 1960s and the appearance of ‘immateriality’ in the 1980s. ‘Immateriality’ emerges again in the early 1990s, this time in association with the digital environ- ment, and has remained a much-discussed term and more of a metaphor up to the present since so-called immaterial digital art is in fact a labour-intensive and mate- rial-intensive sphere. In observing the experimental and theoretical activity around artistic technologies over the past 50 years, it is possible to discern two directions: first, dematerialization in the context of non-technological art, and second, immate- rialization of the art object in the context of technological art.