Material Encounters: Introduction to The Explicit Material

Cultural Sociology, 2013

The paper explores the central role of artworks in the field of contemporary art. It is based on an ethnographic study of the conservation laboratory at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and draws from three detailed case studies where the temporal and spatial trajectory of artworks led to processes of competition, collaboration, and repositioning among the agents involved in the acquisition, exhibition and conservation of these artworks. The study demonstrates the importance of artworks qua physical objects in the field of contemporary art, claiming attention to materiality in field theory and engaging with an object-oriented methodology in field analysis. Artworks are shown to intervene in field processes, both reproducing divisions and re-drawing boundaries within and between fields, and actualizing positions of individuals and institutions.

Workshop Deutsches Museum, 2017

The paper explores the central role of artworks in the field of contemporary art. It is based on an ethnographic study of the conservation laboratory at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and draws from three detailed case studies where the temporal and spatial trajectory of artworks led to processes of competition, collaboration, and repositioning among the agents involved in the acquisition, exhibition and conservation of these artworks. The study demonstrates the importance of artworks qua physical objects in the field of contemporary art, claiming attention to materiality in field theory and engaging with an object-oriented methodology in field analysis. Artworks are shown to intervene in field processes, both reproducing divisions and re-drawing boundaries within and between fields, and actualizing positions of individuals and institutions.

2012

When practitioners adopt craft as the major diligence of their creative practice, they naturally create work for not only the design context but also the art one. The nature of craft that involves direct experience, personal vision and mastery of a medium retains 'material-based' fields of practice, such as ceramics and textiles, for which practitioners tend to create both functional and aesthetic artefacts. Textile practitioners recognise the importance of material as the fundamental element for constructing visual, physical artefacts. However, the written accounts of the meaning of material in shaping the artistic process is barely contemplated and reflected.

2024

A new understanding of the technical object is emerging to perplex and rescramble debates on new materialisms, speculative philosophies, relation realisms, and vitalist ontologies. Working from within an ethics of co-enmeshment, this volume will bring together the question of the technical object and the question of ecosophy to put on display the singular artistry of artifacts. In bringing forth the environmental dimension of the technical object, the essays in this volume will delve into the ontological status of technical objects in artistic practice while taking a closer look at the onto-ethical implications of intra-artifactual interweaving. So far, the conceptual atmospheres surrounding the technosphere, artistic or otherwise, have been shaped in the terms of simian consumerism. Any discussion of the technical object is cast in the vocabulary of an ascribed economic, emotional, or intellectual value. This volume will shift towards an ecosophy of artifacts to explore the intricate mesh of the technical and the artistic beyond modes of valorisation and insignia of co-dependence. The volume encourages submissions that look at technical objects as a wealth of relations fully indifferent to a simian universe and explore vocabularies for the articulation of these relations. Of special interest are the excavations of conceptual regions that preclude epistemological points of entry and call for novel ways of engagement with our practices of perceiving and knowing. The collection will hypothesise that technical objects express these unexplored relations most fully in artistic practice.

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.

Studies in Conservation, 2016

In recent years, many international initiatives have sparked a debate on guidelines and criteria for documenting existing installations and environments. Nevertheless, a comparison between those environments, and lost or reproduced ones, still needs to be closely considered. This becomes even more interesting in the case of works that were made by artists no longer alive. Starting from the study on Italian artist Lucio Fontana's historical environments, we show how a historically accurate reconstruction, based on the analysis of various sources (original documents, letters, articles, interviews and videos, as well as critical essays) can be considered as a conservation strategy for works that were originally created as 'ephemeral', but later became fundamental within art history. The data and metadata can be used as a second step for the reconstruction of the environments, creating 'replicas' that closely mimic the artist's intent and that can then be documented and properly preserved. On one hand, the outcomes of the research presented is that of understanding to what extent it is possible to achieve a fair rendition of Fontana's environments and thus foster their proper appreciation. On a second and more practical level, we will present a study of the first exhibition centered on the reproduction of the artist's environments, which will be held in HangarBicocca, Milan, Italy, in 2017. A scientific and philological approach will allow us to fully respect the original artworks and the context in which they were produced. The reconstruction will also be the occasion to collect data regarding the materials that Fontana used extensively, and to gather information about the companies that produced them, as well as about the past and present quality of such materials, and the possibility of reproducing them today. This approach seeks to investigate the interplay between theory and reconstruction materiality through the double lens of historical research, on one hand, and contemporary conservation and museology debates on the other.