Literature Review

Using a range of found, mostly discarded materials, my sculptural practice is interested in the way material bodies, both human and non-human are situated, positioned and constituted as “part” of the world. I am interested in how meaning is measured, examining what matters and how it comes to matter. A broad range of artists and theorists influence my thinking. This literature review reflects on these various ideas and how they relate to my practice. New Materialist ontologies, specifically the thinking of Karen Barad, provides me with an understanding of the interconnected agential nature of human and non-human forces. Together these carry political and ethical potential as they play active roles in co-producing of the world. Expanding on these notions Joshua Simons’ Neomaterialism highlights how the commodity is an underlying force within all things. Nothing can be considered separate from it. However, potential remains to reconfigure our sociability as humans with material. Mike Nelson’s thoughtful considerations of objects through installation allow me to recognise the interesting and unlimited potential objects offer as sculptural material. Carol Bove’s practice examines strategies of display and exhibition, her ideas help me consider the importance of placement and position to enhance the experiential experience of the viewer.

Toward A New Materialism: Matter as Dynamic

Written by philosopher Rachel Tillman, this article was published in 2015 in an online journal called Minding Nature. This is part of a larger site, Centre for Humans and Nature, which explores ways humans can become more ecologically responsible.

In this article Tillman calls for a renewed understanding of matter which differs from the mechanistic view held by Western thought. She draws on the recent theory of “feminist materialism” or “new materialism”, which actively challenges dualistic thinking and a human-centred concept of agency, to instead consider how material bodies, spaces, and conditions all contribute to form reality.

The article begins by explaining how new materialist theories emerged. She states looking at nature and materiality in relation to the human has been a preoccupation of feminist theory for decades. Women have always been considered closer to the material aspect of the world. However, this was used to denigrate women as the more passive sex and to explain why women’s subservient roles could not be changed. This gave strong motivation to interrogate and examine nature and matter more closely.

Tillman states, feminist theory fought oppression and patriarchy by challenging the fixed definitions of nature, using a social constructionist approach. Although, they did not examine the mechanistic understanding of matter which claims matter is inert, passive and separable. The recent work of new materialist theory has been to challenge this limited understanding. If matter is considered “passive”, it has no agency of its own. Any change or movement is either due to it responding to the laws of motion and collision with other matter. Or from the intentional input of an active (usually human) subject. Thinking of matter as “separable” presupposes a divisibility between mind and matter, and also that matter can easily be divided up from other bits of matter into isolable parts.

The social constructionist theory tends to subsume nature into culture. Tillman uses the work of Karen Barad to point out the problems associated with the linguistic turn and social constructivism, as they fail to properly address material realities for both humans and non-humans. According to Barad, “Language has been granted too much power … it seems that at every turn lately every ‘thing’ – even materiality – is turned into a matter of language or some form of cultural representation.”¹ The problem is, this view claims bodies are blank slates for discourse to write its stories. To culturally and discursively shape, determine and politicise, ignoring the dynamism and agency of biology and matter itself.

Tillman strongly asserts the time has come to gain freedom from the restrictive conceptions of nature and matter, and move away from the divide between the cultural and natural. Against social constructionist and post-structuralist theorists who dismiss the active role matter plays in shaping our world. She explores the perspectives of two new materialist thinkers, feminist theorists, Karen Barad and Nancy Tuana, who forefront the active, dynamic relations between mind, matter, intention, intellect, cultural and social forces. 

Karen Barad’s “agential realism” maintains matter is interconnected with human knowers, shaped by and shaping them as well. She states “we are part of the nature we seek to understand”.² Her research examines science and quantum physics and she states the lessons we can learn from this is matter does not come in separate packages and any understandings found through experiments or experience only become determined within a particular context of engagement. Agents, human and material “intra-act”³, their entanglements create specific phenomena and these all contribute to how reality comes into being. This suggests there are always alternative possibilities which remain to be examined under a different set of circumstances, nothing is fixed.

Importantly, Barad insists our interactions with matter are also ethically charged. Responsibility is not something we choose; we are always already engaged in a mutually performative relationship of responsibility with the world. Put simply we are always responsible for co-creating what is.

Nancy Tuana’s “interactionist ontology” also posits a world of complex relationality. She sees the importance of interdisciplinary work across fields such as the natural and social, not just as an option, but a necessity. She states our choices are ethical. Looking at how choices enable, as well as limit possibilities – what they conceal as well as reveal, and who this effects. We construct our experiences with the choices and distinctions we embrace, these have ethical and political significance. She recognises knowledge practices involve revealing differences, but there is a need to understand these differences are fluid, unfolding and situated.

This article presents a view of new materialism as a theory which rather than dividing and ordering, thinks beyond duality and binaries to understand the world as deeply interconnected in its ongoing reconfiguring. This recognition has political and ethical potential as it challenges concepts of the stable individuated subject, to focus greater attention on the impact of the social and global.

Notes:

1. Rachel Tillman, “Toward A New Materialism: Matter as Dynamic”. Minding Nature: Winter 2015, Volume 8, Number 1: https://www.humansandnature.org/toward-a-new-materialism-matter-as-dynamic. , 30,31.
2. Karen Barad, “Meeting the Universe Half Way: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning” (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 184.
3. Ibid, “Intra-action” signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies, 33.

Neomaterialism

Neomaterialism was published in 2013, as the title suggests examines the material vitalism that flows through and around us in various forms. With a specific focus on contemporary art and exhibition, Joshua Simon, a writer and curator, discusses the sociability of humans and material as rooted first and foremost in our world as commodities.¹

Simon begins by describing how progress over the last four decades has led to what we might think of as the material world becoming more dematerialised. Engagement has become less tactile and more abstract, with humans themselves becoming a commodity unknowingly through social networks over the internet. Labour has changed from one of production to one of consumption as individuals go into debt to absorb capital’s overflow. He asserts, humans no longer live with commodities, but instead live in the commodity’s world.²

According to Simon this has led to the emergence of a new sculptural gesture in contemporary art concerned with the commodity and how its economy activates us. Unlike the one-way street appropriation of Duchamp’s readymades, the “unreadymade” acknowledges the suspended authorship of things in the world. This includes the suspended existence of the exhibition, as this enables the commodity to be seen as an entity that precedes any object, including art objects. This gives an object’s account of what it means to be in the world.³

On concept of ownership Simon recalls the many critiques he has attended over the years. He states that while the main objective of these conversations is to attempt to safely escort these objects out into the world as artefacts, their somatic experience, the bodily experience we have in their company produces totally different meanings which undermine our alleged authorship and dominant opinions over these things. He recognises the humanist tendencies to claim ownership, hierarchy and knowledge over objects saying this is a “failed task”.⁵ He suggests instead, the moment of display offers contemplation of these things as they re-enter the world, that “exhibition actualizes the world”⁶

Private property remains key to understanding our relations with each other, and things in relation to other things. However, ownership requires exclusion, if something is mine, it’s not yours. Simon says that ownership is an economic speculation, a myth we can no longer believe in and suggests we require a new ethics for communicating with, taking care and watching over objects. He uses a well-known luxury watch advertisement as an example, which states “You never actually own a Patek Phillipe you merely look after it for the next generation”. Although this advert keys into the concept of inheritance which is largely accessible to the wealthy, in a broader sense it refers to the ability things have to live longer than humans. It reconceptualizes ownership, giving a glimpse at how inheritance could impel us to take care of things, to benefit our networks and those who come after us. Recognising the core value system that we own nothing gives sentimental value priority over exchange, use and sign values.⁷

Simon examines the language of commodities by reflecting on an essay Hito Steyerl wrote about Walter Benjamin’s 1916 text “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”. For Benjamin “the language of things is not the language that names, identifies and categorizes things – that is the language of man”⁸. Benjamin asserts that “the language of things is that of God, of potential, of what can be done with things. Its interest is in the extension of what things have to say – this is “the language of practice”.⁹ This proposes that language is not restricted to articulation through words but is rather a process of embodiment, each language speaking its own voice, from that embodiment meaning is translated through perception.

Steyerl reflects on Benjamin’s text to suggest that the practice of curating could translate the language of things into aesthetic relations. Not by inventing collectivities that are fetishized, but by “creating unexpected articulations that “present precarious, risky, at once bold and preposterous articulations of objects and their relations, which still could become models for future types of connection.”¹⁰ Steyerl’s ideas here bring together both early and late Benjamin, taking on the spiritual-vitalist direction and the social materialist one simultaneously. As Simon explains “(T)he commodity entails not only the subjectivity of the people who took part in the making, delivering, and selling it, but also of those who clean, dismantle, and scavenge it. The commodity is the form in which things come to be in this world.”¹¹ The commodity comes about through ongoing social relations we all participate in forming.

It is important to recognise that languages of practice; such as the language of music, art and sculpture are not translated through representation, but by actualizing what things have to say in the present. It is not about realism, but instead relationalism. The writing of Simon, Steyerl, and Benjamin seems to suggest that if the language of things is listened to, it engages in the energies of the material world and that these energies exceed description. It is charged with potential which goes beyond representation to become creative, productive, and materially agential, transforming the relations that define it.¹² Therefore, the ability to change the social, historical and material relations of the commodity exist and wait to be discovered within future interactions.¹³

Notes:

1. Joshua Simon. Neomaterialism (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013), 19.
2. Simon, Neomaterialism,25.  
3. Ibid., 40-41.
4. Ibid., 20-21.
5. Ibid., 14-15.
6. Ibid., 15.
7. Ibid., 29-30.
8. Ibid., 103-104.
9. Ibid., 104.
10. Ibid., 104.
11. Ibid., 104.
12. Hito Steyerl. The Language of Things. https://artistsspace.org/media/pages/exhibitions/hito-steyerl/1128046083-1570392245/the_language_of_things.pdf (accessed May 10, 2020), 4.
13. Joshua Simon. Neomaterialism, 105.

Mike Nelson: The Assett Strippers

Mike Nelson is a London based artist who constructs large scale sculptural environments. These are experiential, sensory experiences of material, often site specific and respond to certain periods in time. His latest commission, The Asset Strippers in 2019 was made in response to the architecture and history of the Duveen Galleries at the Tate, London. The exhibition text gives insight into the specifics of this installation via a conversation between the artist and Tate curators, Clarrie Wallis and Elsa Coustou.

Nelson explains the Duveen Galleries were the first purpose-built sculpture galleries in England. Built in 1937, they could be seen as a warehouse for storing monuments of a lost era. With this in mind he was drawn to the late 20^th century, post war time of his childhood. His parents and grandparents worked in textile factories towards a socially progressive vision, however, this declined along with the welfare state during the 70’s and 80’s. Nelson uses relics from the industrial era to examine how ongoing advancements continue to change value, production and labour in Britain. He wanted to return the rooms to what they once were, halls for monumental sculpture.

Online auctions of asset strippers and company liquidators were used to buy machinery and objects from the later part of the industrial era using the very digital technology which superseded it. Nelson describes these sites “acted like an ocean laying out options like beach debris”.¹ Focusing specifically on industrial machinery and objects reflective of general infrastructure, large sewing machines, agricultural machinery, wooden floors, concrete mixers and hospital doors to name a few, were used to fill the rooms of the Duveen in an immersive installation. Nelson carefully considers strategies of display, stacked in layered clusters these materials present a surprising encounter, an alternative perspective from which these objects are not usually seen. This acts to shift the conditioned perception unlocking new insights of possibility and potential. These obsolete materials are presented in a way which allows them to oscillate between machine and sculpture. Asset Strippers also highlights the way Britain’s industrial base at its peak in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created the wealthy patronage making these grand museums possible.

He is interested in “the way objects can be what they purport to be but also shift back into being the very matter from where they came, or what they are made from.”² In a recent interview Nelson says he enjoys collating objects or materials that might potentially become a work, but that they also may just exist as fellow travellers. He finds it interesting to ask when is an object sculpture, and when is it not?, and explains objects oscillate between two states, one of utter inconsequence and one of utter importance.³ With an inability to fix one true meaning, potential always exists for conditions to be reassessed and reflected upon in hindsight to examine new understandings.

For Nelson these machines are personally significant, but also hold a broader sentimental value, marked with the trace of labour, use and human touch, they refer to a time gone by. Most of his works are demolished after exhibition, this excites him to think they only exist in the memory of those who viewed them. He was having problems sourcing old four-by-two timber, his search led him to discover this wood was being bought by one dealer, shipped to China to make designer furniture and then shipped back and sold as luxury goods. This is “part of the whole madness of it all”⁴ he explains.

Materials exist as part of a larger evolving mass, constantly moving toward an uncertain future. The exhibition provides a specific context which transforms the debri into sculpture. Karen Barad suggests matter becomes known through the specific conditions in which it is being observed. That cuts are created between what matters and what is excluded from mattering but not once and for all.⁵ Specific conditions are significant because they have relevance within a larger phenomenon. This also relates to the thinking of Jacques Derrida and his concept of trace, which asserts that something is not only known through what is present, but also by what is absent. Or in other words, not just by what an object is, but also by what it is not.⁶

Although The Asset Strippers focuses the viewers attention on the physical, sculptural presence of these forms, the size, smell and material qualities of an outmoded industry, they also bear traces of the humans, labour and an economy which once made them useful. It may seem at first they sit quietly redundant, however, they are full of latent power not ready to stop working yet,⁷ and shown just before Brexit, naturally become part of a larger of dialogue about shifts in labour and ongoing concerns of capital and economic change, not just in Britain but also the wider world.

Notes:

1. Mike Nelson, Exhibition catalogue, Mike Nelson: The Asset Strippers. 2019
2. Nelson, Exhibition catalogue, Asset Strippers, 2019.
3. Mike Nelson, Art Basel Meet the Artists Mike Nelson. March 2020 https://www.artbasel.com/stories/meet-the-artists-mike-nelson
4. Hettie Judah, 2019. Interview: Fire sale Britain: Mike Nelson on why he turned the Tate into a big salvage yard. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/mar/18/mike-nelson-interview-tate-britain-asset-strippers-cement-mixer
5. Karen Barad, “Meeting the Universe Half Way: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning” (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 181.
6. Catherine Turner, “Critical Legal Thinking: Law and the political. Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction”, May 27 2016, https://criticallegalthinking.com/2016/05/27/jacques-derrida-deconstruction/
7. Hettie Judah, Interview, 2019.

The Artist’s Voice: Carol Bove  

Carol Bove is an American based sculptor who uses both found and fabricated pieces in her work. These become installed both in galleries and outdoors. This public artist talk was in conjunction with a large group exhibition at the ICA Boston in 2017, called The Artist’s Museum. The premise of the show was artists collections and how connections across culture and history can be made using these. This discussion focuses on how mechanisms of display are a primary concern of her work.

Bove begins by talking about the language of display, what it means and how it informs her work. She explains that the meaning and persistence of history have also been a constant concern for her, that languages are intertwined with history so these concerns are inextricably related.

Bove refers to display as a “language”. This implies a broader concept of language which expands beyond how we write and speak using words. As Saussure suggested language is semiotic; a code of signs and symbols we interpret to gain meaning.¹ Therefore, display plays an important role in the making of meaning, it can be read by the brain and directly felt by the body. The work of art is not self-contained, but includes the viewer, the method of display, the surrounding space it sits in and the histories, precedents and conventions which have gone before.

Bove sees the zeitgeist belief of 60’s Minimalism with the reduction of forms to their essential elements and the erasure of a history that came before, as a tabula rasa or clean slate. This logic was also employed by art galleries reducing them to a white cube. Bove states “the Minimalist assertion and developments is one of the fundamental elements in the language of display that we inherit now … any work that came after this has been sedimented on top of it”². Although galleries don’t have to look like a white cube anymore. The idea of the gallery as an objective space is trite and flawed. I argue this is a space like any other, defined by underlying systems of politics, hierarchy, capitalism and regulation. There is an ambiguous relationship to be had with the gallery, it can be both worked with and against. To look beneath the defining character and seemingly innocent, neutral white walls. Spaces, walls and definitions are penetrable, workable and porous. In this way institutional critique enables galleries to become both the problem and the solution.

Bove also believes the 60’s realignment of the gallery space carries unexamined assumptions about the frame, what it supplies to the art object and what experiences are possible. She states another really important framing mechanism is the readymade. Where the power rests with the artist to decide what the art is. However, it is our social conventions and belief about the frame of the gallery context that enables this transformation from non-art to art. Bove says “the gallery space brackets the object outside the realm of normal objects … outside its’ normal function and confers a different status on it”³. This is something she thinks of as ‘pedestal ontology’.  When something sits on a pedestal it’s raised up and physically separated from the realm of other objects. This allows us to ask, what does this object mean? She is interested in looking at the way we look, or what she describes as “bracketing the (bracket)”⁴. The ‘pedestal’ does not have to be a traditional plinth, for Bove the pedestal can a shelf, a table, even a layer of bright blue paint. Bove’s definition of a pedestal appears to be the mechanism which enables the work to be examined more fully.

Sensuous materials with a strong element of the tactile, markers of use and damage are important to Bove. She says she watches the viewer, they seem almost rabid, like a bully in a hurry to read the work like a text. She understands that works are also read cerebrally by the intellect, but rather than the viewer gaining meaning through references outside of the work from the conditioned mind, she prefers an experiential perception. Bove uses a few tactics to frustrate the viewer, to induce a more phenomenological experience. Steel is painted with layers of brightly coloured matt paint to look like rubber, which causes confusion. The viewer connects to the primitive appearance of rusty, contorted steel elements as they feel the force of what they have been through. Lastly the pedestal subtly alienates the viewer, this uncomfortable feeling brings them back into their internal body to experience the works in a more visceral way. This is also a reason why the scale of her work has grown over the years.

These techniques bring new materialist values into play, in particular the ideas of Karen Barad as she states “(H)umans do not simply assemble different apparatuses for satisfying particular knowledge projects but are themselves specific parts of the worlds reconfiguring.”⁵ Barad’s agential realist ontology suggests the mutual involvement of agency, material bodies, nature, culture, and discursive practices all perform to co-create meaning. She refers to this as a diffractive methodology, which respects the entanglement of knowledge production, reading important insights and approaches through one another to help illuminate how differences emerge, what gets excluded and and how those exclusions matter.⁵ 

Positioning is an essential feature of Bove’s work. She relies on the gallery space to ‘bracket’ or signal it is art. This leaves the question, could art be positioned outside an art context and not lose significance? Could this be a way to examine assumptions about the frame and what it supplies to the art object? To recognise the potential for exhibition to possibly become a broader, more inclusive experience.

Notes:

1. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Semiotics: Study of Signs” https://www.britannica.com/science/semiotics
2. Carol Bove, “The Artist’s Voice” Artist discussion presented at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, May 13 2017,https://www.icaboston.org/video/artists-voice-carol-bove 9:18
3. Bove Ibid. 18:10
4. Bove Ibid. 19:04
5. Karen Barad, “Meeting the Universe Half Way: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning” (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 184.
6. Ibid, 30.