So I wrote this essay. About materiality. about dematerialization. It is pretty fascinating a topic. In a world where art has been shifting away from the context of a painting on the wall, has art become less material? It seems to be increasingly material. It just is subservient to the conceptual value. Sometimes I want to defy materiality because I have some notion of reaching freedom in a life where I am confined to time and space, confined to live within a physical body. Yet I am an artist because I love 'stuff'. I want physical testaments to my creations. Latour in his philosophies has a similar ambiguity to his viewpoints on materiality, not seeing to reach any strong conclusions, and maybe within that is the truest beauty. Anyhows. I shall stop talking and let you read it...
Rivka Cyprys
7/1/18
“Moving beyond materiality”
“The tiresome strife between objective physical matter and subjective social force gives way to a more fascinating theme; Objects” (pg.3)
Art. Immateriality. Can those two coexist? Can art truly be immaterial?
At what point does art lose its status of art due to its lack of presence of materiality? But most importantly is immateriality a legitimate claim to be said of any artworks thus far? These are all wider questions on art, but can be explored on some level, through lenses pinpointed on artists who have these claims within their artwork. Tomas Saraceno gave a lecture on the topic “Moving beyond materiality”, an aspiration he has within his artwork. Looking at particular pieces of his work, that claim is perplexing due to the physical mass of his work, yet artists such as Robert Barry make similar claims as well, and his work does occupy less physical or visible space. In “Prince of Networks – Bruno Latour and Metaphysics” by Graham Harman, the duality or conflict of materiality of object is weighed against its identity purely as a network of data, whether via energy or social exchange and the like.
According to Latour it is possible to deny materiality, perceiving objects as purely as networks, an exchange, a system of molecules, atoms and data, – “Biological systems exchange molecules networks of chemical reactions … Thus, biological networks operate in the realm of matter, whereas social networks operate in the realm of meaning”, a claim Saraceno has of his work. Yet ultimately, “there is no art which does not bear some burden of physicality. To deny it is to descend to irony”, Mel Bochner (Materiality, Page 168). As long as artwork occupies the physical space we live in, it is bound to have a level of materiality. Or is it? Can art be a network devoid of physical matter, the possibility of its materialistic, somatic entity being denied?
The book “Prince of Networks – Bruno Latour and Metaphysics” holds an extensive look into what is coined “Object – oriented philosophy” and explores the different angles of the materiality or lack of it within objects. “Latour’s position is somewhat ambiguous when it comes to the subject/object dualism” (P.158) therefore it is difficult to determine his final opinion on the mater yet allows for an open discussion of the two-sided argument.
Latour speaks of ‘’Actualism” - and that “nothing transcends actuality”, implying a concreteness of objects in physical space. “Things exist independently of us or are constructed by the mind, Latour says they are “socially” constructed […] nothing exists but actants and all of them are utterly concrete” (pg.16). Latour holds that an “object is more than its relations,” (pg.152) for if that were the case you reach a space where the world is “a single lump universe, a world devoid of any specific realities at all” (Pg.159), which Latour seems to reject. In this vein an object is purely an object, to speak of it in relation to other abstract or more transcendental qualities seems to be eliminated as an option.
“An object is weird – it is never replaceable by any sum total of qualities or effects. It is it’s own thing apart from all foreign relations with the world.” (Pg.188)
However there is a simultaneous argument claiming objects to exclusively be their relations, mainly as the view of Whitehead, yet something that Latour held of. “It makes no sense to speak of actual entities as enduring units” (pg.152). “A thing for Latour is no more than its sum total of perturbations of other entities. There is no mysterious residue in the things hiding behind their relations with other things.” (Pg.158). This would also be the opinion of Hume “who famously denies that an object exists as anything more than a bundle of qualities habitually linked together by the mind” (Pg.153)).
With these two contradictory approaches it makes it difficult to know where Latour stands, whether understanding an object to be limited to its physicality or devoid of it in entirety “Latour’s position lies somewhere in the middle of the following continuum” (Pg.159).
Tomas Saraceno has the hope of moving away from materiality, “and make accurate three-dimensional data,” seeing his work as a network of data rather then physical matter. Artworks generally have physical presence - it’s questionable to speak of move from the realm of materiality to art existing as networks of data, particularly when looking at a large installation such as those of Tomas Saraceno’s, whose larger scale installations occasionally have sculptural values, such as “Cloud city” (2102) which “consists of a 28-foot-high aggregate of 16 interconnected 12- and 14-sided polyhedrons the size of small rooms that are made of polished steel and clear plexiglass.” Saraceno, seemingly acknowledges the existence of materiality, even by moving away from its usage, making it questionable if he has actually removed himself from its limitations.
Although Latour’s discussion on object-oriented philosophy held a duality that allowed for no clear resolution, by observing both sides of this division we are able to explore middle grounds, allowing an object to be its relations it is an entity that consists of more than just its concreteness. The object-Oriented Philosophy allows that duality of understanding materiality and objectivity, “Objects exist as autonomous units, but they also exist in conjunction with their qualities, accidents, relations, and moments without being reducible to these.” (P.156)
“This means they cannot fully dissolve into a global system of relations” (Pg.161) he holds that even if the object is a relational network– there is still “a specific individual set of relations.” (Pg.161)
“In principle we can have an intuition of the essence of any object; they do not lie in some transcendent realm beyond consciousness, but are embedded within it.” (Pg.178)
“Saraceno's works ‘refuse to be subordinated to tectonics,’ remarked Nader Tehrani ” Saraceno’s work is resisting “tectonics”, building and structural limitations. This is an interesting statement as Saraceno is a trained architecture, yet “the artist is more of a composer than an urban planner.” – artistically Saraceno is pushing materiality and structure within social contexts. However there is still an aspect of materiality that assumedly would be taken for granted within architectural context - as one who deals with physical space and constructions within that space. In Reconstruction #1 by Jane Finigan, she says, “Saraceno understands architecture as ideal, or in the platonic mode, idea, nominal structures that do not, or will they ever, know any phenomenal form.” (Pg.28) Which is a complicated duality – a structure that is said to have no form. Of his work in the Barbican as part of his “Air-Port-City” project (2016) - they said, ‘The architecture dissolves, and undermines it’s very status as a structure.” (Pg.28)
In Saraceno’s work “Cloud city” (2012) constructed on the roof of the Metropolitan museum of New York, although in other contexts it’s said, “What steel was to the cities of the 20th century, perhaps air will be to those of the new millennium. Water, air and gas — the most mercurial of substances — are the materials of the artist” the structure of that particular work was steel and pexiglass. It is an incredible structure, a beautiful piece of art, but nonetheless it undeniably a structure made up of metals, a material, that has a prominent place in form. In the works such as “In orbit” (2013) and “On Space time form”(2012) moving away from the argument is more understandable, the material being less prominent in usage, although still evidently there.
Saraceno’s work explores many topics and it is moving away from the traditional usage of space, and a sense of networking, which allows for a duality of concepts and the networking beyond pure solid materiality. There is the “extended spatial environment” a sense of interactions between human and space, and social transactions. Transcending pure physicality and thinking about environmentally friendly advancements, “Most of his works are variations on a theme: transparent envelopes of air suspended high above the ground. These envelopes may contain plant life, water, air or bodies; they are blueprints for incubating a world in the sky,” yet the physicality still visibly stands.
There are art movements such as conceptual art, challenging the need for art to occupy physical space in the form of a painting or sculpture. Even within minimalism to a lesser extent; but as long as there is an object – a material used in the artwork – there is visible materiality.
An art piece such as “Inert Gas Series/Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon/From a Measured Volume to Indefinite Expansion”, 1969 by Robert Barry possibly moved away from materiality in a more tangible sense, the gases that Robert Barry released don’t stay confined to any set amount of space and therefore indefinable. It has no dimensions. The artwork has little physical remnants. Barry said, “There wasn’t any object. The thing didn’t get in the way – it simply was what was going on.” (Some places to which we can come for a while to “be free to think about what we are going to do.”” p.31) Even then there is a canister involved, there is documentation involved. “While documentary photographs were taken of the action of the releases, the only physically tangible evidence of the work would remain the poster […] He has put something into the world but you just can’t see it or measure it. Something real but imperceptible.” Robert Barry was working with nothingness - that seemed to be a goal of his within the art, yet, is it really ‘nothing’?
Another artwork by Barry was “’90 mc Carrier Wave (FM)’, 1968, is a work that resulted from de-materialization, a key concept in his work. No one could see the sound being transmitted...” (pg.75) Materials were used in both artworks but their visibility wasn’t within a large structure.
Barry said, “The term ‘art’ (…) may be a term that we are going to have to eliminate to really get what art is about.” (Pg.37) Maybe the problem is within the perception of art; to change the definition of art will allow the freedom beyond the physical matter or materialistic values. Yet Barry is speaking of art that arguably takes up less physical space than the installations or sculptures of Tomas Saraceno do.
Barry isn’t trying to create a physical structure that involves human interaction, which makes de-materialization more attainable, whilst Saraceno is setting out to create ‘cities’. Human involvement usually implies a certain level of materiality.
Whitehead said – “I have a vague feeling that we would need to drop the Einstein-Minkowski model of four-dimensional space-time” (pg.174) a statement that “is perfectly scientific despite amounting to nothing more than a hunch” (Pg.174)
Despite all theorizing, “we must uphold objects” (Pg.175) to speak of an alternative viewpoint can have scientific or philosophical sensibility but doesn’t particularly reflect an in-life experience. (Pg. 175)
Bringing phenomenology into question allows us to say materiality is only the mind’s projection, yet wouldn’t be a valid argument in reference to 3D structures as the likes of Saraceno’s installations that exist in dimensions deeper than the ones constructed by the mind’s eye. “The third dimension can never be given as a mental content, since contents come only in the form of two-dimensional flat surfaces, with the third dimension never receiving direct visual expression. Simply put: we experience objects, not masses of sense data.” (Pg.197), and although there may be more than what initially meets your eye, and arguably especially in reference to art that is intended to have ulterior meaning, but within the material itself, “is always one object undergoing accidental, transient changes that do not alter the thing itself.” (Pg.198)
Zubíri would hold of the essence of things, and therefore the experience of the thing is effected by other factors, yet “The interplay here between unity and plurality of the thing is called ‘essence’ […] destroy the real object and you have destroyed the essence at the same time” (Pg.206) it is valid and holds importance, yet resides within the materiality that when lost – is lost automatically with it.
By talking about the physical properties within an artwork we don’t have to be making it devoid of other narratives, allowing it the freedom to transcend its physical matter. Materialist are capable of doing otherwise, “they try to annihilate all intermediate levels of meaning and accept only a final, physical substratum.” (Pg.170) The defect of paying too much attention to the physical matter of artwork, is that it has intentions far beyond its physicality, yet acknowledging physicality doesn’t have to deny additional, purposeful attributes.
There is always the risk of losing that battle however to the materialist, “materialists have scored repeated triumphs over alchemists, astrologers, and spiritual obscurantists in the kingdom of nature, while only irrational reactionary resistance has blocked the same progress in political and intellectual matters” (Pg. 171) Looking at art through an intellectual standpoint is important so it doesn’t fall into a category that isn’t accountable to reason at all, yet arts is the place to push these boundaries, where dreamers can dream, creators can create, where the lines of reality are blurry. For Saraceno to aspire to create cities that exist beyond the planes of reality as they have been understood to be up till this point in time is admirable, whether accomplished in actuality or not.
Essentially as physical beings within a physical world there is no relief of materiality in our existence. To aspire, as an artist to challenge this and move away from the axioms of lived life is understandable and maybe admirable, but has it been accomplished yet? Not really. However- if this is truly attainable in any full capacity, that, we are yet to discover.
Bibliography
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