scholarly journals Understanding Material vs. Immaterial in Conceptual and Digital Art

Tahiti ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rahma Khazam
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Digital Art ◽  
Art And Politics ◽  
Art Object ◽  
History Of ◽  
Technological Means ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Courtauld Institute

In the history of twentieth-century art, we can identify two key moments when the notion of the immaterial became a focus of attention. The first, spanning the period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, was the dematerialization of the art object in the context of conceptual art, famously described in Lucy Lippard's Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. The second was digital art, which likewise emerged in the 1960s, foregrounding the use of technological means to produce immaterial artworks. Yet in both cases, the claim of immateriality was unfounded. Building on accumulating evidence, the conference “Conceptualism and Materiality. Matters of Art and Politics” held at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London in 2019 drew attention to the importance of materials and materiality in conceptual art, countering its reputation as idea-centred. As for digital art, it has become increasingly obvious that the infrastructure and tools required to produce and maintain it are firmly grounded in the physical world, thereby challenging its alleged immateriality. The first part of this essay explores dematerialization and its aftermath in the context of conceptual art, while the second highlights the analogous developments taking place in digital art. My aim will be to shed light on these shifts from material to immaterial and back again in both conceptual and digital art, and map their similarities and differences. As I will show, both tried – and failed – to satisfy art's recurring but unrealizable yearning to rid itself of the material.

scholarly journals BEYOND BRAZIL: REMEMBERING GUY BRETT THROUGH HIS OWN EYES / Além do Brasil: lembrando Guy Brett através de seus próprios olhos

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (41) ◽  
pp. 350-408
Author(s):  
Michael Asbury
Keyword(s):  
Art Criticism ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
British Art ◽  
Art Object ◽  
Kinetic Art ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Shed Light

The British art critic Guy Brett has become a standard reference in Brazil through his writing on and friendship with artists such as Sergio Camargo, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Mira Schendel during the 1960s and later with Cildo Meireles, Antonio Manuel, Lygia Pape, Jac Leirner, Waltercio Caldas and so many others. While these artists have come, to a large extent, to define how contemporary art is understood nationally, Guy’s contribution helped weave their creative outputs within a larger art historical narrative, helping inscribe them, even if still only partially, within the hegemonic and institutional canons. Yet, it would be limiting to consider Guy’s relevance through this single, albeit important, perspective. This article, not so much an essay but a series of annotated quotes, seeks to shed light on Guy’s own intellectual trajectory, focusing on the particular way he came to articulate, through his writing and curation, the art that he was interested in. What actually interested him ranged from the singular subjective experience with the art object to its wider relation with the world. When referring to that which bridged such diverse approaches to art, Guy often invoked the idea of cosmic energies, field forces, sometimes in a literal sense such as in the case of electromagnetic force in the work of the Greek artist Takis, at other times more metaphorically. Such invocations whether referring to ancient cosmologies, millennial knowledges or scientific thought, never attempted to determine or impose his own perspective upon others or imply any sense of superiority of one type of art over another. In Guy’s own understanding, the universal seemed antithetical to the way it is usually prescribed within the history of modernism. Indeed, Guy never had a problem with modernism itself but with the narrow constraints with which it has been considered. His criticism was directed primarily towards how modernism has been historicised and instrumentalised within the institutional structures of art.Keywords: Guy Brett; Kinetic Art; Signals Gallery; Art Criticism; Decolonising. AbstractO crítico de arte britânico Guy Brett se tornou referência única no Brasil por meio de sua escrita e amizade com artistas como Sergio Camargo, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Mira Schendel durante a década de 1960, e mais tarde com Cildo Meireles, Antonio Manuel, Lygia Pape, Jac Leirner, Waltercio Caldas, assim como tantos outros. Embora esses artistas tenham, em grande parte, definido o modo como a arte contemporânea é entendida em âmbito nacional, a contribuição de Guy ajudou a tecer suas produções dentro de uma narrativa histórica da arte mais ampla, colaborando para os inscrever, ainda que parcialmente, nos cânones hegemônicos e institucionais. Seria, no entanto, limitado considerar a relevância de Guy mediante essa única, embora importante, perspectiva. Este artigo, não é tanto um ensaio, mas uma série de citações em busca de lançar luz sobre a trajetória intelectual de Guy, focalizando a maneira particular como ele veio a articular, por meio de sua escrita e práticas curatoriais, a produção de arte pela qual estava interessado. O que realmente o interessou variou desde a experiência subjetiva singular com o objeto de arte até sua relação mais ampla com o mundo. Ao se referir ao seu interesse por assuntos tão diversificados no campo da arte, Guy frequentemente invocava a ideia de energias cósmicas, forças de campo, às vezes em um sentido literal, como no caso da força eletromagnética existente na obra do artista grego Takis, outras vezes de forma mais metafórica. Tais invocações, sejam cosmologias arcaicas, conhecimentos milenares ou pensamentos científicos, nunca tentaram determinar ou impor suas próprias perspectivas sobre os outros ou implicaram qualquer senso de superioridade de um tipo de arte sobre outro. Na própria compreensão de Guy, o universal parecia antitético à maneira como é normalmente prescrito dentro da história do modernismo. Na verdade, Guy nunca teve problema com o modernismo, mas com a forma limitada pela qual tem sido considerado. Sua crítica era dirigida principalmente ao modo como o modernismo tem sido historicizado e instrumentalizado dentro das estruturas institucionais da arte.Palavras-chave: Guy Brett; arte cinética; Signals Gallery; Magiciens de la Terre; decolonial.

International Indeterminacy: George Maciunas and the Mail

ARTMargins ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 57-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colby Chamberlain
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Attorney General ◽  
Conceptual Art ◽  
New York State ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Mail Art ◽  
Art Object ◽  
Curatorial Practice ◽  
History Of

The term “network” has often been used to characterize Fluxus's internationalism and to identify its membership. This has led a number of scholars to argue that Fluxus anticipated forms of artistic exchange now associated with Internet-based art. More recently, it has cast Fluxus as a precedent for applying a network model to other transcontinental avant-gardes, particularly in curatorial practice. Yet in the rush to relate Fluxus to contemporary discourses on global connectivity, insufficient attention has been paid to the specific apparatuses that facilitated its cohesion. This article stages an intervention into Fluxus studies (and by extension Conceptual art, mail art, and other transnational movements associated with communication and the “dematerialization” of the art object) by drawing on the field of German media theory to analyze the “paperwork” that makes up much of the movement's material production. Specifically, it focuses on how the artist George Maciunas's engaged the postal system in order to facilitate Fluxus's collectivity, as well to insinuate Fluxus's methods of experimental composition into larger power structures. After an opening discussion of Maciunas's important diagrammatic history of Fluxus's development (a.k.a. the John Cage chart), the article tracks Maciunas's deployment of newsletters to organize Fluxus activities, his infamous mail-based sabotage proposals, his collaborations with Mieko Shiomi and Ben Vautier, and his “Flux Combat” with the New York State Attorney General.

scholarly journals Easy but not weightless – Pop Art, conceptual art, and politics: the progressive art of Miklós Erdély and Tamás Szentjóby in the second part of the 1960s

KÜLÖNBSÉG ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Péter Kőhalmi
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Pop Art ◽  
The Political ◽  
Art And Politics ◽  
Art Scene ◽  
The 1960S

Miklós Erdély’s theory of freedom can be analysed from the perspective of his general thoughts on the dichotomy of life and freedom.  However, the article focuses on the problem of Erdély’s theory of freedom in the context of the political. If, as he claims, freedom exists in art, then what is the relation of his art to the political, the actual conditions of freedom? This question can only be explored if his work is seen in context, in the context of the contemporary art scene of the 1960s. The paper claims that in comparison with the early neoavantgard art of Szentjóbi Tamás and company, Erdély’s work is tame or easy but surely not weightless.

scholarly journals Imagining Africa in Eastern Europe: Transcultural Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis in Cold War Yugoslavia

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 234-251
Author(s):  
Ana Antić
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Transcultural Psychiatry ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
World War ◽  
International Context ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Second World ◽  
Shed Light

This article seeks to write Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe into the history of post-Second World War global psychiatry and to explore the significance of Marxist psychiatry in an international context. It traces Yugoslav psychiatrists’ transnational and interdisciplinary engagements as they peaked in the 1960s. Focusing on the distinguished Belgrade psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Vladimir Jakovljevic (1925–68), it looks at Yugoslav psychiatry’s clinical and anthropological research in the global South to shed light on its contributions to Western-dominated transcultural psychiatry. Through this lens the article also explores how Eastern Europe’s intellectuals engaged with decolonisation and the notions of race, ‘primitivism’ and modernity. Jakovljevic’s involvement in transcultural psychiatry demonstrated the inherent contradiction of Eastern European Marxist psychiatry: its dubiously colonial ‘civilising mission’ towards the subalterns in its own populations and its progressive, emancipatory agenda. Jakovljevic’s writings about Africa ultimately turned into an unprecedented opportunity to shed light on some glaring internal inconsistencies from Yugoslavia’s own socio-political context.

The synthetic proposition: conceptualism as political art

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nizan Shaked
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Complex Method ◽  
Political Art ◽  
Art And Politics ◽  
Art Object ◽  
The Social ◽  
Martha Rosler ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Definition Of

This chapter takes a comparative look at several models of interdisciplinary conceptualist practices that responded critically to Conceptual Art’s original claims. Artists responded to a limitation they identified in the narrow focus of early Conceptual Art, and turned to the social, the political, and the “life-world,” external to the hermeneutic definition of art. When this second wind of conceptualism integrated external subject matter, it was no longer in the modernist sense of art and politics. Synthetic conceptualism incorporated the basic investigations of Conceptual Art to form a complex method of artmaking that was deconstructive just as it was referential. Artists integrated a meta-critique to reveal frameworks that endowed artistic language and strategies with pre-conceived meaning. Three artists exemplify this shift. Adrian Piper transitioned from an analysis of the art object as a factor of time and space to the role of cultural forms in formulating gendered and racialised social meaning; Mary Kelly from labour and gender issues to the discourse of the subject; and Martha Rosler from the documentary mode to the critique of representation in mass media.

Forging the “New” in Contemporary Art in Brazil, 1960s and 1970s

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Shtromberg
Keyword(s):  
Information And Communication Technologies ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Military Coup ◽  
Brazilian Art ◽  
Art Object ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

The history of exhibitions in Brazil during the 1960s and 1970s provides a key reference point for understanding how artistic vanguards and contemporary art unfolded in direct relationship to social and political contexts. The seminal exhibitions during these pivotal decades elucidate how the contemporary in Brazilian art stages and reframes conceptions of the “new” vis-à-vis the art object. The exhibitions in question trace the development of Ferreira Gullar’s não-objeto (non-object, 1959) and its path toward the idea-based artwork, an impulse that was prevalent throughout the 1960s in the United States and Europe as well. Inaugurated by the emergence of Brasília, Brazil’s new capital city in the formerly barren hinterlands of the state of Goiás, the 1960s witnessed a new model of artistic practice that pushed the boundaries between art and life, actively seeking out the participation of the viewer. This is most evidenced in the canonical work of artists Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark. By the 1970s, challenges to the utopian undertakings from the previous decades had become imbricated with political activism, as artists and intellectuals alike pronounced a commitment to the quest for democracy after the military coup of 1964. The 1970s also witnessed heightened artistic engagement with new information and communication technologies, including the use of video equipment and computers. Constructing the history of Brazil’s contemporary art via the most important moments of its display will not only historically and politically contextualize some of the groundbreaking artists and artworks of these two decades, but also introduce readers to the challenges that these artworks posed to the more traditional methods of institutional display and the criteria used to interpret them.

Turkey’s Small Capital, A Player from the Start: Relations with the State and Big Capital

2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-108
Author(s):  
EMRE BALIKÇI
Keyword(s):  
State Policies ◽  
The State ◽  
Early History ◽  
Business History ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
State Involvement ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Shed Light

This article aims to shed light on the early history of small-scale capital in Turkey. Turkey’s paradigm of development in the 1960s and 1970s, as in other belatedly industrializing countries, meant active state involvement, generally in favor of big capital. This emphasis on the large players has caused small capital’s influence on the era’s state policies to be largely overlooked. This article argues that small capital, popularized in the 1990s with the concept “Anatolian capital,” has deeper roots in Turkish economic and business history than formerly thought.

scholarly journals On the History of the Formation and Processing of the Collection of the Tibetan Texts from Khara-Khoto Kept at the IOM, RAS

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-18
Author(s):  
Alexandr V. Zorin ◽  
Alla A. Sizova
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Period ◽  
Russian Academy Of Sciences ◽  
Current State ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Academy Of Sciences ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Post Soviet Period

The Tibetan manuscripts and block prints from Khara-Khoto that were passed to the Asiatic Museum with other texts brought by P.K. Kozlov from his Mongolia and Sichuan Expedition have been insufficiently studied. Their processing was initiated in the second half of the 1960s and continued in the Post-Soviet period. The collection of the Tibetan Texts from Khara-Khoto, according to our analysis, included a number of documents from other sources. Trying to understand why it took place, we looked for and found some archival documents that shed light on the history of the formation of this collection and, simultaneously, helped to clarify some general issues concerning the fate of texts brought by P.K. Kozlov from Khara-Khoto. This paper presents the results of our study of the documents found in the St. Petersburg Branch of the Archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Archives of the IOM, RAS, the Russian Ethnographic Museum and the Russian Geographic Society. The description of the events is divided into two parts: the first one reconstructs the chronology of the process of transferring manuscripts and block prints of P.K. Kozlovs Expedition to the Asiatic Museum; the second one deals with the history of the processing of the Tibetan texts from Khara- Khoto starting from the 1920s and up to present, when the contents of the collection have been critically revised. The table that reflects the current state of the Collection of the Tibetan Texts from Khara-Khoto kept at the IOM, RAS is provided in the appendix.

Cinema as Idea

2020 ◽  
pp. 439-521
Author(s):  
Jonathan Walley
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Delayed Response ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Art World ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Prior Art ◽  
Expanded Cinema ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Chapter 6 considers works of expanded cinema that could be called “conceptual cinema.” “Conceptual,” here, refers to the belief that cinema among many avant-garde/experimental filmmakers and critics that cinema was ultimately a conceptual phenomenon, even when it took forms that seemed decidedly material. The term, or variants of it, was used in the 1960s and 1970s, often to refer to “imaginary” films, films planned or written but purposely never executed, and unprojected or unprojectable films. There are parallels between such conceptual cinematic works and conceptual art. In both cases, concepts, intentions, imagination, and discourse are taken to be as constitutive as art works as materials and physical processes. The objects of the film medium were, and continue to be, de-centered in favor of these less tangible, conceptual, or discursive dimensions of cinematic practice. While conceptual art will be a point of reference, chapter 6 will also show that a concept-based ontology of cinema emerged organically from within the history of avant-garde/experimental film. That is, it should not be thought of simply as a delayed response by filmmakers to prior art world developments, as if playing catch-up with their fellow artists.

scholarly journals Listening to the Past: History, Psychiatry, and Anxiety

2005 ◽  
Vol 50 (7) ◽  
pp. 373-380 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Tone
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Past History ◽  
History Of Psychiatry ◽  
Biological Psychiatry ◽  
Political Factors ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Shed Light

This article explores the history of psychiatry and the rise of biological psychiatry and suggests ways in which the study of history can shed light on current psychiatric practice and debate. Focusing on anxiolytics (meprobomate in the 1950s and benzodiazepines in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s) as a case study in the development of psychopharmacology, it shows how social and political factors converged to popularize and later stigmatize outpatient treatments for anxiety. The importance of social context in the creation of new therapeutic paradigms in modern psychiatry suggests the need to take into account a broad range of historical variables to understand how modern psychopharmacology has emerged and how particular treatments for disorders have been developed, diffused, and assessed.

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