New Materialisms

The term “new materialism” emerged at the brink of the new millennium, and it has been used in different scientific disciplines where it has been taking various meanings. What could be taken as a common denominator is the theoretical and practical “turn towards material”, i.e. emphasising the materiality of the world – both social and natural, as opposed to the post-structural focus on the text, systems of thought, and discourses. Materiality here stands for human bodies, other living beings, natural and built environment, as well as the material forces such as gravity and time. In the context of contemporary art practices “new materialism” is not a regular term, while in the domain of the new media art and film it has just started to be defined.

Commencing in 2011 with the exhibition Concretely Immaterial and systematically since 2015 through a series of exhibitions and the program line New Materialisms, the association grey) (area has been trying to contribute to the subject, in collaboration with other curators. The theme has been observed via the prism of post-media approaches to art, and via post-digital conditioning of our everyday, whereby digitality penetrates almost every aspect of society. The project aims at forming dialogues among important authors of concrete and conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s and to them connected discursive fields and artworks of contemporary practitioners who act in the post-media context. Furthermore, the shaping of an aesthetic experience as of working mechanism in the process of creating the physical world has been set as a premise. The change in discourse, that occurred a few decades ago, we can see in the example of the treatment of light and movement in artworks. While in the 1960s light and movement were introduced as new materials in visual arts, or more precisely, – Lumino-Kinetic art, they were still perceived as immaterial elements of the work in the visual domain. Since the 1960s some Lumino-Kinetic artworks have been questioning the limits of human visual perception, e.g. by using stroboscopic light and a physical object in motion. Today’s art practice has another approach to the notion of materiality and uses quantification of characteristics of different matter and phenomena as the elements for an artwork (e.g. database art). Among other elements, a (measurable) movement and light for real-time interactions of artwork have been often used. Some artists who have been following the aesthetics of the conceptual practices of the 1960s and 1970s in their contemporary work use data and quantification in their practice through the elements of the inversion of significance, the absurdity, humour, or the elements of the wondrous. New Materialisms explores the German philosopher Max Bense’s identification of the “aesthetic condition”, and his proposition that “the aesthetic condition is as material as the physical condition of any observed object”. His analysis pursued the goal of “programs for the production of aesthetic conditions”, using early computing machines. Materials relating to the infamous clash at a 1970 panel discussion between Bense and Joseph Beuys, which has been described as “the visibly spectacular finale to the project of a rational, mathematically oriented aesthetics”, is included in the project. Project New Materialisms has been carried out via multi-annual series of exhibitions, performances, and lectures. As we can claim with certainty that neither the curators of the show nor the artists saw both parts of the exhibition Concretely Immaterial that took place in 2011 in two physical spaces in the galleries of grey) (area and HICA - Highland Institute for Contemporary Art, the only person who experienced it in its entirety both in Croatia and Scotland is the colleague Sarah Cook, who wrote a reflection on that experience that we published in this monograph. The text by Bronaċ Ferran Strange Loops in the Binary – neither high road nor low reviewed the exhibitions New Materialisms (Station 2) and Programmable States? which were organized simultaneously again in 2015.

Program:

An object(ive) World: Siegfried Fruhauf, Rainer Kohlberger, Ralo Mayer, curator Gerald Weber, 2020.

Dina Karadžić, Vedran Gligo: 2020|5050 // Triptih o tektonskim transgresijama, 2020.

Sounding DIY, 2018: Tin Dožić, Claude Heiland-Allen, Noise Orchestra, Bioni Samp, Hrvoje Hiršl / Davor Branimir Vincze

Senzorna koža / Gerilska košnica, 2017: AnneMarie Maes

New Materialisms (Station 3.5): Improvizacija za osciloskop i Kaosspad, 2016: Ivan Marušić Klif

New Materialisms (Station 3.4), 2016: Eloi Puig

New Materialisms (Station 3.3), 2016: Hrvoje Hiršl

New Materialisms (Station 3.2), 2016: Goran Trbuljak

New Materialisms (Station 3), 2016: Alexei Blinov, Martin Callanan, Vladislav Knežević, Špela Petrič / Miha Turšič, Goran Trbuljak

New Materialisms (Station 1), 2015: Špela Petrič / Miha Turšič, (Digitalizirani) Praxis, Armin Medosch

Concretely Immaterial, 2011, grey) (area and HICA