On the way out throw me an idea or two … cont.
Dave Beech Acconci wouldn’t be the classic artist of dematerialization. You would maybe get more mileage out of Barry or Weiner in terms of a dematerialization of physical matter that prioritizes their conceptual nature. Or you could think of the eras…ed de Kooning drawing maybe as different kind of precedent? Or the various examples of self-destructive art? Picabia’s ‘Fig Leaf’ might be interesting too. What about Landy’s skip?
My view, Paul, is that the conceptualists seriously underestimaged the materiality of ideas and culture. Ideas that are denied material presence (and I am including speech in this) eventually wither and die. Ideas simply do not exist independently of materiality even if they are not ontologically reducible to it. People who are very experienced at Chess can play in their heads, but they need to learn on a board with pieces. The same goes for learning holy scripture by heart. We might like to think that our ideas are internal and belong to us, but their existence in large part depends on the material practices and institutions that seem to be separable from them.
Paul O’Kane Yes, I am always amused by the prevalence of B&W phortographs and typewritten texts which now stand-in for what may have seemed at the time to be ‘dematerialsed’ practices. Photography and typewriting in the heyday of Conceptualism seemed t…o be considered a kind of invisible and objective record untouched by idiosyncratic material qualities -hilarious.
However, studying PhD in a framework of ‘History of Ideas’ I did become very impressed by the way that our ‘world’ is so thoroughly shaped by ideas, ideas which, while immaterial take concrete forms in order to impact upon the world but which are also infinitely ‘plastic’ and ‘malleable’ in the sense D&G would agree I think. Ideas must be irreverently ‘forged’, ‘reformed’ ‘juxtaposed, ‘turned upside-down’ etc. etc. i.e. we must never treat them as sacred or unworldly but in just the same way we treat any other material.
Dave Beech I think we have very different ontologies of the ‘idea’ Paul
Paul O’Kane Oh no that’s awful!
