A Prior Magazine # 17
MATERIALISM
Lost memories from these days by David Maljkovic Poor, Surreal or Shadowless, Re-runs and Returns Questions of thingness, of the contested primacy of the object in art and of the status and fate of material culture more generally, have clearly reemerged at centre stage of the contemporary art scene in recent years. They were preceded, some years ago, by a resurgent interest in the issue of craft and craftsmanship, form and formlessness, that signals a renewed desire for (or at least a definite willingness to return to) materiality, or a more immediate experience of material reality, that could be said to have been born from a general disillusion, growing fatigue, and downright discontent with the regime of dematerialization that reigns supreme in the global information economy. Although this does not necessarily mean that art production is now suddenly steeped in base or literal materialism – and we were told early on that this year’s Berlin Biennial would feature a night exhibition, Mesnuits sont plus belles que vos jours, conceived specifically to accommodate the curatorial challenges of immaterial art’s many guises: discursive practices, film, performance and sound art etc. – it does seem fair to state that some of the most important developments in contemporary art are shaping up around concerns and questions (deemed irrelevant and obsolete only a generation ago) of a decidedly ‘materialist’ bent.
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A return to matter and stuff, to “things themselves” then, as the phenomenological creed would have it – and maybe the crux of this dynamic lies not so much in the things to which we appear to be returning, as in the very
movement of returning, of turning and going back, of looking to past preoccupations in both anger and love, curiosity and sadness. Seen in this light, the revival of a sensuous materialist sensibility could be framed within the much larger context of the culture of melancholy retrospection and partial nostalgia that have become hallmarks of continental European art of the late nineties in particular. It is no coincidence that so much attention in the current issue of A Prior is being lavished on the ultimate manifestation of thingness – that most emblematic and melancholy prone of things, that is the monument. Solid and built to last for posterity, often outlasting the ideologies that they were meant to embody, monuments are a defining feature of contemporary Berlin.