Academic literature on the topic 'Materiality (art)'

In this dissertation I explore the phenomenon that Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht calls "presence effects" as it is illuminated through encounters with performance art. In Chapter One I describe what is meant by materialities of communication and outline three heuristic features of materiality. In Chapter Two I define performance generally as a mode of action and performance art as a mode of encounter. Chapters Three, Four, and Five utilize the theoretical foundations established in Chapters One and Two to examine the work of three performance artists: Carey Young, Tim Miller and my own performance persona, Reddy the Robot. Finally, in Chapter Six I concretize the potential utility this dissertation may hold for readers interested in materiality, presence, and performance art. Ultimately I argue that tuning into presence effects (as present in performance art and otherwise) can help underscore the value of presence, rethink what limits mean, and highlight the irreducibility of the body.

La thèse étudie la question du rapport à la matière des artistes britanniques et de leurs critiques à différentes étapes de la fin du dix-huitième siècle au début du vingtième siècle. Au coeur de ce travail de recherche se trouve la notion de texture, pensée comme outil critique renvoyant à la fois à la surface peinte des oeuvres et à leur iconographie. La thèse démontre que la matérialité apparaît comme une dimension fondamentale de ce qui fait la spécificité de la peinture britannique. La notion de texture, conçue comme concept plastique plus qu'essentialiste, permet de rendre compte de certaines tendances persistantes qui structurent la création artistique, la pensée théorique et le débat critique en Grande Bretagne. Sur la période observée, nombreux sont les artistes qui s'attachent à faire sentir la vérité des phénomènes naturels et le vernaculaire dans leur tangibilité. Aussi, l'approche profondément concrète de la nature (humaine et végétale) par les peintres britanniques rend compte du rapport direct qui s'opère dans leur peinture entre matière observée et matière représentée. La conscience des matériaux et du matériel, telle que la révèle le discours critique, est au centre des problématiques du champ artistique en Grande Bretagne. En historicisant ce rapport à la matière, il s'agit d'inscrire la question de la texture dans un contexte épistémologique — qui lie création artistique et empirisme — et dans un rapport, excentrique, à la modernité. Cet angle d'approche permet de relier différentes périodes trop souvent perçues comme étanches et en ce sens de porter un regard nouveau sur l'art britannique<br>This dissertation looks at how the meaning of the painted surface engaged artists and critics in contemporary discourses at different stages between the late eighteenth century and early twentieth century. At the heart of this research project is the notion of texture, thought of as a critical tool, referring both to the painted surfaces of artworks and to their iconography.This dissertation demonstrates that the concept of materiality is a productive optic through which the history of British art can be read. The notion of texture, conceived as a plastic concept rather than an essentialist one, allows for the identification of persistent tendencies structuring artistic creation, theoretical thinking and critical debates in Great Britain. In the period under focus, there are numerous artists who consistently try to capture the truth of natural phenomena and the tangibility of the vernacular. Thus, British painter's profoundly concrete approach to nature (human or topographical) testifies to the direct links which are created in their paintings between observed and represented matter. The consciousness of materials and of materiality, as revealed by critical discourses, is at the centre of artistic debates in Great Britain. By historicizing the approach to matter, I situate the question of texture in an epistemological context linking artistic creation to empiricism. Considered in this way, texture takes on an eccentric relationship to modernity. This prism of study allows me to link different periods too often perceived as watertight and therefore to offer a new outlook on British art

This thesis brings feminist ontologies into a renewed dialogue with post-phenomenological landscape studies through the development of a critical arts-research practice. Contemporary landscape scholarship in cultural geography foregrounds landscaping practices as performative; visual culture studies, similarly influenced by phenomenology, critiques the powerful fixings of representation; whilst current commentaries on art-geographies focus on questions of interdisciplinarity, rather than the potential for art practice-as-research to be generative of politically complex cultural geographies. Landscape, replete with complex power geometries and tension, both resists fixing and framing, and also becomes defined or imaged by these same operations. My goal in this thesis is to find a way of working, as an artist, with an understanding of landscape as being continually in eventful—and sometimes violently eventful—process, beyond conventional framings of image and landscape. Initially, this art practice (undertaken as research within cultural geography) worked with a violent flash flood and resultant loss of life, and was set against the backdrop of picture-postcard West Cornwall. Whilst focused through practice on this usually trickling mile-long moorland stream, something happened. This research became infected by concurrent geo-political events. Through practice in the studio, the violent lifeworld of the stream collided with an activist project associated with the 2014 Gaza conflict. Land and image became both occupied and ghosted. This corporeal and material collision of practice(s) afforded a productive entanglement of practice and theoretical engagement. My search for a way of working with landscape as an artist that accounts for the unpalatable dimensions of material formations, for the dying within living, for the exclusions, subjugation, violence, or even extinctions of landscape—led me to realise that I cannot stand back innocently and safely behind the camera, outside of the frame. I propose that landscape is inherently violent, and that as such, landscaping practices are always politically differentiated and situated. It is a violence in which there can be no innocent place of on-looking; we are all mutually implicated in landscape and landscaping-practices, and indeed, the ghosts of our own vulnerabilities are never far away. The thesis demonstrates that the unpredictability and riskiness of researching through a critical arts practice, can produce the conditions for disruptive interventions generative of new ways of (body)knowing in the world. These ways of knowing serve to confront the violence and contradictions of a fast changing enviro/geopolitical landscape. Working from within an art practice—as geographical research—contributes a perspective of political complexity and generative encounter, in which unexpected collisions, between things, practices, and bodies function to produce spatial connections beyond contemporary analysis.