The Re- and Dematerialization of the Object (of Art) Through the Analysis of Hungarian Examples from the Late 20th and 21st Century

Tatai, Erzsébet (2013) The Re- and Dematerialization of the Object (of Art) Through the Analysis of Hungarian Examples from the Late 20th and 21st Century. In: The challenge of the object: 33rd congress of the International Committee of the History of Art, Nuremberg, 15th - 20th July 2012 = Die Herausforderung des Objekts: 33. Internationaler Kunsthistoriker-Kongress/ CIHA 2012, Nürnberg. Germanisches Nationalmu. Wissenschaftliche Beibände zum Anzeiger des Germanischen Nationalmuseums, vol. 32, 4 . Verlag des Germanischen Nationalmuseums, Nürnberg, pp. 1283-1286. ISBN 978-3-936688-64-1

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Abstract

Examining an object (of art) entails the examination of art itself. That is, in a narrower sense, the question is whether art manifests itself in its materiality or it can be comprehended through something else. Although the advocates of dematerialization insist that the essence of art is not in its materiality – the material is merely a medium and rematerialization is not necessarily its opposite but perhaps merely a struggle for visibility or for crossing the stimulus threshold. Around 1970 dematerialization was – as Lippard and Chandler put it – a complex phenomenon that could be traced back to various motives (for example, notions that held that form and medium were equally insignificant, that art lived in the mind and had a conceptual existence, was not commodity, and consequently required increasingly less material and ultimately the object [of art] might even be invisible.) The absence of the object of course suggests a shift toward art becoming a theorethical thing; on the other hand, however, dematerialization corresponded to the underground modus vivendi under the Communist era. After the pictorial turn and the rematerialization of art, the absence of the object has a different significance. Firstly, it underlines the intellectual and contextual character of art, and secondly, it highlights its sociological aspect. Increasingly, art is an intellectual practice or a service, rather than the production of luxury goods. By means of its special visual imagery it poses questions to society. The paper analyses parallel contemporary art practices from the point of view of how they contribute to the discourse of the lack of the object of art.

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