Locally, the Art Association of Australia & New Zealand (AAANZ) has a call for papers (due 1 September) which includes a session on NM convened by Barbara Bolt and alluding to some Melbourne-based practitioners' work: 'The "New Materialism"in and through Sculpture and Spatial Practice'. The Call for Papers can be read online or downloaded as a pdf at: http://aaanz.info/aaanz-home/conferences/2013-conference/inter-discipline-2013-call-for-papers/ Bolt's session abstract reads:
In New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies (2012), Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin propose that where artworks are concerned, a ‘new materialist perspective’ engages the entanglement between the form of content (the material condition of the artwork) and the form of expression (the sensations as they come about) (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012: 90). With its intimate engagement with objects, materiality and spatial and social relations, Sculpture and Spatial practice provide the exemplary conditions of possibility for examining the ethical, aesthetic, epistemological and ontological claims of the new materialism through the arts. This panel calls on rhythm’s expressive territories in Bianca Hester’s sculptural fashionings, the bothersome matter and the humorous life of Sarah Crowest’s mounds, the action improvisations of Benjamin Woods and the introverted kinetic sculptures of Laura Woodward in order to take stock of the opportunities and limits offered by a new materialist perspective.
You may remember Benjamin Woods from his Outward Project earlier this year - this will almost certainly get discussed in this session. There are other sessions proposed for this conference that also have the ring of NM about them -- sometimes contesting some of its premises (which can only be a Good Thing).
Overseas, the Association of Art Historians (AAH) in the UK has a particularly interesting session listed for their 2014 Annual Conference. Convened by Sophie Halart and Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra, the session is titled: Making Do - Materiality in the Conceptual Age:
The
emergence of conceptual art in the United States and post-war Europe marked the
most radical change of paradigm since Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made. Advocating
the ‘dematerialization’ of the art object and a redefinition of art as a
(self-) questioning language, conceptualism challenged received ideas about the
production and circulation of artworks. Over recent years, a large body of
research has examined the development of conceptual practices in so-called ‘peripheral’
regions, such as Eastern Europe and Latin America, and the ways in which they
responded to the double imperative of resisting the cultural hegemony of the
West/North and opposing authoritarian regimes. Yet the articulation of
conceptualism as a critical category deserves further attention.
This
panel seeks to re-examine conceptualism in the light of that which it has
tended to negate: materiality. Pertaining to the artwork’s
physical existence, as well as to its ability to trigger an embodied relation
with the audience, a reconsideration of materiality
in conceptual art raises questions about the historical conditions of artistic
production and the roles of gender and space within this practice. What does
materiality tell us about a conceptual piece? How are the material and
conceptual intertwined? How do different media involved in conceptual art approach
and treat matter? Is there such a thing as a ‘return’ of materiality
in the post-conceptual age? How are these notions deployed institutionally? The
panel will assess the importance of exploring
the interrelations of conceptualism and materiality, and encourage comparison
and dialogue between different regions and timeframes.
Also listed in the abstracts are sessions on 'Material Translations' (a theory of transnationalism and material meaning) and 'Matters of Fact', on the 'material and ontological aspects of artmaking' (which sounds suspiciously like an NM discussion to me). View the Session Abstracts at: http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/2014-conference where you can download or browse a pdf under 'Call for Papers'.
The next Sawtooth roundtable is on the agenda for discussion today: so those of you previously invited to the Thunking Table watch your emails.
