A Matter of Historicity: Material Practices in Audiovisual Art

The material body of audiovisual artworks seems an apt site for exploring arts currently much discussed potential as a public agent, touching upon social and political issues. Theoretical developments in art theory, film and media studies and feminist/queer theory point towards a material turn, which calls for a critical exploration of the material bases of artifacts as significant and potentially agential in political and cultural dynamics. However, current critical assessments of politically engaged audiovisual artworks often continue to privilege structural and content-based readings, and to neglect the material aspects of the works in question: their formal, technological, and spatial dimensions, as well as their haptic, tactile, and sonic aspects. Aligning art and film theory with an address of technological and formal aspects, our project will develop a material criticism for contemporary, politically engaged audiovisual artworks. Our focus is on recent works by Yael Bartana, Anna Biller, Phil Collins, Tacita Dean, Harun Farocki, Omer Fast, Bruce LaBruce, Tsai Ming-Liang, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Alex Zhang Huangtai, all of which pursue questions of historicity: they concern themselves with the narration or representation of historical events. Due to their critical stance towards historical representation, these works have to date predominantly stimulated content-based readings, while our project will explore their material aspects as agents of criticality in their own right. Their emphasis on spatial arrangements, their careful assignment of specific bodily modes of perception and participation to audiences, as well as their insistent presentations of obsolete styles, formats and technologies call for an examination of how these material dimensions transport critical impulses towards their own historicity; how, in short, historicity can be described as an active, material practice. Our project asks for the specific material conditions that shape the interaction with the artworks in question. With our analysis of the technological and material bases of the historicity emerging from the artworks described above, we will engage with the material turn from a new, media-critical, art- and film theoretical point of view: How can material and technological aspects shape aesthetic experiences? What exactly does an artworks materiality do, if it is considered agential? We will work through complex questions of the potential politics of material approaches in the age of digital production and dissemination and question how a critical turn to materiality can develop and maintain an edge of political critique. We will look at how materiality, in dialogue with the questions of historicity posed by the artworks chosen for this project, can point to the unevenness of a new, global postmodern public. Following these interconnections, our project takes materiality seriously as a substantial part in the critical register of contemporary audiovisual art.

The project A Matter of Historicity Material Practices in Audiovisual Art has explored how the material dimensions of artworks can contribute to how artworks generate historical meaning. The project has yielded results in three main aspects. First, it has shown that artworks can act as historical agents in their own right, and that their materiality can tell stories that counteract and/or supplement those stories suggested by the same works content. Secondly, it has stressed that sound and hearing play an important part on how artworks comment on history and its representation, and that these often neglected aspects deserve more critical attention in current academic discourses. Thirdly, it has shown that while a focus on materiality is a necessary and helpful expansion of existing models of theorizing representation, it must always be grounded in models that grasp representational politics. Moreover, we have shown that it is necessary to theorize representational politics as politics that remains aware of the particular structures of power subjugating human agents, as they exist within the social, geographical, economic and historical contexts in which the work circulates. While these insights are primarily intended to contribute to the theoretical discussion of artworks as agents of historicity, i.e., to the fields of art theory and media studies and queer_feminist studies, we have also discussed our findings with artists and curators, thus possibly also impacting the field of artistic and curatorial practices.