#Space age art serial
#Space age art archive

The color of the plume is networked to correspond to the current market price of gold. The work is an illuminated water vapor plume that shifts from magenta to pastel cyan as it hazily wafts from a hot tub-like structure. Mika Tajima’s recent public art project Meridian (Gold) (2016) does just that. There are a host of artists who still engage with tensions of dematerialization and its opposite, materialization. For those following in the footsteps of Donald Judd and Robert Rauschenberg, art historian Joshua Shannon suggests “dematerialization was a perfectly logical move for New York artists-at last relinquishing grit in order to track the new direction of their world,” which was becoming increasingly immaterial. For instance, art historian Frances Colpitt claims dematerialization crucially paved the way for the “political and identity-based content of the art of the 1980s and beyond.” But as an idea, media critic Johanna Drucker characterizes dematerialization as a “fallacy” deeply rooted in contemporaneous computer-heavy rhetoric that sought an impossible separation of information from matter. While many of us use the word dematerialization without thinking about what it means, scholars have debated the term’s meaning, use, and legacy. But for lack of a better term I have continued to refer to a process of dematerialization, or a deemphasis on material aspects (uniqueness, permanence, decorative attractiveness).' In the opening pages of Six Years, Lippard addressed complexities of her own term: 'Since I first wrote on the subject in 1967, it has often been pointed out to me that dematerialization is an inaccurate term, that a piece of paper or a photograph is as much an object, or as “material,” as a ton of lead. You don't need to go to Art Basel to know that art objects still exist and are perhaps more commercial than ever before.

Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art, an exhibition devoted entirely to Lippard’s pioneering work and its impact on Conceptual Art.īut what really was dematerialization? In the end, art, of course, did not sublimate.

Since then, Marilyn Stokstad and Michael Cothren have used the term in the fifth edition of their standard-issue survey text Art: A Brief History, explaining “conceptual art literally ‘dematerialized’ the art object by suggesting that the catalyst for a work of art is a concept, and the means by which the concept is communicated can vary.” The term has even entered the vocabulary of famed New York Times art critic Roberta Smith, who lauded the 2011 exhibition Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface for “trac the dematerialization of Finish Fetish sculpture into the perceptual etherealities of Light and Space art.” In 2012 the Brooklyn Museum opened Materializing “ Six Years ” : Lucy R. This text helped cement dematerialization’s status as foundational to twentieth-century art history.

#Space age art archive

The book-with its title of more than eighty words in length-functioned as a retrospective archive of sorts that assembled a network of texts, documents, and works of art that defined the “ideas in the air” circulating around this time. In 1973, Lippard published Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972.

Through dematerialization, the critics believed art might escape commodification because dealers could not sell art-as-idea. Lippard and Chandler dubbed this radical transformation “dematerialization,” a term that has since matriculated into art historians’ lexicons, as well as the annals of art history.

#Space age art serial

As examples of this trend, the authors discussed now-legendary pieces like Hanne Darboven’s schematic serial drawings and Joseph Kosuth’s cool, distanced definitions, which have become examples of Conceptual Art par excellence. In their frequently cited essay “The Dematerialization of Art”-which appeared in the February, 1968 issue of Art International-art critics Lucy lippard and John Chandler prognosticated a future without objects, and described an emerging “ultra-conceptual” art that would no longer require studios as sites of material production.