Materiality: documents of contemporary art/ edited by Petra Lange-Berndt

Includes bibliographical references and index

Materiality has reappeared as a highly contested topic in recent art. Modernist criticism's tendency to privilege form over matter was paralleled by technically-based approaches in art history that reinforced connoisseurship via the science of artistic materials. But in order to engage critically with the meaning of hair in David Hammons' installations, milk in the work of Dieter Roth or latex in the sculptures of Eva Hesse, one needs a very different set of methodological tools. This anthology focuses on the moments when materials become wilful actors and agents within artistic processes, entangling their audience in a web of connections. It investigates the role of materiality in art that attempts to expand notions of time, space, process or participation. And it looks at the ways in which materials obstruct, disrupt or interfere with social norms, surfacing as impure formations and messy, unstable substances.It re-examines the notion of 'dematerialization'; addresses materialist critiques of artistic production; surveys relationships between matter and bodies, from the hierarchies of gender to the abject andphobic; explores the vitality of substances, and the concepts of intermateriality and transmateriality emerging in the hybrid zones of digital experimentation