Materials of the mind

Many iconic twentieth-century art movements, well represented in ARTIST ROOMS, promoted a rejection, avoidance or devaluing of high quality, traditional fine materials or indeed materials at all.

Prof Andrew Patrizio, History of Art, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh

Chief among these are conceptual art, Arte Povera and feminist art. This project will explore a fascinating, yet under-researched boundary where the material and immaterial meet.

Tracing the influence of conceptual art innovators such as Sol LeWitt and Lawrence Weiner on more recent generations of artists, the project will ask questions concerned with the precise material choices that such artists have made, and how bound they have been to ideological suspicions of materialism, particularly in the context of their dissemination through display and touring, and individual and institutional collection.

Further questions regarding the attention paid to specific material choices and their practical and symbolic power used, paradoxically, in relationship to ‘immaterial’ work, and questions over materiality and value systems arising from the histories of Art Povera movement will be addressed.

The project will also explore the relationships between conceptualism and feminist-engaged and their sharing of many of the tantalising issues over material choice and sustainability.

The power of the ideas-led and ideological art of Jenny Holzer hangs at least to some degree on specific materials, in particular industrial display technologies that originate in production systems rather than art. It is more commonplace to see this fact not taken further in relation to materials and technologies once the ideological point is made.

Further to this, the research will seek to highlight the passion and attention to materials has been implicit in some aspects of conceptualism, yet is rarely explicitly discussed, for example, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s well-known for collaboration with craft-workers or applied artists with material expertise (NGS having recently acquired a relevant collaborator’s archive).

One consequence of conceptualism’s suppression of materiality and the possible theoretical associations related to material choices is little scholarly interest. (Instead, there is clear interest in the conservation of contemporary art as a whole, bounding the territory in terms of recent chronologies and new materials such as plastics rather than the aesthetic trajectory around conceptualism and related anti-materialist ideas.) ARTIST ROOMS offers a unique opportunity to extend this scholarly research.