Class discussion of what Materiality is":
Tactile response and materials
Fabrication
Sense response
Meaning of the material social political eg embroidery and its history
Silicone material bodily and motion
Social cultural political
Environmental
Material as an English
Originality
Integrity
Reductive
Denoting an instance degree or quality of condition
Specificity
Julieanna breaking a cup to disclose what it’s materiality is
Physical aspects
Everything is material we differentiate
Light as material
Reading for my work, Aurum Stroll surfaces
things appearance
Immaterial material
Readings on Materiality -
Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966.
“There are no facts, only interpretations,” Nietzsche, 1880, Sontag used Nietzsche’s theory as the catalyst for her 1964 masterwork “Against Interpretation,”
“to interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings,’ first published in 1966, Sontag was an American writer, filmmaker, philosopher, teacher, and political activist. Her extensive writings about photography, culture and media, AIDS, human rights, and communism and leftist ideology.
Against Interpretation, examines our culture’s generally well-intentioned but ultimately perilous habit of interpretation, which she defines as “a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code, certain ‘rules’ of interpretation,” a task akin to translation. The problem lies in the interpretation of a work, the translation it’s self, re configuring the works meaning, the very act of this is altering it. For example Philo of Alexandria, re interpretation, or revamping the Hebrew Bible into spiritual paradigms, excavating the old text for a a “…sub text, which is a true one...”
The earliest writings on art criticism, the Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, claiming that art was purely imitating reality. Since this affirmation, art has sought to justify it’s self. All western theory and thought on art confined within the paradigm as either mimesis or representation, therefor since has been in need of it’s own defense. Creating a division between form and content, …”making content essential and form accessory…” (pg96) “Interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys…”
“It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world.” And biography, by the same measure, is the revenge of research upon the intellect. The life of the mind is turned into “the life,” a coffin full of rattling facts and spectral suppositions, less an invitation to read or reread than a handy, bulky excuse not to.”
Sontag argues that is to resist the tendency to over focus on content, at the detriment of the form. Sontag insists that a new way of viewing and understanding art needs to be described, the question is how. Arguing that more insistence on the form of art will silence the intellectual pursuit of excessive focus on content. A new vocabulary that is descriptive rather than prescriptive. Arguing that what we don’t need now is “… art into thought or worse yet, art into culture…”
What is needed is a vocabulary — a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary — for forms. “content” Sontag says, simply makes a profitable commodification of art.
“Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.”
“content” — perhaps the vilest term by which professional commodifiers refer to cultural material today — and how it defiles art:
The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
Material Response:
My intention is to find materials that relate to my own work and some of Kates. Glass has been a material that has always fascinated me for it’s multi dimensional and refractive qualities. Rather than go through the process of firing to create a glass artwork, I felt the need to find something immediate to form. After some research, it became apparent that car glass, which is already fired, could be explored. At the car yard, a broken windscreen, with it’s fractured geometric fragility had caught my eye. I set about returning to the car yard to create a work using this material. It would behave in a very different way to the previous safety glass, it would shatter and fracture but hold it’s form due to the glue that holds the two panes of glass in place.
Response to Materiality based on Yes Tomorrow:
Riffing off of Kate Newby’s, Yes Tomorrow exhibition, using broken laminated glass pieces as my material, found in a car yard, I fossicked through dog poo and dirt to find these glistening gems. Many ideas have come to mind in terms of a digital simulation of the ocean. Responding to both the material and the test space site, it has occurred to me as I respond to the space, that a motion, made by my hands, that is reminiscent of the tidal motion that I’m entranced by when seaside. As if invisible digital water has swept in and deposited the sand in such a way as to leave its trace.
Yesterday I went back out to Upper Hutt to salvage a cracked windscreen as I’ve been envisaging a black glass ocean wave, to be wall mounted. The process of gently breaking by hand the forms, the laminate gluing and holding the forms in place. Very excited to try this sculptural glass approach. Have been wanting to make glass sculptures for years but have been held off by its process. This immediate touchable and formable laminated glass gives me access to a surface renderable. Reminiscent of refractive ocean surface
Thoughts is reaction to using the broken glass within the test space":
Cubes are pixel like, tying in with simulation theory. Could this be a representation of pixels and a simulated ocean deposit.
Motion, flux, deposited, shifting, churning
Processes biological coastal processes driven by winds, waves and currents sculpt the edges of the coastline
The transportation and deposition of sediment.
As a material , glass is sand that’s been melted down and chemically transformed.
Beaches are the result of wave action by which waves or currents move sand or other loose sediments of which the beach is made as these particles are held in suspension. ... Beach materials come from erosion of rocks offshore, as well as from headland erosion and slumping producing deposits of scree. The three principle marine processes that influence coasts are erosion, transportation and deposition. Erosion refers to the breaking down of the land by the force of waves.
Definition
The physical, biological, and chemical processes operating on the surface and shallow subsurface of a beach, resulting in stratigraphic, granulometric, and sediment compositional variations, construction of physical sedimentary structures and biogenic structures, authigenic/diagenetic mineral responses, and biogenic mineral products.
The glass functionality as it was intended, as car windscreen material is set free from its intended use and is framed within a new context, removed from its former meaning of car glass and transformed.
Exploring the beach of Oruaiti Reserve, a place I go for much inspiration and connection with nature, I started, as Kate had described, to really look at the processes that were happening on the shore. Noticing the patterns created by the motion of water, it’s depositing of sand and pebbles,
Most other substances in solid form are crystals, minus a few exceptions. These include things like glass, which doesn't form a regular structure. Instead of crystallization, materials like glass and clear plastics freeze before a structure can be set up.
Researching how to lay the deposits of sediment left on the digital shore. Throwing gives an organic motion similar to the sea. Could also sculpt by hand a symmetrical pattern. The feeling of ocean movement. Residue of the event.
water and glass cleaning, watching the biological processes of how water creates deposits
Moved by hand the material looses an organic water motion, using a broom or brush with motion brings some interesting results. Interested in the idea of symmetry at a quantum level from Tenet. Studying the shore line and taking photo reference there is a trace of the ocean where the pebbles are deposited by tidal motion. Imagined a ocean moving through and leaving its deposits rather than following an illustration created, sculptural as opposed to contrived
Crit review presentation
digital debris
This brings me back to my final work for Exposure. Understanding Entropy
Entropy is order. When (anything) is in a particular state, or a bunch of things in a particular arrangement, you might say it is in order. The opposite being disorder. Entropy is a formal (mathematical) definition and measure of how ordered something (a system of things) is. One way you can visualize this (it is but one illustration — the scope what entropy applies to is universal) is say a deck of playing cards. When new, the cards are in order of suits (spades to hearts) and each suit is in order of value (ace, 2 … 10, jack … king). When you think about it, of all the possible ways the cards could be arranged into a deck — there is only ONE arrangement which we call ”in order”. In this case, we say the deck has low entropy, and if fact it has the minimum entropy — it can’t be more ordered than in order. If you shuffle the deck — the CHANCE that the deck is still in order after you shuffle it is extremely small (so small you would be accused of cheating if it ever happened). After it is shuffled, we say that the entropy of the deck has increased — it is less ordered. The value of the deck entropy depends on how well you shuffled it. If you just cut the deck once and put the two halves together the other way around, the deck is still nearly in order — every card is next to the one it should be, except the two either side of where you cut it. We say the entropy has increased only a small amount. It’s all about the chance of randomly putting the cards in order. The probability that happening is 1:52! — one in factorial(52). Factorial 52 = 52 x 51 x 50 x … x 3 x 2 x 1. Which is a stupendously large number — way larger than the number of grains of sand on all the beaches on earth. The chance of you shuffling the deck into order is correspondingly small. It just isn’t going to happen. We can justifiably say it CAN’T happen (even though technically it can). This has profound implications. It means that the deck of cards can ONLY go from ordered to disordered — and in fact from a little disordered to more disordered. We say: entropy must always increase (this is the second law of thermodynamics). Entropy must always increase. How? Through time. As time elapses, the entropy of ALL systems must increase. In fact, the current hypothesis is: the increase of entropy IS time. Or at least, it is the ”arrow” of time — the reason why time never goes backwards. The heat death of the universe is also the result of maximum entropy.
Sculpture in the Expanded Field Rosalind Krauss October, Vol. 8. (Spring, 1979), pp. 30-44.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/materiality
Last night I dreamt that my childhood bathroom, red tiled and full of memory, shattered into millions of tiny pieces.