Material practice

material practice

Janneke Wesseling

Over the past decades, a re-evaluation or even rehabilitation of practice in relation to theory can be witnessed in the field of the humanities. New Materialist modes of thinking are largely accountable for this change in perspective on the role of practice in academic research. In the humanities, ‘practice’ has long been, and often still is, regarded as subordinate and subservient to theory. Many scholars look down on practice as being merely the handwork in the laboratory that is needed to support or provide proof of theory. The truly important work is of a theoretical nature, that is, the work of the mind. The hegemony of theory largely explains the struggle of art academies in Europe to gain recognition for artistic research by universities (see artistic research).

From a historical point of view, the binary understanding of concept and matter, of subject and object, and the hierarchy of theory over practice in Western culture originated in the age-old tradition of valuing vita contemplativa over vita activa. The predominance of mind over body can be traced back to Plato and to Saint Augustine’s embracing of platonic thinking, as argued by Hannah Arendt in The Life of the Mind (1978). Like Plato, Aristotle held deductive thinking in high esteem and downplayed experiment. Aristotle’s Categories became formative of and canonical to medieval scholasticism.

According to American philosopher Ian Hacking (Representing and Intervening, 1983), the imbalance of theory and experiment was reversed with the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, in particular with the thinking of Francis Bacon (1561–1626). During the scientific revolution, practical experiment ‘was officially declared to be the royal road to knowledge, and the schoolmen were scorned because they argued from books instead of observing the world around them’. But times have changed, Hacking tells us, and today the history of the sciences is almost always written as a history of theory rather than of experiment: philosophers of science ‘constantly discuss theories and representations of reality, but say almost nothing about experiment, technology, or the use of knowledge to alter the world’. Hacking also notes that the theory/experiment status difference is ‘modelled on social rank’. His Representing and Intervening contests the theory-dominated history of science. It is Hacking’s conviction that ‘a question posed in terms of theory and experiment is misleading because it treats theory as one rather uniform kind of thing and experiment as another’.

For Hacking, practice is characterized by experiment and by the intervention in reality (instead of the representation of reality). Hacking calls himself an ‘ontological realist’ who believes the entities, states and processes described by correct theories are real, and not mere ‘constructs of the human mind for organizing our experiments’. In a certain respect, Hacking’s Representing and Intervening anticipates New Materialist modes of thinking. Under the heading of New Materialism, a diverse group of thinkers is brought together who, despite differences in outlook, agree in one fundamental respect: the existence of a reality, or of a world, of objects out there, independent of our gaze and of our knowledge of them, independent also of our access to these objects.

These thinkers aim ‘to preserve the autonomy and irreducibility of substance’.

New Materialism embodies the attempt to sidestep the subject-object divide created by René Descartes and Enlightenment philosophers such as Hume and Kant. New Materialists aim to overcome the Cartesian worldview, that is, the subject-object distinction.

A leading proponent of the New Materialist strain of thinking is the American philosopher and physicist Karen Barad—even though she does not like to use the term New Materialism, preferring ‘agential realism’ in its stead. Agential realism is the attempt ‘to rethink fundamental concepts that support binary thinking including the notions of matter, discourse, causality, agency, power, identity, embodiment, objectivity, space, and time.’

Barad emphasizes that

agential realism does not merely offer a new framework through which to understand the roles of the human and the nonhuman, the material and the discursive, but inquires into the very practices through which they are differentiated.

It is not the scope of this text to offer an interpretation of Barad’s thinking. What is important here is that Barad does not refer to matter as a fixed substance, but rather as a process of ‘iterative intra-activity’. ‘Matter’, in her view, ‘refers to phenomena in their ongoing materialization’.

Now, how might this New Materialist account relate to what is generally understood as material practice in the discourse among artists? It must be noted that in artistic discourse material practice is not used in opposition to ‘conceptual practice’. Put otherwise, in artistic discourse, a practice that takes physical material or materiality as point of departure is not necessarily opposed to a practice that is guided by an abstract idea. For artists, material practice and ‘conceptual practice’ are multi-layered terms that do not exclude one another. More than that, from the 1960s onward, conceptual artists sought to connect or entangle matter and idea, image and language, thematizing this connection through their work.

Conceptual art practices therefore may be, and often are, rooted in materiality and in material processes. This is the reason why many so-called Conceptual artists (such as Lawrence Weiner) refuse to be categorized as such. ‘Conceptual’ here refers not so much to the ‘art work as idea’ but to art practices in which the process of art making is regarded as equally important or relevant as the eventual outcome of this process (Cf Weiner: ‘the piece need not be built’). There is no hierarchy here of ‘materiality’ and ‘conceptuality’, and no hierarchy of theory and experiment. In conceptual art (not only referring to American Conceptual Art form the 1960s and 1970s, but in the broader sense of the word), the role and importance of critical reflection in the making process, and of theory in the physical experiment, is acknowledged. One might even argue that nowadays, under the ‘postconceptual condition’ (Peter Osborne), the conceptual nature of art practice is recognized
as a sine qua non. Art practice is of a material as well as a conceptual nature at the same time. One might conclude that the traditional philosophical opposition of matter and concept, of practice and theory, is overcome or nullified here.

Examples in this book of the reciprocal entanglement of concept and matter are Femke Snelting’s project at the Bidston Observatory in Liverpool (see Snelting on embeddednes); Thalia Hoffman’s performance To Serve You (in feeding);
or Kate Rich on business (this book contains many more examples).