pg. 12 - 15 How to be complicit with materials

Material describes not prime matter but substances that are always subject to change.

It is a political decision to focus on the materials of art: it means to consider the processes of making and their associated power relations, to consider the workers - whether they are in factories, studios or public spaces, whether they are known or anonymous - and their tools and spaces of production. (Monika Wagner, Das Material der Kunst. Eine andere Geschichte der Moderne)

For some, to engage with materials still seems the antithesis of intellectuality, a playground for those not interested in theory, while material studies are defined, at best, as an auxiliary science. Materiality is one of the most contested concepts in contemporary art and is often sidelined in critical academic writing.

following a philosophical tradition that privileges form over matter, design over material, drawing over paint and the spiritual over the bodily, such writing often ignore the role of materials in the visual arts, or take it for granted.

Modernist thinking in the way of Clement Greenberg says Rosalind Krauss in her analysis of the post-medium condition, 1999.
In reaction to this art historians such as Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Briony Fer have focused on art that explores processes of embodiment, touch and the materialization of thought processes.
One could argue that even in these projects materials are not valued per se. They are significant because they lead to the non-transcendent, to the submerged zone of the unconscious and the repressed, but materials are not allowed to be vagabond, dirty and contagious, they are only used to think about and think with, to act as an indicator of something else.

The societal characteristics emanating from materials that the philosopher Gernot Bohme identified(source) and above all their histories, are largely ignored; in this respect, these discourses remain within the realm of the white cube.

Let's rewind and start from a different angle. As physicist and philosopher Karen Barad, among others, has phrased it, to engage with materials also means to formulate a critique of logocentrism and the predominance of written language as a tool to generate and communicate meaning.9

Feminist Materialism. containing Haraway, Kirby, Schrader
Possible topic of researching contemporary materialism in critical design and media art practices. Thinking boots on the ground, field work. **Material narratives in times of failing narratives**. How to tell a story with materials.

Returning to material, thinking of the text on dirty movement, in which a floating, up in the air, imaginary is countered through entering the dirty (material) sphere. This imaginary is the result of the narrative structures and clarity missing in my practice and thinking, also within broader society, in searching for narratives and fictions structures connected to material and earth.

Why do I find it so hard to form narratives? Is it a fear of commiting to something? Lose the fear of writing and criticality to the mundane or my personal problems. Also lose the fear of time pressure.

Examples;
fieldwork and extractive practice. critical design practice.
regional German approach, ruhrgebiet as example for material narrative impulse in space.
Kiel as place of failing narrative, missing a feeling of what the city and it's inhabitants are about. past: Industry, boat building, fishing. current: service, cruise, technology, production. No real purpose. What are people thinking? Indifference?

What does Kiel think? Is the public space fitted for showing, and expressing opinions? Opinions and movement of ideas is mostly expressed within and among institutions.

Thinking of possible narrative structures that are communicated through only use of material and material experiment in prototyping. Is this possible? material as language?

Materials are far less anthropocentric, and this is one reason why this category has
been neglected. If anthropology, for example, addresses material culture, it
investigates that which is human-made, and as anthropologist Tim Ingold has
pointed out, even in a discourse which has produced the most elaborate theories
of things, an actual focus on materials remains surprisingly rare.10

In central Europe, since the nineteenth century there has been an ongoing art-historical debate around materials as conduits of meaning.

In contrast to the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain, here the problematic
and essentialist concept of 'truth to materials' was not at odds with industry and
technology. In this tradition, rather than that of Kant and Hegel. and following
the impulse of Aby Warburg's Kulturwissenschaften. (cultural studies) it has been
the aim of scholars like Gunter Bandmann, Wolfgang Kemp, Monika Wagner,
Georges Didi-Huberman and Dietmar Rubel to 'enable the material to talk' ' as
Sandmann phrased it in 1969, already defining material complicity as an
analytical tool within art practice, art criticism and art history.

The category material has also been defined as natural
or subaltern. Therefore, to act with the material and to be complicit means to investigate societal power relations. Are there languages beyond those of philosophy, beyond the official and sanctioned system of the written knowledge game? 24

pg. 17

Other feminist theorists such as Elizabeth Grosz have revived evolutionary theories in
order to point out how materials are always in a state of becoming, entangled in vibrant webs of relations, with their own ecologies and politics.32 (in this volume) Think constant disturbance and polyphonic assemblages.

As scholar Bill Brown has proposed, we know the world only as it is mediated
by the senses. But it might prove useful in the end to avoid the discrepancy
between the phenomenal and the material - to describe instead the phenomenon
of materiality, or the materiality-effect, the end result of the process whereby one
is convinced of the materiality of something.33 (materiality bill brown in 'critical terms for media studies)

To understand the languages that emanate from materials or the atmospheres connected to them one especially needs to consider what happens after the work of the artist is done, once materials are submitted to the forces of time, gravity or the elements.

Phenomenology insists on a macroscopic, anthropomorphic view, while to be complicit with the material means, above all, to acknowledge the non-human.36 (Elisabeth Grosz: Chaos, territory, art: Deleuze and the framing of the earth)

Donna Haraway has phrased it, although one cannot 'be' simultaneously in more
than one subject position or identification (whether a cell or molecule, or a
woman, colonized person, labourer, and so on) one can push for the 'opening of
non-isomorphic subjects, agents and territories of stories unimaginable from the
vantage point of the cyclopean, self-satiated eye of the master subject'.34 (Situated Knowledges, Haraway)

E. Aardema

Collages