Jeanette Doyle: Fifteen Days and Factory Direct at the Andy Warhol Museum: The Relationship between the ‘Immaterial’, ‘Dematerial’ and ‘Material’ in Contemporary Art Practice

Abstract

Jeanette Doyle: Fifteen Days arose from research into the etymology of ‘immateriality’ and ‘dematerialisation’, interrogating the resonance of these terms, and related theory, for contemporary art practice, as regards digital artworks and art broadcast on or informed by the Internet. The project sought, through practice, to investigate the relationship between current constructions of ‘immateriality’ and earlier ‘demateri- alised’ practices associated with Conceptual Art. There is an established and broad discourse on ‘immateriality’ in art practice which emerged in the 1960s. While there have been several different phases in the elaboration of technologically augmented art practices since the 1960s, we are arguably in a moment of transition to an emergent ‘performative’1 paradigm of network culture. In a ‘performative’ paradigm of network culture the emphasis shifts from ‘mediation’ to ‘constitution’ — it is not that a pre-existing image, meaning or ‘experience’ is mediated across a network, but rather the network process performatively produces meanings, images and ‘experiences’. Given this kind of shifting context of art and technology interactions, the established debates on the status of the visual image require critical renewal and theoretical reinvention. Jeanette Doyle: Fifteen Days, at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA (2011),2 was in part an exploration of how the theme of ‘immateriality’ might be further evolved to address the question of the visual image in contemporary and emergent network culture, with particular reference to the current technological expansion of contemporary modes of moving image and installation practices in contemporary art.