The material kept the score: media and material practice in Jennifer Bloomer’s constructions, 1985–1992

Abstract

Recent scholarship has highlighted the significance of media — photographs, drawings, magazines, and exhibitions — for late twentieth-century architectural production. The proliferating media of the period, however, has presented problems for historians. Does this expanded media sphere confirm the views of dominant period actors that the era was concerned with representation rather than materialisation? This paper challenges the characterisation of media as an agent of de-materialisation by highlighting the projects of Jennifer Bloomer, a practitioner and theorist who worked with new physical media derived from Conceptual Art. Architectural interest in Conceptual Art was prompted in part by the intense engagement of Conceptual artists with space in performance, land, and installation artworks. After 1975, architects on both sides of the Atlantic utilised Conceptual Art forms to move away from established architectural media. This essay begins by outlining the architectural turn to the physical media of Conceptual Art and uses the broader context of Conceptual Art to illuminate three installations produced by Bloomer over the period from 1985 to 1992. Borrowing from Conceptual Art’s particular spatial typologies and material interests, Bloomer used physical matter to confront the ideals and idealising functions of architecture and representation. To contest idealisation founded on significant exclusions and erasures, Bloomer used materials to embed architecture’s margins within her work, from marginalised building technologies and transgressive matter, to repressed histories. These installations, to borrow a phrase from Dominic Rahts, produced a ‘material continuity with the world', rather than a dematerialised media. Recovering Bloomer’s projects and framing them within a larger body of Conceptual Art-Architecture projects, this paper intends to expand the terrain and terms of late twentieth-century architectural production. It highlights those who worked with physical media and within a Conceptual Art tradition that asserted the materiality of the representational medium. Media could be material and representational.