New Presentation of the Modern Collection (1905 to 1965)

Musée National d'Art Moderne

Centre Pompidou (Level 5)

Ends November 27th 2015

Published at Hyperallergic.com as

The Pompidou’s Permanent Collection, Reinstalled Along the Lines of Art Theorywww.hyperallergic.com/249545/the-pompidous-permanent-collection-reinstalled-along-the-lines-of-art-theory/

Where the newness of art comes from (when it comes) is something of a conundrum, for some. The

New Presentation of the Modern Collection at the Centre Pompidou Musée National d'Art Moderne

(the second largest art collection in the world with more than 100,000 works) attempts to remedy this

conundrum by pointing out and celebrating certain shrewd and ardent theorists, art critics, art

historians, publishers, editors, poets and thinkers who helped shape Modern Art’s theoretical bones and

taste. As selected by Bernard Blistène, these influential figures of theoretical inquiry are shown putting

forth key conceptual issues that inspired and framed the artworks made between 1905 and 1965 in the

Musée National d'Art Moderne collection. These theorist-activators made (often under appreciated)

decisive contributions to the history of art in the 20th century. I have never seen such a display of

recognition of the thinkers of art before, as here, and it held me in thrall.

Entire galleries or display niches (called dossier displays) celebrate these elusive thinkers’ conceptual

enthusiasms and passionate polemics by combining their publications and archival documents along

with the work of artists in their intellectual circles. The first set of dossier displays (running through

November) are tips-of-the-hat appreciations of Georges Duthuit, poet Blaise Cendrars, Guillaume

Apollinaire, Jean Cocteau, Will Grohmann (German art critic and art historian specialized in

Expressionism and Abstraction), poet/novelist/editor Louis Aragon, André Breton, Georges Bataille,

Jean Paulhan (critic and publisher/director of the magazine Nouvelle Revue Française), Isidore Isou,

Michel Ragon, Pierre Restany, Italian feminist art critic Carla Lonzi and magazine editor André Bloc.

December will see a new round of cognoscenti with Gertrude and Leo Stein, Wilhelm Uhde (German

art collector/dealer/critic), Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade, Black French poet Aimé Césaire, Marcel

Duchamp expert and art critic Robert Lebel, Bohemian-born Swiss historian/critic of architecture

Sigfried Giedion and his wife Carola Giedion-Welcker (who formed a circle of vanguard artists in

Switzerland), French essayist and Surreal poet Francis Ponge, book publisher Bernard Gheerbrant,

writer/poet/artist Alain Jouffroy and English architectural critic Reyner Banham. The list could go on

(why not Henri-Pierre Roché, Georges Wildenstein and Paul Éluard?) and I hope that it does.

The current installation of art from the Modern collection curiously begins with brooding figurative

Expressionist works by Georges Rouault, volatile figurative paintings and drawings powerfully

constructed and dense with suggestive significance. What is especially engaging here is to be in the

presence of electrifying work full of fed-up conviction. If you agree with the artist’s spiritual morality

or not scarcely matters. Rouault means to provoke. This work’s muddy vigor, mixed with severe moral

judgments and rue, took me to an inventive symbolist/ethical place to begin laying out an intelligent

history of 20th century art. One done without carefully applied quotation marks.

The enduring satisfaction of Rouault's sodden gallery is followed with a colorful nod to the scandalous

Salon d’Automne show of 1905 with “wild beasts” Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck

and friends, described by the condemnatory critic Louis Vauxcelles as fauves due to their

spontaneously wild use of bright, improbable, unmixed colors. The utter perfection of Matisse’s “Luxe,

calme et volupté” (1904), with its naked schematized female forms, slightly distorted perspective, and

clearly visible brushstrokes, showed that the fauves were no longer thinking of painting as a symbolic

means of representing ethical judgments on subject matter (as Rouault did), but as an end in itself.

Interesting themselves above all in its material aspects.

Perhaps that is why “Luxe, calme et volupté” – and indeed much of the Modern Art that follows –

appears so bittersweet to me now. Although that painting of Matisse is passionately beautiful, it also

suggests a fresh sensibility of despondency concerning the calm luxury (luxe) of materialism.

Henri Matisse, “Luxe, calme et volupté” (1904) Oil on canvas 98.5 x 118.5 cm, Collection Centre

Pompidou, musée national d’art moderne, MNAM-CCI/Dist. RMN-GP, photo : Philippe Migeat,

Centre Pompidou, © Succession H. Matisse

Materialism is an issue at the heart of how art is reflectively made/received/treated today in two ways.

First with the awful resignation of art as high-end commerce/style/luxury. Take-for-example that

recently resold $179.4 million mediocre Pablo Picasso painting. Rampant economic materialism (an

overly skeptical and narrow approach to experiencing and theorizing life) has brought into art wealth

consciousness and as a result narrow branding. Much excellent art produced is in all probability little

known to us, having fallen between the bars of gold. The art we do see often cleaves to the Modernist

idea of art-for-art-sake, a theoretical objective that has devolved into vapid art-about-art materials. Its

materialism as formal ambition parallels something like Willem de Kooning’s reductive position that

painting is about paint. That kind of approach seems unaware that there is more to do with art than art.

Plus I find it is usually unresponsive to newer, more stimulating, theoretical propositions for art about

coded materiality, intermedia techniques, machine perception, posthuman ethics and expanded

consciousness. This is a pity because truly significant works of art requires dynamic contemplation

from us. Not just lukewarm admiration for serene sumptuousness.

Materialism in art is especially treacherous for art in a time when interest rates are so low, and the

brassy affluent have so much cockamamie currency that they don’t know what to do with it. For many

of them, the undercurrent of contemplative-downer thoughtfulness embedded in Modern Art - which I

sketch out below - seems distant murmurs: irrelevant, pointless and nonsensical. Form is all that counts.

Touché.

Yet not so fast! Visitors to the Pompidou are forcefully reminded by the theory dossiers sprinkled

throughout New Presentation of old materialism's inadequateness for cultural life; its own form of

ridiculous limitations. Indeed these theorist-advocates put forth mostly philosophically challenging,

ambiguously poetic and keenly wistful aesthetic programs. As such, they are unsuitable to delighting-

with-dumb-luxury our 1%’s gilded age. Only wincingly fudged distortions of their theoretical

intentions gilds Modern Art gold.

The second reason materialism is an important issue today is less brooding. It starts by re-reading the

interviews with Rosi Braidotti, Manuel DeLanda, Karen Barad, and Quentin Meillassoux (prominent

new materialist scholars) in Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin's book New Materialism. That open-

access work, and the just released (superb) Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies discordant and

contradictory theory sourcebook Realism Materialism Art, verifies that philosophical materialism

(sometimes called neo-materialism) is a très tendance (trendy) topic in recent art theory. In 2012 I

attended the Speculative Realism-based conference Aesthetics in the 21st Century in Basel where

Graham Harman criticized Relational Art and praised the formalist, media specific aesthetics of

Clement Greenberg, where art objects are free of the “tyranny of context.” Andrew Cole has just

outlined and rejoined Speculative Realism's fêted new materialism (summing up its over-reach) in the

Summer issue of Artforum. Also the esteemed German art journal Texte zur Kunst devoted a themed

issue to Speculative Realism earlier this year.

The Bard book picks up the German gauntlet, offering an even larger overview of an extraordinarily

diverse selection of new realist materialist philosophies (all wishing for a reality that can be known

without being shaped by and for human comprehension) that have been spinning around Speculative

Realism: hyper-chaos, cellular automaton, vitalist-materialism, post-humanisms, materialist idealism,

speculative-materialism, non-philosophy, plasticity, flat object-oriented ontology (OOO), etc.

This contradictory diversity, while being philosophically interesting (if you eat your spinach), at

present suggests to me slight hope for it providing a theoretical center of gravity (or sense of

connective purpose) for art today. Granted, following the influx of subjective-narcissistic personal

narratives and identity politics that has swamped art, a move towards the objectivity of matter has

certain pull. Yet for a bona fide alternative take on contemporary and modern art and impersonal

objectivity as interrelated with spirit, materialism’s bête noire, see Charlene Spretnak’s new book The

Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art: Art History Reconsidered, 1800 to the Present.

At the Pompidou, we are called to take notice of old materialism and other cogent, if neglected,

meditative projects for past art. Amongst all the popular (and market) success of the ring-a-ding iconic

colorful materialism of Modern Art, a different counter narrative is also laid out via these theorists'

dossiers. Between the jazzy monographic sections of artworks by Georges Braque, Picasso, Sonia and

Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, Vassily Kandinsky, Frantisek Kupka, Alberto Giacometti, and Jean

Dubuffet, there are counter salt licks of pensive thoughtfulness throughout.

Most of these theoretical approaches for art tend to create the mental impression of a hypothetical

intimate, three a.m., low-lit room as the proper head-space for works like for Man Ray’s “Marcel

Duchamp Obligation pour la Roulette de Monte Carlo” (1924). This cool double staged photograph

cedes a feeling of sassy, slow motion, late-night activity that has something of smoke and perfume

about it.

Man Ray, “Marcel Duchamp, Obligation pour la Roulette de Monte-Carlo” (1924) Photographie, 8.9 x

11.9 cm, Collection Centre Pompidou, musée national d’art moderne © Man Ray Trust / Adagp, Paris

2015

The particular perverse grace of Man Ray’s “Duchamp” makes it one of the most seductive works here,

and one of the most disquieting. Poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), one of the first passeurs (go-

betweeners) celebrated with a dossier display for his championing of avant-garde radical ideas in art,

may be the one most responsible for this coolly disquieting night sensibility. In his own work he

experimented with the calligram; a visual poem whose typographic composition forms an image.

Apollinaire was a prolific art critic for L’Intransigeant and was founder of the magazine Les Soirées de

Paris where he reported on the emergence of Fauvism, Futurism and Cubism - and also wrote on the

art of Africa and Oceania. Close to Braque and Picasso, he is famous for promoting and explaining

Cubism, publishing his pioneering Les Peintres cubistes in 1913 (read his Cubist Painters: Aesthetic

Meditations). He coined the word Orphism (for the Delaunays’ coloristic Cubism) and Surrealism (that

Breton adapted from him). Polish by birth, in 1915 Apollinaire enlisted in the French army and died at

the age of 38 in 1918 as a result of his war injuries and the flu pandemic.

My feeling is that, starting with the death of Apollinaire, a dark viral irrevocable pathos has always

been buried in the materialism of Modern Art, like a permanent crease. Dim sniffs of dissatisfaction

appear increasingly evident in the galleries following the Cubist rooms of Braque and Picasso devoted

to Dada (including a newly obtained Raoul Hausmann “Portrait of Hanna Höch” (1916)) and

Surrealism. A heady lacework of mnemonic languor, spun around the two World Wars, is woven

throughout these rooms. Punctuated by the dossiers’ darker currents: the two brilliant antagonists

Georges Bataille (1897-1962) and André Breton (1896-1966).

There is often an oblique post-war drowsy mood in the art they supported, where secret gratitude (for

surviving) and freedom are tinged with memory and melancholy. Such as in Breton’s own assemblage

composition “Objet à fonctionnement symbolique” (1931) and Salvador Dali’s newly obtained “Objet

surréaliste” (1936). I believe this melancholy is the reason that during Surrealism’s exile in America

from the Second World War, the movement turned towards self-created myth where threshold-states of

moody consciousness dominate. The melancholy artworks in the Surrealism room, like Gisele Freud's

portrait “Jean Cocteau Paris” (1939), map out an eerie mental zone of falling darkness or gaining

lightness. In-between states, close to slumber/drink, but wide wide awake. Both the Bataille and Breton

dossiers combine these melancholy mental-lighting contradictions into an unsure combination of effort

that mixes breezy public confrontation with gruesome private terrors. There is perplexing intimacy

mixed with the cold largeness of abstract fatalism mixed with Marxist materialism.

Gisele Freud, “Jean Cocteau, Paris” (1939) Photographie, 19 x 14,2 cm, Collection Centre Pompidou,

musée national d’art moderne © Estate Gisèle Freund/ RMN gestion droit d’auteur/Fonds MCC/IMEC

Photo : Philippe Migeat, Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Gisèle Freund,

reproduction Service de presse/Centre Pompidou

André Breton, “Objet à fonctionnement symbolique” (1931) Assemblage d’objets divers sur planche de

bois 24,5 x 41,5 x 32 cm Collection particulière Dépôt au Musée national d’art moderne / Centre de

création industrielle le 03/04/2014 Centre Pompidou, musée national d’art moderne MNAM-CCI/Dist.

RMN-GP Photo : Georges Meguerditchian, Centre Pompidou © Adagp, Paris 2015

Room 21 is completely devoted to André Breton and displays an amazing 255 of the objects and

artworks he collected that formerly adorned the walls of his studio at 42, rue Fontaine. This collection

itself represents a melancholy work of total art. Arranged in apparent random proximity are works by

Picasso, Francis Picabia, Joan Miró, Duchamp and Roberto Matta. They are mixed with a substantial

collection of Oceanic, Pre-Columbian and North American dolls, masks and objects, as well as

miscellaneous found objects, stones, and stuffed birds. In accordance with the wishes of Aube Elléouët-

Breton (daughter of André Breton and Jacqueline Lamba), Breton’s writing desk is presented here

together with the objects that stood on it - among them a Papuan sculpture. The entire assemblage is

full of intelligence and grace and sensuousness: a monument to Surrealist commotion and one of the

most fascinating rooms to be explored in terms of the material of shady myth, an important theme for

Breton.

That theme led Breton to his Le surréalisme en 1947, the exhibition designed by Duchamp that marked

Breton’s reappearance on the Paris scene after World War II. It was entirely devoted to the question of

invention of myth; as was the exhibition Breton organized in New York in 1942 subtitled On the

Survival of Certain Myths and on Some Other Myths in Growth or Formation. We also are exposed to

the journal Minotaure that brought together the two paths of Surrealist thinking about materialism and

myth, represented by the thinker-organizers Breton and Bataille.

Georges Bataille’s dossier room is likewise dripping with dark mythic stuff, engaging as it does with

the journal Documents that Bataille founded in 1929. Librarian, libertine, paleologist, archivist, radical

thinker, author of erotic fiction; Bataille took an active role in avant-garde art and the literary scene by

objecting to what he saw as the aestheticism and sentimentality of the Surrealists. Consequently, he

became Breton’s antagonist from the intellectual ultra-left. After World War II as founding editor of

the journal Critique - after authoring the transgressive philosophical books Inner Experience (1943),

Guilty (1944), On Nietzsche (1945) and Accursed Share (1947) - Bataille’s thought emerged as a viable

alternate to Jean-Paul Sartre’s then reigning philosophical school of Parisian Existentialism. Yet

Bataille’s accomplishment transgresses disciplines and genres so repeatedly and so thoroughly that

capsule accounts of his oeuvre are compelled to delegate themselves to abstractions. However, I can

say with assurance that his thinking consisted of a meditation on, and fulfillment of, transgressions

through excess. Bataille showed us that sanctioned excess is generally inferred in much of art's

perceptible richness and that the syntax of art is inner excess.

Much of the art he liked and supported, like Masson, Unica Zürn, Pierre Klossowski and Hans Bellmer,

is complexly allegorical in a way that provides an interior twisted view of World War II's nasty years.

Many of the uncanny works in his brand of Surrealism have the moony undertones of bad sleep, fever

dreams and sex hallucinations.

Bataille’s idea for art was to double down on materialism. He developed the concept of base

materialism during the late 1920s and early 1930s as an attempt to break with what he perceived as

mainstream modern materialism. This while reinventing the social rituals and mythical narratives that

sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss had seen as ensuring the cohesion of primitive societies.

Including practices of sacrifice. In 1937 Bataille and André Masson created Acéphale, a weird

Surrealist myth promulgated through a journal that twinned with a “secret society” bound together by a

“sacrificial” rite. But besides secret sacrifice, Bataille also promoted for art a non-productive

excess/expenditure found (in varying degrees) in forms of lamentation, spectacle, poetry, erotic

activity, and mystical endeavors. Some of which place an emphasis on a loss that must be as great as

possible in order for that activity to take on its fullest meaning. In the terms Bataille proposes for art,

any restricted economy, any sealed arrangement (such as a definition, image, identity, concept, or

structure) produces more than it can account for, hence it will inevitably be fractured by its own

unacknowledged excess, and in seeking to maintain itself, will (against its own rationalized logic) crave

rupture, expenditure, and loss. More specifically, for Bataille, the term expenditure describes an aspect

of frivolous erotic activity poised against an economy of production.

Following the Dada and Surrealism rooms of art are two devoted to Jean Dubuffet and Alberto

Giacometti, where I forced myself to forget that a Giacometti’s bronze existential pointing man

“L’homme au doigt” had ironically fetched $141.3 million at auction. Across from Dubuffet is Room

38, devoted to the 1940s and certain Spatialist approaches to a dematerialization of architecture,

painting and sculpture. Key theoretical texts here include Gyula Kosice’s Manifiesto Madi and Lucio

Fontana’s Manifesto Bianco of 1946. Works “Concetto spaziale La fine di Dio” (1963) by Fontana and

Dadamaino’s newly acquired “Volume” (1959) well exemplified their theories of dematerialization.

Other art movements offered different understandings of the spatiality of the artwork in relation to its

environment, including Arte Concreta (1948), Groupe Espace (1951), Arte Nucleare (1952), spatio-

dynamism (1952), Groupe Zéro (1958) and NUL (1961). These dematerialization theoretical activities

were followed by those of Op and Kinetic Art, L'Art Informel (Informal Art), Fluxus and the Nouveaux

Réalistes. Also, a whole room has been devoted to Lettrism, with a dossier on Isidore Isou.

Isidore Isou (a.k.a. Jean Goldstein) was born in Romania and arrived in Paris in 1945, where he fell in

with poet/artist Gabriel Pomerand. Together they sparked the creation of Saint-Germain-des-Prés based

Lettrism, soon joined by Maurice Lemaître. Published by the NRF in 1947, Isou’s Introduction à une

nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique laid out the principles of Lettrism as an “avant-garde of

avant-gardes” - a total art project simultaneously theoretical and practical, aesthetic and political, aimed

at the formal revitalization of art through the power of the letter (considered by them to be the basic

material of all expression). Isou gathered around himself many artists, such as Roberto Altmann, Jean-

Louis Brau, Roland Sabatiero (represented here with his “Sculpture filiforme supertemporelle” (1964)),

Jacques Spacagna and Gil J Wolman, the creator of films and film-sculptures without images, such as

“L’Anticoncept” (1951). Here Wolman is represented by his newly acquired “Un Homme saoul en vaut

deux” (1952).

Isou, whose declamations and dramatic interventions recalled Dadaists days, influenced

writers/thinkers such as Guy Debord (author of the essential book The Society of the Spectacle and

founding member of the Situationist International), François Dufrêne (sound poetry pioneer known for

his use of décollage within the Nouveaux Réalistes group) and Paul-Armand Gette.

Less familiar to me was the dossier on Georges Duthuit (1891-1973), an art critic, Byzantinist,

ethnographer and poet close to the poets André du Bouchet, René Char and Yves Bonnefoy. Duthuit

carved out a distinctive niche for himself at the intersection between the Byzantine and 1950s

Abstraction. There is a new acquisition that compliments Duthuit’s interests here; the German abstract

painter Ernst Wilhelm Nay’s “Inferno Halleluja” (1964) that was influenced by the L'Art Informel

movement. Developing a radical critique of the mimesis of Western Art, Duthuit saw post-War

abstraction (back to Matisse) as the culmination of an aesthetic of the decorative that originated in

Oriental Art. Like Bataille, Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris (Surrealist writer and ethnographer),

Duthuit combined interests in contemporary art and ethnography, producing a series of works like Une

fête en Cimmérie (1947-50) in which his poetical text on the Inuits is accompanied by lithographs by

Matisse. Exiled in New York during the Nazi Occupation, Duthuit became a conduit between the New

York and Paris art scenes, editing the Paris-based English-language magazine Transition between 1948

and 1950, assisted by his friend Samuel Beckett.

Also new to me was the combative visionary Michel Ragon (born 1924). His dossier room sketched out

his activities in the ethics of anarchism as a poet, historian, essayist, novelist and critic of art (his first

critical essay was on outsider artist Gaston Chaissac in 1946) and architecture. Ragon championed

CoBRA, L'Art Informel, Kinetic Art, Art Brut and Abstract Art. Speaking of; Barnett Newman's work

represents Abstract Art superbly in the Centre Pompidou’s collection with four large, smoothly

matching paintings. Among them, the majestic “Shining Force” (1961), seen here following a recent

restoration.

Ragon’s room creates theory-links to the art of Chaissac, Jean Dubuffet, CoBRA artists Jean-Michel

Atlan and Karel Appel, German-French painter Hans Hartung (I loved his gestured darkly beautiful

“T” (1956)), architect Jean-Benoît-Vincent Barré, sir blackness Pierre Soulages, Op/Kinetic artist

Yaacov Agam and non-figurative sculptor Etienne Martin. Like a cabinet of curiosities, the room

provides a kaleidoscopic portrait of Ragon and his many-sided theoretical and literary publications. His

concern with Architecture is represented in models and drawings by members of the Groupe

International d’Architecture Prospective (GIAP), which Ragon founded in 1965. With Yona Friedman,

Paul Maymont and Guy Rottier, he championed an architecture of the future while denouncing the

functionalist urban planning of the post-war years. Nearby, Room 37 is dedicated to the structural

elements of Jean Prouvé’s prefabricated buildings.

The last dossier room was of a personal friend of mine, the cultural philosopher Pierre Restany (1930-

2003), champion of Yves Klein and leader of the Nouveaux Réalistes group of the Sixties (the first

exhibition of the Nouveaux Réalistes took place in November 1960 in Paris at the Festival d'avant-

garde). Nouveau Realisme (New Realism) was the European answer to the American Neo-Dada of

Fluxus and Pop Art. The group included Martial Raysse, Arman, Yves Klein, François Dufrene,

Raymond Hains, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, Jacques Villeglé - and was later joined by César,

Mimmo Rotella, Niki de Saint Phalle and Christo. Restany defined this group of artists as sharing new

perceptual and technological approaches to reality.

Pierre, who edited the Milan-based magazine D'Ars, was an acerbic but generous art critic who offered

a fresh perspective on debates around Pop and abstraction. A crusading author of articles, essays and

manifestos, he wrote and spoke widely: on Architecture as Art (SITE) (he wrote regularly for Domus,

the Italian magazine of art and architecture), Lynn Hershman Leeson, Yves Klein, Carlos Ginzburg,

Jean Fautrier, Nicola L, Arman, Alain Jacquet, Shigeko Hirakawa, César Baldaccini and others. When I

knew him he was very interested in the no-logo theme and the effect of the (then emerging) digital

technology on representational imagery. Indeed he organized a show about it called Logo / Non Logo

with Robert C. Morgan and Ellen F. Salpeter for the Thread Waxing Space in 1994. Pierre was keen on

the de/re-materializing role that digital technology brought to the arts while always stressing to me that

non-theoretical art does little more than present itself to market.

Pierre was a tremendous philosophical talker and over dinner or drinks, would close his eyes, and while

stroking his beard, begin talking in a stream of engaging intelligence that ranged from art historical

nuggets to his vision of a networked future for art. It was the likes, for me, not seen since the

Buckminster Fuller lectures at Carbondale (S.I.U.) I attended. Most artists and many critics loved

Pierre and his photo permanently hangs at the entrance of the Palais de Tokyo where he served as

president.

Pierre Restany (right) in Alain Jacquet’s “Le déjeuner sur l’herbe” (1964) Collection Centre Pompidou,

musée national d’art moderne Photo : Jacques Faujour - Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Dist. RMN-

GP © Adagp, Paris 2015

Of course Modern Art had many theoretical, racial and gender limitations, as we know. Among other

things, it's materialism tended towards domination. But some of its philosophical aspects did have a

lightness of touch that corresponded to sangfroid seriousness. Even Dada’s studied silliness was serious

in its social intentions. Much of today’s mainstream market art, still theoretically ironic, detached and

jaded, tries to pull off imitations of the luxury materialism found in Modern Art (some may even get

the surface details right). But in general, I find much of it lacking in a theoretical vision capable of

stimulating and framing how matter matters in the creation of actual artworks at present. The editors of

the Realism Materialism Art book, Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey and Suhail Malik almost state so in

their introduction, explaining that due to the incongruity of competing speculations on materialism

there “is then no uniform or particularly consistent account for the current conditions, ambitions, and

framework of realism, materialism, and art” (p. 30) and materialism “does not look to provide a

coherent panoramic vision that would underwrite a new philosophy of art... .” (p. 31) I agree with them.

Perhaps sensibility to code(s) matters more that matter.

To those that say all art is made from materials, and thus exists as a form of materialism, I say all art is

conceptual/imaginative because the experience of the consciousness of art exists socially and

conceptually. Consequently, after surveying the plethora of new theory concepts that the heterogeneous

neo-materialist views on metaphysics provides art (including my own viractual - where the computed

(virtual) merges with the corporeal (actual) creating art objects that incorporate networked digital

technologies), I think that it is doubtful that any current neo-materialist thinker can again command the

kind of sway on artists that the New Presentation dossier people did. My hunch is that the application

of a coded de/re-materializing philosophical imagination is required.

Joseph Nechvatal