Liste 2014: do you know that our spiritual side is taking materialism means?

 

As we wrote a couple of days ago, and other reviewers have pointed out too, at Liste art fair in Basel some problems need to be fixed. Nevertheless we spotted some interesting pieces, and the red, sour and discordant installation by Timur Si-Qin at Fluxia is definitely amongst them.

 

Elements: three vitrines containing 3D printed human bones and one large freestanding advertisement banner with tao symbols and the word “peace” printed over a close up image of a big red tomato. That is what you see, and also read in the artwork’s caption. But if you ask to the gallery – that is the good side of visiting art fairs! – they will tell you that the artist is trying to register both the tao logo and the word “peace”. This artistic gesture embodies the critic that Si-Qin is moving to the contemporary society.

 

Then, if you speak the key word “new materialism” – the area of contemporary thinking that partly informs the artist’s art practice – the gallery will kindly suggest you the name of Joshua Simon and his book titled Neomaterialism. Thus, pure metaphysics in the temple of materialism.

 

Here a passage from the book’s introduction we definitely are in accord with. It explains that Neomaterialism is about the materialistic side of immateriality. We agree with it because we believe that this immaterial side is indeed expanding, possibly thanks to information, the new “meme”?

 

“Over the last four decades we have witnessed processes of dematerialization in various fields: with the dissolution of the gold standard, money has been dematerialized, commodities have been dematerialized with the ascendance of brand names, and art practices were dematerialized by the emergence of movements such as Conceptual art. Taken together, these processes can serve as a starting point for rethinking materialism. Rather than render the concept of materialism obsolete, however, these extended developments force us to ask whether we can finally understand what materialism means.

 

These processes that aim toward a dematerialization provided a new kind of materiality. Whereas life has gone through a process of spiritualization and abstraction, the abstract and symbolic have gained material-like qualities. The commodity has become the historical subject as it came to operate us as hunter-gatherers, reduced to merely absorbing capital’s surpluses. Jacques Rancière aptly names the regimes that call themselves democracies, “the lived world framed by the power of the commodity.”

 

from Joshua Simon, Noematerialism, 2013.

 

 

September 22, 2014