Image Object Thing

In Joshua Simon and Noam Yuran’s lecture, Neomaterialism, they discuss the regime of no meaning, that all materials have a spirit, and that in this society there is commodity of all things. They discuss the dematerialization over the past 4 decades of currency, things, and art. Symbols behave like materials. Money rules, money communicates. There is an anonymity to all stuff. Fewer things carry a sense of place or otherness, due to globalism (when all of the stuff, even the souvenirs, are made in the same place). How do we find something that has human meaning, or thingness? Old things and vintage things carry the last senses of thingness and traces of place.

If we define the object of our time, it would be the iPad, because it occupies the space between thingness and nothingness. We can touch it, but it contains virtual information, so it rests somewhere in between. The existence of things is an effect of money, in the drive to accumulate. But, things are only ephemeral effects. Money and the movement of money is the ultimate reality of everything in society.

More things become private property and private property is actually a social relation because it exists for the other people to see rather than for the owner. So, something that is social appears under the guise of being material. Simon and Yuran argue that private property is really just in relation to others. Brand names guarantee the thingness and value the “real,” therefore they are made of money. But even money has changed from being material to non-material because it isn’t linked to gold anymore.

How does this relate to the art object? Dematerial art is conceptual art. The conceptual art object is scarce because it is expensive. Dematerialization of the art object is about the idea, not the object: the idea is the primary thing regardless of the physical fact. 

“Conceptual art, for me, means work in which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or ‘dematerialized.’” – Lucy Lippard (Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972)