The Re- and Dematerialization of the Object (of Art) Through the Analysis of Hungarian Examples from the Late 20th and 21st Century (original) (raw)

Examining an object (of art) entails the examination of art itself. That is, in a narrower sense, the question is whether art manifests itself in its materiality or it can be comprehended through something else. Although the advocates of dematerialization insist that the essence of art is not in its materiality – the material is merely a medium and rematerialization is not necessarily its opposite but perhaps merely a struggle for visibility or for crossing the stimulus threshold. Around 1970 dematerialization was – as Lippard and Chandler put it – a complex phenomenon that could be traced back to various motives (for example, notions that held that form and medium were equally insignificant, that art lived in the mind and had a conceptual existence, was not commodity, and consequently required increasingly less material and ultimately the object [of art] might even be invisible.) The absence of the object of course suggests a shift toward art becoming a theorethical thing; on the o...