Conceptualism and Materiality. Matters of Art and Politicsunderscores the significance of materials and materiality within Conceptual art and conceptualism more broadly. It challenges the notion of conceptualism as an idea-centered, anti-materialist enterprise, and highlights the political implications thereof.The essays focus on the importance of material considerations for artists working during the 1960s and 1970s in different parts of the world. In reconsidering conceptualism's neglected material aspects, the authors reveal the rich range of artistic inquiries into theoretical and political notions of matter and material. Their studies revise and diversify the account of this important chapter in the history of twentieth-century art -- a reassessment that carries wider implications for the study of art and materiality in general.

Conceptualism and Materiality. Matters of Art and Politics underscores the significance of materials and materiality within Conceptual art and conceptualism more broadly. It challenges the notion of conceptualism as an idea-centered, anti-materialist enterprise, and highlights the political implications thereof.

Sculptural Materiality in the Age of Conceptualism is structured around four distinct but interrelated projects initially realized in Italy between 1966 and 1972: Yayoi Kusama?s Narcissus Garden, Michelangelo Pistoletto?s Newspaper Sphere (Sfera di giornali), Robert Smithson?s Asphalt Rundown, and Joseph Beuys?s Arena. These works all utilized non-traditional materials, collaborative patronage models, and alternative modes of display to create a spatially and temporally dispersed arena of matter and action, with photography serving as a connective, material thread within the sculpture it reflects. While created by major artists of the postwar period, these particular projects have yet to receive substantive art historical analysis, especially from a sculptural perspective. Here, they anchor a transnational narrative in which sculpture emerged as a node, a center of transaction comprising multiple material phenomenon, including objects, images, and actors. When seen as entangled, polymorphous entities, these works suggest that the charge of sculpture in the late postwar period came from its concurrent existence as both three-dimensional phenomena and photographic image, in the interchanges among the materials that continue to activate and alter the constitution of sculpture within the contemporary sphere.

Sculptural Materiality in the Age of Conceptualism is structured around four distinct but interrelated projects initially realized in Italy between 1966 and 1972: Yayoi Kusama?s Narcissus Garden, Michelangelo Pistoletto?s Newspaper Sphere (Sfera di giornali), Robert Smithson?s Asphalt Rundown, and Joseph Beuys?s Arena. These works all utilized non-traditional materials, collaborative patronage models, and alternative modes of display to create a spatially and temporally dispersed arena of matter and action, with photography serving as a connective, material thread within the sculpture it reflects. While created by major artists of the postwar period, these particular projects have yet to receive substantive art historical analysis, especially from a sculptural perspective. Here, they anchor a transnational narrative in which sculpture emerged as a node, a center of transaction comprising multiple material phenomenon, including objects, images, and actors. When seen as entangled, polymorphous entities, these works suggest that the charge of sculpture in the late postwar period came from its concurrent existence as both three-dimensional phenomena and photographic image, in the interchanges among the materials that continue to activate and alter the constitution of sculpture within the contemporary sphere.

If you attend a contemporary art exhibition today, you’re unlikely to see much traditional painting or sculpture. Indeed, artists today are preoccupied with what happens when you leave behind assumptions about particular media—such as painting, or woodcuts—and instead focus on collisions between them, and the new forms and ideas that those collisions generate. Garrett Stewart in Transmedium dubs this new approach Conceptualism 2.0, an allusion in part to the computer images that are so often addressed by these works. A successor to 1960s Conceptualism, which posited that a material medium was unnecessary to the making of art, Conceptualism 2.0 features artworks that are transmedial, that place the aesthetic experience itself deliberately at the boundary between often incommensurable media. The result, Stewart shows, is art whose forced convergences break open new possibilities that are wholly surprising, intellectually enlightening, and often uncanny.