1.
The Future
of the
Image
Week 5:
The Art of Nothing:
Different approaches
to the ‘non-object’
Deborah Jackson

2.
Art After Space
• Explore the relevance
between forms and
ideas in an age of
project making
Olivia Plender
Information, Education, Entertainment (2007)

3.
Art After Space
• Examine the space for
artistic production, and
its potential as a
transformational context
for
dialogue, exchange, critiq
ue, happenings, performa
nce etc
Francis Alÿs
Paradox of Praxis 1 (1997)
Alÿs pushes a block of ice through
the streets of Mexico City until it
melts; serving as a way to mark time
and measure existence.

4.
The History of the Future
"We have eliminated the real world - which world is left ? The world of
appearances ? Not at all. Together with the real world, we have
eliminated also the world of appearances” (NIETZSCHE)

5.
Hyperreal
There are two hypotheses.
The first one, is that the lost
universe of appearances
has not given way to an
objective world - the world
relieved from truth and
Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order
appearances becomes a
to make us believe that the rest is
fable.
real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the
America that surrounds it are no longer
real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to
the order of simulation. It is no longer a
question of a false representation of reality
(ideology) but of concealing the fact that the
real is no longer real, and thus of saving the
reality principle.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

6.
Jean Baudrillard
Integral Reality
The second hypothesis, is quite
simply the fall, the collapse of the
world into reality.
The world becomes real to such a
degree of reality that is bearable only
by the way of a perpetual denial of
the type : "This is not a world”
(echoing the famous "This is not a
pipe" of Magritte, as a surrealist
denial of the evidence)
Craig Mulholland
This is not a message
(2013)

7.
Jean Baudrillard
Integral Reality
“To turn reality itself into
an art object, you just
need to make a useless
function out of it”
• Instant museification
• Virtual ready-made
We Live in Public
(2009)

8.
Art and the Everyday
The revolutionary idea of
contemporary art was that any
object, any detail or fragment of
the world could exert the same
attraction and raise the same
questions as those formerly
restricted to a few forms called
works of art.
All are equivalent, everything is
great - universal ready-made.
Jeff Koons Acrobat (2003–
09)

9.
The Conspiracy of Art
According to Baudrillard:
• There is no object anymore -
just the idea of the object
• And what we enjoy in it is not
art itself, but merely the idea of
art
• Thus we are no more in the
space of forms, but in the space
of ideology Dave Sherry
(2013)

10.
Image Feedback
Retour-image
Everything we perceive on the
screen is nothing but an image-
feedback producing a reality-effect
through a simulacrum of exchange.

11.
Image Feedback
Now the question is : how
to break this
circularity, this vicious
circle of integral reality -
how to think beyond
truth, how to look
beyond TV, how to live
beyond reality ?
Ross Sinclair
Real Life painting show
(2006)

12.
The Allure of Machinic Life
John Johnston characterizes
“two conflicting cultural
narratives, the adversarial
and the symbiotic,” in which
humans either lose control of
their environment at the
hands of technology or
merge with technological
systems.
Olivia Plender
Machine Shall be the
John Johnston, The Allure of Slave of Man but we
Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Shall Not Slave for the
Artificial Life, and the New Ai Machine
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, (2008)
2008), 12.

13.
Technology and Postmodern Pessimism
The hallmark of
postmodernism
may well be
skepticism, even
despair, over
technology's role
in shaping our
world
Mike Nelson Coral
Reef, 2000

14.
The use of new technologies
throughout history has always
affected the way artists create
their work. Technologies present
the possibilities of how to create
new forms and processes.
“Our cognition becomes more
imaginative as twenty-first
century computers and art will
provide humankind with an
unlimited landscape for
exploration, and unparalleled
aid for the imagination.”
Cliffford Pickover

15.
The ever important
function of creating
an art object by
hand has long been
diminished by
science and
technology.
A landscape painted on David
Hockney's iPad

16.
The relationship between art and
technology to the gallery
Incorporeal materiality (having no
material existence) is materiality
nonetheless
No longer serve to free concepts
from their materiality but shift
materiality away from familiar
objects to the techno-sciences and
post-modern notions of space
Martin Creed Work No. 845 (THINGS
(2007)

17.
Art After Space
Is arts condition today post-spatial?
• explore ‘space’ as an open-ended
term, ranging from personal space
of one’s self and domestic,
intimate surroundings, the
Internet, TV broadcasting, the
streets, web-based online curating,
Martin Creed abandoned buildings and even art
Work No. 79 Some Blu-Tack venues, including the imaginary
kneaded, rolled into a ball, and space of reflection preceding these
depressed against a wall presentations
(1993)

18.
‘UNOBJECTS’
Disembodied presence, devoid
of the materialist trappings of
canvas, paint, stone and metal
associated with conventional art
objects
“unobjects” and “immaterials”
remain distinct from the
dematerialization of art
associated with conceptual
movements and institutional Karla Black
critique Venice Biennale exhibition 2011

19.
“The specific function of
modern didactic art has been
to show that art does not
reside in material entities, but
in relations between people
and between people and the
components of their
environment.”
Burnhan, Great Western Salt Works:
Essays on the Meaning of Post-Formalist Martin Creed
Art, 15. Work No. 370 Balls
(2004)

20.
Cybernetics
“Information is information not
matter or energy. No materialism
which does not admit this can
survive at the present day.”
Norbert Wiener
Part of a utopian view of information,
messages here have no material
presence, acting as pure pattern,
distinct from energy, remaining
immaterial until encoded in print,
electrical pulse or digital bit.
Olafur Eliasson
The Weather Project
(2003)

21.
Lyotard’s Les Immateriaux
‘Material’ aspects of
experience
dissolve, when
mediated by techno-
scientific data, into an
infinity of processes and
relations that cannot be
grasped in perceptual or
imaginative terms.
“To be is to be perceived.”
George Berkeley

22.
“The relationship between
mind and matter is no longer
one between an intelligent
subject with a will of its own
and an inert object. They are
now cousins in the family of
‘immaterials’.”
Jean-François Lyotard, Les Immatériaux, ed.
Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and
Sandy Nairne, Thinking About Exhibitions
(New York: Routledge, 1996), 165.

23.
Richard Hamilton
Just what is it
that makes
today's homes so
different? (1992)
Beyond the dematerialization of the art object, the Pop art problem of
irrealities and issues related to the techno-scientific and digital revolutions,
Lyotard was concern with the artificialization of life beyond the museum.

24.
Space of Curating Immateriality
The postmodern
landscape, in
other words, is
invisible and
imperceptible but
not unreal.
Craig Mulholland
Peer to Peer (2008)

25.
“Change emanates, not
from things, but from the
way things are done.”
Jack Burnham
System Esthetics
(1974)
Keith Farquhar
Plastic Wood (2009)

26.
An Internet of Things
A lot has changed since Benjamin wrote his manifesto on the effects of
mass production of art. Art can now be viewed with the click of a mouse
because the internet is saturated with images of art.

27.
Immateriality -
Art as Process
Any finished work of art stands
secondary to the process of art.
As mere objects they are simply
objects of the past that have
historical (and also aesthetic)
value as records of our past
intentions and attitudes, they can
instruct upon how someone
might have created their own
vocabulary (reality), as artefact
they show how culture is
changing.
Dean Hughes
Filling up puddles on a day that it
didn't rain (2010)

28.
The immateriality question
• Where actually is the art?
• Is art in the moment or is
it in its re-presentation?
• Can art ever be an object?
Martin Creed
Work No. 610 (Sick Film)
(2006)

29.
Post-materialism
The intangible is a state, a
condition, a thing, which
cannot be directly
possessed in its own
possibility, perceived, or
traced. Intangible art,
therefore, can not be held,
seen or reproduced
directly for an indefinite
amount of time nor can it
be bought and sold,
bartered, traded or gifted.
Anthony Schrag
Restore the Natural Order: Lecturing sheep
about the Highland Clearances (2013)

30.
The Tyranny of Vision
You can’t tell
art just by
looking