Materiality and The Afterlife of Artworks: The Rustle of Matter explores, theoretically through a series of case studies, how matter and materials have a role in the afterlife of artworks.
Focusing on modern and contemporary art, this book asks several related questions: How does matter affect the afterlife of works of art and images? How are contemporary artists taking afterlife/materials as part of their practice? And what role does the pair play in transforming centre-periphery relations? Through a range of contributions, this book describes how the History of Art has enlarged its scope through the incidence of both the iconic turn and the material turn, giving an overview of how the notion of afterlife has been increasingly changing art historical studies, and of how this fact is articulated with the growing attention paid to matterand, when matter is considered in relation to a technique, to materials. It offers both an account of the state of things in the theoretical/historiographical discussion and a set of case studies ranging from Picassos Guernica or Torres Garcías murals to the works of Ad Reinhardt or Ana Lupas as well as more recent practices by artists, such as Gala Porras-Kim or Pierre Huyghe.
This book is suitable for students and researchers in History of Art, Visual Studies, Memory Studies, and Philosophy.
Introduction: The Rustle of Matter. Materiality and The Afterlife of
Artworks Part
1. The Life of Artworks. Discussions Held Between the Iconic
and the Material Turn
1. Between Matter as an Obstacle and Matter as a
Condition: The Paths of the Nachleben
2. After Afterlife: Theorizing the
Evolving Material Life of Artworks
3. Creation, Invention: Materially
Imagining
4. The Socio-Political Lives of Persistent Figures Part
2.
Revisiting Art History Narrations: Materials, Figures, Mediums
5. Marbles
Banished and Unearthed. (Im)materiality in the Sacristy of San Lorenzo, by
Brunelleschi
6. Anachronism, Material, and Memory. Luciano Fabro and the
Ghost of Sculpture
7. Many Afterlives. Pablo Picasso´s Guernica in the
Imaginary of Atomic War, ca. 1943
8. Memory and Materiality: Pax in Lucem and
the Survival of Torres Garcías Destroyed Murals Part
3. Engaging with
Afterlife as Artistic Practice
9. No Afterlife! Ad Reinhardts Refusal of the
Material Alteration of His Works
10. An Endless Restart: The Material
Transformation of Ana Lupass Works
11. Just Afterlife: Materials and the
Museum Interstices in the Work of Gala Porras-Kim
12. Liminality in the Work
of Pierre Huyghe
Gabriel Cabello is Professor of Art History at the Universidad de Granada, Spain.
Thierry Dufrêne is Professor of Art History at the Université Paris Nanterre, France.
Rocío Robles Tardío is Professor of Art History at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain.
