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Objects Put to the Test: Learning Exercises in Contemporary Art

This paper will take up a question posed by many contemporary artists, curators and writers: how do “things” gain meaning as aesthetic objects, beyond traditional notions of the artwork? Remarkably, Bruno Latour’s well-known notion of the “assembly” or “parliament” of things has provided a new critical tool linking “matters of facts” with “matters of concern,” with the stated intent to “renew empiricism”. In the field of art, such a proposal could of course be projected onto the attempts of many (post-)conceptual artists—not least those who are associated with social and institutional critique—to frame their work in a much larger context than that of art history. The integration of “things not necessarily meant to be viewed as art” (Mel Bochner) or the understanding of „the world as a fully material thing“ (Ferreira Gullar), dating back to the early years of Conceptual Art and Neo-Concrete Art, prompts us to historicize current claims for empirical experiments: that they offer adequate ways of dealing with the uncertainties resulting from the global crisis. The present-day preference for risk-taking over the reproduction of the already known could be one of the reasons for the increasing popularity of artistic concepts like “test run”, “improvisation”, and “rehearsal” – concepts that will be discussed in their relation to the neoliberal transformation of traditional institutions.