Edited by Petra Lange-Berndt

Part of the acclaimed Documents of Contemporary Art series of anthologies which collect writing on major themes and ideas in contemporary art.

'I welcome this new book about materiality. It explores questions of embodiment in our age of virtuality, and that is no small matter.'

-Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev,
international curator and art historian

This anthology investigates materiality in art that attempts to expand notions of time, space, process or participation. It looks at materials that obstruct, disrupt or interfere with social norms, surfacing as impure formations and messy, unstable substances. It re-examines the notion of 'dematerialization'; addresses materialist critiques of artistic production; surveys the relationship between materiality and bodies; explores the vitality of substances, and the concepts of intermateriality and transmateriality that have emerged in the hybrid zones of digital experimentation. 

Artists surveyed include Georges Adéagbo, Carl Andre, Janine Antoni, Amy Balkin, Artur Barrio, Robert Barry, Helen Chadwick, Mel Chin, herman de vries, Mark Dion, Jimmie Durham, VALIE EXPORT, Chohreh Feyzdjou, Romuald Hazoumè, Ilya Kabakov, Mike Kelley, Zoe Leonard, Anthony McCall, Teresa Margolles, Robert Morris, ORLAN, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Tino Seghal, Shozo Starling, Paul Thek, Paul Vanouse, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Kara Walker.

Writers include Joseph A. Amato, Karen Barad, Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, Hubert Damisch, Georges Didi-Huberman, Natasha Eaton, Briony Fer, Vilèm Flusser, Jens Hauser, Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm, Tim Ingold, Wolfgang Kemp, Julia Kristeva, Esther Leslie, Jean François-Lyotard, Sadie Plant, Dietmar Rϋbel, Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, Simon Taylor, Hilke Wagner, Monika Wagner, and Gillian Whiteley.

Petra Lange-Berndt is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art at University College London and a leading researcher in the field of material studies in art history. She is co-editor of Sigmar Polke: We Petty Bourgeois! Contemporaries and Comrades, the 1970s (2011). 

Paperback, 240 pages, 210 x 145 mm

ISBN 978-0-85488-237-3

First published 2015

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