André Rottmann – författare

The first collection of critical writings on the work of the influential contemporary French artist Pierre Huyghe.Influenced by wide-ranging ideas from land art and institutional critique to experimental cinematic practices and narrative film, the groundbreaking work of Pierre Huyghe since the early 1990s has arguably, even indelibly, altered the landscape of contemporary art. The French artist works at the beguiling intersection of fiction and reality, representation and performance, spectacle and memory, chance and agency, living organisms and technological entities. As formats and discourses of cinema (be it Godard or Lumet) and architecture, holidays (invented or existing) and games, (puppet) theater and opera, fairy tales and (travel) literature, museology and computer technology, life sciences and popular culture (like manga comics or Disney movies) are renegotiated in Huyghe’s variegated projects, the methods and modalities of producing, exposing, and experiencing art, in turn, come under both critical scrutiny and allegorical speculation.Essays and interviews by preeminent scholars, critics, and curators—including Benjamin Buchloh, David Joselit, and Molly Nesbit—trace the trajectory of Huyghe’s practice over the last three decades. You’ll find writing about the artist’s early engagement with the built environment, the temporalities of cinema and television, the customs of social communities, volatile property relations in global media culture, and his most recent and much-discussed ecological redefinitions of the objects and sites of art. These texts explore the far-reaching implications of Huyghe’s many seminal artworks for the history, theory, and ontology of art in the twenty-first century.

Under the present day's highly technological conditions, materiality in science as well as art is perceived increasingly as an agent located beyond conscious human perception in ecological, digital or neuronal environments. In this context, the term nonconscious (N. Katherine Hayles) refers to forms of computer-based experience as well as neuronal bodily processes. The contributions to this interdisciplinary publication enquire into the consequences of the nonconscious as material and imagination for aesthetic practices. In particular, they encourage new critical readings of the theory, history and practice of contemporary art oriented towards notions of reflexivity and intentionality. Is there art without consciousness? New interpretations of the theory and history of contemporary art

Technologies and techniques have informed artistic practices and discourses since the avantgardes' heyday, and their proliferation, now in an increasingly digital culture, has continually transformed the very idea of the medium in global contemporary art. The contributions from internationally renowned scholars, curators, and artists gathered in the present volume map and interrogate this intimate nexus by forging diverse pathways through the political force fields, technological milieus, and ecological environments in which both art and media are situated and interwoven in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As a festschrift, the book also pays tribute to the impact and influence of the art historian Eric C. H. de Bruyn's work.