#neomaterialism

Verbing the Material: plaster cast with efflorescences

(from the growing sculpture series) 

re-imagining materials

“Decolonizing Nature: Making the World Matter” - T.J. Demos

Neomaterialism. Joshua Simon and Noam Yuran on the Subjectivity and Vitality of Things

Over the last four decades we have witnessed processes of dematerialization in various fields: money has been dematerialized with the dissolution of the gold standard, commodities have been dematerialized with the ascendance of brand names, and art practices were dematerialized by the emergence of movements such as conceptual art. Taken together, these processes can serve as a starting point for rethinking materialism. Rather than render the concept of materialism obsolete, they force us to ask whether we are finally able to understand what materialism was really about.

The conversation between cultural critic Noam Yuran and Vera List Center Fellow and curator Joshua Simon addresses the economy of meaning in a reality where symbols have come to behave like material things, and thus assume the place of things. This substitution allows us to reconsider the thing itself and to ask—expanding on the investigation of materialism—what the thing was all along.

Set in The New School’s historic Orozco Room from 1931, the conversation is embedded in a historic playing field, with Jose Clemente Orozco’s murals depicting allegories for 20th century liberation struggles in Mexico, India and Russia.

Participants: Joshua Simon, 2011-2013 Vera List Center Fellow, chief curator, Bat Yam Art Museum, Israel Noam Yuran, research fellow, Minerva Humanities Center, Tel Aviv University, Israel

READING ROOM: Joshua Simon, Neomaterialism (Sternberg Press, 2013). 

Joshua Simon is director and chief curator at MoBY - Museums of Bat Yam. He is co-founding editor of Maayan Magazine for literature, poetry and ideas, Maarvon (Western) - New Film Magazine, and The New & Bad Art Magazine, all based in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. Recent exhibitions include ReCoCo - Life Under Representational Regimes (co-curated with Siri Peyer), and Goods (co-curated with Liz Hagag). Simon was a 2011-2013 fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School, New York, and a PhD candidate at the Curatorial/Knowledge program at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the editor of Solution 196-213: United States of Palestine-Israel (Sternberg Press, 2011).

SC Conversations: Neomaterialism

Saturday, April 12, 2pm

SculptureCenter is pleased to present the New York City book launch of Neomaterialism (Sternberg Press, 2013). Following the ideas presented in his new book, Joshua Simon’s talk will engage with notions of the commodity, the general intellect, debt, labor, subjectivity, thingness, the dialect of material and dialectical materialism.

  Joshua Simon is director and chief curator at MoBY – Museums of Bat Yam. He is co-founding editor of Maayan Magazine for literature, poetry and ideas, Maarvon (Western) – New Film Magazine, and The New & Bad Art Magazine, all based in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. Simon is a 2011-2013 fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School, New York, and a PhD candidate at the Curatorial/Knowledge program  at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the editor of Solution 196-213: United States of Palestine-Israel (Sternberg Press, 2011), and author ofNeomaterialism (Sternberg Press, 2013)

  The event on facebook

About the book