The Technics of Contemporary Art, 1898-Present

My current book project, The Technics of Contemporary Art, 1898-Present, is about the extensive ways in which technology enters into contemporary art. Technical practitioners, technical systems and technical knowledges, through ubiquitous throughout our contemporary cultural landscape, go largely unseen within it. Fabricators, construction workers, contractors, designers, architects and engineers, to say nothing of the tools and systems they use and devise, all command a considerable agency with regards to contemporary art and the conditions of its display. This project addresses the technical and political complexities of their collective contributions, taking seriously the challenges and stakes of coming to (or, at very least, trying to) see these figures at all. Art looks different through a technical lens, and this project is a critical assessment of how that is the case and why it matters to our understanding of art itself.

Methodologically grounded in interviews and archival research, The Technics of Contemporary Art is organized as a series of three case studies, each of which centers not on artists or artworks (though artists and artworks do figure across them), but instead on the ways in which technical specialists, technical systems and technical knowledges set in place the material conditions of what contemporary art is, how it is evolving and how museums and gallery spaces are, in their architectures, evolving along with it.

The first chapter, “Engineering Art: Arup’s Tate,” looks at the role of engineers in the production of contemporary art and its institutions. In the context of art production, engineers work as problem solvers, engaged to execute an artist’s proposal; as extra-disciplinary interlocutors with whom an artist may collaborate to conceive of projects beyond their own imaginings; and as overseers who certify that the craftsmanship of fabricators and installers is structurally sound. In the domain of architecture, engineers may consult on everything from a building’s concept engineering and master planning to its lighting and HVAC. The indelible imprint of the engineering firm Arup on London’s Tate Modern demonstrates how these two domains – the engineering of artworks and the engineering of institutions – are closely related. In this case study, we see how Arup has engineered Tate’s architecture and urban context, as well as many of its most iconic artworks. This implicates individual works of art into a larger ecology of production that spans local and global scales. It also calls into consideration the politics of engineering, and the extent to which an engineer’s professional and corporate ideology inflects upon the work(s) they produce.

The second chapter addresses the museum as an architectural environment. “The Museum Wall Between Modern and Contemporary” takes as its subject the museum wall, a technology that constitutes a concrete interface between art and architecture. Though we often think about the white cube as a space synonymous with an “eternity of display” (as Brian O’Doherty emphatically put it), modern and contemporary gallery spaces are, in fact, spaces of perpetual transformation. Whereas historical museums have permanent gallery architectures that edify the permanent exhibition of permanent collections, modern and contemporary institutions are spatially flexible. “The contemporary” is, by definition, that which has not yet been stilled into the annals of history. This chapter takes an eye to the way in which temporary and flexible walls and wall systems both articulate and enact the precarious temporariness of the historical present.

The final chapter, “Production Value: Technics and Epistemics at the Walla Walla Foundry,” takes up the question of how technical knowledges come into contact – and, inevitably, conflict – with the institutional art world they are tasked with negotiating. The Walla Walla Foundry, in Walla Walla, Washington, is one of the world’s largest commercial producers of large-scale contemporary art. But it is also a site in which many of the workers have little prior knowledge or experience of art, such that their understanding of art is brokered primarily by their direct, first-hand experience of making it. Thus, their technical knowledges, insofar as they stand at an overt remove from how art is more conventionally known, make for an ideal case study by which to extrapolate the distinctions between technical and academic knowledges of art more broadly, and the way in which they challenge each other’s terms in ways that might advance our understanding of both.

Our contemporary cultural landscape is indelibly shaped by non-cultural actors. These non-cultural actors, as I evidence, engage art on their own terms, thus challenging the academic epistemology of the institutional art world they invisibly define. The scholarly discipline of art history draws clear distinctions as to whose experiences are traditionally considered admissible in our understanding of art; my research contests these distinctions. I recognize the insights of engineers, designers and fabricators as centrally relevant to important debates on artistic labor, art and technology and the much-theorized disciplinary intersection of art and architecture. In so doing, I call into question the very ways in which art historical knowledge is defined.