The Artist as Assemblage

Beschreibung

"Ambitious, rich in theoretical insight and grounded in curatorial and institutional practice, this book offers a compelling method which challenges conventional analysis and reimagines the practice of art history, opening up exciting new possibilities for interdisciplinary scholarship."
- Annet Dekker, Associate Professor, University of Amsterdam

"This book offers a compelling rethinking of what it means to write an artist into art history – a richly reflexive intervention in art history, museum studies and curatorial practice."
- Katrina Sluis, Associate Professor, ANU

This book applies and experiments with a methodology based on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage. It uses assemblage thinking and ANT as a functional and analytical toolkit for the enabling of a new way of seeing, key to which are the centrality of desire, affect and excess. By way of the examination of the endless unresolvedness of David Bomberg’s position as both insider and outsider of modern British art, this book highlights the fact that artists and artworks – without beginning or end – are always taking place in the middle of things. Conceiving of an artist as a desired, deliberate and purposeful assemblage means seeing it as the product of highly specific choices and decisions and purely in terms of the kinds of arrangements it makes possible and the set of expectations it entails. This book evidences the ways in which the assemblage’s material and expressive dimensions interact, as well as the ways in which its abstract machine pushes it towards either a stratified state or towards mutation and the making of multiple of connections, and its condition of possibility – ever intersected by lines of flight – functions as a mechanism of defence and a power of selection. Problematizing art historical and cultural understandings of and assumptions about an artist enables us to surpass cliché, “let[ting] in a breath of air from the chaos that brings us the vision” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, 204).

Nicola Baird is a scholar and curator specializing in twentieth-century and contemporary British and European art and culture.

This book applies and experiments with a methodology based on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage. It uses assemblage thinking and ANT as a functional and analytical toolkit for the enabling of a new way of seeing, key to which are the centrality of desire, affect and excess. By way of the examination of the endless unresolvedness of David Bomberg’s position as both insider and outsider of modern British art, this book highlights the fact that artists and artworks – without beginning or end – are always taking place in the middle of things. Conceiving of an artist as a desired, deliberate and purposeful assemblage means seeing it as the product of highly specific choices and decisions and purely in terms of the kinds of arrangements it makes possible and the set of expectations it entails. This book evidences the ways in which the assemblage’s material and expressive dimensions interact, as well as the ways in which its abstract machine pushes it towards either a stratified state or towards mutation and the making of multiple of connections, and its condition of possibility – ever intersected by lines of flight – functions as a mechanism of defence and a power of selection. Problematizing art historical and cultural understandings of and assumptions about an artist enables us to surpass cliché, “let[ting] in a breath of air from the chaos that brings us the vision” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, 204).

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Nicola Baird

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assemblage theory actor-network theory David Bomberg art history and philosophy curation exhibition practice aesthetic experience Ben Uri collection Sarah Rose Collection

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