Minimum worlds: Material Poetics between Time, details and fragments

Abstract

Despite Umberto Eco, in artistic terms we art historians, curators, museologists and museum curators tend to be great consumers of internal coherence, of the illusion of the organized whole, of the control of entropy, of the tranquility offered by balance, in short, of the finished work, prey to a frozen, static and drowsy time. While as far as contemporary art is concerned, this has begun to reverse, for the productions of the nineteenth century and back, these needs persist in a sustained way whenever we choose a piece for an exhibition or for the pages of a catalogue. Just make a comparison between the set of objects displayed in the halls of a museum and the one that constitutes its deposit to identify that the works with their committed structure, with small or large losses, prey to the deterioration of time, nature or human action, or turned into fragments are precisely those who will not be invited to participate in our speech. In this sense the historiography of art reveals a certain degree of material discrimination: We want the finished work! We want you complete! We love your beautiful continuous surface, no breaks, no gaps! But doesn´t this overriding desire for completeness hide a deep fear of dealing with the universe of minimal worlds that make up a work of art, worlds in which different times coexist, and a fragmented, hidden materiality, in constant change and appearance. From different case studies, I propose to discuss certain concepts and methods that start from considering an anthropology of matter and an archaeology of artistic making for the study of images.