Carl Andre’s pyramidal stack of aluminum ingots illustrates a part-whole relationship in which the part informs the structural organization of the whole. The formal logic between the ingots dictates the entire rationale of the piece: it is what it is. In this, Base 5 Aluminum Stack (2005) thwarts what object-oriented philosopher Graham Harman calls the “overmining” of its content, i.e., the impulse to write human interpretation over a thing’s material facticity. In Andre’s work, all questions of meaning generation become self-reflexive.
Laura Carton’s series of photographs, each named for a website (2000-2003), begin with pornographic images downloaded from the Internet. The artist removes the actors’ bodies and then digitally reconstructs the backgrounds. By literally removing the human performers, she asserts that the objects and environment are equal “performers” in generating and communicating meaning. Simultaneously, Carton’s work alludes to the conventional view of pornography as objectifying the humans it displays.
Valie Export’s A Perfect Pair (1986) reveals the insidious nature of commercialism by taking literally the idea that the body of a consumer can become a “walking billboard.” The video shows how a human subject’s autonomy is consumed, and reduced to the point of becoming a floating signifier. Export emphasizes the already-objectified female subject of consumer capitalism, while also extending an equal opportunity attitude toward male objectification.
Regina José Galindo’s work questions the ontological status of the female subject. Her photograph, No perdemos nada con nacer (2000), shows the artist’s naked body, bagged and discarded, in a litter-strewn landscape. The work operates through overt abjection, while also making reference to the convention of viewing the female body as messy and requiring containment.
Through engineered soundproofing, Tom Kotik’s box, Rational Impulse (2004), is able to contain the cacophony of sound within it, until the lid is opened. The unknowable interior and its overwhelming acoustic presence play not only with expectation, but also with human denial of things’ complexity.
Mary Lucking uses biofeedback technology to illustrate the tension between two bodies attempting to act in tandem. Her interactive installation, Pas de Deux (2000) invites two participants to occupy a space in which boundaries between self and environment must be actively challenged and dissolved. With cooperation, biofeedback allows two individuals to renounce their independence and dissolve into a singular system.
In Wall-Floor Positions (1968), Bruce Nauman leans, props, cantilevers, and rests his body on and against the wall and floor of his studio to imitate the manner in which minimalist sculpture is positioned in relation to gallery architecture. Nauman’s mimicry effaces his human significance by making his own body equivalent to the industrial materials deployed in early minimalist sculptures. Continuing Minimalism’s exploration of space through relationships, the artist’s body is a material with which to measure and study the room’s dimensions.
A gift for the unicellular organism Paramecium, Grit Ruhland’s to-scale “slipper” is only viewable under a microscope. Ruhland collaborated with scientists at the Max Planck Institute to build Pantoffel für Pantoffeltierchen (, a slipper-shaped home for the slipper-shaped organism, also known as Pantoffeltierchen or slipper animalcules. The use of scale makes this work at once humorous and an explicit rejection of anthropocentricism. The specific encounter between shelter and organism creates a closed system that positions the viewing human as outside and other.
Anthony Titus’ Empty Field 2 (2007) consists of an atmospheric screen print adhered to a high-gloss enamel wood support. A series of formal cuts and folds fractures the pictorial as well as the physical space, resulting in a destabilization of the notions of viewpoint and prospect, thereby blocking the viewing subject’s centrality.
Ruslan Trusewych’s installation, this is the way the world is (2005-2011), is composed of oscillating fans directed at a cluster of flickering nightlights whose subtle motion activates one another. The arrangement of nightlights and fans creates a closed system that exists outside of human intervention. This chaotic and random mode of communication explores entropy, even while staging a sense of equipoise.
Zimoun’s video of woodworms devouring a piece of wood masquerades as a still image, belying the intense activity playing out beyond human sight. In 25 woodworms, wood, microphone, sound system (2009), the audible element is the only hint at the concealed assemblage of woodworms and wood, an intersection between two things that is at once destructive and instructive.
