Actants of Decay. Processual Art of the 1960s and the Agency of Biotic Materials

My dissertation project engages with intentional processes of material decay in the art of the 1960s. In contrast to their often anecdotal status in the literature, I frame these artworks as a trend towards the general affirmation of decay and, implicitly, the affirmation of non-human influences.

During the 1960s, artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Dieter Roth or Gordon Matta-Clark begin to experiment with biotic materials such as chocolate, yeast, bread mould or agar, and exhibit these experiments inside the white cube. Here, the slowly and often repugnantly decaying artworks enter an ambivalent relationship with their institutional frame. On the one hand, decaying artworks question conventional notions of auctorial subjectivity, of art as a testimony of previous creation, as a portable commodity or as a time-transcending bearer of cultural value. On the other hand, their symbolic and aesthetic value is secured by these conceptual conventions. Equally ambiguous is their art historical position, for example in the topos of the living artwork or in the art history of the vanitas. Furthermore, these experiments are stunning anticipations of present discourses on human/non-human entanglements, on fungi and fermentation processes, and on the bio-artistic merger of ‘art’ and ‘life’.

Negotiating these contemporary topics and the historical research object, I analyse the decaying artworks of the 1960s with focus on two aspects. Firstly, I embed them into a wider discourse of decay in the 1960s. This discourse surfaces in the beginnings of environmentalism, the fascination with Zen- Buddhism, in apocalyptic visions prompted by the cold war, as well as the material culture of this time – from the objects of everyday life to the materials used to make them. With this broad approach, I try to answer the questions of how the discourse of decay shapes the 1960s and is shaped by it – in and outside of art.

Secondly, I relate the question of decay to the question of agency. How is the artistic agency in these artworks distributed to actants participating in processes of decay? How is our understanding of art changed by this distribution, and what are its limits? Is the art of the 1960s and their institutional frame a symbol for our relationship to the non-human, or is it an anticipation to the present renegotiation of this relationship?

When engaging with non-human agency, it is important to circumvent the dilemma between human exceptionalism and ‘animistic’ projection. This is why I understand agency, borrowing from Diana Coole and Bruno Latour, as a situational force which emerges independent from intentionally acting subjects and which can, therefore, be described in situations such as artworks.

With my research, I pursue three goals. (1) The assembly of scattered artistic experiments under the motive of decay. (2) The reconstruction of the discourse of decay in the 1960s especially in material culture, thereby historising our current attempt to transform our material culture towards ‘sustainable’, e. g. biodegradable solutions. (3) A differentiated understanding of agency, as a contribution to the ubiquitous debate on anthropocentrism and as an estimation of the possibilities and limitations of contemporary art practices.