The Artwork as Assemblage. New Materialist Perspectives on Aesthetics

Abstract

To analyse an artwork using the philosophical theory of the assemblage is to expand one’s view of how artworks can be interpreted. In the various and often wildly differing concepts of new materialism, the assemblage acts as a way of describing the agency of matter in general. Following Deleuze and Guattari, who provided various definitions of the assemblage, the new materialist perspectives emphasize, for example, the active linking of heterogeneous parts and a dynamic conjunction of semi-autonomous formations that articulate new affiliations of entities and discourses.

In this essay, Xinhao Cheng’s multimedia installation The Naming of a River, 2014 to 2018, is described as an assemblage, thereby significantly widening how it is interpreted as the artwork. Cheng describes the manifolds of time-space-dimensions in his simultaneously scientific and deeply personal artistic research project on the Panlong River.

In the context of an assembled assemblage theory, formed by combining new materialist perspectives, The Naming of a River can be thought of as existing in an innumerable manifold of different versions. With each new connection made, the entire artwork changes completely. The relations exist not only between the material artefacts of the installation and the artist, but also between the institution, the recipients, and the river. The artwork is a self-productive setting that transcends spaces and times, an interpretation derived from approaches by Manuel DeLanda and Karen Barad. In this process, our understanding of what an artwork can be is significantly challenged.