My research examines the significant contributions of technical practitioners to the production and display of modern and contemporary art. That art is not sui generis is no secret. Technical practitioners, technical systems, and technical knowledges, though ubiquitous throughout our contemporary cultural landscape, go largely unseen within it. In my research, I am interested in how figures like engineers, fabricators, riggers, construction workers, and contractors, to say nothing of the tools and systems they use and devise, have historically negotiated both the world of modern and contemporary art and the very construct of Art as such.

I explore these concerns in my first book project, which is tentatively titled Things Become Art: Engineering the Postconceptual. Contemporary art, as I argue in the book, turns on an epistemic tension. On the one hand, to be considered Art with a capital “A,” contemporary artworks must channel ideas in ways that distinguish them from the mere “stuff” of everyday life. On the other hand, there is an uncomfortable reality: the postconceptual artwork must be materially realized. The technical knowledge and expertise required to materially realize Art – to fabricate it, engineer it, crate it, and conserve it – are substantially different from those of the average artist, scholar, curator, or critic. Art needs theory to make sense, but it also needs the applied insights of technical practitioners to convincingly seem like the pristine, privileged category of object it purportedly is. What interests me in this scenario is less the professional distinction between artists and craftsmen, but rather, as I explore in the book, how their opposed ways of thinking animate the very boundary condition of Art and not-yet-Art.

The book is organized into five sections, the first of which defines and addresses this “third space” of not-yet-Art head-on. Distinct from the more familiar territorial contestation of Art versus not-Art, the domain of not-yet-Art demarcates a third space between these two terms. It is, as I theorize in the book, a domain of making, of art in the becoming, of raw materials already extracted from their source, yet not quite assembled into the finished artwork they are designated to become. The individuals who work within this space, tasked with navigating the complex border politics of things becoming art, actively negotiate – and in so doing, implicitly reveal – the latent tensions of this charged ontological distinction. I explore these tensions in the sections of the book to follow, each of which centers on a different context of art’s becoming, from contemporary art foundries to engineering offices to blue-chip gallery floors. Across cases, I show how such fundamental constructs of art historical expertise, artistic possibility, and authorship are unsettled by the presence and contributions of technical practitioners – in ways that productively complicate scholarly ways of thinking about art itself.  

What does it mean to “own” a work of art? How can history inform new ownership practices across museums and the private sector?