Critical Material Practices with Contemporary Art: Mondloch’s A Capsule Aesthetic

Kate Mondloch’s A Capsule Aesthetic: Feminist Materialisms in New Media Art is an in-depth and lush investigation of three artists’ works, showing how each exemplifies the influence of feminism from the 1960s through today, while also pushing us to think and feel and move forward with feminism. Mondloch’s approach couples aesthetics and ethics through activist prose that is unafraid to embrace populism or pleasure, or to revisit theoretical and historical misreadings of the past (and present). This book does not attempt to explain anything. Rather, it practices, and invites us to practice, conceptual-material engagements with art, and thus sensation, perception, and action. Such practice, the author convincingly argues over the entirety of her manuscript, is intrinsically feminist.

Mondloch’s first book, Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art, similarly proffered a framework and case studies for thinking with specific kinds of what she calls screen-reliant art; and while in my 2010 review,¹ I recommended that manuscript with enthusiasm, the author’s second monograph is more political, more refined, more poetic, and more impactful, across a number of fields and disciplines, precisely because it deepens thinkings and feelings with the artworks described, and art more generally. Her book addresses both the materials and bodies of that art’s making and experience, and matter and embodiment more generally, encompassing the theories, histories, categories, action, and potential futures of feminism writ large.

In Chapter 1, “Inhabiting Matter: New Media Art and New Materialisms Informed by Feminism,” Mondloch begins by succinctly tying together many of the disparate approaches to the new materialisms, process-oriented ontology, and object-oriented philosophy. All of them, she writes, “critique… anthropocentrism,” place “emphasis on the self-organizing powers of matter,” are committed to “thinking from a planetary perspective,” ask us to reevaluate “subjectivity by accentuating the agency of nonhuman forces,” and ultimately plea with us to reconsider “the bases of contemporary ethics” (11). But, she goes on, contemporary feminist approaches (she names Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Claire Colebrook, Elizabeth Grosz, and others as examples) additionally “maintain that bodies (human or otherwise) exist in interaction with an array of discursive forces” (11).

While empowering matter and objects with agency might be a valid response to the perception that language had been granted too much power for too long (an oft-cited criticism from Barad) these scholars—notably, all women (including Barad)—bring material and embodied investigation to ”the forefront of feminist theory and practice… without losing sight of its sociocultural production” (11). Of course concepts and matter both hold power over each other—are in fact a part of each other. And “feminists cannot afford either to lose women’s bodily realities entirely or, significantly, to ignore questions of political subjectivity and the socially constructed experience of bodies—which, as these theorists persuasively describe, are also material” (11–12). As a result, “feminist thinkers… reject traditional subject-centered humanism, but not the fundamental importance of context and embodied experience” (12).

Mondloch’s is a critical material practice, where things (art and matter, writing and thinking) are and do, while also implying and explicating. It is also a hopeful practice, because what we, as humans, explain (and are and do) has the power to impact what is. In A Capsule Aesthetic, Mondloch at once describes and enacts, invites and worries over, models and promotes being and knowing, matter and meaning, involving the ethical implications of each with and through individual works of art: both their experience and theorization.

At the core of Mondloch’s thesis is the claim that new media art, in particular, has us explore “the mechanisms by which bodies and matter become meaningful” (6). And in this exploration, we “think through a seeming paradox: how the artistic enactment of technological intimacy and mediated entanglement, as a feminist material practice, might offer a new model of critical aesthetics” (7). We learn about new feminisms through this work, which has emerged, in part, because of the influences...