Aesthetics of Contingency : Materialism, Evolution, Art
Contemporary art is involved in going beyond of modern dualisms, something that the art critic must in turn be free from in order to continue to describe and act upon the world. The principal issue then for Timur Si Qin is the redefinition of the relationship between human and non-human, by expanding the notion of materiality and by replacing subjectivity and the mind in their material and evolutionist context. He advocates the particular relationship that artists have developed with materials, adopting a very generalist definition of materiality as the tendency and capacity of a system. Matter plays an active role in the creation of its own form: the artist is not alone in giving form to a material but is more-so in dialogue with it. The conceptual materials that have been used in contemporary art since the sixties and seventies continue to be real materials with tendencies and capacities, with unique behaviors and causal forces. His ideas about branding are also part of work being done on the materiality of the mind and the cognitive foundations of culture, and are not to be considered within the context of a discourse on capitalism.
