ABSTRACT
Increasingly since the 2000s, artistic practices invested in the question of time have become inseparable from the developments of new materialism, speculative realism, object-oriented philosophy, and affective studies. This dialogue is particularly manifest in artistic practices concerned with the democracy of objects, the agency of things, the dynamism of matter, and ecology, as well as the sociality and vitality of human and non-human entities. Installations by American artist Sarah Sze are pivotal to this dialogue. Fully engaged in an object-driven investigation of time, they set into play a loose mobilization of new materialist and object-oriented philosophical insights to elaborate a temporality of wonder. This chapter examines Sze’s The Last Garden (Landscape of Events Suspended Indefinitely)—a garden made for the 2015 56th Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition, as part of the biennale curator Okwui Enwezor’s All the World’s Futures exhibition—to disclose the inventive temporalities elaborated in that work by following its connections with new materialism and object-oriented ontological (OOO). Its implicit dialogue with new materialism and OOO offers a point of entry into The Last Garden’s temporal investigations. This chapter asks: if, as new materialists have contended, certain temporalities indeed act as productive forces (forces that generate new objects or are the dimension by which things change, evolve, differ, or transform themselves), what type of temporalities matter in this historical moment and how does Sze’s practice participate in that mattering? My main claim is that the temporal significance of Sze’s work lies in its development of wonder—the subject’s capacity to be amazed; the affective form of temporality that comes about when we encounter objects that surprise us and move us in that surprise—as a condition of possibility of the future. The work of two thinkers, object-oriented philosopher Graham Harman and new materialist philosopher Catherine Malabou, will be put into conversation with Sze’s work to help specify the materiality (and, more specifically, the affectivity) and historicity of that temporality.
