Elize Mazadiego will discuss her recent book
Dematerialization and the Social Materiality of Art, which reconceptualizes mid-twentieth-century avant-garde practices in Argentina with a focus on the changing material status of the art object in relation to the country’s intense period of modernization between 1955 and 1968. Mazadiego presents art critic and theorist Oscar Masotta's notion of dematerialization as a concept for interpreting experimental art practices -- known as arte nuevo, arte vivo, happenings, mass media art -- that negated the object's primacy and developed new materialities rooted in Buenos Aires' changing social life.
Elize Mazadiego is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow in the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. She received her MA in Latin American Studies from UC Los Angeles and her PhD in Art History, Theory and Criticism from UC San Diego . She specializes in Modern and Contemporary art from Latin America, with a focus on postwar art practices, conceptualism, feminism, and transnational exchanges between Latin America. Europe and the US. She is author of the monograph Dematerialization and the Social Materiality of Art: Experimental forms in Argentina (Brill, 2021) and editor of the forthcoming volume Charting Space: the cartographies of conceptual art (Manchester University Press, 2022).