Things say: Manipulations of the object in contemporary visuality

Abstract

The visual arts of the 20th century focused most of their efforts on their own language. By concentrating on meanings, they increased their possible repertoires, assimilating what was already done, not just as an object that precedes the artist’s creative work —an object not created by him— but also, and above all, as a significant fact bearer of a meaning already available within the social scaffolding. In this dynamic, everyday objects adopted a crucial role because they themselves, in their artifactual superabundance, gradually became involved in everyday life. By interacting in the ways of human coexistence, they also modeled our ways of seeing and acting (Appadurai, 1991), allowing them to manifest as a wide repertoire of visual images of potential meanings for saying about our social and cultural contexts. 

This article develops a brief historical approach to the object presence in the arts and other related disciplines and then proposes a series of recurring categories within the object manipulation operations in contemporary visuality. To achieve these objectives, it relies on a body of literature from the history and theory of art, aesthetics, and cultural studies.