“Speculations on Anonymous Materials”: speculation on the materiality of artistic capitalism as a critical response to the aestheticization of everyday life

The “Speculations on Anonymous Materials” exhibition, curated by Susanne Pfeffer and held from September 2013 to February 2014 at the Fridericianum de Kassel Museum is the starting point for this text, which aims to address some aspects that I consider to be crucial in respect of art and speculative futures. With more than 50 artworks by 25 European and North American artists – most of them first- or second-generation children of immigrants – the exhibition demonstrated a new eclectic aesthetic that seems to interweave the Pop and Post-humanist, Post-Internet or Post-Digital styles, with different nuances that go from the abject to some form of contemporary futurism.

The exhibition displayed a “futurised” present (or a “presentised” future), to which one can attribute some reflection about the “hyper” and “trans” aestheticization of the everyday life (Lipovetsky and Serroy) in the current consumerist, post-Fordist society, in particular in terms of its ultra-digitised artistic capitalism. Taking Speculative materialism and Speculative Realism (Meillassoux; Bryant; Harman) and #ACCELERATE: Manifesto for an Accelerationalist Politics (Alex Williams; Nick Srnicek) as its starting point, this article will attempt to theoretically contextualise the exhibition and examine conceptually some of the participating artists, such as Timur Si-Qin, Pamela Rosenkranz, Katja Novitskova, Josh Kline and Ryan Trecartin, among others.
These novel artists work with the material aspect of new digital and industrial technologies and of everyday objects (plastics, digital images, synthetic products, and so on) in works whose physical reality is conformed by subliminal digital processes, thereby evidencing the
hyperreality in which we are submerged. Their works are born from a reaction to the complexity of contemporary capitalist society and to its everyday landscape, and they express the real and virtual environment in which the current and future generations seem destined to live. But above all the exhibition expresses, from the perspective of aesthetics and the theory of contemporary art, a change of onto-epistemological paradigm, which is a symptom of an
evolution with respect to the paradigms in force until now.