Mere Materialism: Aesthetics of Attrition in Paint, Text, and Paper (Lit Z)

Mere Materialism challenges us to recognize a neglected, transhistorical aesthetics of loss. Against the affirmative materialisms prevalent in cultural criticism today, mere materialism in art and literature documents the slow, ordinary violence of routine physical deterioration, including art’s own. It inhabits a space where loss can remain nothing but loss, without having to serve any productive or redemptive purpose.

Attending to material surfaces and the processes of attrition Goldsmith examines works from Rembrandt to the present that that stand in counterpoint to the typical materialist emphasis on dynamic, generative possibility. These works turn aside from such future horizons to pose a central question: Amid the urgent purposes we ask art to serve, and amid the many values we invest in the concept of materialism, is it possible for art to occupy the everyday damage of erosion and, on occasion, simply let loss be?

Wide-ranging in philosophical reference and in discussions of specific materials, conservation theory, and reception histories, the book draws out the phenomenon of mere materialism through a series of extended case studies: a Rembrandt portrait of Saint Bartholomew; Melville’s slave-revolt novella Benito Cereno; a Dada collage by Kurt Schwitters; and recent “gray” writings by Karl Ove Knausgaard and C. S. Giscombe. Together, these works index an aesthetics of fragility and decay, without presupposing that material vulnerability is in a dialectical relationship with deeper meaning, and without assuming that an encounter with it has a redeeming cognitive, affective, political or social function.