Sherri Irvin, "Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art" (Oxford UP, 2022)
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What is the central thesis of Sherry Irvin’s book *Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art*?
Welcome to the new books network.
Hello and welcome to New Books in Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Booked Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co host of the channel along with Robert Talise, Sarah Tyson, and Malcolm Keating. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary pol philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Sherry Irvin, Presidential Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma. Her new book, Immaterial Rules in Contemporary Art is just out from Oxford University Press. Art forms have rules usually implicit but That govern the experiences that artists want their audiences to have.
For example, A representational painting should be hung right side up. The same sort of paint medium should be used in restoration. and the painting itself should not be touched. In Immaterial, Irvin argues that contemporary conceptual art is constituted by custom rules as well as by their physical medium. The artist may specify, for example, that That the work is intended to be handled or eaten. or made out of anything, or even installed however the gallery or museum wants it to. On Irvin's views, such rules are essential for expressing a work's meaning. Even though they can also make that meaning difficult for audiences to grasp. In this illustrated volume Urban considers a wide range of contemporary works to present, elaborate, and address challenges to her view.
Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Sherry Irvin. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy. Thank you, I'm so glad to be here. Yeah, this should be really interesting. Another Uh Делвінту конпорарі арт а Uh tell us a bit about first about yourself and you know how you bumped into philosophy, um, and how you came to your interests in aesthetics and the writing of this book.
Yeah, um I came from a kind of smallish town in Arizona. And um I really enjoyed writing fiction, but I thought, well, there's no career in that. And so I thought maybe I'd go to law school. So when I went to college at the University of Arizona, I kind of got this feeling that you could do pre law and you should take philosophy. And so I took a philosophy class and I just immediately it really clicked with me the way that I think. So I ended up studying philosophy. And uh then I went to grad school and I really just really didn't grad school didn't agree with me. Very well at all. And uh I ended up uh leaving the program, A B D, moving and but but I was living in New Jersey and I kind of started to learn about contemporary art, which isn't something I had really known about when I was younger, got really interested in it, ended up moving up to Canada to the Ottawa area and getting more involved in the contemporary art scene up there.
And I was in the National Gallery of Canada. I was doing some writing for their websites back when websites were new. And I ended up looking in the some of their object files. Um For some of the complex installation artworks that they have there. Um, like there's a work by the artist Liz Magor that's called Production, that I think she made around 1980. And I was sort of reading through These faxes that she had sent to a curator named Jermaine Co., where they were kind of negotiating how they would install her work. And the work had a lot of pieces, like thousands of pieces. And I was like, this is interesting. Like I always thought of artworks as having a fixed form. You know, if you make a sculpture, there's one way to install it.
And I was sort of like what? What is the work? If it's got This stuff. But then they have to negotiate how they're gonna install it on a given occasion. How do we capture what that thing is? And So then I ended up thinking, well maybe I could finish my PhD in philosophy. Maybe I could work on this question. So I sent an email to Alexander Nahomas at at Princeton, which is where I was A B D, and I said, Hey, what would you think if I like Wrote my dissertation and emailed it to you from Canada.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the central thesis of Sherry Irvin’s book *Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art*?
0:01–11:10
2
How did Sherry Irvin’s personal and academic background lead her to study rules in contemporary art?
11:10–21:59
3
Why does Irvin argue that custom rules are constitutive of conceptual art?
21:59–38:53
4
What are the three basic types of rules (display, conservation, engagement) that govern contemporary artworks?
38:53–53:31
5
Which paradigm cases illustrate Irvin’s theory of rule‑based art (e.g., Lawrence Wiener’s “Stake Set”)?
53:31–1:05:04
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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