Hannah Cohen

What are the politics of technical knowledge in the world of contemporary art? Intellectual apprehensions of art, by privileging the insights of texts, (critical) theory, and abstract ideas over and above the empirical truths of objects themselves, do not simply explain contemporary art—they sustain it. They define how contemporary art can and should be known and, in turn, the forms of experience that are conceptually relevant to this understanding. Always already present within the art world, however, if largely invisible across its ranks, is an entirely different way of knowing that concretely contests these defining ways by which art is conventionally understood.Technical knowledge is a vital presence in the world of contemporary art. Technical practitioners—fabricators, riggers, engineers, and conservators, among others—work behind the scenes to set into place the material conditions of what contemporary art is, how it is evolving, and how museums and gallery spaces are, in their architectures, evolving along with it. In this article, I draw on firsthand interviews with fabricators at the Walla Walla Foundry, a commercial art foundry in Walla Walla, Washington, to dissect how these individuals engage art on their own terms, thus challenging the academic epistemology of the institutional art world they invisibly define. This epistemic tension (between academic and technical ways of knowing), I argue, is relevant to our scholarly understanding of what the philosopher Peter Osborne has called “postconceptual” art. It also raises critical methodological questions for the discipline of art history writ large.