In the 1960s, artists around the world experimented with the creative possibilities of material decay processes. Martha Minujin allowed the surfaces of her paintings to dry out and crumble, Dieter Roth made sculptures from moldy kitchen waste and Gordon Matta-Clark inoculated works with yeast. The project examines both the art-historical references of these experiments and the traces of contemporary discourses: the nuclear threat endows artistic processes of disintegration with a prophetic or therapeutic effect, capitalist throwaway culture makes durable artworks seem outmoded, and systems-oriented ecology frames decay as a mode of interrelation. Such artworks and discourses are not only of historical interest. They gain new relevance in light of today’s debates on non-human agency, on fungi and fermentation as motives of the symbiocene, and on the emotional responses to a deteriorating planet.

Yorick Josua Berta studied the history of art and visual culture, Russian studies and philosophy in Berlin, Frankfurt/Oder, Moscow and Canterbury. During his studies, he worked as a student assistant at Humboldt University Berlin’s Cluster of Excellence »Image Knowledge Gestaltung« and the Society for Model Research, and as an intern at the Hygiene-Museum in Dresden and the German Centre for Art History in Paris. In 2020, he began his PhD studies and a position as university assistant to Jasmin Mersmann at the University of Art and Design Linz. He also works as a curator (most recently with an exhibition on the ecological view on art at the Traklhaus Salzburg) and writes film reviews for the Berlin magazine indiekino. He has lived in Vienna since 2019.