This is a thesis on the artwork as 'Material Complex'. The written element is a critical enquiry into the ideal of totality and homogeneity for artistic production, and a critique of this ideal as orthodoxy. I consider the idea of aesthetic judgement in relation to its ideological investment, and challenge the idea of normalised readings for its assumption of universality via an understanding of individual perception as practice. Although I realise the impossibility of escaping an eventual collective (aesthetic; ideological) intelligibility, I argue that the motivation to do so nevertheless produces criticality. I am starting from the position that the judgement of an artwork is produced in the performance of a Hegelian sublimation (Aufhebung) of its conflicting material elements. I stage the ideological import of this sublimation via Christian Metz. This focuses the enquiry in the first instance on audio-visuality. The thesis thus commences with a cross-reading of Sergei Eisenstein's position on montage with Roland Barthes' ideas of the symbolic and signifying. I develop this critical trajectory in the second part, where I theorise my viewing of Robert Smithson's film Spiral Jetty and of Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker via Julia Kristeva and Jean-Francois Lyotard respectively. Thereby I identify the method of 'collage-montage' and, in a critique thereof, I advocate 'temporal-collage' as a strategy that provokes, through its deliberate non-resolvedness, complex individual productions. The last part of the thesis tests this strategy on concurrent contestations of the network age in dialogue with concerns of '70s Conceptual Art. In conclusion I come to propose 'timespace-collage', produced continually in 'subjective ideality'. The concerns of the text element are informed by, and developed in, my studio practice. Here I am working with sonic and visual material to produce complex expressions that provoke a sensorial practice rather than an intellectual judgement
