Documents 

Artists increasingly refer to “post-object-based” work while theorists engage with material artifacts in culture. A focus on “object-based” learning treats objects as vectors for dialogue across disciplines. Virtual imaging enables the object to be abstracted or circumvented, while immaterial forms of labor challenge materialist theories. This anthology surveys such reappraisals of what constitutes the “objectness” of production, with art as its focus.

Among the topics it examines are the relation of the object to subjectivity; distinctions between objects and things; the significance of the object’s transition from inert mass to tool or artifact; and the meanings of the everyday in the found object, repetition in the replicated or multiple object, loss in the absent object, and abjection in the formless or degraded object. It also explores artistic positions that are anti-object; theories of the experimental, liminal or mental object; and the role of objects in performance. The object becomes a prism through which to reread contemporary art and better understand its recent past. [editor summary]

Walt Kuhn (1877–1949) is best known for his bold, modernist paintings of showgirls and circus performers. He was deeply involved with theater and the circus for much of his life, and his work was informed by years of close observation. Combining a modernist impulse with a showman’s instincts, Kuhn created portraits that penetrate the veneer of burlesque shows and circuses as well as vigorously rendered still lifes. Kuhn was one of the principal organizers of the 1913 Armory Show, and from about 1922 to 1925, he also turned theater professional, writing and directing satirical skits and pantomimes. In the late 1920s, his mature style emerged through a unique melding of modernist principles with an updated realism.[editor summary]

In a world where technology, spectacle and excess seem to eclipse former concepts of nature, the individual and society ... the notion that the sublime represents a taking to the limits, to the point at which fixities begin to fragment ... examines how the ideas of the sublime are explored in the work of contemporary artists and theorists, in relation to the unpresentable, transcendence, terror, nature, technology, the uncanny and altered states. [editor summary]

Amid the global uncertainties of our times, failure has become a central subject of investigation in recent art. Celebrating failed promises and myths of the avant-garde, or setting out to realize seemingly impossible tasks, artists have actively claimed the space of failure to propose a resistant view of the world. Here success is deemed overrated, doubt embraced, experimentation encouraged, and risk considered a viable strategy. The abstract possibilities opened up by failure are further reinforced by the problems of physically realizing artworks--wrestling with ideas, representation, and object-making. By amplifying both theoretical and practical failure, artists have sought new, unexpected ways of opening up endgame situations, ranging from the ideological shadow of the white cube to unfulfilled promises of political emancipation. Between the two subjective poles of success and failure lies a space of potentially productive operations where paradox rules and dogma is refused. This collection of writings, statements, mediations, fictions, polemics, and discussions identifies failure as a core concern in cultural production. Failure identifies moments of thought that have eschewed consensus, choosing to address questions rather than answers.[editor summary]

The spontaneous, unexpected or random event is a vital component in numerous works of Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus and conceptual photography. And the camera snapshot seems intrinsically implicated in the workings of chance. But why today does chance remain a key stretegy in artists' investigations into the contemporary world? This anthology analyses the meaning of these strategic spaces of uncertainty, poised between intention and outcome, and provides a new critical context for chance procedures in art since 1900. [editor summary]

A unique set of conditions produced in both space and time and ranging across material, social, political and economic relations, Situation is now a key concept in 21st-century art. This anthology traces its evolution from the 1960s emergence of site-specific art to its divergent implications in the global era. Among the topics surveyed are the limits of site; the role of the artist as ethnographer or fieldworker; the relation between action and public space; the meaning of place and locality; and the crucial role of the curator in new situation-specific art. [editor summary]

The desire to move viewers out of the role of passive observers and into the role of producers is one of the hallmarks of twentieth-century art. This tendency can be found in practices and projects ranging from El Lissitzky's exhibition designs to Allan Kaprow's happenings, from minimalist objects to installation art. More recently, this kind of participatory art has gone so far as to encourage and produce new social relationships. Guy Debord's celebrated argument that capitalism fragments the social bond has become the premise for much relational art seeking to challenge and provide alternatives to the discontents of contemporary life. [editor summary]