Documents 

Neoliberalism has taken autonomous professional values and labour firmly in its grasp. Traditional forms of employment are replaced with post-Fordist conditions in which work has become freelance, mobile, projectbased, and temporary. This way of working is not new to artists. They have seen themselves confronted with these precarious conditions since many years. Mobile Autonomy detects what modes of economy and different innovative working modalities artists and other artistic professionals have developed in order to create their work in today’s social, economic and political conditions. Theoretical insights are alternated with hands-on practices, in order to learn from and reflect on contemporary artists’ working conditions. ‘We need to stay mobile to keep our autonomy alive, and we need to develop new autonomous practices to keep our mobility alive. [editor summary]

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]

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]

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]