Documents 

This anthology investigates materiality in art that attempts to expand notions of time, space, process or participation. It looks at materials that obstruct, disrupt or interfere with social norms, surfacing as impure formations and messy, unstable substances. It re-examines the notion of 'dematerialization'; addresses materialist critiques of artistic production; surveys the relationship between materiality and bodies; explores the vitality of substances, and the concepts of intermateriality and transmateriality that have emerged in the hybrid zones of digital experimentation. [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]