Abstract

In the book’s two texts concepts of art "return" from the past, mostly from the founding narrative of contemporary art, but they are not taking us back to the past. The past that is recovered in our present is a measure of the distance that separates us from it. The texts' central proposition operates through the bracketing of objects. By suspending its own internality an object allows itself to be examined through its external relations in the material context of art and institutional practices. Its customary literalness and self-reflexiveness are turned round into a working method for unfolding and investigating its own contextual complexity. What an artwork is is also what it does and makes us do. Through its agency, it engages a coordinated collective of people, practices and objects. Its event questions the boundaries of personhood and consciousness, and it decenters the anthropocentric as well as the generic spectator. Somewhere in between the academic's talk (what I am thinking) and the artist's talk (what I am doing) theoretical discourse can exemplify the representational as being routed in live performance and material externality.