The rise of the exhibition as critical form and artistic medium, from Robert Smithson's antimodernist non-sites in 1968 to today's institutional gravitation toward the participatory.
In 1968, Robert Smithson reacted to Michael Fried's influential essay “Art and Objecthood” with a series of works called non-sites. While Fried described the spectator's connection with a work of art as a momentary visual engagement, Smithson's non-sites asked spectators to do something more: to take time looking, walking, seeing, reading, and thinking about the combination of objects, images, and texts installed in a gallery. In Beyond Objecthood, James Voorhies traces a genealogy of spectatorship through the rise of the exhibition as a critical form―and artistic medium. Artists like Smithson, Group Material, and Michael Asher sought to reconfigure and expand the exhibition and the museum into something more active, open, and democratic, by inviting spectators into new and unexpected encounters with works of art and institutions. This practice was sharply critical of the ingrained characteristics long associated with art institutions and conventional exhibition-making; and yet, Voorhies finds, over time the critique has been diluted by efforts of the very institutions that now gravitate to the “participatory.”
Beyond Objecthood focuses on innovative figures, artworks, and institutions that pioneered the exhibition as a critical form, tracing its evolution through the activities of curator Harald Szeemann, relational art, and New Institutionalism. Voorhies examines recent artistic and curatorial work by Liam Gillick, Thomas Hirschhorn, Carsten Höller, Maria Lind, Apolonija Šušteršic, and others, at such institutions as Documenta, e-flux, Manifesta, and Office for Contemporary Art Norway, and he considers the continued potential of the exhibition as a critical form in a time when the differences between art and entertainment increasingly blur.

Beyond Objecthood: The Exhibition as a Critical Form since 1968 (Mit Press)

Arts & Photography

Voorhies, James

History & Criticism

The MIT Press

Contemporary art exhibitions appeal to cognition as well as the senses, modeling a new and expansive understanding of global aesthetics. In this original work of aesthetic theory, James Voorhies argues that we live in the shadow of old ways of thinking about art that emphasize the immediate visual experience of an autonomous art object. But theory must change as artistic and curatorial production has changed. It should encompass the full range of activities through which we encounter art and exhibitions, in which reading and thinking are central to the aesthetic experience. Voorhies advances the theoretical framework of a "postsensual aesthetics," which does not mean we are beyond a sensual engagement with objects, but rather embraces the cognitive connections with ideas that unite art and knowledge production. Cognitive engagements with art often begin with publications conceived as integral to exhibitions, conveying the knowledge and research artists and curators produce, and continuing in time and space beyond traditional curatorial frames. The idea, and not just visual immediacy, is now art's defining moment. Voorhies reframes aesthetic criteria to account for the liminal, cognitive spaces inside and outside of the exhibition. Surveying a wide range of artists, curators, exhibitions, and related publications, he repositions the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno, and draws inspiration from Rosalind Krauss and Fredric Jameson, to describe a contemporary "logic of the curatorial." He demonstrates how, even as we increasingly expect to learn from contemporary art, we must avoid an instrumentalist and reductive view of art as a mere source of information. As Voorhies shows through an analysis of two major global exhibitions, dOCUMENTA (13) (artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev) and Documenta11 (artistic director Okwui Enwezor), and of Ute Meta Bauer's curatorial work at the Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, it is imperative for artistic research to retain its unique role in the production of knowledge.

Postsensual Aesthetics: On the Logic of the Curatorial

Reference

Published for an exhibition at DC Moore Gallery in New York, Remote Futures documents Darren Waterston’s recent paintings exploring the allure and menace of utopias. These works, at once Edenic and dystopian, are realized in layers of oils and glazes on gessoed wood panels.

Darren Waterston: Remote Futures

Individual Artists

DC Moore Gallery

In 2008, American artist Robert Beck changed his surname by a single vowel to Buck. This act of artistic self-nomination was precipitated by what he had achieved as Beck, an oeuvre often autobiographical in content and persistently diverse in form. Working in various mediums (drawing, sculpture, photography, and video) the artist has returned repeatedly to the universal themes of family, memory, identity, authorship, and loss. While his own experiences are central, the artist deliberately withholds information to solicit the viewer's own unique associations. Several works discussed herein are again relevant in the wake of recent shootings in the United States, with the images of teen shooters in Beck's Thirteen Shooters, 2001 echoing Andy Warhol's 1964 mural Thirteen Most Wanted Men. Robert Buck lives and works in New York City. His work has been exhibited internationally, including a solo show at the Wexner Museum of Art (2007), as well as in group exhibitions such as  The San Francisco Museum of Art s The Air We Breath (2011).

Robert Beck Robert Buck

Rennie Collection

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Books by Voorhies, James

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Voorhies, James. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Beyond Objecthood: The Exhibition as a Critical Form since 1968 (Mit Press)

Postsensual Aesthetics: On the Logic of the Curatorial

Darren Waterston: Remote Futures

Robert Beck Robert Buck