Sputnik - Post-post-object as neo-post-object

An Object (with a capital O), in art, is a self-enclosed and atomic object. It is the return of the object-painting as it appeared in the early 1960s at the end of a path that started with Malevitch's Sputnik (1915) and led through Ad Reinhardt to the Frank Stella of early minimalism. The object-painting had by then become non-art and was located in real space. Nevertheless it only existed for a short time before being eclipsed as the negative other of post-object or non-object art.
"While solutions add up, the problem changes" writes the author, quoting George Kubler. The "return" of the Object takes place in another context and under different conditions. After their long and productive divorce, they have now become two moments in a same process. Non-object Works have not escaped being objects : this is why they were said to have failed in resisting their institutional integration.
Their success has nevertheless been in exerting a critical activity, through this integration, within the institution. They have changed the museum context and the art world, and they have turned curatorial practices into a casuistry while grounding them directly in the aesthetic relation. In Object art, the art is on the side of the context in which an Object is maintained as what it is (its transindividual field of exteriority).
The practices engaged in exhibition, restoration, conservation, documentation, publicity, law, etc., which are generally located outside the limits of a work, have become those of active participants in the existence of the work. While the notions of context and interactivity are being extended, the dividing line between the white cube and the backstage of the museum-factory is erased, like the border between the spectator and the actors of those practices (producing the concept of a SpectActor).
The content of an artist's writing generally merges theory with practice in that the distinctions and their configuration created in the mind are also made in the concrete world. The paradigm shift proposed in this text can be read in two ways : it operates in the definition of a "plastic" work, and it operates a reading in the genetic program of contemporary art.