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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."

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"In Beyond Objecthood, Voorhies provides a clearly structured account of the evolution of context as the base of our aesthetic and political encounters with contemporary art. His account draws much-needed attention to the ways in which institutional habits and frames determine meaning in our encounter with an art object, and how key artists unsettle these habits to invoke critical power beyond the reach of much so-called political art´." - Catherine Wood, Senior Curator, International Art (Performance) Tate Modern, London

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James Voorhies is a curator and art historian of modern and contemporary art. He is Dean of Fine Arts and Associate Professor at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

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