Antony Hudek Knihy

Discussions of the object as a key to understanding modern and contemporary art. While artists increasingly describe their practices as “post-object,” theorists continue to engage material artifacts as cultural agents. Approaches such as object-based learning treat things as tools for dialogue across disciplines. At the same time, virtual imaging can abstract or bypass the object, and immaterial forms of labor challenge traditional materialist accounts. This anthology surveys shifting definitions of “objectness” in artistic production, addressing the object’s relation to subjectivity, distinctions between objects and things, and the passage from inert matter to tool or artifact. It also considers the everyday in found objects, repetition in multiples, loss in absent objects, and abjection in degraded or formless ones, alongside anti-object positions, experimental or mental objects, and the role of objects in performance.