Just what is it that makes the same so different?

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 then.

The texts' central proposition operates through the bracketing of objects.

Boundaries and interactions are asserted, but boundaries are not inherent

properties of entities and entities have no inherent substance. A boundary is

like a multifaceted interface at which a synthetic inside and a scattered outside

meet, correlate and interact with one another.

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.