ABSTRACT
In this chapter, craft, crisis, and the contemporary are imagined as converging through the vehicular material form of artworks presented for exhibition. Here, we can speculate on the object losing its stature as a consequence of absorbing aspects of atmosphere or forces of history. Art is, thus, laid bare: Revealing nothing but its craft or its nature. This chapter stresses the “whereness” of art by placing context as paramount. This context is implicated by the subject of the exhibition itself as part of an effort to reconceptualize “art” and the bare material through which it offers its autonomy. Emphasizing context, however, is not simply a task of somehow connecting the “out there” to the “over here” of art—a process substantially reconsidered in the wake of so many colonialisms. The problematic form of address is inscribed here in the contingency of having to locate it as if it were unrooted or cut loose. This form of address, at once genealogy and locution, may well be the frisson of the critique and reconstruction of context, the tension and the excitement of attending to art’s doubled (although not binary) coding—a process which can become sensuously particular.
