Spoutnik

The artist Aav both writes about his own work and uses it as a paradigm for a broader reading of contemporary art theory and practice. The book opens with an apparent paradox: the work is described as "second order" contextual art, while it is also stated to be, in a post-formalist age, an "absolute object" in the tradition of Malevitch, Ad Reinhardt and the early Frank Stella object-paintings. This double-speak between the atomic and the contextual is a challenge to the way in which in art theory they are both held to be mutually exclusive and unconnected. The context is approached very differently from the way in which post-object art brackets the context within non-limited work. It is the very bracketing of the Sputnik that enables art to exist between sets of brackets, not only inside them. Object and context work together through correlative sets of brackets, while the empirical institutional context and institutional theory are evoked as an integral part of the theory and practice of art, rather than as mere supplements. Autonomy, limitation, instantaneousness, literality and empiricism as predicates to works were rejected in postmodernism – seen as being associated with a naturalist ontology. The artist's paradigm shift involves putting these concepts back to work alongside more current notions of non-limitation, impermanence, site specificity, environmentalism and interactivity, etc., considered as complementary and no longer mutually exclusive in the context of a bigger picture.