Beyond Objecthood

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 n