This article presents an introduction to four texts that the German feminist-materialist art historian Lu Märten (1879–1970) published between 1903 and 1928. It outlines some of the major concepts of and contexts for this unduly neglected thinker. Her writings covered a wide terrain that spanned studies on the labor conditions of female artists, polemics against “proletarian art,” and a monist, rather than dialectical, view on film, art, and what she called the “full life-work of a human.” At the core of her multiple endeavors was the demand for remaking the history of art as a history of form that is more capacious than art's institutionalized Western field. Situating Märten's work in historical debates (e.g., on Marxist aesthetics in the 1930s), the introduction also points to the new legibility that her nonaligned materialism gains with the material turn in the humanities.

“Art Work as Life Work: Lu Märten's Feminist ‘Objectivity’” highlights the feminist stakes of German feminist-materialist art historian Lu Märten's interventions in the interwar discourses on art and labor, on objectivity ( Sachlichkeit ), and the new media of film and radio. The essay argues that Märten's contributions to these areas sit squarely within more familiar narratives of materialist aesthetics and Weimar culture (from Walter Benjamin's epochal Artwork Essay to the Bauhaus) and that they do so on account of her heterodox reading of Marx and commitment to Spinoza's monism. In Märten's view, this non-binary materialism offered an alternative, non-Hegelian route to a materialist conception of art or as she preferred to say, form . In contrast to art history's academic formalism, Märten espouses a notion of form that does not maintain art's autonomy but instead connects art to other social fields. Here form always evolves out of informality. The essay traces the close bond between art work and life work across Märten's multiple publications, including her theoretical magnum opus Essence and Transformation of Forms/ Arts and her studies on The Economic Conditions of Artists and The Female Artist . In so doing, the text contributes to revisiting the firm boundaries that art history has drawn between objects and communities.

Recent philosophical tendencies of “Actor-Network Theory,” “Object-Oriented Ontology,” and “Speculative Realism” have profoundly challenged the centrality of subjectivity in the humanities, and many artists and curators, particularly in the UK, Germany, and the United States, appear deeply influenced by this shift from epistemology to ontology. October editors asked artists, historians, and philosophers invested in these projects—from Graham Harman and Alexander R. Galloway to Armen Avanessian and Patricia Falguières to Ed Atkins and Amie Siegel—to explore what the rewards and risks of assigning agency to objects may be, and how, or if, such new materialisms can be productive for making and thinking about art today.