Once
the Hayward seemed a hitter on the London gallery circuit. But since
the high of the much-celebrated 'Undercover
Surrealism', I find I haven't been back in some six years.
Admittedly, partly because I saw the John Cage show in Bexhill before
it transferred to London, and (alas) missed the
Rodchenko photography. But mostly because they seemed to
be becoming more and more mired
in Brit Art. And frankly I sometimes wonder if even
disliking Brit Art betratys too much of an involvement with it. What
would it take to tempt me back?
The
answer, it transpires, is an exhibition of invisible or otherwise
unseeable artworks, described by curator Ralph Rugoff as “the best
exhibition you'll never see.” Perhaps he should have pre-empted the
inevitable heckles and called it 'The Emperor's New
Clothes.' Needless to say, many scoffed. But is the result
gimmick, folly, one-note joke with stretch marks or actually
something worth taking in? Take that poster image (above), is it of a
man heading into infinity or just stepping himself into a corner? But
even if it just is a series of empty rooms with an entry fee, that
already sounds better than Brit Art, so I decided to find out...
(And
yes I did think of posting a blank review, broken up by empty frames
for the illos, of a review in white-on-white text, and all the other
variants...)
Anti-Art
Was Just the Start
Things
kick off with Yves Klein's video 'Propositions
Monochrome', from the 1957 Paris exhibition of blank space.
(Commonly called 'The Void', though that was
theoretically the title of an empty vitrine within the show.) The
concept was that the artist had passed through the space, influencing
it with his personality, a parody of the great artist and his
heightened sensibilities. I wasn't sure whether the smart-suited
figure (actually Klein himself)was the artist inbuing the place with
his special presence, or a gallery-goer carefully inspecting these
empty spaces. I don't suppose it matters. It provides the vital spark
needed by every gag – the straight man.
He
went on to even more direct critiques of art as a commodity, selling
“zones of immaterial sensibility” for gold, a short-circuiting of
the artist's relationship with wider society, doing something
pseudo-mystical for the wallets of the wealthy. Purchasers received
certificates modelled on cheques, some of which are on show.
Similarly,
Tom Friedman's '1000 Hours of Staring' (1992/7) is
a piece of white paper he simply stared at for that set time,
ostebsibly taking those years to create it. Of course it doesn't
work, it's just a blank piece of paper, the supposed superior
hyper-intensity of the artist is not magically transmitted. (In fact
we don't even know if he actually did it, as he refused to document
anything.) Meanwhile in 'Untitled' (1991) Maurizio
Cattelan reported
the theft of an invisible work of art to the police, then exhibited
his copy of their crime report. Something out of nothing.
Such
Dada anti-art antics, aiming to fail and to take down with them the
whole of the rest of art, of course these remain vital. It's not just
a joke, it's a joke with the sting of the truth. We have a straight
choice. We can either forget about art, feign that it somehow
magically transcends capitalism's ability to regulate our social
relations, or embrace anti-art. And what better place to show this
stuff than today, and at this temple to Brit Art? Those conspicuous
consumers who buy pickled sharks from Damien Hirst, they don't really
like the work, do they? Any more than a Rolex
owner thinks it tells the time better than a more regular watch. They
just want to own a Hirst. They buy the price tag and the work comes
free.
Yet
twenty years ago, and full of piss and vinegar, I would have wanted
the whole exhibition to stay like this, repeatedly hammering the same
point home. After all, in Richard Hell's phrase, I belonged to the
blank generation. But it isn't so one-note, and today I'm glad of
that.
Pure
Dada is a bit like stripped-down, three-chord punk tracks. Music
generally goes back to that when it starts getting lost. But, for all
that both are negative sentiments, both are starting points. You
remember that essential lesson as you move on. They're not intended
as places for you to stay. Having quoted Richard
Hell, let's follow up with X Ray Spex: “anti-art was just the
start.”
As
things turn out, there's more to invisible art than straight
provocation. When the exhibition states boldly “works that share a
similar blankness can convey remarkably varied content,” it's
notable how fully it can live up to that promise. Though it would be
an exercise in folly to imagine that whiteness could be categorised
or the invisible boxed, let's run through just a few of them.
Art
Needs No Objects
If
conceptual art can too easily be conflated with anti-art, there is of
course an overlap between the two. The catalogue correctly sees in it
“a form of resistance to...the increasing power of the martekplace
to determine the significance of works of art.” With no artworks to
grasp, there were no items to trade. Simples. But conceptual art is
more an attempt to reset the priorities of art than a fist-pumping
attack on it.
Lucy
Lippard calls it “a dematerialisation of art” while Laura
Cumming in the Guardian comments “it's only the thought
which counts.” Take Robert Barry's 'Inert Gas Series'
(1968) in which he released inert gases into the air, to allow them
to travel slowly but inexorably around the world, me and you
inevitably breathing a little of them in. It's perhaps the comsummate
conceptual artwork as its a mteaphor for conceptual art itself, or
quite possibly art overall. Art is about the release and
dissemination of ideas, with the rest either accoutrements or
obstacles.
Hence
conceptual art doesn't set itself up as a type of
art, as another ism, but as the purest form of
art, stripped of it's unnecessary appendages. The sinking stone was
only ever a means to get the ripples going on the pond. If you can
create them without the bother of the stone, so much the better.
However,
'Air Conditioning Unit' (1972, above) by Terry
Atkinson and Michael Baldwin of Art and Language gives conceptulism a
different spin. A room is empty save for two air conditioning units.
The outside wall is covered by a text explaining all this, in dense
and fairly incomprehensible language. There's also a poster
avdertising an early showing of this, which is itself almost all
text. (In fact the room existing at all was something of an
afterthought, it was not set up until four years after the work was
conceived and the idea disseminated.)
It
would be easy to take it as a skit upon the theory-heavy world of
Modernism. (Even the catalogue suggests they “set out to question
and subvert the basic tenets of Modernism.”) But their point would
actually seem to be a wider one – to render problematic the
supposed discrete reality of an art object. Language inherently
involves a cultural filter, I can't write “air conditioning unit”
in a way that will keep you cool, I have to write it in English or
some other culturally specific language, and so on. Art can feel free
of all that. A sculpture of Winston Churchill is simply a scuplture
of Winston Churchill, surely.
Yet as
the catalogue says art was never about “the inherent
characteristics of an object... but with how it is positioned within
a larger symbolic network.” A statue of Winston Churchill in the
park may look straightforward enough, but actually is just the tip to
the iceberg of whole set of cultural assumptions. The artists are
attempting to invert things and show us the iceberg.
The
Invitation of Incomplete
Surround
white with other colours and it stops being a blank canvas and
immediately becomes a vivid foreground colour. (I've used that trick
with my own comics.) Equally, silences in music can be arresting or
even profound.
Similarly,
some works here use the unseen as a trigger for the imagination, with
the works as pointers, giving the audience just enough of a framework
that their minds can start to fill it. Perhaps the majority of works
fit this caregory to some degree, for even the all-white works are
framed, not empty spaces on the walls.
The
mosty clear-cut example might be Carsten Holler's 'The
Invisible' (1998, above). Asked to design a racing car for
an art project, a kind of modernist 'Wacky Races',
his contribution was an “invisible car.” We see it's starting
block laid out on the gallery floor, but that is all. Being a
natural-born cynic, I did not imagine an invisible car had actually
been built and now sat there. But somehow, I found I couldn't walk
over those lines.
It's
not that each of us constructs a working model of what that invisible
car might look like, and so ends up with their own personalised
artwork. It's more that the space becomes a focus for thought, and
your mental assumptions come to inhabit it. It's like those horror
films that avoid showing you the monster, figuring whatever is
formless in your imagination will always be scarier than anything on
screen.
Taking
a Chance
We've
all long since turned against any notion of art as didactive, a fixed
object transmitting a set meaning into the audience's mind. We
recognise it as a collaborative process between the transmitter and
the receiver's ears. But the interchange, the radio static is still
often seen either as a simple passageway or an obstacle to be
overcome. Yet that game of Chinese Whispers is just as much a part of
the magic happening. Once you start to think in this way, chance
becomes a method of creating art just like a paintbrush or a camera.
Bruno
Jakob released a series of 'Invisible Paintings',
where the paper or canvas was subject to rain, snow or other elements
which would corrode or undulate the surface. The catalogue tells of a
Venice exhibition in 2010/11 in which he left the paintings outside
for the elements to 'paint' as the show progressed.
These
probably stretch the show's theme, they're more ultra-minimalist than
actually invisible, in the manner of John Cage's visual art. But they
provide a useful contrast. Particularly when put in the context of
pristine white works, they show how the brain needs very little
suggestion to start seeing the work as a painting. See a sheer white
sheet in a frame and you think “art statement” and check out the
indicia to see what the artist was thinking of. Add just a few pale
indications and you think “art work” and look at the canvas.
Art
As Impermanence
We're
always being told great art is timeless, which must be the highest
form of visibility there is. A corollary notion is that art must
always be kept in its original state. Works are preserved or
restored, with any failure to do so presented as a tragedy. But of
course nothing lasts forever, putting (as they have done in Brighton)
a
piece of Banksy graffiti under glass is just staving off
the inevitable. So what happens not just when you make art that is
impermanent, but is about that impermanence?
Take
Song Dong's 'Writing Diary With Water'
(1995-present, above), in which he kept a diary by writing with water
on stone. Of course the water just evaporates.
As a
diary represents a life, they also contain the concept of sedementary
layers. A conventional diary is a record of progress, a moving from
one state to another. This diary accumulates, as if our memories are
not a series of events, but a set of pictures each superimposed on
the ones before, not advancing like a career but growing like coral.
Oddly,
there's no attempt to explore the overlap with auto-destructive art.
Chance creation of art is all very well, but should the processes
stop there? Could they actually start after that
point? Gustav
Metzger's (semi) recent show explored the way it's erosion
and decay could become the subject matter of a work of art.
Significant
Absences
But
also, and in a paradoxical reversal of everything above, art can also
be used to make visible the otherwise invisible. The invisible can be
used to represent the ideological, the stuff you don't notice because
it's become so naturalised in your mind.
For
example, in 1974 Michael Asher took a wall out of the Claire Copley
gallery in Los Angeles, to expose the gallery offices and “put on
display issues related to labour and the selling of art.”
(Unreproducable here, of course, but mentioned in the catalogue.)
And of
course there's also a political dimension, where history and even
geography render some events and people invisible. In the German city
of Kassel a a public fountain, erected by a local Jewish
businessman, was destroyed by Nazis. To simply rebuild it would be
to remember its original donor, but also wipe Nazi crimes from the
record. Horst Hoheisel's 'Ashcrott Fountain'
(1987) instead rebuilds it but upside-down, sinking into the earth,
“a funnel into whose darkness the water recedes,” thereby marking
both the original fountain and the attempt to wipe it out.
Invisible
Walls, Invisible Bridges
There
are always works which don't fit your clumsy categories, and the
invisible inevitably does not take well to an imposed order. Fitting
nowhere above but a welcome addition to the show is Jeff Hein's
'Invisible Labyrinth' (2005, above), where
headsets vibrate a warning whenever you hit an unseen wall of his
virtual labyrinth. This work is fun, involving and charmingly
site-specific. It's fitting that they're vibrations not verbal
instructions, as it makes them feel more like a 'sense', and less a
command. Alas in this less-than-blockbuster show there was only one
other person trying it when I got there, when it really needs a small
crowd, but you can't have everything.
The
steward opening a section of a clear white wall to adjust controls
was presumably just performing a function, but it still felt like an
integral part of the piece - a glimpse of the hidden world of works
behind the smooth passages we traverse.
However
the blurb is surely getting carried away by claiming it “disrupts
conventional patterns of behaviour.” Already that day not only had
I been unable to step on the starting pad of Holler's invisible car.
I'd seen a Tube station guard challenge people who'd walking in to
an 'out' section of the station, surely the equivalent of a buzzing
headset. Surely we follow invisible walls all the time, sticking to
lines marked on the floor, standing to the right on escalators. I've
been to that Tube station frequently, and probably now consider those
floor markings as impermeable as an actual wall.
But
this seems more like the success of the piece than the failure.
Foregrounding a sublimnal activity, renewing our awareness – that
feels like something art should be doing.
And
talking of making use of the gallery space...
No Art Here, Let's Look at the Gallery
Bethan
Huws comments that attendees “tend to pass from one work to the
next, as if the artworks were little islands, and the seas – white
walls/ concrete floors in between – go unnoticed. They pass from
New York to San Francisco to... so to speak, without noticing the
surroundings.” Of course this is similar to John Cage's infamous
silent piece, which aimed to bounce us into noticing the ambient
sounds of the performance space. Huws' means to get us to reaquant us
with our surroundings was to hire an actor to pose as a gallery-goer,
but do nothing out of the ordinary for the role.
Now
me, I'm one of the contrary types who always
notices the layout of galleries, just like I take in the typography
of books. And the look here is quite vivid; vast white spaces, with
what works there are spread apart, the indicia on see-through perspex
or faded grey. (You can't even see these from a distance, so spied
from a distance other attendees look for all the world like they're
staring at bare walls.)
Of
course the gallery space affects us, perhaps more strongly if only
taken in subliminally. In 'The Air Conditioning Show'
I got all the conceptual backstory about
art-as-text, but mostly just found the room a calming space to hang
out in. Sitting down, I started tuning into micro-details, such as
the way the two air conditioning units had different hums. It was
actually hard to tear myself away, I had to focus on the promise of
the rest of the show and other errands I then had to run. The
whiteness of the gallery became, for me, a vivid foreground colour.
Notably Glenn Ligon's 'He Tells Me I Am His Own'
(2003) names an all-white print after an evangelical hymn, riffing
off religions usage of “white light” as a metaphor for the holy.
...which
is perhaps unsurprising. Due to the accursed Olympics, London was
more-than-usual cloged with crowds, cops and flags (not necessarily
in that order). Even the more enjoyable stretches, such as the South
Bank, are stimulating rather than relaxing. Compared to those teeming
streets, the show felt like a little slice of heaven. (Think of the
all-white heaven in 'A Matter of Life and Death.')
It even seemed designed to evoke this, inverting the normal flow of
rooms, so you came to the cathedral-like space of the biggest,
whitest room last. (A sacrifice for this payoff being they couldn't
get you to exit through the gift shop, normally the gallery
equivalent of chocolate by the supermarket tills.)
It
also brought to mind two colliding quotes. Alan Vega' said of the
notoriously confrontational punk gigs put on by his band Suicide in
Seventies New York, “people were coming in off the streets...
hoping they’d be escaping and all we were doing was shoving the
street back in their face again.” While Peter Blegved, interviewed
in the Sound
Projector, once commented on his changing tastes in middle
age “I'd pay more for silence now than music.”
The
problem of this show with nothing to see isn't that it doesn't work,
that the blank walls bore, it's that it works far too readily. It
presents itself as something radical and challenging when its
actually something of a chill-out space. What we can't see, was that
ever going to hurt us? In the video below Rugoff talks of
“forego[ing] the complacency of seeing”, yet also of the show as
“a pallete-cleanser, at a moment when London is having an endless
series of spectacles.” Does this show want to keep its Dada roots
and eat them?
Let's
be upfront, I can recognise some of myself in that Blegved quote and
enjoyed being in that serene space. Purging the mind of clutter and
instilling a zen state of calm, that's a credible purpose of art and
invsiblity seems a likely means towards that end. But should it
over-rule all the others? Weren't we told near the start that there
could be as many forms of invisible art as any other? The
antagonistic anti-art that kicks off the show, should that just be
kicked out from there-on in?
A
Slice of Darkness
As if
acknowledging this, some of the more recent works try to spice things
up a bit. For example, in Tom Friedman's 'Untitled (A
Curse)' (1992, above), a witch has hexed the space above an
empty plinth. While with his afore-mentioned '1000 Hours of
Staring' the failure had been the point, this time the
failure seems just that. For it to work we would need to be
transported back five hundred years, when we last believed in such
stuff. After being unable to step on the starting block of the
invisible car, my first reaction was to stick my head just where the
curse would be. I am, at the time of writing, not feeling any ill
effects.
The
most clear-cut attempt to inject a bitter undertaste was Teresa
Margolles' 'Air'(2003), at first sight a straight
replication of 'Air Codnitioning Unit'. But the
air is from humidified water previously used to wash down Mexican
murder victims. Yet again the effect seemed insufficent. On a daily
basis, we consume stuff based on the crippling exploitation of
others. The clothes we wear might well have been made in a sweatshop
where workers were beaten or killed for trying to form a trade union.
There's nothing strong enough here to bring any of those repressed
thoughts home. (Perhaps we should initially be told it's mountain air
from outside a Swiss sanitorium or some such, and encouraged to
breathe deeply, before being told the truth.)
The
catalogue mentions a 1974 Warhol invisible scuplture surrounded by
burglar alarms of different pitchces, primed to go of as soon as
visitors approach them. Something like that would have been warranted
here, to shake up the calmness a little. (And certainly it would have
been better than the Warhol piece they do show.) Another possibility
would have been to include an empty room, unmarked by signage or any
other indication whether it was another artwork or simply a space
left bare.
There's
precisely one piece which actually does succeed in unsettling. James
Lee Bryar's 'The Ghost of James Lee Bryars' (1969)
is nothing but a jet-black room to commemorate his inevitable death.
(And restaged after his actual death in 1986.) It's the yang to the
yin of 'Air Conditioning Unit', the dark to... oh
wait, you saw that one coming. After all that gleaming white,
plunging yourself into the pitch black is startling, like diving into
icy water from a hot day. A woman before me visibly had to marshall
her efforts before she could enter. (In a smart move, you haved to
pass through that room to reach the rest of the exhibition.) It feels
closing not opening, and I felt none of my earlier desire to hang out
in there. It's stark and unfunerary, with none of those flowers,
shared memories or talk of “better places”, just a stone-cold
fact. Some things, there's just no escaping.
Of
course it's possible that the black room only
feels so dark from all the whiteness everywhere else. An artwork
reliant on a cultural context is an inevitablity. But in this case,
this work might have been reliant on the context of this particular
show for it's powerful effect. In, for example, a show devoted to
death it might fit in far easier. That might be thought a step too
far into relitavism.
Invisible,
The New Visible
...which
is perhaps what we should expect. Unlike his earlier-discussed works
Klein seems serious about his proposed 'architecture de l'air', with
buildings held in place by jets of air, to “dissolve social mores
and conventions.” He even tried to patent them. But that liberating
open-ness now doesn't seem that far removed from the glass-and-steel
constructions that dominate the modern London skyline, such as the
near-completed Shard I passed on the way in.
A
credit card company I once worked for were working feverishly on a
transparent card, which they clearly saw as a kind of holy grail.
Apple have virtually trademarked the colour white with their
branding. Once gold or blue were the signifying colours of status.
Now, especially since the banking crisis, every corporation is aiming
at this 'open' look. Even the idea of the show as a kind of Zen
refuge from the London streets, perhaps even that can be criticised.
Perhaps it's actually their epitome.
One
argument would be that presenting all this as a gallery show at all
was an inveitable diluting of the concept. The programme talks a lot
of invisible art as a with-holding. Perhaps they should have copied a
trick used by Barry and just released the programme, tied to a
non-existent gallery complete with unreachable map instructions.)
My
natural reaction was to bask in this exhibition as if it glowed.
Presented with an all-white room, my heart was briefly at peace. But
my brain had nagging questions for both the show and my heart.
Whether that was some dilemma purely of my own, which I merely
projected onto those vast white walls... well, if an empty plinth can
be termed a piece of art, to encourage a more active response from
the viewer, then so can a review. It's up to you to decide.
Coming soon! More out-of-date exhibition reviews...
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