Hayward's invisible art show offers more than meets the eye
from http://www.theweek.co.uk/art/47390/haywards-invisible-art-show-offers-more-meets-eye
This show about nothing is surprisingly engaging - if you leave your cynicism at the door
What you need to know
The Hayward Gallery's new exhibition, Invisible: Art about the Unseen 1957-2012, explores ideas related to the invisible, the hidden and the unknown. The show features works by celebrated artists such as Andy Warhol, Yves Klein, Chris Burden, Yoko Ono, Maurizio Cattelan and Carsten Höller.
The Hayward Gallery's new exhibition, Invisible: Art about the Unseen 1957-2012, explores ideas related to the invisible, the hidden and the unknown. The show features works by celebrated artists such as Andy Warhol, Yves Klein, Chris Burden, Yoko Ono, Maurizio Cattelan and Carsten Höller.
Exhibited works include Yves Klein's plans for an 'architecture of air', canvases 'primed' with snow water and brainwaves, an empty plinth space 'cursed by a witch', a pedestal containing Andy Warhol's aura and a room containing an artist's ghost.
The exhibition is curated by Ralph Rugoff, director of the Hayward Gallery, and runs until 5 August.
What the critics like
This exhibition is a seriously brilliant jest, says Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. Of course it courts tabloid headlines and sarcasm. It is like Jerry Seinfeld's sitcom, a show about nothing. "But it succeeds because it is in on the joke, which it makes unexpectedly profound." Frankly, there's a lot more art to see here than there is in many exhibitions around today.
This exhibition is a seriously brilliant jest, says Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. Of course it courts tabloid headlines and sarcasm. It is like Jerry Seinfeld's sitcom, a show about nothing. "But it succeeds because it is in on the joke, which it makes unexpectedly profound." Frankly, there's a lot more art to see here than there is in many exhibitions around today.
Among the surprises of the exhibition is the realisation that artists have used invisibility in so many different ways, says Richard Dorment in The Daily Telegraph. The delightful Tom Friedman's cursed plinth has something to say, as does Maurizio Cattelan's send-up of the whole idea of conceptual art. The show is almost entirely without visual interest, "but everything else about it is fascinating".
This is not a show for the cynic, says Ben Luke in the Evening Standard. It places great faith in its audience, lending us an active role in forming the art. It playfully questions the foundations of art, shaking up the idea of the artist as a gifted creator and the viewer as an observer of their genius. "By giving us little to see, it actually makes us look harder."
Traditionalists might scoff that this exhibition is just a new rendition of The Emperor's New Clothes, says Artlyst, but, as clichéd as it might sound, "there is much more to the exhibition than meets the eye".
What they don't like
Though the show gives you a lot to think about, says Richard Dorment in the Telegraph, I preferred reading the punchy catalogue essay by curator Ralph Rugoff. An occasional invisible artwork is one thing, but a show where everything is invisible requires "a great deal more of my powers of concentration than I am prepared to give". ·
Though the show gives you a lot to think about, says Richard Dorment in the Telegraph, I preferred reading the punchy catalogue essay by curator Ralph Rugoff. An occasional invisible artwork is one thing, but a show where everything is invisible requires "a great deal more of my powers of concentration than I am prepared to give". ·
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/9325152/Invisible-Art-About-the-Unseen-1957-2012-Hayward-Gallery-review.html
Invisible: Art About the Unseen 1957-2012, Hayward Gallery, review
Is art invisible to the naked eye any less potent than that which we are able to see, asks Richard Dorment.
8:00AM BST 12 Jun 2012
111 Comments
'Unseen’ at the Hayward Gallery is an exhibition about invisible art. Apart from white walls, blank canvases, unmarked sheets of paper and nearly invisible labels, the building appears to be empty – or rather it is empty, except for 50 works of art that, as it happens, nobody can see. The show is almost entirely without visual interest – so if that’s what you’re after, go to the Royal Academy. But everything else about it is fascinating.
Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Obvious examples in everyday life are radio waves, X-rays and magnetism. You can’t see faith or intuition or telepathy either – but all are very real to those who have experience of them. In the 20th century, the idea that the most important thing about a work of art might not be visible originated in Marcel Duchamp. In his ready-mades, he tried to liberate art from aesthetics in order to put it once again “at the service of the mind”. His charming 50 Cubic Centimetres of Paris Air bottled in a glass ampoule is arguably more interesting to think about than to look at, but it could only have been made by a homesick Frenchman.
This is the historical background against which the Hayward show starts. Yves Klein created The Void in 1957. The original work (which still exists) consisted of an empty gallery in which Klein claimed to have infused his artistic sensibility, a commodity – like wit, desire, or intelligence – that you cannot see or feel, but know when it is there.
Klein considered his sensibility to be so precious that he would exchange it only for a bar of pure gold. And if the customer would agree to burn the receipt proving he’d bought it, Klein would throw most of the gold into the Seine, thereby rendering every aspect of the transaction invisible.
As a devout Catholic, Klein understood that belief is as necessary to the practice of art as it is to religion. Both require an ability to make a leap of faith into areas of human experience that have no material dimension. Only a fool or a saint would agree to the transaction Klein proposed, but to do so would be to transcend materialism and worldly self-interest – and so from a theological perspective to live in a state of grace
The idea that an artist’s sensibility is in some way palpable did not die with Klein. The American performance artist Chris Burden once spent three weeks in a gallery lying in a prone position at the back of a high platform where he could not be seen by visitors to his show. What interested Burden was whether the knowledge of the unseen artist’s presence altered their response to the space they were in. Of course, it did. A consecrated church feels different from one that is unconsecrated and the presence of a Royal or a celebrity at a public function changes the atmosphere whether we actually see them or not.
And not just famous people, either. The performance artist Bethan Huws has hired professional actors who will pretend to be visitors to the show at the Hayward. They will look and act like everyone else in the gallery, except that they are not there to look at the works of art but to render themselves “invisible” by disappearing into the crowd. I bet you a fiver, though, that if you go to this show, you will feel their presence or at least be more attentive to the person standing next to you, even if you do not spot who they are.
Among the surprises of the exhibition is the realisation that artists have used invisibility in so many different ways – some successful, some not. Late in his career, Andy Warhol announced that he had imprinted an empty plinth with the aura of his celebrity, but the work feels like a perfunctory recycling of old ideas. Yet when that delightful artist Tom Friedman paid a professional witch to curse an area of about 11 inches above an empty pedestal he was saying something worth hearing. For the piece will evoke as many responses to it as there are visitors to the show – indifference with some, fear in others, and a cackle of laughter from me.
And I laughed, too, at Maurizio Cattelan’s send-up of the whole idea of conceptual art when he reported the theft of an invisible art work to the police, then exhibited the solemn police report in the gallery.
In art, death is usually treated as a thing or an event. In this show we are shown that it is more often an absence. During his lifetime, the performance artist James Lee Byars created an installation about his own death consisting of a pitch-black gallery that the visitor enters and leaves by passing through heavy velvet curtains into a total, enfolding darkness. Fifteen years after his death, it has become even more macabre.
Claes Oldenburg proposed a memorial to John F Kennedy in the form of a gigantic statue of the assassinated president buried upside-down in the ground. Conventional memorials are designed to comfort (and delude) future generations into thinking that the heroic figure somehow lives on. Oldenburg suggests that we should instead know what it is like to have had something extraordinary, and then have it taken away.
I am sure that Oldenburg’s idea influenced the thinking behind Maya Linn’s monument to American soldiers fallen in Vietnam, because that, too, is a sort of grave, into which visitors descend to meditate not on a glorious victory but on the tragic waste of human life.
Though Unseen gives you a lot to think about, I enjoyed reading the punchy catalogue essay by curator Ralph Rugoff rather more than the show itself. I’m prepared to engage face to face with a work that’s invisible every once in a while. But to spend hours in a show where everything is invisible is to ask a great deal more of my powers of concentration than I am prepared to give. My loss, I know.
