Invisibility So As Not To Disappear

During the “Dionysiac” exhibition, produced and presented at Centre Georges Pompidou in February 2005, Maurizio Cattelan stated: “This is doubtless a radical invisibility: to disappear, to break, so as not to bend.”¹ 1 - From the online press kit for the “Dionysiac” exhibition, Centre Georges Pompidou, communications department (our translation). In recent decades, many artists have taken up the challenge of making their production invisible, of producing no tangible object while ­remaining within the system. At the risk of seeming gratuitously absurd or provocative, artists find in invisibility more productive uses than a simple fascination with nothingness, emptiness, or the prospect of art or the artwork disappearing for good. By disappearance, then, we mean that something—a work, an exhibition—is withdrawn from the “spectators”’ view while continuing to exist nonetheless. Indeed, such disappearance, etymologically originating in the semantic field of visibility, is rather an occasion for a different perception of the work, tied to the imagination rather than to the perceptual or the visual.