Can\u2019t See a Thing<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
From July 1 to November 16, 2008, long-distance runners sprinted through the Tate Britain (The Duveen Galleries) as if it were a stadium, in an accelerated rendition of visitors hurrying through museums without really seeing anything. Work No. 850<\/em> (2008), by Martin Creed, draws from the experience of a rushed visit to the catacombs of the Capuchin Monks in Palermo: \u201cWe were very late and only had five minutes to see it all before closing time. To do it, we had to run.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Tate Britain, \u201cMartin Creed: About This Work,\u201d [online, at http:\/\/www.tate.org.uk\/britain\/exhibitions\/duveenscommission\/about.shtm].<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n In the end, Creed finds such a visit to be perfect: freed of the obligation of looking, he concludes that the works produce invisibility in any case. \u201cI think it\u2019s good to see museums at high speed. It leaves time for other things.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Ibid.<\/span> In their way, exhibition venues, visually obstructed with their profusion of objects, contribute to the general dissolution, possibly even to the disappearance of the image. Besides, an empty space can sometimes be more appealing than a space crowded with artworks. On arriving in France in 1911, three weeks after the theft of the Mona Lisa<\/em> from the Louvre, Franz Kafka remarked that the public had rushed to see the empty space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By way of a vacant exhibition space and an absent painting, the Mona Lisa<\/em> had become an \u201cinvisible curiosity,\u201d the object of a veritable cult.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Hans Belting, Le Chef-d\u2019\u0153uvre invisible<\/em> (N\u00eemes: J. Chambon, 2003), 355-82.<\/span> Responding to the risk of overexposure\u2014and to visitors, who hardly look at what there is to see in any case\u2014some artists, to avoid disappearance, simply propose apparently empty halls. Emptied of their objects, they acquire an invisible quality, allowing visitors \u201ctime for other things\u201d than looking. For the Turner Prize in 2001, Creed exhibited a \u00adcompletely empty room at the Tate Britain: Work No. 227: The Lights Going On and Off<\/em>. Which is precisely all that happens every five seconds. In this particular instance, visitors were often disconcerted, invariably disappointed by the deemphasis of the material aspects of the artwork, the uninterruptedly white walls, and the totally empty space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The disappearance of the exhibited object, its invisibility, transforms the spectator\u2019s perceptual activity. He or she is no longer a \u00addisembodied eye, as Brian O\u2019Doherty had decried,5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Brian O\u2019Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space <\/em>(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).<\/span> but must in fact take part in actualizing the work, as long as the exhibition setup provides the required clues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In some \u201cobjectless\u201d exhibitions, spectators must engage an unconventional and unfamiliar experience: instead of passively looking on, they must become producers of images themselves. At Simon Pope\u2019s Gallery Space Recall<\/em>, for instance, when it was presented at the Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff (October-November 2006), visitors were asked to recall an exhibition. Confronting visitors on the walls of the empty art \u00adcentre was the following injunction: \u201cYou are invited to recall, from \u00admemory, a walk through a gallery space.\u201d The \u00adexhibition was part of Walking Here and There<\/em>, a research project carried out with neuropsychologist Vaughan Bell with the intent of exploring the relations between space, mobility, illusion, and memory. The dialectic between memory and the exhibition space is precisely what interests Rirkrit Tiravanija in his invisible A Retrospective (Tomorrow Is Another Fine Day)<\/em>, which he proposed at the Couvent des Cordeliers in Paris, February 10 to March 20, 2005. A guided tour enabled visitors to explore the space while imagining works that were described to them. Thus were presented Untitled 1989 ( )<\/em>, Untitled 1990 (Pad Thai)<\/em> (four white pedestals on which the artist placed objects and leavings from a Thai dinner), Untitled 1991 (Blind)<\/em>, Untitled 1992 (Free) <\/em>(more scraps from shared meals), Untitled 1996 (Rehearsal Studio No. 6)<\/em> (a music rehearsal room created for an \u00adexhibition at the Dijon Consortium), Untitled 1997 (Tomorrow Is Another Day)<\/em> (a replica of his New York City apartment open night and day in the \u00adgallery), and Untitled 2002 (He Promised) <\/em>(another of architect Rudolph Schindler\u2019s Los Angeles home at the Secession in Vienna). Identification cards and loudspeakers could just be seen within a plain plywood \u00adscale-model of the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; simultaneously, an actor playing a ghost recited Philippe Parreno\u2019s \u201cSitcom Ghost\u201d while Bruce Sterling\u2019s Yesterday Will Be Another Day<\/em> aired through the speakers. As the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Art Moderne\u2019s programming took place at off-site venues while the museum was being renovated, the \u00adartist gave visitors wandering through the empty spaces an \u00adopportunity to recall exhibitions they might have seen in the past. The plywood structure had thus transformed the MAMVP into a locus of memory. A windowed white rectangle at the beginning of the exhibition invariably suggests the museum\u2019s ground floor \u201caquarium.\u201d This guided tour draws the exhibition into the classical device of ekphrasis<\/em>, as every description of an absent work allows the visitor to create a mental image of that work. Connoisseurs of Tiravanija\u2019s production leave the exhibition with a \u00adpersonal image they can later transform into a memory of having \u201cseen\u201d the retrospective at the Cordeliers. Visitors return home with this thought from Tiravanija: \u201cWe hope that you have heard and invented an image that is your very own.\u201d Non-visibility or the absence of the work only produces images in a particularly structured space: the tangible object disappears, but the work continues to exist; the exhibition is then an ideal mechanism, because it allows one to employ a set of deictic markers\u2014catalogues, informational cards, scenography\u2014to give shape to what we do not see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The absence of the work enables visitors to construct mental images, a process in line with the Classical rhetorical device of associating image with place. As in this exhibition, the art of memory consisted of delineating a mental architecture inhabited by the missing scenes or objects, which one had to imagine oneself navigating in order to complete the \u00admnemonic process.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Francis Yates, The Art of Memory<\/em> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).<\/span> Such constructions, called \u201cpalaces of memory,\u201d had to be associated with uncommonly active or provocative images. An \u201cinvisible\u201d \u00adexhibition might in fact produce more images than a conventional one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tiravanija\u2019s text, \u201cNo Ghosts in the Wall,\u201d creates a kind of scenario for the visit while illustrating his intention to connect his work with a \u00adcertain reality\u2014no ghost, nothing unreal or supernatural. The ghost\u2014\u00adalso the title given to the text that replaces the loaned work on the museum wall\u2014produces no distinct image. Still in the dialectic of appearance and disappearance, the ghost is of the unreal, the supernatural, the fantastic, while the artist seems to be telling us that the images we create as we visit his retrospective are not fantastical, but quite real. Even the ghost one might bump into is of flesh and blood. The exhibition\u2019s reduced \u00advisibility is not an apophatic or negative comment, but a locus for the production of images, even when there is nothing to see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The connection with memory and the production of mental images is \u00adevident in Tino Sehgal\u2019s practice as well. It is also manifest in the work\u2019s particular invisibility. Unsuspecting spectators will often inspect the walls and look into nooks and crannies for several minutes without \u00adseeing anything before noticing that others in the hall are behaving strangely, turning their backs to them while mumbling, for instance, and then realize that this is part of the work.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Stephanie Cash, \u201cTino Sehgal at the ICA,\u201d Art in America<\/em> (September 2005).<\/span> In This Progress<\/em>, exhibited at the ICA in London in 2006, several tour guides\u2014four generations, one after the other, from the youngest to the oldest\u2014lead visitors through the ICA\u2019s empty spaces and toward the question: \u201cWhat is progress?\u201d Here, too, characters are specific to the setting. Invisibility in Sehgal\u2019s art is tied to a \u201cdeproduction.\u201d Production and deproduction are \u00adreciprocally bound to each other in a binary logic,8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Tim Griffin, \u201cTino Sehgal An Interview,\u201d Artforum International<\/em> (May 2005).<\/span> in which it is a question of doing away with the tangible object, not the work of art. Museums must shed their \u00adprevailing emphasis on materialist production to propose different types of production: \u201cCan I go into this place where the celebration of this model [of production] has installed itself in Western society, the \u00admuseum, and celebrate something else?\u201d9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Ibid.<\/span> The deproduction \u00adinherent to the materials used (movement, singing, speech) and to \u00adspectators\u2019 uses of the work is, once again, productive of images. As with Tiravanija, speech and orality are employed as a means to construct fictional \u00adsituations that the \u00adspectator must imagine and image. His work is \u00adneither performance nor spectacle, it is situational,10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Ibid.<\/span> a specific temporal, spatial, and \u00adimaginative situation that allows the artist to say that his work \u00adpertains to the \u00admuseum.11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - Sebastian Frenzel, \u201c\u2018Ceci n\u2019est pas le vide\u2019: An Encounter with the Artist of Transience Tino Sehgal,\u201d signandsight <\/em>(June 2005).<\/span> The image thus created is dependent on the visitor\u2019s \u00adever-changing rapport with the work. The experience will leave no traces\u2014neither video, nor object, nor photograph\u2014other than \u00admental images, memories. The artist refuses to document his \u00adexhibitions and considers that any video or photographic documentation would prove inadequate, for it would risk involving the production of objects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If something has disappeared, it is indeed the visual and tactile object, but its absence tends to create a new type of attention. It is no \u00adlonger enough to look passively on while awaiting an aesthetic frisson<\/em>. Space must once more become the locus for creating fiction, not just for perception. Visitors too preoccupied with the fact of having nothing to see will remain attached to an overbearing reality that prevents them from experiencing the work. The walls will indeed remain white, empty, and insignificant. As the \u201cinvisible\u201d exhibition must be imagined in order to exist, with verbal utterances acting as fictional props, it serves to \u00adstimulate each individual\u2019s imaginative capacities. The more imposing the perceptual givens of the work, the less enabled are spectators to form their own images. Every exhibition, even the most conventional, only exists through the fiction the visitor creates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [Translated from the French by Ron Ross]<\/p>\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/66_DO02_Desmet_Tiravanija_Tomorrow-Is-Another-Fine-Day-scaled.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/66_DO02_Desmet_Tiravanija_Tomorrow-Is-Another-Fine-Day-2-scaled.jpg\")
Tomorrow Is Another Fine Day<\/em>,
Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Art moderne de la Ville de Paris\/ARC au Couvent des Cordeliers, 2005.
Photos: Marc Domage, courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nCreating Images from the Invisible<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/66_DO02_Desmet_Creed_Work-No.-850-scaled.jpg\")
Work No. 850<\/em>, Tate Britain, London, 2008.
Photo: Hugo Glendinning, courtesy of the artist & Hauser & Wirth (Z\u00fcrich, London)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nSituational Fiction<\/h2>\n\n\n\n