if walls could talk

Today a friend sent me this link to the New Zealand Herald comment on the Paris exhibition of Voids, a Retrospective. It is an exhibition of ... nothing.

It does raise the question for me, not of the value of such an exhibition, but "what is art?"

Although I "paint for my crust" these days, I don't particularly want to fill galleries with my work. I don't have a need to be famous, to leave a legacy. The work I do now, if not commissioned, must satisfy other criteria known (and unknown) to me. In my own mind, but defying definition, there is something that contributes to making something "art".

I once thought that I previously painted pictures, but had moved on to making art. Once ideas, more than the reproduction of an image, become involved, and I put it into the public arena for critique, I called it art. Now I am not sure any more. I remember debating this with other artists. Did we reach a conclusion? Probably not. I exhibited in Cassino in 2005, but didn't move to Italy until several visits later. At that point I thought that I had "long moved on" from painting landscapes! No more simply painting pictures, now I was making thoughtful art like the Cassino exhibition. Little did I know...

My first Italian exhibition of landscapes (2006), encouraged by my local mentor, was painted to establish my place here. "Kay, you must have an exhibition, before you go back to New Zealand. It must be paintings of here". The works were simple, pretty, colourful, happy works - painted rapidly to meet a deadline. I wasn't particularly proud of them as I thought they were a long way from being my "best" work. However, at the opening of the show, the maestro (former teacher, respected elder of the village) wrote in the visitors book that through my paintings I had given back to the people the love for their village that they had forgotten. After talking with him I began to treat landscape painting with a little more respect.

I wish the maestro, who died last year, could see my new watercolours. They are painted with all the love I now have for this village, this valley. His house and his church are in the first one. They are paintings, and can be called "art". I believe that I put more into them than simply copying, performing a series of techniques. But an empty room, can that be art?

At the Guggenheim in New York (2004) I first experienced this type of exhibition, although it was an installation work using hidden lights. There was, however, nothing to look at. It took me a while to adjust to the space, and at the time I was very conscious of all the other people moving about in the half dark in the busy gallery. But standing in the Tate in London last year, waiting for the runners to run through the otherwise empty gallery, was a different experience altogether. Famous galleries, exhibitions without "objects" to view.

If art is an experience, does there need to be a visual? Music is art. Do you need see it to appreciate the experience of hearing? If, while standing in an empty gallery contemplating "nothing" I have new experiences, new thoughts, does that make the gallery a place of art for me? Or a place of meditation? Can the two be the same?

I have to admit that occasionally I peek into empty rooms in galleries when exhibitions are being changed. Just as I love the blank page, full of potential, I enjoy musing on the history, the potential, and the "something" that is a blank gallery wall.

What is art? I don't know. I would like to think that art encourages contemplation, changes the way one feels, adds something to the world. I hope it is more than "eye candy", decoration for a house. I hope it is something that makes a house an individual home, that raises social issues, that records a period in history.

Empty galleries? Yes, there is a place for such an exhibition. I would like to see it. But I am not sure that I would define it as art. The fact that it is in a gallery brings to it "a story" that links it to art. Can we call it a place of contemplation, in the absence of art?

I think that the curator, Mathieu Copeland, got it right.

"But it is not just a kind of radical, conceptual art. You are also invited to explore, in a physical way, each different space, all of which have a different texture. It is a true experience."

I believe that there are three things in an art experience. The object created with intention, the viewer, and the "gap" between, where the interaction takes place. This is where there is a melding, not controlled by the artist, and not completely controlled by the viewer. Perhaps I have to accept that if there is an artist statement, an intention, a viewer and an experience, then this exhibition too is art.

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The Press release:
Vides (voides)


A retrospective

curated by Laurent Le Bon, John Armleder, Mathieu Copeland, Gustav Metzger, Mai-Thu Perret, Clive Phillpot

A quite exceptional event, "Vides" (Voids) is a retrospective of empty exhibitions since that of Yves Klein in 1958. In almost a dozen rooms of the National Museum of Modern Art, it assembles in a totally original manner exhibitions that showed absolutely nothing, leaving empty the space for which they were designed. The idea of exhibiting emptiness is a recurring notion in the history of art over the past fifty or so years, almost to the point of becoming a cliche' in the practice of contemporary art. Since the exhibition by Yves Klein - "The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State of Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility" in Paris in 1958, totally empty exhibitions have been the statement of different conceptions of vacuums.

While for Yves Klein it was a way to point out the sensitive state, by contrast it represents the peak of conceptual and minimal art for Robert Barry with "Some places to which we can come, and for a while 'be free to think about what we are going to do' (Marcuse)" (1970). It may also result from the desire to fudge the understanding of exhibition spaces, as in the work "The Air-Conditioning Show" from Art & Language (1966-1967), or to empty an institution to modify our experience, as in the work by Stanley Brouwn. It also reflects the will to create the experience of the qualities of an exhibition venue, as with Robert Irwin and his exhibition at the ACE Gallery in 1970, or with Maria Nordman at her exhibition in Krefeld in 1984.

Emptiness also represents a form of radicalness, like that created by Laurie Parsons in 1990 at the Lorence-Monk gallery, which announced his renouncement of all artistic practice. For Bethan Huws and his work "Haus Esters Piece" (1993), emptiness means being able to celebrate the museum's architecture, signifying that art is already there on site and there is no need to add works of art. Emptiness assumes almost a sense of economic demand for Maria Eichhorn who, in leaving her exhibition empty at the Kunsthalle Bern in 2001, helped to devote the budget to the building's renovation. With "More Silent than Ever" (2006), Roman Ondák, for his part, had the onlooker believing that there is more than what is just left there to be seen.

Image: Centre pompidou, architectes Renzo Piano et Richard Rogers, photo D.R © Centre Pompidou

Press contact
Head: Isabelle Danto tel +33 (0)1 44784200 fax +33 (0)1 44781340 e-mail isabelle.danto@centrepompidou.fr
assisted by Florian Richaud tel +33 (0)1 44784856 fax +33 (0)1 44781302 e-mail florian.richaud@centrepompidou.fr

Centre Pompidou
Place Georges Pompidou - Paris
11am-9pm, ticket counters closed at 8 p.m.
Rooms closed at 8.50 p.m.
Late night openings for certain exhibitions, as indicated on the website, Thursdays to 11 p.m.
Ticket counters closed at 10 p.m.