Ralph Rugoff – A Brief History of Invisible Art

Lecture date: 2007-03-09

‘To represent something is in a sense to make it visible to others as a possible object of reality. In eschewing this scenario, invisible artworks divert our focus from the physical and tend to increase the visibility of the artist’s own role. They underscore the part played by our own responses in forging meaning from our encounters with art as well as the social and physical scaffolding that shapes its presentation. In this respect, invisible art belongs to a tradition of contemporary art predicated on the idea that an artwork is a collaboration involving the labour of both the artist and the audience. Somewhat paradoxically, it is precisely as a kind of rhetorical limit to artistic practice that invisibility can help us to rethink our relationship to the visible. There’s no limit to the potential meanings that can be constructed around invisibility as a trope.’
From Yves Klein’s utopian plans for an ‘architecture of air’ to Tom Friedman’s sculpture of a cursed space above a plinth, via works by Michael Asher, James Lee Byars, Bruno Jakob, Jay Chung and others, Ralph Rugoff traces a brief history of invisible art.

Ralph Rugoff is Director of the Hayward Gallery. His publications include monographs on George Condo, Mark Wallinger and Anya Gallacio. In 2005 he won the inaugural Ordway prize (in the category for arts writer and/or curator).

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