See “Invisible Art” before it disappears
Anna Somers Cocks explains why this Hayward Gallery show,
closing 5 August, should not be missed
By Anna Somers Cocks. Web only
Published online: 26 July 2012
Anyone listened to the 1963 song “Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa
How long can we understand a work of art in the terms of
its own time? Fifty years? Twenty? Probably not more than five if it is
contemporary art, which is as finely tuned to the mood of the moment as pop
music, but usually with an additional load of more or less philosophical
baggage that makes it even harder to penetrate after the theory has moved on.
Precisely because of this, I recommend catching “Invisible:
Art about the Unseen 1957-2012” at the Hayward Gallery in London
As its curator Ralph Rugoff says in the catalogue (also
printed in pale grey, and completely lacking in bullshit): “Art is about paying
attention, and invisible art asks us to pay attention in a different way.” Good
for him. This has been a gamble that has paid off and most of the critics have
loved it. The show hasn’t got a sponsor—they don’t usually do immaterial—but
Rugoff, who is also director of the Hayward Gallery, went ahead anyway. Maybe
it’s because he comes from California
That old magus Duchamp should be the patron of the whole
event, because none of the works could have been made without his influence,
direct or indirect. It aims to explain the various reasons why artists have
made invisible art, from the idea that art is in the eye of the beholder to the
idea that the market has turned art into a mere commodity so you must purify it
of substance, to the idea that you can make almost invisible art and play with
people’s sense of space, to the idea that some political issues are so serious
that you can only deal with them by absence and allusion. As you see, a lot of
ideas.
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