Voids

The politics of emptiness

“Voids. A Retrospective” is a paradoxical exhibition: by re-actualizing nine “empty exhibitions,” it is simultaneously an experimental project that refuses the classic rules of the visual arts and an historical object that confronts the projects of Art & Language, Robert Barry, Stanley Brouwn, Maria Eichhorn, Bethan Huws, Robert Irwin, Yves Klein, Roman Ondák, and Laurie Parsons.

At once the support and an extension of the event, this publication outlines the concept of the void in art, aesthetics, philosophy, religion, science, popular culture, architecture, and music, and broaches the subject of nothing, of vacuity, of the invisible and the ineffable, of rejection and destruction.

Opening with a catalogue section that documents the nine selected historical and contemporary exhibitions, the publication also contains an anthology of more than forty texts, many published here for the first time, as well as contributions by artists created especially for this volume.

Essays by Benjamin Buchloh, Jean-François Chevrier, Stuart Comer, Lucy Lippard, Bob Nickas, Brian O’Doherty, Sadie Plant, Ralph Rugoff, Jon Savage, and Sarah Wilson thus intersect with interviews conducted with Robert Barry, Morgan Fisher, Claude Parent, and Jacques Villeglé, and the propositions of Hans Haacke, Malcolm McLaren, Olivier Mosset, Yoko Ono, Sturtevant, and Lawrence Weiner.

Through the rich documentation, as well as the texts by specialists on the subject, this book proposes an evaluation of the origins, the mechanisms, and the resonances of this major artistic gesture consisting of emptying the exhibition space rather than filling it.

Published with the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Centre Pompidou-Metz and the Kunsthalle Bern.

French edition available by Editions du Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Awarded in the competition “The most beautiful Swiss books 2009.”