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 which
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
Peter Downsbrough,
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster,
Wade Guyton,
Hans Haacke,
Sherrie Levine, 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.
