Plenty of Nothing; Art/Money/Installation

IN HIS RECENT article ‘Art and Money’ (1), Russian-born, Germany and New York-based theorist Boris Groys casts a systematic eye over the landscape of contemporary art, largely in lieu of the pressures exerted on it by the art market. He points out, in contradiction to the assumption that all art is essentially market-orientated, that many exhibitions today function in ways that exceed the market. Large exhibitions exceed the market because they are mass cumulative experiences aimed principally at public interest. Therefore, even though the art presented might be touted by the commercial galleries that support it, most people who see such art in such contexts have neither the money nor the inclination to buy it. More than this, though, Groys’s focus is on the affective power of installations as a dominant artistic medium of our age. Installations are significant because at their most successful and ambitious they activate collective desires in political ways that undermine attempts to reduce them to mere fodder made available to elite connoisseurs. This is a big claim in an era thoroughly saturated by the external expediencies of anticipated market outcomes. Consequently, it is a positive one as well. From an Australian situation it is particularly revealing as the practice of installation is now, more than ever, comparatively absent from the local terrain of contemporary art. Naturally, there are innumerable artists who ‘install’ objects, paintings, photographs and videos in spatial configurations. Still, most of these ‘installations’ – the term has become so popularly and conveniently porous by now – are ultimately reducible to the sum of their parts, parts that can be readily distributed to willing collectors. Out of this scenario, installation art properly defined by its dependency on site and its irreducibility to isolable components, poses especial challenges. Never is this truer than when the installation art in question appears to exhibit ‘nothing’. In a global climate founded squarely on reinvigorated traditionalist principles of material accumulation, contemporary exhibitions in which ‘nothing’ is shown pose important questions concerning art’s value. Groys argues that installation art needs and deserves to be financially supported, even though it may be fundamentally uncollectible (2). When such art enters directly into a dialogue with emptiness and absence the stakes are raised. Indeed, as a potential, albeit quietist, extreme to principles of enforced accumulation, the installation of nothing echoes the hollowness that underpins most transactions in the art market where a potential investor seeks only to make an ‘informed’, that is reliable, investment. When there is nothing to buy, let alone to see, the politicised and ‘realist’ impact of installation art comes to the fore.

Installations exhibiting nothing – more or less an anomaly in the Australian context – have an illustrious heritage elsewhere. Indeed, in 2009 the Centre Pompidou in Paris, in conjunction with Switzerland’s Kunsthalle Bern and France’s Centre Pompidou-Metz, staged an ambitious event titled Voids, a Retrospective (3). The aim of this ambitious enterprise was to present to European audiences a survey of the many artists whose contribution to art has ostensibly been the presentation of empty galleries. Publicly funded, an exhibition of this kind could easily have been construed by many as a massive hoax preying on the gullibility of a ‘tax-paying’ public caught unawares. Tellingly, such an assumption filters directly back to arguments pertaining to art’s monetary worth, particularly since here money would appear to get you plenty of ‘nothing’ (discounting the astute catalogue, of course). However, the nothing accounted for by this exhibition is distinctly more varied than the unerring sameness of capitalistic exchange. The exhibition, or series of linked exhibitions, began with Yves Klein’s seminal Le Vide (The Void), 1958 at the Iris Clert Gallery in Paris. Klein’s Le Vide – presenting a gallery interior freshly painted white, stripped of all extraneous décor and from which all art objects were absent – was one of the first shows to call into account what may be deemed the gallery apparatus. The work, framed very publicly at its opening via the self-conscious deployment of velvet curtains and a royal guard of honour, exposed the gallery’s inherent enmeshing within a system of audience expectation automatically linked to promises of imminent acquisition. Robbed of such opportunity the audience was left with the ‘magic’ of the contemplation of the empty space. Given that this exhibition was facilitated by a renowned commercial gallery one has to ask what their ‘investment’ in such an apparently ‘missed’ opportunity was if not to highlight the especially daring character of the artist himself. Appropriately, Klein’s quasi-theatrical conjuring of emptiness was later complemented by a much more direct comment on the artistic value of ‘nothing’. In his (in)famous series of performances, The Ritual Transference of a Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (1959–62) Klein offered a collector the chance to ‘own’ the experience of having valuable material for which they had paid handsomely, in this case a quantity of pure gold leaf, to be dispersed into the river Seine. The true ‘object’ of this transaction became the signed certificate, an agreement between the purchaser and the artist that simply testified that such an event took place.

Such historical examples are important as they illuminate a very particular point regarding art’s relationship to money and to questions of value. Klein’s contemporary statements mostly evince spiritualist leanings tied to his dual engagement with Zen Buddhism and Rosicrucianism. Other writers argued that the artist’s pronouncements indicated instead his knowing cultivation of controversy and self-publicity. Nonetheless, in retrospect there is an undeniable ‘pointy end’ to Klein’s implied commodity critiques that he was probably unwilling to freely admit. Conceptually linked to Klein’s Le Vide is American conceptual artist Michael Asher’s untitled work of 1974 executed at Claire Copley Gallery in Los Angeles. For this piece Asher simply removed the gallery partition separating the commercial gallerist from her space. Exhibited was nothing but the now ambiguous relationship between the gallery director, whose investment in the final instance is business-directed, and the artist, who originally staged in has literally exposed her. With the wall removed the director sat isolated at her desk at the end of a long corridor-like space in full view of visitors and flanked by the unglamorous-looking contents of her stockroom. Nevertheless, what is equally notable about this work is knowledge of the contract that must have been signed between artist and dealer, just as Klein’s contract resulted in the intentional wasting of material rather than its accumulation. In Asher’s ‘installation’ the commercial dealer was obviously willing for the artist to take control of the gallery space itself for no apparent commercial outcome. This is unless, of course, the boldness of the artist’s gesture was to compensate via subsequent repute, thus enhancing the cutting-edge prestige of the gallery in question. In any case, the relation is finally uncertain and tense, as well as being interrogative of the mechanisms that separate the general public from access to the behind-the-scenes activities of the business of art. In normal circumstances it is only those with sufficient ‘disposable income’ who are initiated into the auratic ‘mysteries’ of contemporary art ownership.

In both Le Vide and Asher’s intervention the artists’ aim was to make public that which is resolutely private and privatising: the business of art. For Groys the true power of installation resides in its public galvanising of desires, the unscripted interactions it can provoke and its collective political ramifications (4). What happens, though, when installation, an art form preeminently a priori socialised, is realised in private? An artwork that is hidden and not seen, Groys argues, is no artwork at all and may as well not have been made in the first place (5). Public exposure is what defines art and what opens it to social thought and, by implication, to potential action. In the case of HAUS u r Rheydt (1989–95), the German artist Gregor Schneider slowly transformed a suburban family house into an ever-evolving concatenation of added, altered and simulated rooms. As with other artists who see the task of installation as primarily offering propositional spaces, Schneider presented no real ‘art objects’ in HAUS u r. Alternatively, a banal living room was replicated directly adjacent to it; a basement door opened to reveal a dark, empty and functionless space entirely insulated from the outside; a neglected garage area with a partially filled-in hole in the floor appeared elsewhere in another part of the house; and a dining room imperceptibly rotated on its axis. In this way Schneider’s HAUS u r, where he actually lived and worked, facilitated an experience of the uncanny founded on the hidden tactic of multiplying suburban banality within the same hermetically sealed space. Experience of that labyrinthine space for the relatively few invited to enter it was one of familiarity undermined. Moreover, Schneider’s HAUS u r altered over time and at the artist’s leisure, raising further questions about its value as art: it is not contained by a museum, it was paid for by the artist and it was accessible only to the expressly invited. Revealingly, since making HAUS u r, and almost wholly on the basis of its semi-mythical reputation, Schneider has been asked to re-create parts of it for very public events. One of the most notable of these was the 2001 Venice Biennale where the artist presented the TOTESHAUS u r. Here, Schneider, clearly with the aid of a vast team of builders, filled the German pavilion with a reconstruction of the house. In doing so he subverted the pompous neo-classical architecture of the pavilion façade, as well as the habitual expectations of those wanting to see art of undoubted ‘national significance’. What they were actually faced with was a multi-storey complex of empty domestic rooms repeated and simulated right down to the grime incurred by constant habitation. Larger than life, Schneider’s ‘haunted house’ placed itself beyond the scope of the commodity, even while the artist works as a commercially successful contemporary practitioner.

Turning away from issues of interiority and back to considerations of the functioning of public art institutions is the determined, if playful, strand of questioning evidenced by the work of Berlin-based Danish artist Jeppe Hein. In 2005 Hein exhibited his Labyrinthe Invisible at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The installation appeared at first glance to be nothing but a pristine, cavernous and entirely empty museum space. This space, however, was rigged with a network of hidden sensors tracing a series of interconnected invisible rooms. Bemused viewers supplied with headphones were invited to negotiate this invisible architecture. The headphones interacted with the system of sensors so that every time a viewer ‘touched’ one of the unseen walls they were confronted instantaneously with a loud buzz reminding them that they had transgressed a threshold. However, rather than a simple game, Hein’s ‘museum-scale’ work alerted visitors, by implication, to the many unseen partitions that divide institutional spaces into independently functioning, atomised units. Upon entering a museum of contemporary art the visitor usually experiences a sense that they will be granted access to secrets that would otherwise be unobtainable. These secrets nominally pertain to the meanings suggested by artworks that are innately dependent on their art-institutional context to communicate. However, in reality, the museum visitor is denied at every step any real sense of the totality of the contemporary museum as a labyrinthine entity. Closed are the storerooms full of artworks not displayed. Closed are the offices of curators and other staff responsible for materialising the content and contents of the museum. Closed too, obviously, are the financial departments that not only pay staff but which perpetually fundraise and enable the staging of exhibitions in the first place. Hein’s invisible labyrinth forced an awareness of limits that may not be crossed and which, although materially present, can never be accessed, except by initiates. A related work of Hein’s, Let Me Show You the World (2000) appeared similarly as nothing but a large empty museum space. The room featured a small hole drilled at eye level in the centre of the farthest wall. As the only detail in the room, effectively its punctum, audiences approached the hole hoping to glimpse something of value through it on the other side of the wall. Instead, they were met with a steady gush of very cold air making it impossible for them to keep their eyes open long enough to see anything. Attempts to do so would result in the advent of false tears stimulated by the cold air. Rather than emotional, these tears were wholly physiognomic and metaphorically suggested an ironic sense of disappointment at being offered ‘nothing’ as a legitimate gallery experience.

Toying further with audience expectations and with notions of cultural value is the recent work of Slovakian artist Roman Ondák. Ondák represents a type of art that concerns itself overtly with propositional situations rather than ‘things’. Eminently attesting to this outlook was an untitled work of Ondák’s first shown in a commercial gallery, Galerie Martin Janda in Vienna, in 2005. The work was yet another empty gallery. The only feature of the space was the string cordoning off entry to it, from which was suspended a plastic sign that read ‘Deadline postponed until tomorrow’. Instead of simply offering viewers the experience of contemporary art as one geared principally to consumption, Ondák alternatively indicated art as fundamentally based on invisible thought processes. In this case, the process had seemingly been humorously curtailed either by the artist’s ineptitude or laziness. Certainly, the art world now more than ever valorises the productive spirit. In a global scenario, traditional craft-orientated values once scorned by post-conceptualists have returned with a vengeance. The return to
the production of self-consciously technically skilled artworks may be explained by the fact that they automatically guarantee increased consumer desire. Denying the possibility of consumption other than as an idea, Ondák in this installation short-circuited the standard path to acquisition by indicating its resounding lack as a possibility: the public might eagerly consume aesthetic objects but they will rarely understand or care for the underlying thinking that produces art. In 2003, in a similar vein, Ondák staged a series of performance interventions titled Good Feelings in Good Times for which he paid anonymous participants to queue inside and outside cultural institutions. Inciting interest by their mere presence, Ondák hinted via his amassed ‘employees’ at the hyperbole that frequently surrounds particular institutions and the cultural events they stage. Such hyperbole is routinely regarded by such institutions as thoroughly necessary for proving quantifiable public outcomes like gallery attendances that in turn are seen to provide the bottom line for their continued existences. Related too was Ondák’s installation More Silent Than Ever (2006), first exhibited in Paris, and consisting of yet another completely empty, fluorescent-lit institutional space. In this instance, the room was rumoured to contain a concealed eavesdropping device as indicated by the list of materials on an accompanying wall plaque. Of course, being hidden, the eavesdropping device could not be seen and may or may not have existed. How does this knowledge of potentially being listened to and recorded transform the gallery going experience? Making visitors feel suddenly self-conscious about the thoughts they would otherwise unthinkingly share, Ondák here projected an invisible but nonetheless monumental object into the museum as part of a greater iconoclastic gesture. The object in question was the psychological barrier that slyly prevented unthinking carefree social banter between visitors and which, as a result, undermined the notion of the museum or gallery as inherently a space of ‘free thought’. Thus, the gallery customarily valued for its support of ‘freedom’ was indicated to be equally immured in the politics of consensus whereby only positive thoughts are deemed justified.

Closer to home, examples of installations that trade in their interrogation of art’s presumed values via the presentation of nothing are rare. In 2004 the New Zealand artist Dane Mitchell presented the work Spells in Auckland. The installation comprised an aluminium museum barricade in a corner of the gallery and a nearby sign that read: ‘This area has been cursed. Please do not enter.’ A related work by the same artist from 2008, Invocations, repeated this gesture, although now the sign read: ‘A portal to the spirit world has been opened in this area. Please do not enter.’ In both cases the gallery was figured – to paraphrase both Bruce Nauman (6) and another of Mitchell’s works – as a space of ‘mystic truths’. Such truths traditionally grant art a value far exceeding that of the mundane world. Meanwhile, the gallery becomes a sanctified space of ritual where viewers, so inclined, seek to see beyond the ‘merely’ visible. Mitchell’s installations link such romantic thinking with the rising global popularity of ‘alternative religion’. Proponents of the latter aim to recapture a sense of spirituality beyond the confines of institutionalised religion. Naturally it is not accidental that such desire for ‘more’ than what can be physically apprehended coincides with an overarching global system of rampant materialism ever-speculating over guaranteed returns: the unerring positivism of one system simply counter-poses another plying the negational value of the invisible. Also plying the value of the invisible was an exhibition from 2007 instigated by Ian Geraghty, one- time founder and director of the now defunct Grey Matter artist space in Sydney. The exhibition in question, Wunderkammer at Sydney’s Loose Projects, was dedicated to Seth Siegelaub, an independent curator who in the early 1960s was the first American gallerist to exhibit and collect dematerialised conceptual art. The title of Geraghty’s show also conjured, deliberately contradictorily, the ‘room of wonders’ so beloved of European audiences from the Renaissance onwards. The wunderkammer prefigured contemporary exhibitions as vast accretions of collectible, although ultimately unrelated, curiosities, whose definitional boundaries had yet to be defined. In Geraghty’s wunderkammer, referencing Siegelaub’s curatorial approach, the curiosities were invisible. In fact, the ‘collection’ of works represented in this show took the form of a series of typed statements that directed possible readings of the nothingness confronting gallery visitors. Therefore, the gallery was suddenly transformed simultaneously into an ‘Audio Catchment Area’, a space where distant urban sounds were collected; a locus for the meeting of two spirits from adjoining buildings facilitated by a psychic; and the apparent focus of a crack team of Kung Fu experts lying in wait in the surrounding lanes ready to test the reflexes of departing gallery visitors (7). All in all, both Geraghty’s and Mitchell’s projects addressed the unspoken conventions of value promoted by most galleries that demand under all circumstances that ‘useful’ space not be ‘wasted’.

Interestingly, all these ostensibly ‘dematerialised’ art practices seem to bear an uncanny relationship to the types of immaterial creative practices that have become so prevalent within contemporary culture. These network- based expressions, the Internet and its adjuncts being foremost among them, likewise traffic in an invisibility factor where the physical support of the technology disappears in favour of an emphasis on the transcendent possibilities of being both here and elsewhere at the same time. However, Groys is quick to point out that the supposed immateriality of installation is a myth. When we consider space seriously it is the ultimate material; space is what defines materiality and material relations in the first place (8). Another important aspect that differentiates the immateriality of certain installation practices and the spaces of media technology is the excessively informational dimension of online space. Rather than liberating, the subject free to create and interact online is in reality mired in what Jean Baudrillard describes as ‘unlimited metastasis’ (9). Creative communication in this immaterial zone actually represents ‘free, secular and obligatory communication ... leading to the dictatorship of forced exchange – [that] no one will escape ... this is the virtual dimension of hegemony ...’(10). Such hegemony is echoed in the dematerialised flows of global capitalism that are already way beyond intelligible regulation. This is a rogue capitalism operating behind the scenes and ultimately indicating that ‘capital’s coup de force is to make everything dependent on the economic order, to subject all minds to a single mental dimension’ (11) Opposed to the obligatory demand to ‘inform’, installations that present the absence of ‘things’ simultaneously challenge viewers to socially co-create and intervene in the spaces of the art institution and gallery. In doing so, viewers freed of the imperative to interact with art in prescribed ways, are encouraged instead to apply their thinking to the wider implications of the relations between spaces. The exhibition space that exhibits ‘nothing’ deflects the standard expectations of gallery going publics to alternative thoughts of the intertwined functioning of related institutions that define the invisible structures in which we live. These are the structures, in the art world and beyond, that compel us to behave, usually unbeknown to ourselves, in the ways we do. Thus, the deliberately empty gallery is also a space of radical possibility that alerts us to other options and to a consideration of the arbitrariness of the powers that direct our time and attention. This includes pervasive efforts in our globalised societies to encourage us to behave at all times ‘financially’, like automata.

In the end, however, given the array of dematerialising installation practices surveyed here, it would be false to imagine, regardless of the challenges to ‘sense’ and utility they pose, that such work were primarily designed to affront principles of commodification because, as Groys writes: ‘to perceive the critique of commodification as the main or even unique goal of contemporary art is just to reaffirm the total power of the art market – even if this affirmation takes the form of critique’ (12).

Clearly, to produce art, in this case installation, only as an attempt to attack the art market is dialectically but a way of reiterating the saturation of market values in art. Therefore, to approximate the works mentioned here solely along the lines of ‘commodity critique’ is to rob them of their nebulous and ambiguous qualities. Klein’s Le Vide, for example, while unquestionably a comment on externally imposed codes of value in art, is also a poetic rumination on the physical support of the gallery itself, the frame that allows art to be seen in the first place (even when there is nothing to see). Likewise, Klein’s series of performances, The Ritual Transference of a Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, was both a criticism of materialism13 and an equally poetic series of acts aesthetically framing isolated and predominantly unrepeatable gestures. And the same could be said in different ways of most of the works mentioned in this article. Still, in a milieu where ‘artworks ... become iconic not as a result of their display in a museum but by their circulation in the art market and in the mass media’,14 the critical dimension of these installations, the fact that they defy their reduction to imagery for circulation, is noteworthy. In a contemporary Australian setting beholden, no matter how subtly or not, to a Protestant work ethic bound by economistic biases, it is unlikely that such forms of practice will ever be properly supported. This is doubly the case when we take into account a wider scenario where Nietzsche’s long-dead God has since been substituted for the ubiquitous and omnipresent ‘tax payer’. The mythical ‘tax payer’, though, seems mainly unaware of the mechanism by which the utility they insist upon, and the endless accumulation they crave, is facilitated by the continual addition of zeros. Such a situation is particularly fitting when viewed in relation to contemporary art practices extolling the value of ‘nothing’, for, on the one hand, zeros merely guarantee the value of thoughtless consensus, while on the other, the nothing presented is open and full of undetermined possibilities.

Alex Gawronski

Originally published in Broadsheet vol. 40 no. 2, Oct, Nov, Dec, 2011. CACSA, Adelaide, Australia.

1. See Boris Groys, Art and Money, e-flux journal, #24, 2011.

2. Groys writes: ‘critical, analytical art should be supported in the first place: if it is not supported, it will be not only hidden and discarded, but, as I have already suggested, it would simply not come into being.’ ibid.

3. See Voids, A Retrospective, Éditions du Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2009.

4. ‘An art installation, on the contrary, builds a community of spectators precisely because of the holistic, unifying character of the space produced by the installation. The true visitor of the installation is not an isolated individual, but a collective of visitors – a multitude, if you like.’ Groys, op. cit.

5. ‘... as if excluded artworks can somehow still exist somewhere, even when they are not shown ... to not show an artwork simply means not allowing it to come into being at all.’ ibid.

6. Bruce Nauman, THE TRUE ARTIST HELPS THE WORLD BY REVEALING MYSTIC TRUTHS (WINDOW OR WALL SIGN) (1967), neon text.

7. See Mark Titmarsh and Alex Gawronski (eds), Loose Papers: Loose Projects 2006–2007, University of Technology, Sydney, 2010.

8. ‘On the contrary, the installation is material par excellence, because it is spatial – for being in space is the most general definition of being material.’ Groys, op. cit.

9. Jean Baudrillard, The Agony of Power, Semiotext(e)/ Intervention Series, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2010, p. 124.

10. ibid, p. 44.

11. ibid, pp 86–87.

12. Boris Groys, Art Power, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2008, p. 6.

13. ‘Klein also wanted to cleanse the temple; he wanted to rob art of the materialism (which he equated with materiality) which seemed to him to corrupt it, to weigh it down.’ Edward Lucie-Smith quoted in Thomas McEvilley, Yves the Provocateur: Yves Klein and Twentieth Century Art, Documentext/McPherson & Company, 2010, p. 187.

14. Groys, 2008, op. cit., p. 47.