Invisible Art at The Hayward Gallery 2012

In 2012 I went to the Hayward Gallery to the Invisible Art exhibition but I forgot to review it so I will do it now because it was a very interesting well curated exhibition about the invisible and emptiness.

When I tell my friend's (not artists) about Invisible Art they always look at me puzzled the first thing they ask is it possible to create something invisible? Then they say if is it invisible, how I am going to be aware of it? The Invisible Arts exhibition is about how do you engage with art. It questions the idea that the content of art can not always been seen. First of all some of the artists that have dealt with Invisible have been interested more in the actual space than a visible work of art inside of it like for example Robert Barry Energy Field see below.

Then there is Yves Klein and his plans of an 'architecture of air' below where he was keen to explore the subject without any visible content. Yves Klein was interested in mystical ideas, the infinite, he strongly believed  that what can not be seen it is of most value like for example love, hope, it's an Utopian work.

Most of the works in Invisible challenge our understanding of what is art and push our perception capacities asking us to use not only to see with our eyes but with our imagination. Some artists in the exhibition used invisibility to show political disappearance, marginalisation of social groups and to make the viewer aware of the suppression of information like the work of Teresa Margolles. Some of the works where also funny like the one by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan  where he poked fun at the absurdity of bureaucracy as his work was about a police report about his invisible art work being stolen in the car, which is very funny as the story is so absurd.

 What the exhibition shows is the variety of works in terms of concepts achieved under the umbrella 'Invisible Art', in one case there is a piece of paper that an artist looked at for 1000 hours over a period of five years. There is the work by Italian Gianni Motti where he used invisible ink highlighting that the creative process is private as the viewer can not see what he wrote, he is the only one who knows what he wrote.

More serious is the work of Teresa Margolles where she is using water  inside humidifiers as they where used in the morgues to wash the bodies of murder victims in Mexico city mainly killed by drug cartel so in this way you are not looking at photographs of bodies but you are actually feeling the mist of their bodies on yourself which I found to be intimate and disturbing.

Then there is the 'Plinth' by Andy Warhol where he stood before stepping off, his take on fame and traces of it and society obsession with fame.

The Erased Playboy centre fold by Tom Friedman  where  he spent a long time rubbing off the playboy pin up from the play boy centre fold. It seems to me that Friedman is interested in the concept of how to make a drawing with no image. One is left only with the creases of the Playboy which are specific to playboy centrefold ( I am no expert on this but my male friends say so).

Then i saw The Yoko Ono early sixties Introduction paintings: typed commands which stimulate the viewer imagination as the audience was asked to participate with their imagination.

Yoko Ono said 'in your head, a sunset can go on for days. You can eat up all the clouds in the sky'. Her instruction paintings  where not just graphic images in themselves that's why she had the instructions typed for example her ' Hand Piece' typed in 1961 reads: 'Raise your hand in the evening light and watch it until it becomes transparent and you see the sky and the trees through it', it's poetic.

I also found very poetic the work of Song Dong where he wrote a diary on stone due to being poor and not able to afford ink. His thoughts disappear when the water dries which is quite zen in the approach. Also Lai Chich-Shen'g work is interesting he basically draws in pencil around the  Hayward Gallery space on the edges of pillars and doorways, around floor tiles

Then there is the work by Byars made in 1969 which was  unsettling as you had to go inside a space that was pitch black and I lost any any sense of bearing. It was titled the Ghost of James Lee Bayars, I didn't know where I was even if there was a small light towards the exit which I really couldn't see so  by mistake I went out from the entrance instead of the exit, I couldn't find it and I bumped into some one else too..

It was also interesting to see how people around me where nervous around the empty plinth by Tom Friedman called Curse 1992, apparently he hired a professional witch to curse the plinth I can assure you that nobody was going near it  away of showing the power of superstition on people.

In the exhibition there was also a car park space number 4 by Carsten Holler a space that was supposed to have an invisible car which was quite weird I mean I walked inside the car space couldn't have cared less if there was a car or not but i did see other people not walking in the space actually thinking that there was a real car there even if invisible, maybe there imagination was stronger then their rational side.

At the end of the exhibition there is a fun work by Danish artist Jeppe Hein called 'Invisible Labyrinth' where the audience had to listen to digital headphones and walk around a wall less labyrinth. There was a strange humming vibration emanating from the headphones which told you that you had hit a wall so you had to change direction which made the work partly about the barriers that surround us and we are not aware of.