Laurie Beth Clark
University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor of Art (4-D).
For more information, visit LaurieBethClark.art
Andrew Salyer
Something: A Brief Survey of Nothing, 1958 to 2006
This exhibition attempts a reading of four historic immaterial artworks, revealing the potential problematics inherent in exhibiting artwork in a system that traditionally allows only one discrete artwork in one distinct place at one time. The artworks included in this exhibit are: Yves Klein’s The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, The Void (1958), Robert Irwin’s Experimental Situation (1970), Laurie Parsons’ 578 Broadway, 11th Floor (1990), and Simon Pope’s Gallery Space Recall (2006). Each artist in this collection (the versions of the work seen here today are slightly scaled down from the original) uses the gesture of an empty gallery space to expand our understanding of the art experience as participatory and relational, resistant and hostile, silent creative thought-space, and lastly, as a single node in the network of memories related to past exhibitions.