© Centre Pompidou, Georges Meguerditchian, 2009

"Vides. Une Retrospective" (2009). Installation view, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2009.

Yves Klein Robert Barry Stanley Brouwn Michael Asher Show Me the Money All the President’s Art London Sales Preview Piero Manzoni

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With almost as many curators (six) as there were artists (nine), the exhibition "Vides" (Voids) was handicapped from the get-go by its self-characterization as a retrospective. Starting with Yves Klein’s famous 1958 gesture at Iris Clert gallery in Paris, "The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility," for which the artist left the gallery empty, the show tried to demarcate a trajectory of empty exhibitions since the advent of the master of the immaterial. In addition to Klein’s inaugural void, featured vacancies included works by Laurie Parsons, Bethan Huws, Maria Eichhorn, and Stanley Brouwn. Though an exhibition consisting of apparently untenanted spaces might seem like an easy enough gambit, the missteps here were many. Lacunae like the absence of Michael Asher (who declined on the principle that he does not restage exhibitions outside of their original context) pretty much forfeited the exhibition’s right to call itself a retrospective, while the unremitting sameness imposed throughout the empty, unmodified gallery spaces reserved for each artist and the homogeneous, pedagogical wall texts that accompanied them seemed to be the result of a certain procrustean glee. To present eventual artworld dropout Laurie Parsons’s 1990 nonexhibition at Lorence-Monk gallery in New York in the same way as Robert Barry’s 1970 ongoing work Some places to which we can come, and for a while "be free to think about what we are going to do" (the quote is from Herbert Marcuse’s "An Essay on Liberation") suppresses their differing agendas of withdrawal and possibility, respectively. Although audacious to the point of quixotry (and praiseworthy as such), this exhibition would have greatly benefited from much more effort to emphasize the differences between these heterogeneous voids.
"Vides. Une Retrospective" originally appeared in the May 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' May 2009 Table of Contents.