Is this art?
Posted: Thursday, 5 March 2009 by Joseph Vancell in
Art exhibitions without exhibits are nothing new. Nothing has been a recognised art form for half a century. But the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris can claim a cultural first this week: for the first time since John Cage penned his noiseless 4'33 and Yves Klein invited thousands to view an empty, white-washed room the Centre Georges Pompidou is devoting an entire retrospective exhibition of 51 years of exhibitions without exhibits by nine different artists. How can a museum retrospectively exhibit nothing? With great care.
The exhibition, Voids, a Retrospective, fills, or fails to fill, five rooms in the French national museum of modern art on the fourth floor of the Pompidou building. All the rooms are entirely empty. The walls are white. The floors are bare. The lighting has been arranged just as carefully as for any other temporary exhibition. The gardiens (guards) watch suspiciously to make sure that the visitors do not touch anything, or in this case that they do not touch nothing.
The exhibition is hailed by one critic as the most radical show ever seen inside a museum, Voids, a retrospective is a celebration of art which, as the artist Robert Barry put it, wants us to be "free for a moment to think about what we are going to do".