The Hayward Gallery Blog – Southbank Centre

The technical team has just finished installing Jeppe Hein’s ingenious Invisible Labyrinth. For an invisible artwork, there’s a lot of visible gear – industrial struts stretch across the gallery’s 6 metre-high ceiling, supporting a grid of infra-red transmitters that beam signals down to the digital headphones that you wear to enter the piece. But when you’re ‘in’ it and the headphones are murmuring their vibrations in your ear, it’s a mind-boggling, wondrously disorienting experience of bumping into unseen walls and trying to ‘feel’ your way through a space you cannot see (and adding to its eeriness, one of seven different labyrinths is based on the one in the movie The Shining).

Book tickets for Invisible

Invisible: Art about the Unseen 1957 – 2012
12 June – 5 August 2012

Invisible Art brings together works from the past half century that explore ideas related to the invisible and the hidden. The exhibition includes work by some of the most important artists of our time as well as younger artists who have expanded on their legacy.

From the amusing to the philosophical, there are works you can observe and others you can take part in, such as Jeppe Hein’s Invisible Labyrinth. From Yves Klein’s utopian plans for an ‘architecture of air’ to Robert Barry’s Energy Field (AM 130 KHz) from 1968 – which encourages a heightened awareness of the physical context of the gallery- this exhibition span diverse aesthetic practices and concerns.

Many of the works in Invisible seek to direct our attention towards the unwritten rules and conventions that shape our understanding of art. Other works invoke invisibility to underscore the limits of our perceptual capacities or to emphasize the role of our imagination in responding to works of art.  Some use invisibility as a metaphor that relates to the suppression of information or the political disappearance and marginalization of social groups.

Artists in the exhibition include Art & Language, Robert Barry, Chris Burden, James Lee Byars, Maurizio Cattelan, Jay Chung, Song Dong, Tom Friedman, Carsten Höller, Tehching Hsieh, Bruno Jakob, Yves Klein, Lai Chih-Sheng, Glenn Ligon, Teresa Margolles, Gianni Motti, Roman Ondák, Yoko Ono and Andy Warhol.

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We were unpacking invisible artworks over the weekend as we prepare to begin installing the Invisible exhibition in the gallery this week. Of course, as you might imagine there’s not a lot to unpack.  But one of the most interesting art crates I’ve ever come across holds Tom Friedman’s 1992 sculpture Untitled (A Curse), which he made by hiring a professional witch to curse a spherical area above an otherwise unoccupied pedestal.  The crate not only includes a padded space for the custom-made pedestal, but also includes a specially rounded area for the invisible cursed sphere above it. ( It would’ve been nice to see the look on the inspecting officer’s face when that  piececame in through customs. )

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Lai Chih-Sheng, a wonderful artist from Taipei, arrived in the gallery today to begin creating the largest drawing I’ve ever seen for Invisible: Art about the Unseen 1957 – 2012. The drawing fills up our entire Gallery 3 (which is something like 18 metres by 22 metres by 4.5 metres high).  Yet he assured us that it will be almost completely invisible.  Along with three assistants helping him, Lai Chih-Sheng is meticulously drawing over every existing edge in the gallery – in other words, any place where two walls meet, or the wall and the floor, or the lines in a concrete column, etc.  It is painstaking work that requires great patience, and the gallery has a atmosphere of intense concentration right now as they begin this epic invisible project.

By Ralph Rugoff, Director, Hayward Gallery

Book tickets for Invisible

Invisible: Art about the Unseen 1957 – 2012
12 June – 5 August 2012

Invisible Art brings together works from the past half century that explore ideas related to the invisible and the hidden. The exhibition includes work by some of the most important artists of our time as well as younger artists who have expanded on their legacy.

From the amusing to the philosophical, there are works you can observe and others you can take part in, such as Jeppe Hein’s Invisible Labyrinth. From Yves Klein’s utopian plans for an ‘architecture of air’ to Robert Barry’s Energy Field (AM 130 KHz) from 1968 – which encourages a heightened awareness of the physical context of the gallery- this exhibition span diverse aesthetic practices and concerns.

Many of the works in Invisible seek to direct our attention towards the unwritten rules and conventions that shape our understanding of art. Other works invoke invisibility to underscore the limits of our perceptual capacities or to emphasize the role of our imagination in responding to works of art.  Some use invisibility as a metaphor that relates to the suppression of information or the political disappearance and marginalization of social groups.

Artists in the exhibition include Art & Language, Robert Barry, Chris Burden, James Lee Byars, Maurizio Cattelan, Jay Chung, Song Dong, Tom Friedman, Carsten Höller, Tehching Hsieh, Bruno Jakob, Yves Klein, Lai Chih-Sheng, Glenn Ligon, Teresa Margolles, Gianni Motti, Roman Ondák, Yoko Ono and Andy Warhol.

Filed under: Invisible | Leave a Comment »