Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965

November 17, 2016•Art, Exhibitions, Uncategorized

Guest contributor Ananya Mukhopadhyay reviews the exhibition, on view at Haus der Kunst, Munich, until 26 March 2017

Image courtesy Grosvenor Gallery

Haus der Kunst’s ongoing exhibition Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945 – 1965 takes as its premise the ruptured discourses of nationalism and humanism which were sharply brought to light during and following the Second World War. The exhibition traces the global artistic response to the cataclysmic events of the Holocaust, the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the enduring political schisms of the Cold War. In addition to rehabilitating waning and Nazified ‘degenerate’ European modernisms, Postwar surveys the contributions of artists from pan-Asian, African and American backgrounds. In doing so, curators Katy Siegel, Okwui Enwezor and Ulrich Wilmes follow in the footsteps of Rasheed Araeen, whose seminal exhibition The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain was held at the Hayward Gallery in 1989. In another sense however, Haus Der Kunst goes further than to simply subvert the hegemony of Western Modernism. ‘Postwar’ becomes a condition that is not topographically constrained: it is a global consciousness of a violent modernity which counts partition conflicts, decolonisation and the rise of new technologies among its various geopolitical faces. Indian and Pakistani artists are featured prominently in this recent survey of alternative voices.

Image courtesy Grosvenor Gallery

Baroda artist Jeram Patel is on view alongside Araeen, Anwar Jalal Shemza and Mohan Samant in a section of the exhibition dealing with materialism, entitled ‘Form Matters’. Patel is perhaps most well-known for his experimental brutalisations of the picture surface with a blowtorch, and also for his black abstractions on paper which are seen as in-betweeneries, or illustrations for the interstitial spaces of experience. Postwar, however, exhibits a dark, highly textured oil-on-board composition. A luminous window floats atop the murky abstraction which dominates the picture plane. The curious referentiality of this window element suggests a beyond, a concealed au-delà which emphasises the very instrument of its obscurity: the material blackness of the foreground. The physically ruined postwar landscape had prompted a concern with this kind of material manipulation, with the surface transformed from mediating membrane into the primary site of expression. Highly prized by Alfred Barr, Mohan Samant’s tactile Green Square (1963) is also presented as an embodiment of this trope.

Another area of the exhibition focuses on ‘New Images of Man’, highlighting the major crisis of humanism which characterised the postwar period. Existential questions are combined with a concern for nation building in the works on view here, including Man (1951) by M.F. Husain and Head of a Man Thinking (1965) by F.N. Souza. Husain’s monumental canvas is largely articulated in the colours of the Indian flag, featuring folk dancers, nude female bodies and the sacred cow. The central character of Man is a pensive black figure, drawing the eye by virtue of its chromatic negativity, and raising the question of identity in a newly independent India. Souza’s Head is a similarly charged work of dappled blackness, a stigmatised colour in the context of ubiquitous racial conflicts and migratory movements across not only Indian but global borders.

Image courtesy Grosvenor Gallery

In the context of modernity as cosmopolitanism, Postwar posits the work of Krishen Khanna, Avinash Chandra and Pakistani artist Sadequain. Chandra’s typical blurring of the line between abstraction and figuration permits the entwinement of various different figures, distinguished by their varied colours and rotund, interlocking forms. While Chandra’s Early figures (1961) is decidedly erotic in its staging of heterogeneous characters, Krishen Khanna’s News of Gandhiji’s Death (1948) uses depicted newspapers to divide up and isolate the various figures on the canvas, thematising separateness within a community, despite their unifying interest in a tragic event.

Krishen Khanna, News of Gandhiji’s Death (1948). Image courtesy Grosvenor Gallery

Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965 is on view at Haus der Kunst, Munich, until 26 March 2017.

A Morning with F N Souza’s Daughters

September 2, 2013•Art

In conjunction with Saffronart’s Francis Newton Souza LIVE Auction on September 11, Elisabetta Marabotto shares an article on Souza by Selma Carvalho

F.N. Souza: Live Auction, September 11, 2013, Saffronart. Image Credit: http://www.saffronart.com/auctions/fn-souza-sale-2013-3609

F N Souza was born in Saligao, Goa, in 1924. He achieved world-wide acclaim as a modernist artist proclaiming, “I leave discretion, understatement and discrimination to the finicky and lunatic fringe.” He died in 2002.

The house in Belsize Square where Souza and Lisolette lived, as it is today. Image Credit: Selma Carvalho

As I turn the corner into the leafy suburb of Belsize Square and walk past the quiet of St. Peter’s Church, I hold my breath. Row upon row of neatly tailored period houses stand to attention on either side of a narrow, well-disciplined road. I can’t see protruding flower-beds, tangled bushes, creeping vines, restored pubs or any hint of disorderly Bohemian irreverence, which might have attracted Francis Newton Souza. And yet, this is where the anarchist of the art world, F N Souza and Liselotte de Kristian spent much of the fifties.

I glance up and see Anya, Souza’s youngest daughter by Liselotte waving to me. Francesca, his second daughter by Liselotte joins us. The apartment has an old-world East European feel to it; walls bear the brunt of photographs creeping like vines into every available space. A pair of ‘Liselotte’ paintings hang on the walls; this is Souza at his most vulnerable, naked self. Smooth, clean lines, no distortion of body parts, no disfigurement of the face, just one line joining another, seamlessly recreating the woman he loved onto canvas.

There is something cherubic about Anya. Francesca’s black hair is coiffed back and her beautiful cheekbones slightly flushed. Somewhere in these women, I can detect steely Konkan determination mixed with the courage of the East European Jew.

“My mother used to have her Progressive League meetings here,” Anya says. “A sort of meeting-up of old-world socialists,” Francesca adds.

Liselotte de Kristian was of Jewish descent, born in 1919 in Prague, Czechoslovakia, to a journalist father and a controlling mother who covered up all the furniture with dust-sheets. Her father died when she was six and her mother’s decline into very bizarre behaviour and constant mood-swings meant a childhood of bribery at times and beatings at others, a childhood which Liselotte knew was not normal. Her entire adult life, in a way, came to be defined by this need for normalcy, which she seldom found. She left Prague, a few days after Hitler’s army marched in and made her way to England where she took up odd jobs. Winning a part-scholarship to RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) changed her life. Two relationships followed, both equally bereft of love.

I ask about Souza.

“He was actually acknowledged as a writer in this country before his art.” Francesa says.

Souza’s house in Goa. This is his maternal house in Saligao. Image Credit: Selma Carvalho

Souza arrived in England, in 1949, by his own accounts “almost penniless.” England took little notice of this newcomer. Multiculturalism may have been the new Londonism, but it was still a time when landladies put out signs saying, “No dogs, No blacks.” A curious mix of artists, writers, booksellers and gallery owners had established themselves around London’s West End; they congregated, almost like a cult, in Soho. Pasty British poets enjoying the exquisite pain of displaced Jews. They spent much of their time at the French House and Colony Room, watering-holes in Soho, drinking, brawling, dancing naked on table-tops, flitting between squatting and homelessness, fashionably poverty-stricken and flirting dangerously with the law. One of those afflicted with this Sohoitis was the deliciously handsome English poet, Stephen Spender, editor of Encounter magazine who was to form a friendship with Souza. Souza’s autobiographical essay, Nirvana of a Maggot appeared in Encounter (1955) and was immediately applauded.

“Ida Kar was a great friend of both my mother and father. You must visit the National Portrait Gallery. There is an exhibition on,” Francesca urges.

A few days later, I find myself outside the imposing National Portrait Gallery, the fine streets leading up to it are lined with bookshops. A picture of a young Souza snapped up in black-and-white by Ida Kar takes centre stage. He looks unassuming and unsure.

The Church where Souza was baptised in Saligao. Image Credit: Selma Carvalho

Ida was an Armenian, dark-haired and loud-mouthed. She met her husband, Victor Musgrave, twelve years her junior, while in Cairo and they moved to London in 1945. Their house at 1 Litchfield Street, from where Victor ran Gallery One, saw a steady stream of squatters and lovers come and go. Taking lovers never proved to be a conflict of interest. Stephen Spender knew Musgrave, who gave Souza a solo-show at Gallery One in 1955. The show was a sell-out and if it established Souza, it also established the reputation of Musgrave, as a sort of champion of the art world’s voiceless and defiant avant-garde artiste. Musgrave and Ida had a curious interest and sympathy for the inner-city underbelly, keeping close company with prostitutes. Souza was now firmly entrenched in London’s high Bohemia; untethered from middle-class values, spurred on by leftist leanings, sexually unconstrained and seminally creative. This world was very different from Bombay, and one in which no doubt, he came alive.

“Your mother was the love of his life,” I venture into more disquietening territory.

“There’s a quote in Words and Lines, a dedication to her. I think they were just very intellectually compatible,” Francesca says finally.

Liselotte met Souza in the December of 1954. He was unimpressive, wearing a suit three times his size with intensity to his eyes and a persistence which scared her. He asked her why she didn’t have children and told her she must be barren. When she said she hadn’t wanted children, he replied, “I want you to be the mother of my children.”

The narrow road across from Souza’s house in Saligao, a road he would have walked on and the neighbourhood he would have known quite well. Image Credit: Selma Carvalho

Ida Kar, Victor Musgrave, Liselotte Kristian, F N Souza; all these disparate lives had serendipitously intersected in London, only to discover they weren’t disparate souls. They shared a sense of dispossession and a reformer’s zeal, which at times bordered on the anarchic. Both Musgrave and Souza were deeply disturbed by race riots in fifties Britain. In a departure from his usual subject matter, Souza painted Negro in Mourning, 1957.

Negro in Mourning, F.N. Souza. Image Credit: http://www.bmagic.org.uk/objects/1999P10

Souza was married to Maria Figueirado. Liselotte had never technically divorced from her marriage to Richard. Souza and she proceeded to Paris, in what was to be their honeymoon, living for 2 months on £100 between them, cooking on a spirit-stove in their hotel room. Liselotte had worked in television and had played a small part in a film. She fell pregnant while in Paris.

Do you remember him as a father or an artist? I ask.

“He was very affectionate… There are certain artists,” Francesca says to me, “their entire life and their work, their life’s mission, it’s inseparable.”

Souza was totally consumed by his art. His relationship with Liselotte swung between euphoria and despair. Almost overnight and unannounced, he sunk into the oblivion of alcohol. The normalcy of family, which Liselotte had so craved for, dissipated into an unpredictable and often violent relationship.

Despite the drinking, the next few years proved to be enormously successful for Souza. He had five shows at Gallery One. The last one in 1961 at North Audley Street, where Musgrave had shifted the gallery, was hugely successful and in many ways marked the pinnacle of his career. But his relationship with Liselotte had all but collapsed. (Although in a 1958 letter to Victor Musgrave, he still writes lovingly of her). Shortly afterwards, Souza married Barbara Zinkant. In 1967, he left for America.

I bid farewell to the sisters and climb down the old-fashioned stairwell, contemplating what Francesca said, “He was a genius…what he will end up being remembered for is his work, that’s what will stay.”

Selma Carvalho is the author of Into the Diaspora Wilderness, and Project Manager of the Oral Histories of British-Goans Project.

Beyond the Commodity Fetish: Art and the Public Sphere in India by Nancy Adajania

March 8, 2013•Art, Exhibitions

Manjari Sihare recommends an article by cultural theorist, Nancy Adajania commissioned for the Guggenheim UBS MAP Initiative on South and South East Asia

New York: A few weeks ago, I shared an article by Susan Hapgood on performance art in India commissioned for the Guggenheim’s UBS MAP Initiative on South East and South Asian Art. The exhibition, No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia, features works of some of the most compelling artists and collectives in South and South East Asia today. It is on view at the Guggenheim, New York, until May 22nd, after which it will travel to the Asia Society Center in Hong Kong followed by a venue in Singapore, details of which are yet to be confirmed. All the works in this exhibition have been acquired by the Museum for its permanent collection. The exhibition’s title is drawn from the opening line of the William Butler Yeat’s (one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature) poem “Sailing to Byzantium” (1928) that is referenced in the title of American novelist, Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel No Country for Old Men. The use of this title brings forth the concept of a culture without borders. The concept has been emulated on the exhibition webpage, which hosts a series of essays on the different facets of art creation from South and South East Asia. June Yap, Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator, South and Southeast Asia, introduces the project in this video. We are thankful to the Guggenheim Museum for sharing this content on our blog.

Here is an article by Mumbai based cultural theorist and curator, Nancy Adajania, discussing two Indian institutions who have largely facilitated the creation of cultural knowledge in post-colonial India, Gallery Chemould in Bombay (now Mumbai) and the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi. In the coming weeks, we will be re-posting more essays from this series, and also a review. Stay tuned.

Beyond the Commodity Fetish: Art and the Public Sphere in India

by Nancy Adajania

Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Müller with Cybermohalla Ensemble, Bureau of Contemporary Jobs in the Cybermohalla Hub at Sarai Reader 09: The Exhibition, Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon, 2012–2013. Photo: Shamsher Ali . Image credit: Guggenheim Museum

Rather than conduct a general survey of contemporary Indian art, I would like to draw attention to two major and formative histories of artistic production and the creation of an infrastructure of cultural knowledge in postcolonial India. These histories, which have not so far received the appropriate degree of critical attention in the Indian art world, were brought dramatically to light by two recent events: first, the death of Kekoo Gandhy, founder of Gallery Chemould, Bombay, one of India’s earliest commercial art galleries; and second, by the fiftieth-anniversary celebrations of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi, a transdisciplinary research institute devoted to the social sciences and humanities.

The Progressive Artists Group surrounded by supporters at the Bombay Art Society Salon. Photo: Courtesy Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai. Image credit: Guggenheim Museum

Why link two institutions—Chemould and CSDS—that, at first glance, appear to have little in common? Both were founded in 1963 and embodied the impulses of a late Nehruvian modernity, with its simultaneous emphasis on a self-critical national renaissance and an internationalist expansion of horizons. Both institutions have made important contributions to the production and sustenance of a lively public sphere, building coherent communities around themselves: while Chemould was active in mobilizing both the art world and civil society, CSDS has worked in a hybrid space between scholarship and activism.

Khorshed, Shireen and Kekoo Gandhy outside Gallery Chemould, Mumbai. Photo: Courtesy Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai. Image credit: Guggenheim Museum

Kekoo Gandhy (1920–2012) was a visionary and cultural catalyst who shaped the contours of Indian modernism by generating cultural infrastructure. His tenacious lobbying for private and state patronage resulted in the foundation of the Jehangir Art Gallery and the Bombay branch of the National Gallery of Modern Art. A cultural entrepreneur of great foresight, Gandhy first brought visibility to the works of modernists such as K. K. Hebbar, S. H. Raza, K. H. Ara, and M. F. Husain, exhibiting them at his framing shop, Chemould Frames, in the 1940s and ’50s. From the early ’60s onward, Gallery Chemould, which he cofounded with his wife Khorshed, was housed on the first floor of the Jehangir Art Gallery, Bombay’s first public gallery. Chemould’s small space, which hosted exhibitions of work by significant artists including Tyeb Mehta, Bhupen Khakhar, Nalini Malani, Vivan Sundaram, Atul and Anju Dodiya, and Jitish and Reena Saini Kallat, greeted the visitor with a table for conversation before curving away toward a wall of paintings. At this table, Gandhy shared his dreams of political and cultural freedom with artists, cultural producers, lawyers, and activists.

Gallery Chemould does not fit into a classical gallery ecology because Gandhy did not see the production of art as separate from larger political and cultural questions. During the Emergency (1975–77), when an authoritarian regime muzzled dissent and imprisoned those in opposition, the Gandhys sheltered activists in their home. During the 1992–93 riots in Bombay, when Hindu majoritarian militants targeted the city’s Muslim community, Gandhy contributed actively to the mohalla committees—neighborhood groups that promoted interreligious amity. Whether by presenting subaltern artists for the first time at his gallery (Warli artist Jivya Soma Mashe’s exhibition in 1975, for example) or by helping secure the secular ideals of the republic, Gandhy devoted his life to the pursuit of equity and justice.

Both Gandhy and CSDS (which was founded by political scientist Rajni Kothari and funded mainly by the Indian Council of Social Science Research) believed in sustaining and strengthening Indian democracy—still a work in progress. Early on, academics at CSDS polemicized Western theoretical models of modernity, instead advocating the approach of multiple modernities. After the Emergency, Lokayan, which was linked to CSDS, propagated non-party politics and worked with social movements at a grassroots level, nurturing civil-society activists such as the environmentalists Vandana Shiva and Medha Patkar, who would go on to develop and articulate alternative, sustainable models of development.

Sarai Reader 09, curated by the Raqs Media Collective, Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon, 2012–2013. Photo: Shveta Sarda. Image credit: Guggenheim Museum

Academic research conducted at CSDS resonates in public life, particularly in debates conducted around policymaking and the transformation of the media. In 2000, CSDS’s Ravi Sundaram and Ravi Vasudevan launched the new media initiative Sarai, working in collaboration with Raqs Media Collective (artists Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta), to analyze critically the impact of emergent, informal, and independent media in the public domain. Sarai, true to its name, which is taken from a word for public resting place, has become a refuge and transit point for architects, filmmakers, writers, and artists, and has avoided a narrow academicization of knowledge by adopting multiple methodologies. As a Sarai-CSDS fellow myself in the early 2000s, I found the space to generate alternative contexts for new media art and to test out what Okwui Enwezor has called the “will to globality” expressed by subaltern media practitioners in a post-national context—one in which the old certitudes of nationalism have failed, but have yet to be replaced by new interpretative frameworks.

Sarai, along with the NGO Ankur, gave birth to the Cybermohalla project, which works in the interstices between legal and illegal domains, old and new media, creative pedagogy and art, in Delhi’s working-class neighborhoods. Participants in the Cybermohalla project are today published writers and established media practitioners in their own right. In an art world that tends to fetishize creative output as commodity rather than nurture it as conversation, Kekoo Gandhy and Sarai-CSDS (more informally in the former case and more programmatically in the latter) have attempted to produce new socialities in which the Gandhian, the Nehruvian, and the Marxist, the academy-trained artist and his or her subaltern rural/urban counterpart have generated a discourse through the alternately tight and loose weave of consensus and dissensus. Especially over the past decade, when all value seems to have been dictated by the market, it is important to flag alternative frameworks and platforms that have sustained significant forms of artistic articulation and critical inquiry in the Indian art world.

Nancy Adajania is a Bombay-based cultural theorist and independent curator. She was artistic codirector of the 2012 Gwangju Biennale.

An interview with Adeela Suleman

October 28, 2012•Art

Josheen Oberoi of Saffronart speaks with Adeela Suleman about the trajectory of her art practice

New York: On November 7-8 next week, Saffronart will have it’s inaugural sale of Art of Pakistan. This is a curated selection of modern and contemporary art by established and emerging artists.

An important contemporary artist featured in this auction (including two of her works) is Adeela Suleman. She was born in Karachi, Pakistan and studied Sculpture at the Indus Valley School of Art (1999). Prior to that she completed a Master’s degree in International Relations from The University of Karachi (1995). Suleman has participated in group and solo exhibitions worldwide, including at Gallery Rohtas 2, Lahore, in 2008; Canvas Gallery, Karachi, in 2008; Aicon Gallery, New York, in 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011; International Exhibition of Contemporary Art, Bologna, in 2008; and Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan at the Asia Society Museum, New York, in 2009-10.

Adeela Suleman
Untitled, 2008
Powder coated and enamel painted steel cooking utensil, steel spoon and cycle ornament, with foam and cloth
Image courtesy: Saffronart 24 Hour Auction: Art of Pakistan (Nov 07-08, 2012)
For more details: http://www.saffronart.com/auctions/PreCatalog.aspx?eid=3487

Her body of work has consistently reflected a deep engagement with political, gender and societal concerns, an interest that was manifest in her years at the university as well. She has previously worked with found domestic objects made of metal, creating sculptures and body amours for women that beautify as much as cage the female figure (like in the work on the left) while her recent body of work sees a move towards a flatter silhouette in her sculptural work.

I had the pleasure of speaking to Adeela in 2010 during her solo show in New York at Aicon Gallery. Here I share with you my conversation with her about her work and the direction her art has taken.

Q: Your oeuvre has always had an underlying stream of social and political consciousness in it. Is that a deliberate choice on your part?

Adeela: I did my Masters in International Relations at the University of Karachi before my BFA and my experience at the university has been an influence in my work. The university was very politically charged and there was a great awareness and involvement amongst the student body. Even at that point, my college projects commented on such issues.

Q: Would you see yourself as an activist as well as an artist?

Adeela: I am not an activist. I am observing and acknowledging because one is aware of the surroundings, we don’t live in a bubble. I am not making a judgment on what should happen or not.

Q: There does appear to be a shift in the language you are using – from the steel utensils’ sculptures in the past few years to the works in your recent exhibition at Aicon Gallery in 2010, which have less volume. Could you talk about that?

Adeela:It has been a natural evolution for me. My college projects used to be about found objects, where I once made a tea fountain in a shrine. I then worked with motorcycles. The presence of utensils in my work came from using gadgets that made the life of women easier. So, I was making these objects my own. Now, I am using the skin of these objects to make the artwork. There is a loss of humor compared to earlier works because I am talking more of death in this suite of works.

Q: Is that also from a growing concern with the political situation in Pakistan and elsewhere in the world, the growing hostilities?

Adeela:Yes, you think about how we carry on with our daily activities when there is so much destruction around because it does not directly affect us. But there is always a tension between life and death, between what to do and not to do. The only thing certain seems to be death.

Q: Could you talk about the process in your recent suite of works After All its Always Somebody Else…?

Adeela:I wanted to use steel sheets like that used in mortuaries. Abdul Sattar Edhi, a great philanthropist started an ambulance network, where he would pick up unclaimed dead bodies, give them a bath and give them a dignified burial. This was on my mind when I started this suite of work. I do small drawings, put them on a computer and look for images I want to use, which are like found objects for me. Once I assemble the complete image, it is transferred to a larger scale and steel sheets are hammered to create them in three dimensions. I work with the craft people, because I am essentially a sculptor and see objects in three dimensions.

You can see more of Adeela’s works from this auction here and learn more about her practice here and here. You can also read a New York Times review of her work here.

More to it than meets the eye?

July 3, 2012•Art

Sabah Mathur of Saffronart on Hayward Gallery’s new exhibition ‘Invisible: Art about the Unseen 1957-2012’

Gianni Motti, Magic Ink, 1989
Image credit: http://www.theweek.co.uk/art/47390/haywards-invisible-art-show-offers-more-meets-eye

London: The latest show at the Hayward Gallery about the art of the unseen makes for a fascinating visit. Although there is not much to look at, there is a lot to appreciate. Including works by Andy Warhol, Yves Klein, Yoko Ono, Maurizio Cattelan, and Robert Barry, this exhibition explores ideas related to the invisible and the hidden.

Invisible art seems to be a type of conversation between artist and audience. As we enter the almost empty rooms with blank canvases, unoccupied plinths, and nearly invisible labels, it seems at first that we are being sold the emperor’s new clothes, but we quickly find that in presenting things that cannot be seen, artists are ultimately asking us to re-imagine how we engage with art.

According to the curator, Ralph Rugoff, it is possible that the history of what may be called ‘invisible art’ began on May 14, 1957. On that date Yves Klein opened an exhibition in Paris that included a seemingly empty room. The artist argued that the white walls of that space were infused with the artist’s sensibility and nothing else. In the following year, Klein took this a step further and developed the immaterial room into an entire exhibition at Iris Clert’s Paris gallery. We get a glimpse of this through a vivid archival film of the artist striding about his empty gallery contemplating the bare (but curiously glowing) walls as if there really was something to see. This landmark work arguably kicked of a low profile tradition of invisible art that has spanned seven decades.

Since 1957, artists have been drawn by various motives to make work that engages with the invisible and this exhibition brings together the key moments in this history revealing that there is no apparent limit to the possible meanings of invisibility in art. Therefore, the fact that the whole exhibition is centred on the invisible does not mean it is repetitive. Among the surprises of the exhibition is the realisation that artists have used invisibility in so many different ways, says Richard Dorment of the Telegraph.

Klein himself went on to explore the unseen in numerous ways. He envisioned a new society in a non-material world. This led to the ritual sale of ‘zones of immaterial pictorial sensibility’ in 1959. He began to issue certificates for these zones in exchange for pure gold. Several sale ceremonies were conducted in Paris on the banks of the river Seine, and if, in the spirit of immateriality the purchasers agreed to burn their receipts, Klein would throw the gold (or at least most of it) into the Seine. The exhibition shows photographs recording one such transaction with Hollywood screenwriter Michael Blankfort.

The invisible can be engaging with works such as Yoko Ono’s ‘instruction paintings’ which consist of written statements asking readers to visualise in their own minds the actions, images and scenarios suggested by the text. Visitor participation peaks with Jeppe Heine’s Invisible Labyrinth, which has to be navigated equipped with digital headphones which vibrate (activated by infrared rays) every time we bump into one of the maze’s virtual walls.

The invisible can also suggest a mischievous attitude with works that make us laugh such as Maurizio Cattelan’s Untitled (Denunzia) which is a standard police report that officially documents the artist’s claim that an invisible artwork had been stolen from his car the night before he was to exhibit it at a group show in Milan. He exhibited this solemn police report instead. There is also Untitled (A Curse) by Tom Friedman who hired a practicing witch to curse the space above the plinth.

One of the rooms is devoted to all-white canvases including Bruno Jakob’s works which are a challenge to cynics, as they are made with not much more than canvas or paper exposed to the elements and creatures such as garden snails. Although at first these works appear to be blank, they evoke a range of images often suggested by their titles such as The Visitors where Jakob has exposed the paper to snails. The room also includes Magic Ink by Gianni Motti which consists of drawings sketched in invisible ink.

Another interesting but rather spooky work is The Ghost of James Lee Byars which is essentially an empty and dark room enclosed by thick velvet curtains. The artist spent most of his life contemplating death, and his own death was the subject of many of his works. Teresa Margolle’s work, which also deals with death, also provokes uneasiness. Upon entering her installation Aire/Air, we find an empty room with two working air-conditioning units. The slightly humid air is cooled by water from public mortuaries in Mexico City that was used to wash the bodies of murder victims before autopsy.

Also included is Warhol’s empty plinth, on which he had once stood to leave behind the ‘aura of his celebrity’. Other interesting exhibits include photographs of Song Dong’s secret diary written with water on stone, and Claes Oldenburg’s proposal for a memorial to John F. Kennedy in the form of a gigantic statue of the assassinated president buried upside-down in the ground, only to be viewed through a small hole while lying on the ground. Conventional memorials are designed to comfort future generations into thinking that the heroic figure somehow lives on. Oldenburg suggests that we should instead know what it is like to have had something extraordinary, and then have it taken away.

Pakistani-born artist Ceal Floyer shows her work, Plumb Line, which acts as a pointer to the unseen. It marks the dead centre of the entire space of the Hayward Gallery, including its depths, such as its basement storage area, plant room, library and offices, which are hidden from the exhibition visitors.

This novel show demands our attention and gives us a lot to think about. As the curator points out, the idea is based on the thinking of Marcel Duchamp who took exception to what he called ‘retinal art’ or art aimed at the eye. His 50 cubic centimetres of Paris air bottled in a glass ampoule is arguably more interesting to think about than to look at. Duchamp’s most profound impact on the future of invisible art was his notion that an artwork is only ever fully realised in the mind of its audience.

Although the conception of this exhibition proved to be interesting, I am not sure how long works with almost no visual interest can capture our imagination and keep us amused. This modern experimentation may have a prankish flavour, yet it is engaging and profound. As Jackie Wullschlager of the Financial Times has said, “Rugoff is an inventive curator and has curated the show as primarily a participatory performance piece, dependent on physical encounters with spaces that by turns inspire dread, confusion, laughter, annoyance.”