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Where’s the art?

The last thing a museum should do is keep information from its visitors. The checklist provided here will help to identify works in the exhibition. You are encouraged to explore on your own but if you can’t find particular works, a Gallery Attendant will be pleased to assist you.

Any exhibition of what we are calling “ambient art” must necessarily distort the work, by calling attention to it. Our only curatorial excuse is that museums de-contextualize (or, at the very least, re-contextualize) all works of art, thus changing them in subtle and obvious ways. The hope is to add more in the new context than is taken away.

This is art that is meant by its makers to be discovered gradually—even to be passed over by a certain proportion of its potential audience. It can hardly, therefore, be labeled or pointed at with signs without distorting its meaning. Nor, for the same reasons, would it be true to either the artists’ intentions or the viewer’s authentic experience to distribute a map of works in the galleries.

My hope, moreover, is that part of the experience of this exhibition will be a heightened understanding and awareness of the environment in which it is presented. The new CAC building has been filled with worthy and and exciting art since its opening a little more than a year ago, but it has nevertheless been filled. At the same time, one of the key elements of “ambient art” is its seamless integrity with the ambience. So, enjoy the building as it was designed, without specially constructed exhibition walls and signage, and enjoy the surprises that await you.

* * *

Consider nothing.

It is an idea that has fascinated thinkers for centuries. Plato and Socrates imagine the world as a cave where we trust more in shadows cast on the wall than in reality; the Zen master Hakuin contemplates the sound of one hand clapping. Perceptual psychologists subdivide space—itself a concept opposed to objects—into the positive and the negative. Astronomers posit black holes, absorbing everything around them, yet imperceptible.

But are these really examples of nothing? We may not be able to prove or disprove the existence of black holes, but it they are out there, they’re not “nothing.” A shadow may be in some ways inferior to its referent, but it is a phenomenon of light that can be described and studied. Even the idea of a single clapping hand is a spiritual teaching tool.

As Francis McKee writes in Nothing, a marvelous book of essays and art on the topic:

Nothing is impossible. Or, put another way, “nothing” is a concept so fraught with paradox and contradictions that is defeats definition. The flipside of nothing is something and each attempt to consider the idea of nothing reveals another “thing” or entity—no matter how mundane, microscopic or previously imperceptible.¹

Or, as the philosopher Henri Bergson put it in his 1911 book Creative Evolution, “To represent ‘Nothing,’ we must either imagine it or conceive it.”² And once conceived, it is no longer nothing.

For many people, works of art are synonymous with rare and precious objects. But for most artists, the object has never been the point. The distinction between “craft” and “art” is a modern one, but artists though history have recognized that there is an ineffable element of the best art that doesn’t have to do with technical matters of coating, carving and constructing things.

Kazimir Malevich declared in 1915 the “the artist has liberated himself from all ideas, images, notions, all objects arising from them and the entire structure of didactic life.” Malevich, and works like his White on White, 1918, pushed the limit, but the notion that the object embodies something supremely significant, and at the same time indefinable, has its roots in the philosophy of art through the ages. The Greeks’ idea of “catharsis”… the religious enlightenment that Renaissance or Zen art was meant to provoke… what John Dewey called “aesthetic experience” and Walter Benjamin called “aura”… all of these concepts have less to do with the physical work of art itself the with its nonmaterial essence.

In the mid-twentieth century, art began to consider that essence as its subject. John Cage’s soundless musical composition 4’33″, 1952, and Robert Rauschenberg’s self-descriptive Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953, both deal directly with what we might call the “substance of absence.” (They lead, however, to different conclusions: Cage revels in the music of the world filling a space that some would call “silent”; Rauschenberg at once negates the handwork and reifies “hand”—the spirit—of a master.)

In 1958 Yves Klein presented his famous Le Vide (“The Void”), a gallery containing only the artist’s idea, which he opened with great fanfare at a large reception. It was, he said, a work about the essence of art:

The object of this endeavor: to create, establish, and present to the public a palpable pictorial state in the limits of a picture gallery. In other words, the creation of an ambience, a genuine pictorial climate, and, therefore, an invisible one. This invisible pictorial state within the gallery space should be so present and endowed with autonomous life that it should literally be what has hitherto been regarded as the best overall definition of painting: “radiance.”³

The art of the 1960s and ‘70s is suffused with disdain for—or, at least, doubt concerning—the object. Indeed, one of the most important critical texts of the era is Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, 1966 to 1972.⁴ Conceptual Art and the Fluxus “movement” produced some of the most obvious examples of the inclination to devalue art objects in favor of art ideas.

Minimalism, too, struggles with the idea of Meaning as a topic of art but attacks the issue from a completely different direction. The curator Ann Goldstein, who organized one of several recent exhibitions of minimal art, describes the early ‘60s as a time when “art’s associative or symbolic function was being renegotiated in favor of its conception as a self-referential object situated in physical and temporal space that engages a self-reflexive spectator.”⁵ In other words, the artists who adopted the minimalist vocabulary sought to drain their work of any reference outside itself—a process that at the same time filled it up with its own self-evident significance.

These two impulses—the one to distillation, the other to concretization—are not so far off, and they continue to occupy artists today, as the works selected for Nothing Compared to This demonstrate.

* * *

Ours is an era in which big and loud are among our highest values, a time when the quiet joys of contemplation routinely yield to the excitements of intensity. Art of powerful scale, sound and motion competes well in such a cultural marketplace.

Many artists today, however, are working against the widespread idea that works of art must insist upon our attention, must command the space they occupy. For some, such a way of working is a kind of new humility, perhaps born of renewed interest in ancient traditions of reflection and meditation. Among others it is a tactic of infiltration—an insinuation rather than an insistence, a subliminal communication in place of a shouted one.

This exhibition looks at the works of twenty-two artists artists who occupy and control space by subtle, often indirect means. Like the language of the poet, distilled to its essence, it is art that means to create the irreducible gesture. This art’s most salient distinction, however, is that it is often not meant to be contemplated, or even directly looked at. Call it “ambient art.” Ambient art is peripheral. It infuses space as much as it occupies it.

What does it mean to make work that may never be seen, in a society where the brand is everything? The question could as easily be turned on its head: what does it mean that our society has, in its inexorable way, turned everything, including people, including art, into little more than a brand? No wonder, then, that a quest for meaning and significance would lead some artists to try flying under the radar.

“If art is to be transforming, it has to catch you off guard,” Francis Cape, one of the exhibition’s artists, said in an interview.⁶ There is an air of authenticity about works that don’t try too hard. Vincent Mazeau likens some of his work to “a genre scene—everyone already knows the image.” But there is an element of camouflage, as well, in ambient art—a scent of sabotage in a fearful time—and Mazeau’s “EXIT” sign, altered to read “EVIL,” is an example.

In a sense, most active artists live a life infused with ambient art. To visit virtually any studio is to experience a sort of three-dimensional sketchbook of ideas and instincts, a shifting installation that conflates thought and environment. When the personal impulse becomes a public expression it is traditionally a discrete object, but some artists today find it productive to blur the boundary between internal and external. Kara Hamilton makes some of the most self-effacing works included here. Interviewed for the Contemporary Art Center’s newsletter, she felt the quotation attributed to her was “a fuzzy account of what I said” and proposed to erase parts of the text. The resulting erasure (page four of the newsletter) was an unattributed, multiple work, edition 50,000-plus, distributed to the museum’s mailing list and on Cincinnati newsstands as a supplement to the local alternative newspaper.

Not all the artists in this exhibition would recognize music as a source for their work. Nevertheless, the development of Ambient Music as a method, if not a movement, in the twenty-six years since Brian Eno introduced the concept with his Music for Airports has had a profound cultural impact. Eno has developed a significant body of serious background music; he was the first to identify the artistic possibilities of music “that could be listened to yet could be ignored.”

Certainly, that comes close to describing in musical terms the sculptural works by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Rirkrit Tiravanija included in the exhibition. Gonzalez-Foerster rearranged a small library to create a geological-looking “vein” of blue book spines; Tiravanija responded some time later by creating what can only be called a small minimalist sculpture—a stack of red books—in front of the Blue Vein. In the private home that is their original setting, the works likely would not be seen by a casual visitor unless pointed out. But once noticed, they are a visual “call and response” full of humor and substance.

This exhibition could not begin to include all the artists who are investigating ambient possibilities today. Even to attempt a definitive survey of the work of those who employ, say, sound or light—two of the most fruitful techniques for the purpose—would be next to impossible (and would surely take more space than is available at any one museum.)

Nothing Compared to This (ambient, incidental and new minimal tendencies in recent art) is, instead, a survey of working methods and ideas on the topic: sculptural, painterly, performative; formalist, narrative, fantastic; personal, social, political.

* * *

Museums are frustrating places for artists.

In one sense the museum is the ultimate presentation venue—a hospitable environment that carefully displays and preserves art, where people come to look in a focused way. A museum exhibition announces the respect of experts, and it shares with the world the artist’s most intense and personal ideas and feelings.

But the museum is also unavoidably an artificial setting, intentionally set apart from the day-to-day world within which the work of art was conceived and must ultimately have its effect. Museum audiences demand “interpretation” of works that have intrinsic meaning, apart from anything that might be said about them. Museum curators, in the very act of selecting one work over another, remove it from its context and subtly change it, as surely as the scientist changes an organism by taking it into a laboratory.

The museum has not always existed, nor have artists always succumbed to its sway. At least since Marcel Duchamp, who subverted the privileged object of art by elevating the everyday, there have been artists who preferred the humble to the extravagant, who valued thought over technique. This Guide to the exhibition, of necessity, suggests possible routes of investigation and interpretation. If the exhibition is successful, however, it will prove this text to be superfluous, if not antithetical, to the works of art themselves.

Ambient art proposes an “art world” indistinguishable from the real one we negotiate daily. It envisions a day-to-day world to which nothing compares.

* * *

Ricci Albenda
Born Brooklyn, New York, 1966; lives in New York

Ricci Albenda creates sensuous sculptural forms, subtly “scooped out” of the gallery wall. The artist sees these works as “portals to another dimension,” but “dimension” is a word of multiple meanings. In fact, Albenda’s spatial manipulations suggest a search for both a new geometry—another kind of physical space—as well as an alternate reality.

We experience a work by Ricci Albenda completely differently from the way we engage most sculpture. From one vantage point, the larger Denise collapses into the concentrated energy of Roseanne; in a different light, both works nearly disappear, or the bud-like Roesanne may appear to bloom into its nearly six-foot sister. (The works are named for women in the artist’s life, but he says that the primary function of the names is to catalogue them).

The space that we viewers occupy is actually an undifferentiated part of the sculpture. We become enveloped by the work of art, perhaps completely unaware that we are, literally, contained by it.

Francis Cape
Born Lisbon, Portugal, 1952; lives in New York

What is the difference between a carpenter and a sculptor? Francis Cape has built a meticulously crafted wood-panel wall, not as a decorative surface but as a discrete object. In one sense such works are, he agrees, “absolutely” like abstract paintings—color field surfaces arranged according to classic formal principles. But they are also, of course, tributes to work and workers. Trained both in art schools and as a journeyman woodworker, Cape brings the two traditions together, propping intellectual speculation against muscular experience.

As with many of his works, Cape designed this wall specifically for the Contemporary Arts Center, and it is his first foray into a rigidly Modern vocabulary. Its proportions, its seams and joints, might be mistaken to be required by the constraints of construction; they are, in fact, artistic responses to the building’s architecture. Thus, Cape’s wall is a reminder that everything we make, all that we do, is a choice.

Recently the artist has begun to consider both sides of the wall, inventing a kind of unspecific narrative for the “behind” half of the work.

Maurizio Cattelan
Born Padua, Italy, 1960; lives in Milan

Realism in art takes a beating regularly, but no artist is a more joyful bully than Maurizio Cattelan. In a work done for the 1997 Venice Biennale he mounted hundreds of stuffed pigeons in the galleries, high above the heads of visitors and the valuable and fragile works of other artists. Faux pigeon splatterings on the floors and walls—a reference to Abstract Expressionism, perhaps—completed the effect.

In the lingo of the art world, works of art that are loaned by their owners to exhibitions outside their home city are said to “travel.” It is a particularly apt word in the case of Cattelan’s bird-sculptures, which he calls Turisti (“tourists”). Thirty-three have traveled to Cincinnati.

The silliness of their presence in a museum is part of the point, but they also bring attention to the absurdity of creating such artificial and hermetic environments as museums to hold living works of art. Isolated in the gallery from the messy outside world, we are the objects of these tourists’ observation.

Martin Creed
Born Wakefield, England, 1968; lives in Alicudi, Italy

At Tate Britain in 2001, as a finalist for the prestigious Turner Prize, Martin Creed had the audacity to present Work No. 227: The Lights Going On and Off, for which No. 160 is an earlier precedent. As with all his art of the past fifteen-plus years, the titles are exact descriptions of the form of the works.

To the consternation of the British tabloid press, the artist won the prize, and with it the obligation to explain himself. With a mixture of candor and gall, Creed told the BBC, “I was trying to make something that would make use of the whole space and in another way I couldn’t decide what to do.”

But then, striking a romantic note that might be equally appropriate to the art of J.M.W. Turner himself, he added, “I couldn’t find a material I wanted to make something out of. Because I want my work to have the whole world in it and to mean everything to everyone and that’s an impossible dream.”

Humor is a central element of Creed’s work, which can focus our attention on our surroundings via the most minimal of means. Work No. 115, 1995, is an example: it is subtitled A Doorstop Fixed to a Floor to Let a Door Open Only 45 Degree.

Brian Eno
Born Woodbridge, England, 1948; lives in London

Though Brian Eno developed his idea of “ambient music” nearly 30 years ago, his influence on the world of music continues to be profound. The concept of art that is fully present, yet not insistent, has found currency in the visual arts as well. Though there have been many excellent ambient music projects since Music for Airports, none is a more appropriate theme for this exhibition, and so it introduces the show in Dr. Stanley and Mickey Kaplan Hall.

Eno has called his ambient work “music for drifting off somewhere,” but by that he does not mean that it doesn’t involve the person who experiences it. In fact, he says, “Ambient is closer to heavy metal than anything else. Because it’s to do with immersion and so is heavy metal.” The analogy in the visual arts might be to architecture, which can have a profound effect on our emotions, our interactions with others, even our way of living, without our full realization.

Spencer Finch
Born New Haven, Connecticut, 1962; lives in Brooklyn

Memory and mood are connected not only to time and the events that pass through it, such as might be recalled in a narrative. Elements of remembered experience that can be more intense, but that are not often recorded, are carried upon the air—sound, smells, and feel, for example. Or, as Spencer Finch shows us, color.

With the aid of fluorescent lamps laid on the gallery floor, Finch creates an intimate landscape: a moment on a winter afternoon, standing in the shade of Monet’s famous house in Giverny. Monet, of course, was the kind of painter who would have exulted even to suggest the light quality at that instant. Finch uses light itself, metering and recording its intensity and color temperature outdoors in France, then reproducing it with carefully calibrated filters in a museum gallery in Cincinnati. He does not show us a place, as a photographer might do; he brings it to us, and puts us into it.

Tom Friedman
Born: St. Louis, Missouri, 1965; lives in Northampton, MA

One of Tom Friedman’s best-known works of art is a meticulously crafted sculpture, at 1:1 scale, of a housefly. Nothing Compared to This is the first public exhibition to present the self-deprecating sequel to that 1995 work, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

To test the boundaries of realism, as Maurizio Cattelan, Anya Gallaccio, Kaz Oshiro and others also do in this exhibition, is a tradition of modernism going back at least to Manet. What is worthy of our notice? Why are certain subjects thought to be heroic and others vulgar?

Friedman’s sculpture also lampoons contemporary art that relies on spectacle for its effect on an audience. Into a work that occupies less than half a cubic inch, the artist concentrates all the attention a viewer might bring to a work filling the grandest room.

Anya Gallaccio
Born Paisley, Scotland, 1963; lives in London

Anya Gallaccio often makes works of fragile organic materials—flowers, plants, fruits—that wither and rot in the gallery, creating unabashedly romantic, modern-day memento mori. These may be contrasted with more permanent forms, as when she hung apples from the branches of a cast bronze tree, allowing them to decay, leaving puddles of their browning juices on the floor of a British museum.

One large assemblage of cut flowers, pressed behind glass where viewer could see them fade and molder, was ironically titled Preserve Beauty. Believe Me embodies the pathos of such work but offers some relief: its bronze stems and glass berries are among the most permanent of materials. Cast from an actual bittersweet branch, however, it is no more than a lifeless remembrance of the original.

Renaissance artists sometimes included, tucked into an inconspicuous corner of their paintings, a skull or other symbolic reminder of the transience of human existence. Gallaccio takes that tradition a step further, off the canvas and into the space of the audience, creating a relationship between her modest observation and all that is contained or transpires in the room.

Gaylen Gerber
Born McAllen, Texas; lives in Chicago

Gaylen Gerber has created a site-specific painting on canvas, sized to entirely fill the wall it occupies. Though under-painted gray, as all such works that he has made have been, he has encouraged the CAC to re-paint the surface to match the other walls in the exhibition. Indeed, he even proposed to have a work by another artist hung on top of his, loaning it from his own collection.

“I’m interested,” the artist writes, “in the normative aspects of visual language (hence my use of gray): the way that we, as part of a shared culture, take certain forms, colors, etc. for granted as institutional or as neutral common ground.”

“As it blends with the architecture, my painting becomes almost invisible, just as the norms of our culture do.”

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
Born Strasbourg, France, 1965; lives in Paris

As a guest at the home of a private collector, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster took the opportunity to rearrange part of the collector’s art library, grouping all the books with blue spines into a “vein” of color, running through the bookcase. The metaphor of a library as embedded with something valuable, available to be mined, falls back upon itself: though distinctive in its form, the vein would assay as no richer in content.

When the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija saw The Blue Vein at the collector’s home, he responded by building a faux-minimalist stack of the red-spined books on the shelves, which he playfully called The Red Threat. Together, these works usurp the tyranny of the catalogue, creating new relationships between ideas that are no more or less valid than an alphabetical sequence, and less intellectually constraining than a purported “subject” arrangement.

Typically, the arrangement of books in a library would not be thought of as a sculptural action; on the surface, no gesture could seem more casual than a stack of unshelved books in front of a bookcase. Yet how we store the objects in our lives is a deliberate act, even if not a fully conscious one. By calling attention to the creative possibilities of such a humble task, Gonzalez-Foerster strikes notes discernable in all her work: a joy in blurring perceived boundaries between art and life, an uncomplicated pleasure in the everyday. Tiravanija, too, celebrates the ordinary in his own work, and here creates an artistic pendant in support of her simple gesture.

Kara Hamilton
Born Toronto, Canada, 1967; lives in Brooklyn

Kara Hamilton’s rub-on “tattoos” re-interpret the gallery wall as a skin—an exterior surface of the mystery behind it, rather than a containing envelope for art and viewer. The image, a shadow of a maple leaf, is fixed but apparently fleeting: a natural mirage in an urban territory, a glimpsed memory of her Toronto upbringing.

The artist has also created a pin for this exhibition that is displayed in the museum store. Hamilton has a particular fascination with our idea of what is “precious,” and how that value is determined. She crafts conceptually rich jewelry, much of which has found its way to tony New York accessories showcases and the pages of fashion magazines: damaged rings and pins, cast and finished in precious metals; tangled, twisted and knotted gold-chain necklaces; stud earrings set with raw, uncut diamonds; carefully hand-polished commercial findings—the “backs” of most jewelry—appreciated for their naked simplicity.

And what is the value of a fallen star?

Vincent Mazeau
Born Babylon, New York, 1965; lives in New York

Doors mark the boundary between here (the place “we” occupy) and there (where “they” are). Vincent Mazeau creates a profound shift in our psychological perception of space merely by shuffling two letters of the alphabet, replacing the ubiquitous, generic public EXIT sign with one that reads EVIL.

Though this work was conceived prior to September 11, 2001, the New York artist has found deeper meaning in his EVIL/EXIT sign in the months since. “These days,” he writes, “we are ever slightly on guard, as we walk from place to place, in and out of various public spaces. As we come and go, through the many passageways, we are aware of the subtle shifts in our sense of security…”

Kaz Oshiro
Born Okinawa, Japan, 1967; lives in Los Angeles

Lavishing extraordinary attention on the image of a chain-restaurant trash bin, Kaz Oshiro carries the trompe l’oeil painting tradition into the sculptural realm.

Oshiro’s paintings on canvas are assembled into structures that heighten their realism, but this is a verisimilitude of a surprising sort: they are not depictions either of the natural world or of objects made from natural materials. Rather, they are images of manufactured images—painted versions of ordinarily photo-produced wood grain contact paper or plastic laminates. They are pictures held together with grime and duct tape, constructed into the homely tools of modern living.

Jorge Pardo
Born Havana, Cuba, 1963; lives in Los Angeles

Jorge Pardo makes works that occupy an indeterminate place between sculpture and décor, between art intended for study and contemplation and the modernist ideal of furnishings that provide an open framework for living. Like many Pardo works, Vince Robbins is also an idiosyncratic sort of portrait, in this case of a former assistant. It is an uncharacteristically flamboyant work, casting strong colored patterns on the walls of the room where it is shown. But it is completely consistent with all his work in that it employs purposely limited means to claim its entire environment.

In 1998 Pardo completed one of his best known works, his own Los Angeles home, which he has described as “a sculpture that is also a house.” He told Art in America magazine, “A museum might have more difficulty with a house being presented as a work of art than the people who are actually seeing it. Museums sometimes don’t appreciate that ordinary people are perfectly ready to understand just about anything as art. That’s something I always rely on, as much with this house as anything else I’ve done.”

Todd Pavlisko
Born 1974, New York; lives in Chicago

Fountain, 2003, is a typical, stainless steel water cooler such as might be found in an office or the corridors of a museum. Try to use it, however, and this drinking fountain delivers red wine. The allusion to Duchamp’s famous readymade also titled Fountain is clear, as is the reference to the biblical miracle of water turned into wine.

When presented for the first time at Cincinnati’s Linda Schwartz Gallery, the sculpture occupied a prime space on the gallery wall. Yet visitors—even those who knew the gallery well—routinely ignored it unless they were thirsty. Such is the strength of our habits of observation.

Here, the work is presented in a more naturalistic setting, in part to heighten its effect as an argument for art as transubstantiation.

Karin Sander
Born Bensberg, Germany, 1957; lives in Berlin

Karin Sander has constructed three new works for this exhibition, all of them perfectly available to observation, all of them easy to miss. 0:15, 8:32, 18:28, 28:08, 36:57, 47:04 is a sound work, its title the key to intervals during each hour when it is heard in the galleries. The incongruous sound of a splash, lasting no more than a second or so, brings a startling recollection of nature—”landscapes” of a sort—into the ostensibly neutral space of the museum.

Also included is one of a series of “wallpieces” the artist has produced since 1986. As she has pointed out, “the picture is created not by applying material but by removing it.” Many hours of sanding a patch on a wall’s surface bring it to a high polish—producing a work simultaneously apart from its support and its ambience and a part of it. The reflective glaze is at one time an impenetrable plane and a deep illusion.

Hanging on the Sixth Street façade of the CAC is a “patina painting” created by the chance coloration imparted by weather and the urban air. The work announces the exhibition perfectly: it is a self-portrait of the city, presented as no more or less valid a record than the concrete wall upon which it hangs, yet more significant for the consciousness it represents.

Tavares Strachan
Born Nassau, Bahamas, 1979; lives in Nassau and New Haven, Connecticut

A Bahamian artist, transplanted to Rhode Island, shares his longing for the very different islands left behind through works made of light and heat. I Can’t Forget What I Have Forgotten presents heat as an object—unseen but intensely present—mounted on a pedestal. In an earlier work Strachan “imported” the light from his mother’s yard in Nassau into his New England bedroom, by linking light meters and sun lamps via the Internet.

A second Strachan work has also been commissioned by the CAC: a visual mystery story, told in two identical chapters. The piece recalls a 2003 work for which the artist removed a broken window from a building in a derelict neighborhood, then had it identically reproduced using laser-cutting technology. Several of the copies were re-installed in the same neighborhood. Thus a chance or destructive event is celebrated as a multiple sculpture of negative space, and the community receives a humble gift: a simple gesture of notice.

Do-Ho Suh
Born Seoul, Korea, 1962; lives in New York

The work of Korean artist Do-Ho Suh has attracted attention for its power to evoke personal memory in the context of cultural analysis. Who Am We? is an installation of wallpaper, a medium increasingly used by artists today. From a distance the wall is an attractive, if incidental, mauve field; upon close examination, an indistinct pattern resolves into thousands of photographic images of Asian faces: distinct individuals—Suh’s high school classmates—rather than the homogeneity implied by the social concept of race, or the repetition of dots on an ornamental surface.

The traditional “decorative arts” have been commandeered by many current artists as a medium for social, even polemical, statements. Another example in this exhibition is the work of Francis Cape.

Tony Tasset
Born Cincinnati, Ohio, 1960; lives in Chicago

We assume that what is displayed in a museum is art, and Marcel Duchamp taught us to see that art is anything an artist does. From those truisms come all the jokes about people in art galleries puzzling over the meaning of air conditioning vents and collectors offering to buy fire extinguishers and janitors’ carts.

In fact, there are conventions that signal value in the halls where art is shown. A frame, a spotlight, a Plexiglas® case will serve multiple functions, from conservation to veneration. Those codes have been largely omitted from this exhibition as an experiment in the conveyance of meaning.

Tony Tasset has made such signs the substance of his 1986 work Sculpture Bench. On one level a simple play on words, beyond that the piece requires us to consider the relationship between such ideas as “significance” and “usefulness.”

Rirkrit Tirivanija
Born Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1961; lives in Berlin and New York

For a discussion of this work, please see the entry for Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, above.

Andrea Zittel
Born Escondido, California, 1965; lives in New York and Los Angeles

Andrea Zittel’s A-Z Uniform for Andy Stillpass is not always on view in this exhibition, because the work is complete only when worn by its owner. The owner will visit the CAC and attend museum functions regularly during the run of the exhibition.

In 1994 Andy Stillpass, at the time an automobile dealer prominent in the Cincinnati region, commissioned Zittel to design a suit that he could wear to work. Asked to provide information about the way he worked and where the garment would be worn, the collector outlined the basic form of his professional and social life. A conservative, dark wool suit, embellished only by a subtly darker silk trim, was the result. Artist and collector agreed that this was to be a uniform. Stillpass would wear the suit exclusively for at least six months each year, which he did for six years until he sold the business.

The work may be a commentary on the regimentation of business, but it is more than that, as Stillpass realized from the start of the project. He wrote to Zittel, “I have come to realize how disorganized have been my wardrobe choices in functionally and symbolically determining my identity.”

The implication is that in allowing someone else to make those wardrobe choices, that person (or, in the case of many of us, that designer, that store, that manufacturer) takes a hand in determining identity. At that moment, he surely realized, he was agreeing to become the collector collected.

Heimo Zobernig
Born Mauthen, Austria, 1958; lives in Vienna

A set of shelves that seem less than useful—deep but not far enough apart to take advantage of their depth, risky in their unsupported cantilevers. A sculpture constructed with the precision of a sculpture by Donald Judd, but of humbler material, less imposing scale, unmuscular proportions.

What are we to make of Heimo Zobernig’s flatfooted, even goofy object, hanging in the middle of a major wall but seeming to serve no function? Sculpture or furniture? Looking, like so many of the artists in this exhibition, to unskein the pair of tightly wound balls we want to call Art and The World, Zobernig seems to allow both possibilities and neither.

Sources and Acknowledgements

It is more than mere coincidence that the exhibition A Minimal Future? Art as Object, 1958-1968 at the Museum Of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which took place earlier this year, coincided almost exactly with a major show on the East Coast. Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated): Art from 1951 to the Present at the Guggenheim Museum also posits a history of minimalism. In addition, several smaller exhibitions on related topics have been mounted at museums and galleries in 2004. At the same time, a consortium of thirty-six museums, science centers and other cultural organizations in the Philadelphia region presented The Big Nothing, following upon such precedents as the exhibition Nothing (and the book inspired by it) that traveled through Europe in 2001 and the Andrea Rosen Gallery’s 2003 show, In Full View.

This exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center was initially conceived without knowledge of such comprehensive efforts internationally. But something, surely, is in the air, and the exhibition has benefited greatly from the research and ideas developed by their curators. Nothing Compared to This is a more personal selection of a limited number of works chosen, frankly, because I was intrigued by what seemed a widespread impulse that I did not fully understand. I am pleased to share my discoveries with the community to whom I devoted nine years of my career as CAC Director, and with whom I look forward to exploring the vitality of today’s art as the museum’s Curator at Large.

CAC Curatorial Assistant Sandra Light conducted research, arranged loans and prepared biographical materials. More importantly, she made many helpful suggestions regarding the exhibition content and form; I am indebted to her for her professional assistance and collaboration. CAC Chair Joe Hale; Trustees Tom Neyer, Stan Kaplan, and Alice Weston; and my friends Andy Stillpass (whose inspired collection ignited my early interest in this work) and George Kurz have been supportive from the exhibition’s inception. Since her appointment as Alice & Harris Weston Director, Linda Shearer has been enthusiastic in her encouragement, as has the museum staff.

I am grateful to the lenders and galleries recognized in the exhibition checklist for their cooperation, and also to the following for ideas and assistance: the staffs of Gavin Brown’s enterprise, Marc Foxx Gallery, and D’Amelio Terras Gallery; Joe Amrhein, Pierogi; Thom Collins; Rosamund Felsen; Kara Hamilton; Hudson, Feature, Inc.; Rose Lord, Marian Goodman Gallery; Anthony McNerney, Christie’s, London; and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, Salon 94.

Finally, and most importantly, we all owe thanks to the artists whose work and ideas are at the center of this effort.

1. Graham Gussin and Elle Carpenter, eds. (London: August Media, 2001), 16. ↩︎
2. (New York: Henry Holt and Company), 278. ↩︎
3. Yves Klein, 1928-1962: A Retrospective (Houston: Institute for the Arts, Rice University, 1982), 225. ↩︎
4. (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973). ↩︎
5. Ann Goldstein, ed., A Minimal Future? Art as Object, 1958-1968 (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004), 17. ↩︎
6. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from artists in the exhibition are from interviews with the author. ↩︎