Seeing is not enough

Seeing is not enough: while the more recent art history has largely dismissed the visible, the heirs of Duchamp, in their nihilistic impulse, often go one step further, abandoning the object nature of art as such. This is the approach taken by Karin Sander in her piece Zeigen (2006), which confronts visitors with an existing empty room or empty gallery walls which only show the usual title labels of the works exhibited. The works themselves are missing or not to be seen. Their presence, however, is perceptible through a different sense. The artist asked a number of fellow artists such as Sylvie Fleury, Hamish Fulton, Mona Hatoum, or Lawrence Weiner to choose a work of their own and give an audio description of it. The viewer is liberated from vision and referred to an alternative mode of perception which leads him from a concrete, obvious, accustomed, trained to an imaginative, aural aesthetic experience. In this sense, nothingness cannot exist – for there is always imagination, the viewer’s seductive mind power.

As one could argue that seduction is a reverse power game where the seducer aims at controlling the realm that will over-power him in return, Sam Renseiw shifts, in this video, from colour to a seemingly empty, colourless space. A short recent experience of Nothing, in Frankfurt, with audio from London's Tate Modern. Enjoy the cryptic piece by cliking here, or enter nothing above. (patafilm #223, 02'22'', 8.3 MB, Quicktime/mov - Flash version here)