SPOOKY INVISIBLE ART. Robin Blake had a review in the Financial Times (July 28/29) of an exhibit at the Hayward Gallery in London entitled “Invisible: Art About the Unseen”. In the review, Blake compares two pairs of conceptual works of art. One example is a vacant plinth by Andy Warhol. The comparison is with a similar plain plinth by Tom Friedman, but Friedman had commissioned a professional witch to cast a spell on the space above it. Blake calls the Warhol plinth “imaginatively inert”, but says that the Friedman plinth is “wonderfully charged with the viewer’s anticipated response.”
Another example compares a 1972 work which consisted of a room containing only two air conditioners and “an almost identical artwork” done in 2003. However, the 2003 work used for the cooling agent in the two air conditioners “water previously used at the Mexico City morgue to wash the bodies of unidentified murder victims.” Blake says that the 2003 installation “reveals the “limpness” of the 1972 piece, while in the 2003 work “the identities of the dead are as fugitive as the air we breathe….”
Installation art sometimes reminds me of spook houses at Halloween.