The Presence of Absence: New Installations

The Presence of Absence offers contemporary installation works, many commissioned for this exhibition, by thirteen artists: Judith Barry, Daniel Buren, Daniel L. Collins, Dan Graham, Jenny Holzer, Patrick Ireland, Justen Ladda, Sol Lewitt, Lorie Novak, Bucky Schwartz, Leni Schwendinger, Lawrence Weiner, and Krzysztof Wodiczko. Guest curator for the exhibition is Nina Felshin. 

As a traveling exhibition it is unusual: participating institutions do not receive any art works, nor do the artists travel to create their works at each site. Instead, the Illingworth Kerr Gallery has received instructions prepared by each of the artists in collaboration with ICI which describe (in detail) how each piece is to be created anew. The IKG has received only written instructions, diagrams, stencils, and slides from ICI. Working from these, an installation team including ACA (now AUArts) students will truly re-create the works of art in the gallery.  

Unlike many installation works, the ones in this exhibition are not site-specific; the artists did not know when they prepared their instructions where the show might appear. Instead, they designed their works to be adaptable to standard gallery architectural features: a length of wall, a corner, a hallway, a window.  

All of the works rely on these gallery surfaces as their sole support. In other words, the wall or window becomes an integral part of the piece. When, at the end of the exhibition, the gallery is repainted and the slide projectors unplugged, the works of art will cease to exist until the next gallery re-creates them. Several of the works in the exhibition allow the installers some discretion in their execution or require the addition of information. For these reasons and because no two galleries are alike, the exhibition will differ quite magically each time it is mounted.  

The Presence of Absence is an exhibition about artistic process as distinct from the art object and from the artists physical gesture. Although its roots lie in the conceptual art projects of the 1960s, this show has particular relevance in the late 1980s as Post Modernism critiques the commodification of art and of the artist. As guest curator Nina Felshin explains in her catalogue essay, "The art world of the 180s (characterized as it is by the commodification of art, the inflated status of the artist, the embrace of commerce, fashion, and public relations) is not entirely comfortable with some of conceptual art's most basic impulses. The absence of the object as commodity and the artist as personality are the very aspects of conceptualism that question the art object's exchange value and challenge the notions of authorship and ownership.”  

This is a traveling exhibition organized and circulated by Independent Curators Incorporated, New York, a non-profit traveling exhibition service specializing in contemporary art. The exhibition, tour, and catalogue are made possible in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and Art Matters Inc.