April 29-May 5, 2004

cover story

Touching the Void

Outside the white box: (l-r) Tanya Leighton, Bennett Simpson and Ingrid Schaffner, co-curators of the Institute of Contemporary Art's "The Big Nothing," looked far and wide for art about nothing of any kind. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

A show about nothing unites the arts community.

by Lori Hill

"l love talking about nothing." Like a lot of local curators and programmers these days, Richard Torchia is caught up in a strange but pervasive dance with semantics.

Torchia, director of Arcadia University Art Gallery, really does enjoy talking about nothing. So does everyone else involved in "The Big Nothing," a summer-long series of exhibitions and programs initiated by the Institute of Contemporary Art that centers on the idea of nothing and nothingness in art, science, music, film, even popular culture.

"The satisfaction we all take in puns and wordplay, even after two years, is a little surprising," says Bennett Simpson, associate curator at the ICA.

"The Big Nothing" -- the citywide show spurred on by the ICA's exhibition of the same name -- brings together about 36 Philadelphia arts and cultural organizations this summer after several intensive but levity-filled years of planning and collaboration.

"Nothingness -- it should be depressing, gray and lifeless, right? And yet it has been impossible to resist the urge to joke, collectively. Call it cosmic wonder. Or irony. Or self-defense."

The deflecting impulse is understandable. The concept conjures up every stereotype about contemporary art: blank canvases, tape loops of white noise, performance artists sitting frozen in chairs for hours on end.

It's ripe for the lampooning.

Yet the ICA is about to embrace it unabashedly, with the help of a dizzying array of local artists, curators and programmers.

And they're doing it with style and humor, without losing the very real, very important conversation among generations of artists that's at the heart of their project.

As for the originators of the project, avant-garde ideas and provocative exhibitions are really nothing new for the ICA. Since its founding in 1963, it's broken new ground in the contemporary art world, showing the work of people like Robert Mapplethorpe ahead of the curve.

Nor is a citywide initiative involving many organizations anything to stop the presses about. The Clay Studio's citywide series of ceramic shows comes to mind, as does the Philadelphia Museum of Art's John Cage exhibition "Rolywholyover: A Circus," with its related shows at galleries and museums and performing arts events. Last summer's Furniture Society conference and the Print Center's IMPRINT campaign each fueled collaborative events.

What makes "The Big Nothing" unique is the simultaneously restrictive and liberating use of a single, somewhat arcane concept. It presented a challenge, almost a dare, for arts organizations across the city.

The fact that 36 of them took it on at a time of the year when many organizations take a sometimes months-long hiatus is a testament to the strength of the idea. So this summer, from Abington to Chestnut Hill, from Glenside to Rittenhouse Square, from Queen Village to Fairmount to Old City and back again to the ICA in West Philly, "The Big Nothing" has something to say.

What of nothing, then?

Can't the absence of something be just as interesting as its presence?

Is it possible for a more powerful message to be communicated through silence rather than noise?

Doesn't a blank slate convey infinite potential, not emptiness?

You get the idea. Everyone from Duchamp to Warhol to contemporary artists like Roe Etheridge has tried to make sense of nothingness and its implications.

It is with these seemingly contradictory, head-spinning notions in mind that ICA's senior curator, Ingrid Schaffner, devised "The Big Nothing." Somewhat paradoxically, the idea for the show came to her when she was working on an exhibition in New York about five years ago. "After doing "Deep Storage,' a show about art that put everything in, I wanted to do its opposite, a show about art that reduces and eliminates," she says. ""The Big Nothing,' the impulse to empty out and erase, is the flip side of "Deep Storage,' the impulse to store, collect. Or, you might say collecting is about filling the void. The two complement each other and form a kind of binary whole."

And what started as just another exhibition in the ICA's regular schedule quickly evolved into an entirely different animal.

"I wanted to figure out a way to bring in the historical precedents for our show of contemporary art," says Schaffner. So one of the first people she approached with her idea was then-curator of modern and contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Ann Temkin. The result was a series of special, additional labels on works in the PMA's permanent collection putting them in the context of the concepts at hand.

Slowly, the ICA tested the art scene's waters about the possibility of a larger "community initiative," bringing in people like Torchia, the Rosenbach Museum's Bill Adair, PAFA's Alex Baker, The Print Center's Jacqueline van Rhyn and the Fabric Workshop's Doug Bohr.

By May 2003, all this evolved into the "Big Nothing Congress," a conglomeration of approximately 60 movers and shakers in the city's contemporary art scene -- the University of the Arts' Sid Sachs, the Gershman Y's Cheryl Harper, Vox Populi's Yana Balson and independent curator Julie Courtney among others -- who met in the ICA's auditorium to generate ideas.

Now, sitting in her office above the ICA's galleries, Schaffner and the other "Big Nothing" curators, Simpson and Whitney-Lauder curatorial fellow Tanya Leighton, riff on ideas of nothingness, emptiness, nihilism and nonsense in all the permutations that have emerged in planning a project that clearly excites them all.

They joke, they make puns, they recall the soundboard of ideas that was the Big Nothing Congress and the excitement it generated. And they marvel over the art community's coming together for the project.

"It started to have a life of its own," says Schaffner, with not a little wonder in her voice.

Indeed: Soon organizations that weren't originally part of the process got wind and asked to be involved, and dozens upon dozens of programming possibilities emerged, with groups large and small finding ways to participate and to make connections between the idea of nothingness and their individual missions.

So there's the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts showing landscape paintings of diminishing horizons and big empty skies. The American Philosophical Society is contemplating black holes. Vox Populi will explore acts of destruction and their aftermath. The Woodmere Art Museum will boast a 16-foot "nothing" on its front lawn. And the African American Museum in Philadelphia is hosting a series called "Defying Invisibility: Black Independent Films and Filmmakers." The Wagner Free Institute of Science will consider the big zero of infinite space in 19th-century scientific thought.

And there are like-minded shows at the Edgar Allan Poe house, the Clay Studio, University of the Arts and more, as well as programs by Relâche, Pig Iron Theatre Co., New Paradise Laboratories and even a "Nothing Cabaret," with a performance by Bardo Pond and a screening of Andy Warhol's Sleep. The list goes on.

"Collectively, all the projects tell an exceptionally provocative and exciting story," says Leighton.

The diversity of the programming owes much to the brainstorming sessions of the Big Nothing Congress, even early on in the process.

"I remember Roy Goodman from the American Philosophical Society got it immediately and proposed doing something with their "black hole’ collection," says Schaffner. APS houses the papers of John Wheeler, the physicist who coined the term "black hole."

Along the way in the planning process, some of these weightier implications became apparent, even if it was unconscious.

Simpson explains, "The real-life backdrop of this exhibition, though not part of its conception, is war, political discontent and the multiple collapses and negations that happened around 2001, from dot-comism to the WTC, which we as a world are still grappling with."

Amid discussions of everything from atomic bombs to Zeno’s paradox to Seinfeld, these darker moments emerged.

Torchia recalls Jeremiah Misfeldt of Locks Gallery taking the discussion to a new level. "He mentioned at one point how we were really all skirting around nothing," says Torchia, "that a lot of the things that people were bringing to the table were approaching nothing, but that to deal with nothing with a capital N, this sort of absolute absence of anything, was to deal with something so chilling and possibly evil Ö the idea of thinking of the universe before there was a universe. It suddenly silenced everyone. It was like, "Whoa, we can’t go there.’"

But "The Big Nothing" goes everywhere, especially with the project that started it all, the ICA’s exhibition. Encompassing both of the building’s main galleries, it serves as the conceptual anchor for the citywide project, charting the course of artistic approaches to nothingness and related philosophies from the 1970s until today.

Schaffner's points of reference historically go back to Marcel Duchamp with his readymades and "the possibility that art can be just an idea," dadaism, Kasimir Malevich (his "purging of the picture plane" and desire "to erase the past") and Joseph Cornell ("his material was ephemera, life's little nothings").

So reduction, elimination, emptiness, the void, the sublime, nonsense -- all of these ideas, explored for centuries in so many ways by writers, dancers, filmmakers and, of course, artists -- get a new treatment with "The Big Nothing." The evolution is put on display, to be considered, criticized and even refuted.

The show surveys the changeability of these concepts over time, with the works of more than 60 national and international contemporary artists -- from recognized names such as Gabriel Orozco ("Empty Shoe Box") and Yves Klein to emerging artists like Bernadette Corporation (a film called Get Rid of Yourself) and Gareth James.

Included are posters and press releases related to Day Without Art -- the day when museums and galleries shut their doors or shroud their work in recognition of World AIDS Day. Documentation of Robert Barry's closed-gallery events, Louise Lawler's photos of empty or deinstalled gallery spaces and a recreation of Andy Warhol's Invisible Sculpture represent more gestures of art-free art.

There are artists from New York, Spain, Japan, Argentina, the Netherlands and Korea, but local artists are represented well by Thomas Chimes, Eileen Neff, Paul Swenbeck and others. Simpson and Schaffner remember seeing Swenbeck's blackened tin-foil creation The Evil Weed at a Space 1026 show, and immediately pegged it for inclusion in the show. (See sidebar on the ICA show below.)

This approach -- eager acceptance of a variety of work and openness to emerging artists -- enabled "The Big Nothing" to be so alluring to so many types of organizations and artists. For its organizers, working on a project so large in scope and time-consuming, this energy kept the process fun.

"The thing I like about Ingrid's work is that it's very scholarly but it's also whimsical," says Paula Marincola, director of the Pew-funded Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, who has written an essay for "The Big Nothing" catalog. "It makes a real contribution to the field, but it's accessible and popular."

The PEI, besides funding single-institution activities (Jorge Pardo's redesign of Fabric Workshop's lobby), has helped launch large-scale projects such as New*Land*Marks, an ongoing public art project in conjunction with the Fairmount Park Art Association. For "The Big Nothing," the initiative supplied funding specifically for the project's map and guide -- a collaboration between Abacus Studio and Space 1026 artists Andrew Jeffrey Wright and Thom Lessner (who also designed the eye-popping logo, which Schaffner calls "a graphic whoosh"). The result is a quirky, hand-drawn rendering of the project's reach across the city.

In addition to PEI’s contribution, funding for the approximately $85,000 ICA exhibition came from several sources. It was a combination of private donors and organizations such as the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. and charitable organizations such as the Locks Foundation. However, each venue project was independently funded by the organization itself. Additional monetary support allowed the ICA, in conjunction with the usual practice of announcement cards and e-mail distributions, to run ads not only in local publications but in national publications as well, namely Artforum and the Village Voice. The institute expects press from ARTnews and The New York Times. In all, the support the project has received serves as an indicator of its range and appeal.

Cara Schneider, spokesperson for the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp., says the reason they "love these collaborative things is that it gives you a chance to speak to different voices. People know the PMA, they know PAFA and they even know ICA Ö but when you add this wrinkle, you have to know that there’s a really vibrant scene and we’ll give you an immersive experience."

ICA co-curator Leighton says, "I’m fascinated and impressed by the diversity and creativity of everyone’s interpretation of "nothing’ -- not to mention their enthusiasm and good will in working collaboratively. Ö The fact that everyone has worked so harmoniously together is a great indicator of the support and respect that everyone has for each other in this community."

Alex Baker, curator of contemporary art at PAFA, was involved in the CityCircus component of the PMA’s John Cage exhibition and is pleased with the similar programming of "The Big Nothing."

"Since 1995 I can’t think of any other big, umbrella, visual-art-driven exhibition that did this festival-like approach," he says. "So it’s high time that this should happen again. It really does precipitate conversation among people at a table, sometimes people who never really talk to each other or who should talk to each other more."

Ultimately, while "The Big Nothing" is a momentous and unifying event for the arts community, it’s Philadelphians who will reap the benefits, with a slate of programming in what can be a relatively dead season.

"It's the summer of doing nothing. Summers are lazy and there's a lassitude about it," says Marincola.

"Now there's this other thing: You can spend the summer doing nothing."