I read his message with a wide grin. Invisible : Art About The Unseen 1957-2012. Fifty works in all, at the prestigious Hayward Gallery, including such masterpieces as invisible ink drawings, a plinth upon which Andy Warhol allegedly once briefly stood, and a movie that was shot without film in the camera, which took over two years to make. Brilliant. I laughed until tears ran down my legs into my shoes.
But this exhibition is real.
And you will know some of these artists, these are not comedians like the young Barry Humphries, whose early art japes in Melbourne included filling gumboots with sick and exhibiting them as Puce In Boots. Warhol himself is here, as is Yoko Ono, the woman who single-handedly broke up The Beatles, some say, Yves Klein, Gianni Motto and Maurizio Cattelan.
One room contains four walls adorned with blank sheets of paper. Apparently the public will have a different experience with each one. Another has paper which the artist stared at for 1000 hours over a period of five years. Mental osmosis.
Best of all, writes my friend the painter, desperate to keep his art aloof from such underbellied anarchy, is Cattelan's contribution: a police report investigating his claim that an invisible artwork had been stolen from the back of his car. My friend, with sarcasm and aesthetic loathing fighting like wild dogs to escape from his typing fingers, calls this genius.
And he is damn right.
Nothing is terribly under-rated as an art form. Seinfeld, 180 episodes of sustained creative brilliance, the finest sitcom of them all, was said by its creators to be a show about nothing. No further words need be spoken, my case is dusted and done. And no need whatsoever to mention that even Shakespeare himself twigged to this fundamental creative tenet. Much Ado About Nothing. How can a mere painter criticise Shakespeare?
The Director of the Hayward Gallery is Ralph Rugoff. Now cynical conspiracy theorists may be rising from their chairs at this point to question this name Rugoff, given that television's most worthless televangelist is Peter Popoff, and the legendary $50 billion Wall Street embezzler is called Badoff. Could all three Offs perhaps be related?
No they are not. They are all real.
Ralph Rugoff, not a missing toupee in sight, is a damn straight thinker to boot.
"This exhibition is not a joke," he says. "This is the best exhibition you'll never see. It leaves so much up to your imagination, like the power of radio compared with television - in great radio drama you're inventing characters. There is a lot of invisible art out there you're never going to see." Rugoff came to London from San Francisco, where 6ft 7in conceptual artist Martin Kersels once strode into his gallery and swept him off his feet like an upturned Christmas decoration, suspending the curator by his ankles. "It was such an insane experience. My whole world turned inside out and I didn't know what was going on for a second," said Rugoff. "I was very thankful to Martin for doing that." So Rugoff is a man open to change. Who are we to criticise this?
I have resonated with dumbfound for years that more art gallery directors have not been suspended upside down by their ankles to free up their restrictive inner templates.
"Ralph is pretty experimental; he doesn't follow the herd," says Matthew Slotover, another intriguing surname, co-director of the Frieze annual contemporary art fair. "Yet his shows never fail to capture viewers' imaginations." We would be living in a terrible terrible world indeed if we could not have our imaginations captured. Call me old-fashioned, this exhibition sounds absolutely top hole.
- Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
