June 14, 2004
Review of "Big Nothing" at ICA Philadelphia
Artnet has published my review of "The Big Nothing", now on view at the ICA Philadelphia. Formatting issues on that site made my text a little weird (as did the use of my second-to-last draft), so here's the full review as I intend it:
“It’s okay, we’re on fairly solid ground,” Robert Smithson assures Nancy Holt midway through their 1971 film Swamp, presented near the entrance of “The Big Nothing,” an ambitious group exhibition about Seinfeld’s favorite topic now on view at the ICA Philadelphia. Co-curated by Ingrid Schaffner, Bennett Simpson, and Tanya Leighton, the show starts with a bang: a cut-to-the-chase survey of the empty or closed gallery as an artistic gesture, with ephemera documenting Yves Klein’s 1958 Le Vide and Robert Barry’s Closed Gallery (1970) through Gareth James’ wReconstruction (2000) and Santiago Serra’s Spanish pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale. From there, however, like Smithson and Holt wandering more or less blindly through the reeds and tall grass of exurban New Jersey, the show meanders in too many directions at once. Moving through the first-floor galleries, “nothing” is proposed as an apex of spiritual aspiration, in Minimalism, in memorial gesture, in consumer vacuity, and elsewhere.