Touched By Your Presence

Despite the immense popularity of mail-order catalogues and phone sex, we still belong to a cultural tradition in which seeing is believing. In the art world, this notion reached an apotheosis of sorts in the early 60s when Frank Stella formulated his famous credo, 'what you see is what you get', declaring that his paintings comprised nothing besides the paint on the canvas. If Stella's statement seemed to sum up a materialistic strain of artistic activity in the early part of the decade, other artists of the period were not so eager to limit art to what could be perceived visually. In 1968, Barry Le Va, who was then making installations that were plainly visible, declared that the content of his work was, in fact, invisible - its physical elements were merely clues to a meaning which existed elsewhere. Around the same time, a number of conceptual artists began creating intangible projects that eschewed material artefacts. It was an approach summed up in Douglas Huebler's announcement that 'the world is full of objects, more or less interesting. I do not wish to add any more'. It was echoed too in Robert Smithson's belief that 'installations should empty rooms, not fill them', and his suggestion that a museum devoted to different kinds of emptiness could be developed.

The larger background to this flirtation with the imperceptible was the 'bigger is better' aesthetic that characterised so much post-war art: evident in the heroically-sized canvases of Abstract Expressionists, the Pop-giganticism of Rosenquist and Oldenburg, and the monuments of Minimalism and Earth Art. To the aesthetic size-queens associated with these currents, the expansive visibility of an artwork seemingly ensured its public authority and presence. Yet by 1969, invisible art was showing up all over the place. Artist Tom Marioni curated 'Invisible Painting and Sculpture' at the Richmond Art Center in California, for example, which featured a group of artists including Bruce Connor, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Robyn Whitlaw. Robert Barry, who produced works using microwaves, electromagnetic fields, ultrasonic sound and inert gases, summed up a certain strain of interest in the unseen with his 1969 Telepathic Piece, which appeared as a bracketed statement in an exhibition catalogue: 'during the exhibition, I will try to communicate telepathically a work of art, the nature of which is a series of thoughts that are not applicable to language or image.'

Telepathic Piece pinpointed a major concern for many artists at the time: an emphasis on thinking and communicative possibilities over art's visible and material qualities. But by invoking a sensibility beyond words, it also underscored an interest in the Sublime - an aesthetic preoccupation which typically gets written out of the Conceptual art story book. For Barry - who once remarked that 'Nothing seems to me the most potent thing in the world' - invisibility was a means of evoking the void and emptiness. Immeasurable and without limit, the realm of the unseen is as Sublime it gets.

Superficially, the most direct precedent for the invisible art of the 60s was Yves Klein's romance with the void. Beginning with his 1957 exhibition at Galerie Colette Allendy, which included an empty white room saturated with what the artist called 'invisible pictorial sensibility', Klein embarked on a Utopian programme of producing immaterial art, establishing zones of immateriality (and selling them), presenting 'invisible paintings' at group exhibitions and drawing up plans for an 'architecture of the air' - including an 'air roof', designed to serve as a transparent shield over habitats and large tracts of land. For Klein, the great benefit of invisible architecture was that it would enable people to maintain constant visual contact with the sky, and so to retain a connection to its sublime expanses. A desire to instill a similar sensation of unboundedness also informed exhibitions such as 'Le Vide' of 1958, for which he removed all objects from Iris Clert's Parisian gallery except for an empty vitrine. Although the space appeared unoccupied and devoid of content, Klein insisted that it was filled with the medium of human consciousness; a force so tangible that, according to the artist, 'some people were unable to enter [the exhibition], as if an invisible wall prevented them'.

Klein predicated such works on his belief that our perception of art does not depend on vision or any other physical sense, but on what he called 'sensibility' or 'affectivity', terms which vaguely conjure up realms of unfettered imagination and emotion. But by the 60s, these shop-worn trademarks of the Sublime were given short shrift by a new generation of invisible works. Art & Language, for example, designated the volume of air in an empty air-conditioned gallery as an artwork, not in order to provoke an experience of unbounded awareness but to argue (as Duchamp had with found objects) that art, rather than being identifiable through specific visual characteristics, is defined by its cultural and conceptual context. As they declared in a 1968 essay: 'things are noticed and attended to not in virtue of some "naturally" obvious assertiveness but in respect of culturally, instrumentally, and materially conditioned discursive activity.'

In the sphere of public art, disillusionment with traditional political monuments gave birth to what art historian Sergiusz Michalski has called 'a new art form: monuments which tried to attain invisibility as a way of engendering reflection on the limitations of monumental imagery'. Curiously, Claes Oldenburg, better known for the wry giganticism of his homage's to everyday objects, played a leading role in developing this low-profile territory. His Proposed Underground Memorial and Tomb for President John F. Kennedy (1965) called for a huge statue of the assassinated President to be buried head-first in the ground. The statue's size would be identical to that of the Statue of Liberty, suggesting that Kennedy's murder had turned the American Dream on its head. In 1967, Oldenburg actually carried out a proposal for a very different kind of invisible monument - one intended to protest not only against the Vietnam War but also the celebratory heroic memorials that the artist imagined (wrongly as it turned out) would eventually be erected to honour its veterans. For Placid Civil Monument (1967), Oldenburg hired a crew of municipal grave-diggers to excavate a hole in the lawn behind New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Besides suggesting a grave, the hole evoked an inverted plinth, cancelling out in advance the visibility of future monuments to the war. But Placid Civil Monument ultimately went beyond the negative iconography of the Kennedy memorial, as the artist, after documenting the grave-diggers' work, had the hole filled in hole, leaving no trace of its brief existence.

The same year, Maria Nordman began creating works in specific urban settings, usually in and around Los Angeles, that employed ambient sounds, shifting sunlight and shadow, and the chance presence of local pedestrians. Geared towards accidental encounters and blending with their surrounding environments, Nordman's works ideally attained a kind of invisible participation in the flow of urban life: an aesthetic which seemingly matched her desire to create a democratic art that would be accessible to viewers from all backgrounds. The idealistic undertones of Nordman's approach resonate in much other invisible art from this period, as if practitioners believed their work could achieve a state of social and political grace simply by dispensing with a perceptible presence. From another perspective, however, projects like Nordman's represent the culmination of a century-long concern with dissolving the boundaries between the work of art and its larger environment - a vein of interest that essentially reverses the strategy of collage: rather than incorporating worldly fragments, the artwork is incorporated into its surrounding milieu, embracing a dissolution of identity that, once again, recalls the mechanisms of the Sublime.

For later artists, idealism took a back seat and invisibility became a strategy for provoking and frustrating audiences, and playing against their expectations, by withholding the anticipated object of desire. For Oh Dracula, a 1974 performance at the Utah Museum of Art in Salt Lake City, Chris Burden replaced a painting on the wall with a large cloth chrysalis which he then climbed inside. Burden hung on the wall for one day during museum hours, cloistered in darkness like a light-sensitive vampire. In White Light/White Heat (1975), the artist spent three weeks concealing himself from viewers in a New York gallery, lying on a wide shelf-like platform which he had built high enough so that he was hidden from view. Burden commented at the time that he was curious to find out whether people would be able to sense his unseen presence, and, no doubt, whether they would really believe he was there if they couldn't actually see him.

Playing on the spectator's good faith, these invisible performances wryly replaced the avant-garde's traditional hostility towards its audience with a passive/aggressive withholding. In the early 60s, Duchamp had proclaimed his disgust at the commercialisation of the art world, declaring that 'the only solution for the great artist of tomorrow is to go underground' - to become invisible. Works such as Burden's, which were less about invisibility per se than about something being hidden from view, inevitably raised questions about the place of art - and the artist - in a commodity-driven culture of over exposure, even as they seemed to throw back into the public's face accusations that contemporary art was merely a case of the Emperor's New Clothes.

Hiding oneself or one's art can also be an exercise in humility, an ego-stripping practice designed to force artist and audience alike to rethink the desire to exhibit, and to question the narcissistic value we place on public approbation in general. The performance artist Tehching Hsieh, probably best known for the year-long performances he began in the 70s (such as living outdoors in New York City for a twelve-month period) has recently completed such a project but, by its nature, it would be surprising if many people were aware he had even embarked upon it. For a 13-year performance which stretched from December 31st 1986 until December 31st 1999, Hsieh continued to make art, but did not show it to anyone in any way, shape or form. The lesson in invisibility he offers is simple yet powerful: rather than take the measure of himself from the external world, he makes do with his own internal value system - a system which remains unseen but must be deeply felt in order to carry out such a project.

Invisible art continued to reappear at odd intervals during the 80s and 90s, typically in a more ironic mode. Andy Warhol, Mr Visibility himself, produced and installed his 1985 Invisible Sculpture at New York's Area nightclub - a place where people went to be seen - by stepping on a plinth and then stepping off it, presumably leaving traces of his resonant celebrity aura orbiting in its airspace. Almost a decade later, Tom Friedman made what could be seen - if only you could see it - as a distinctly non-Utopian return to Klein's practice of 'sensibilising' space. Hiring a professional witch, Friedman instructed her to cast a curse on a spherical space floating 27 cm above the top of a pedestal, which the artist subsequently exhibited as Untitled (Cursed Space), a droll inversion of the quasi-theological aura created by museum and gallery display rhetoric.

A number of other artists in the 90s have explored a slacker-style, degree-zero dissolution that often flirts with notions of invisibility. For her 1996 performance Invisible Crowds, Hayley Newman dispersed her audience of 50 by bus to unannounced locations across Vancouver and left them to find their own way home. In 1990, Peter Santino began a ten-year project entitled Failure (in the astronomical sense of the word, which refers to gravitational collapse) for which he produced series of tiny lead balls that grew ever smaller over the course of the decade, culminating in a group of invisible works planned for 2000.

When architectural showpieces such as the Guggenheim Bilbao or the new Tate Modern attract more attention than the artworks they house, and when curators are spurred to create ever more spectacular exhibitions to compete with such spaces, the idea of invisible art can serve as a much-needed tonic, prompting us to see through the art world's grandiose distractions, and so, perhaps, to think a little more clearly. They also remind us that, in the larger scheme of things, art occupies a fairly immaterial position, and whether visible or not, works of art ultimately come to life only in our imaginations, in the unseen museums we carry within us.

But perhaps the most salutary effect of invisible art lies in the chameleon-like array of meanings which have cloaked it over the past half century. Rather than simply serving as a static limit defining the no-go zone of artistic practice, it has alternately appeared under the guise of the Sublime, of social idealism, avant-garde aggression, personal humility and ironic commentary. No single artist has been able to possess invisibility as a signature medium, and its wayward history gently yet pointedly mocks our waning belief in the cult of originality. It suggests instead that art doesn't begin and end in a physical frame or a singular context, but lives on in the potentially endless process by which we make use of it.