No Show Museum

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No Show Museum
Data
place Johannesburg and Zurich
Art
Art museum
opening 2015
management
Website

The No Show Museum is a museum that is dedicated to nothing and its diverse manifestations in the history of art . It was founded in 2013 by the Swiss artist and curator Andreas Heusser . The museum's collection includes around 500 works and documents by over 150 international artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Virtual collection

The museum's collection extends over four floors, each consisting of two wings. Works, documents and artifacts from conceptual art, minimal art, painting, performance art, photography, literature, theater, film and music will be shown. The different wings are thematically dedicated to the different approaches to nothing:

  • Nothing but denial: the art of doing nothing
  • Nothing but Annihilation: The Art of Annihilation
  • Nothing but emptiness: the art of absence
  • Nothing but invisibility: the art of the imperceptible, the unseen, the hidden
  • Nothing but reduction: the art of minimalism
  • Nothing but a gap: the art of omission
  • Nothing but a statement: the art of saying nothing
  • Nothing but imagination: the art of pure imagination

Background information on all artists and their works is provided in German, English and Spanish.

The offer is supplemented by a library that provides further texts, publications, exhibition catalogs and research work on the subject of nothing in art, but also in other disciplines (philosophy, science, literature, music, etc.).

Mobile museum

Walkable bus

The No Show Museum has been on a world tour with a converted bus since 2015. Inside the mobile museum is a futuristic-looking white cube (4 m long, 2 m wide, 2.10 m high) in which the current special exhibition is shown. It also offers access to the virtual collection via iPad stations and houses the museum shop with a limited selection of souvenirs such as the Buy Nothing Card (personal credit card with which you cannot buy anything) or Art Free Air (artificial air as a medicine for allergy sufferers). The exterior of the bus, painted in matt black, serves as a walking blackboard that can be labeled with announcements and information about the current exhibitions.

The mobile exhibition space of the No Show Museum. Mansbach, 2015

Thematic special exhibitions

The special exhibitions in the mobile museum each illuminate certain aspects, variants and themes of nothingness in art: Invisile Artworks (2015) presented 24 immaterial and invisible works of conceptual art. The focus of the show Nothing is impossible (2016) was on works of art that do not exist and cannot possibly exist (e.g. because it simply exceeds the possibilities of what is feasible to produce the work of art or because the attempt to realize it becomes indissoluble conceptual and logical contradictions.) In the special exhibition ¡No falta nada! (2017) was about the art of nothing as absence, e.g. B. because the work of art was lost or irrevocably destroyed, or because it never existed.

World tour of nothing

The No Show Museum has dedicated itself to the task of spreading nothing all over the world: year after year, new continents and regions are to be opened up for nothing. The first stage of the Nothing World Tour started in Zurich in July 2015 and led through 20 countries in Central and Northern Europe. The tour included around 30 exhibitions in museums and empty galleries, in public squares and secluded places. It ended in October 2015 in Venice , where the No Show Museum, as an official participant in the 56th Art Biennale, played at the Lido and the Salon Suisse. In the summer of 2016, the mobile museum was shipped to New York for a second, 80-day exhibition tour. The North American tour led through 20 states in the USA and Canada to the west coast of the USA and as far as Mexico. The third stage ran from November 2017 to January 2018 from Baja California in Mexico through the countries of Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama) to Colombia, with numerous exhibitions in public spaces and in cooperation with museums and local galleries. The fourth stage was a tour of Western Europe in autumn 2018 with exhibitions in France, Spain and Portugal, including in the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) in Lisbon.

Invisible Artworks special exhibition in the Mobile Museum, Budapest, 2015

Conceptual background

Nothing but an aesthetic category

In the modern age, “nothing” develops into an aesthetic category that is just as independent as the beautiful, the ugly or the absurd. In the artistic examination of the (non-) phenomenon nothing, traditional means of design are questioned and new possibilities of spatial, temporal and material design are tried out. Nothing is mostly understood as the negation of being and objectivity, although strictly speaking nothing can not be defined. The fact that every attempt at description or sensualization is doomed to failure has spurred many artists of the 20th century even more to deal intensively with nothing and the questions of its representability. The result is a multitude of artistic strategies and works to nothing.

Nothing but readymade

With his first readymades from 1913, Marcel Duchamp demonstrated how any object can become art if it is placed in the context of art. The new context changes the view of the object: It is no longer perceived as a mere object, but as a placeholder for an idea or artistic intention. In the course of such attributions, the once common object is transformed into a work of art. With the same principle, nothing can "acquire the dignity of a work of art through the choice of the artist" (André Breton). Whether or not it is recognized as a work of art and finds its way into the art discourse depends primarily on the institutional and contextual environment in which it is shown. The No Show Museum is an attempt to create such an institutional framework that ensures in the long term that nothing is art.

The museum as a mobile art context

The museum has a real exhibition space in the form of a converted bus. This creates a mobile art context that can, on the one hand, dock with established institutions, and on the other, also exist autonomously. The mobile museum also offers the opportunity to develop new regions and spaces for the art of nothing. It then has the function of a marking element with which any location can be identified as an exhibition area.

The museum as a parable

On a structural level, the No Show Museum recreates typical mechanisms, rituals and strategies of established institutions in the art world. This turns it into a model on which one can observe which framework conditions must be present so that something - or “nothing” - is recognized as art. What does it take to successfully convey and market art?

List of artists presented in the No Show Museum

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Nana Adusei-Poku: On Being Present Where You Wish to Disappear. In: Journal # 80 - March 2017. E-Flux, March 2017, accessed in March 2017 .
  2. ^ Ana Laura B. Villalta: Museo de la Nada en MARTE. Americanosfera, November 16, 2017, accessed November 16, 2017 (Spanish).
  3. ↑ Arnulfo Agüero: Un viaje espectacular del arte a las regiones de la nada. La Prensa, November 12, 2017, accessed November 12, 2017 (Spanish).
  4. ↑ Beatrix Dargel: Nothing to see! In: Deutsches Museum (Ed.): Culture & Technology . Nothing, issue 1/2018. Munich.
  5. ↑ Carina Pérez: Llega el No Show Museum al MACO. NVI Noticias, November 18, 2017, accessed November 18, 2017 (Spanish).
  6. ↑ u. a. Palazzo Trevisan, Venice; Lauba Gallery, Zagreb; Chimera-Project Gallery, Budapest; Umelka Gallery, Bratislava; divo Institute, Kolin, Vienna Contemporary, Vienna; #Poligon Art Space, Warsaw; Tallinn Art Hall, Tallinn; Survival K (n) it Festival 7, Latvian Center for Contemporary Art, Riga; Luda Gallery, St. Petersburg; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Tenthaus Project Space, Oslo; Sixtyeight Gallery, Copenhagen; Grimmuseum, Berlin; Island Project Space, Hamburg; Wolfart Project Space, Rotterdam; Museum Strauhof, Zurich.
  7. ↑ Steiner, Juri; Doubt, Stefan: Pro Helvetia's platform to present the Swiss contributions to the Venice Biennials
  8. ↑ Yale University Radio WYBCX: The Art World Demystified , Hosted by Brainard Carey
  9. ↑ Jaime Moreno: El arte en la ausencia. El Periodico, November 28, 2017, accessed November 28, 2017 (Spanish).
  10. ↑ cf. Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: "The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972". New York, Praeger, 1973, p. 40.
  11. ↑ cf. Lütkehaus, Ludger: "Nothing", Haffmans Verlag, Zurich 1999
  12. ↑ See the following exhibition catalogs on the subject of nothing:
    • Armleder, John; Copeland, Matthieu; Le Bon, Laurent; Metzger, Gustav; Perret, MaiThu; Phillpot, Clive and Pirotte, Philippe (eds): "Voids: A Retrospective", Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2009
    • Hollein, Max, Weinhart, Martina: "Nothing - Nothing", Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2006
    • Rugoff, Ralph: "Art about the Unseen", 1957–2012, London: Hayward Publishing, 2012
    • Varnedoe, Kirk: "Pictures of Nothing. Abstract Art since Pollock", Princeton / Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006
  13. ↑ cf. Dorothee Fauth: "Art Lexicon: Readymade ". Hatje Cantz 2003.
  14. ↑ Hector Olbak: The unfindable Readymade
  15. ↑ Le No Show Museum, le musée qui n'a rien à montrer. In: rts.ch. December 26, 2014, accessed May 11, 2019 (French).
  16. ↑ Thomas Wyss: “Nothing is the horizon of all of us”. Interview with Thomas Heusser. In: tagesanzeiger.ch . May 27, 2015, accessed March 27, 2019 .
  17. ↑ Nothing but a Museum , Surprise Strassenmagazin No. 351/15