"A Brief History of Invisible Art"

CONCEPTUAL ART

On a recent Saturday, I went to the downtown galleries looking for something I knew I would not find. I wanted to see early Italian Renaissance painting, and nothing else would satisfy the urge. A few days later, my thoughts turned to Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts' "A Brief History of Invisible Art." Perhaps the artists included in this group exhibition were once confronted with a similar dilemma — what if the thing you're looking for isn't there? Whether it's physically inaccessible or purely inexpressible, what about those things that are actually made of nothingness? The works included in this show (all made between 1967 and 2005) frame the invisible in order to draw attention to absence and leave in its place the trace of an idea, a set of instructions to reveal what is missing, or an artifact that only slightly captures what is absent. Jay Chung's Nothing Is More Practical Than Idealism is a snapshot of the cast and crew of a movie he shot with a camera that wasn't loaded with film. All but a handful of the participants knew this, and you can't help but feel a little sorry for them in their hopefulness. "Happy Nothing: Still Collecting," an ongoing series of paintings made by Bruno Jakob using "invisible painting, lemon yellow, water, brain, energy, touch, and light on paper canvas" is about as far as you can get from 15th-century Florence, when artists were laboring over how best to paint perspective. Jakob dispenses with the visual altogether, inviting the viewer to make a leap of faith that the canvas does indeed contain an image of screaming dust/brain or muffled giggles/light. I had wanted to look at early Italian Renaissance paintings to see how artists began to break away from a flattened perspective and capture space, air, and light. Five hundred years later, artists are still trying to figure it out. (Katie Kurtz)

A BRIEF HISTORY OF INVISIBLE ART

Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, California College of the Arts, Logan Galleries

Through Feb. 18. Tues. and Thurs., 11 a.m.–7 p.m.; Wed., Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

1111 Eighth St., SF. (415) 551-9210, www.cca.edu