The appreciation of nothing

In Paris, art exhibitions without exhibits are nothing new. Nothing has been a recognised art form for half a century. But the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris can claim a cultural first this week: a retrospective exhibition of 51 years of exhibitions without exhibits by nine different artists. How can a museum retrospectively exhibit nothing? With care. The 500-page catalogue costs 39 ($98).

The exhibition, Voids, a Retrospective, fills, or fails to fill, five rooms in the French national museum of modern art on the fourth floor of the Pompidou building. All the rooms are entirely empty. The walls are white. The floors are bare. The lighting has been arranged just as carefully as for any other temporary exhibition. The gardiens (guards) watch suspiciously to make sure that the visitors do not touch anything, or in this case that they do not touch nothing.

The aim of the retrospective exhibition - refused by several other leading museums in other countries - is to celebrate and explore a movement begun in Paris by the minimalist artist, Yves Klein. Klein, influenced by Zen Buddhism, was the first artist to present an exhibition of blank walls at the Galerie Iris Clert in Paris in 1958.

Klein's exhibition of nothing has been revived for the Pompidou show (which can be seen, or rather not seen, until March 23). In theory, the Pompidou is not presenting the same nothing because these are not actually the same blank walls. There are, however, explanatory panels with the same explanations.

Klein's blank walls are a "specialisation of sensibility to raw materials through stabilised pictorial sensibility". In other words, by seeing nothing, you are encouraged to see everything more clearly.

Five curators have worked on the Pompidou's retrospective of nothing art, which includes works - or non-works - by seven other artists: Robert Barry, Stanley Brouwn, Maria Eichhorn, Bethan Huws, Robert Irwin, Roman Ondak and Laurie Parsons.

One curator, Mathieu Copeland, says the exhibition is partly an exploration of art as the rejection of art: a refusal to add to a world already cluttered with images. "But it is not just a kind of radical, conceptual art.

"You are also invited to explore, in a physical way, each different space, all of which have a different texture. It is a true experience."

- INDEPENDENT