The Art of Disappearing
By Johan Lundh
When a successful artist decides to stop producing art a ripple of questions ensues. Does this act announce the end of a lucrative career, or is it instead a refusal of the art world, which made the success possible? Can a successful artist move away from the profession of art? Will this decision be interpreted and accepted as a private choice rather than a public statement? Or, alternately, is it an altogether radical gesture, an attempt at fusing art and life?
For the last three years, Dutch curator Krist Gruijthuijsen has devoted himself to examining artists who have stopped creating art through his project Archiving Disappearance. The project is an archive of artists who have left artmaking and the art world behind. Archiving Disappearance has resulted in two symposia so far. The first took place during Gruijthuijsen’s residency at Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Centre in Istanbul, Turkey, in the spring of 2006. Among the participants were the Dutch artist duo Bik Van der Pol, the Swedish curator Anders Kreuger, and the American curator Bob Nickas. The second took place at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, during the winter of 2006. In the second edition, participants included the Swedish artist Andreas Gedin, the German artist Heinrich Sachs and the Austrian curator Hedwig Saxenhuber. The two installments shared a similar structure in which each participant presented an artist who had abandoned art, for one reason or the other. A book with texts and images from the two symposia is currently in production. Like Marcel Duchamp’s The Large Glass (1915 –1923) Gruijthuijsen argues that Archiving Disappearance is a “permanently unfinished” endeavor.
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Excerpt of feature article published in issue 101 of C magazine (Toronto, CA), 2009.