The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) presents barely there (part two), on view September 16-December 30, 2011.
barely there (both parts one and two) considers the ability of art to engage broad and often intangible concepts by generating a series of connections rather than functioning as a prescribed whole. The exhibition includes a multigenerational group of artists and artworks produced in the span of over eighty years, from the late 1920s to the present.
The first installment of the exhibition, presented this summer, dealt with the mind, touching on abstract concepts such as death, love, identity, imagination, knowledge and the unintelligible—many of them a constant fascination to artists over the centuries. The second part features work that focuses on the body as a generator of knowledge, memory and as an instigator of social, political and spiritual change.
The artworks in barely there are ephemeral, immaterial and/or transparent—as the title suggests—and exist in a permanent state of contingency without trying to generate true or false answers, focusing instead on the immense and open-ended possibility of art to pose large questions but also to be meaningful rather than decipherable.
The artists in the two part exhibition are Francis Alÿs, Marcel Broodthaers, James Lee Byars, Luis Camnitzer, Frank Capra, Jason Dodge, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Félix Gonzalez-Torres, Pablo Helguera, Christoph Keller, Kimsooja, Mark Lombardi, Lee Lozano, Christian Marclay, Rivane & Sergio Neuenschwander, Max Ophüls, Wilfredo Prieto, Yvonne Rainer, Paul Ramirez-Jonas, Ranjani Shettar, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Nicolás García Uriburu, Franz Erhard Walther, Adolf Wölfli and Francesca Woodman.
Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD)
4454 Woodward Avenue
Detroit, Michigan
www.mocadetroit.org/exhibitions.html