OF THIS MARVELLOUS VOID

Participating Artists:
Mario Ayala
Matt McCormick
Mia Scarpa + Carley Gmitro
Amelia Lockwood
Mieke Marple
ProblemChild Advisory

Curated by Andrew McClintock

In 1958 Yves Klein's exhibition La spécialisation de la sensibilité à l’état de matière première en sensibilité picturale stabilisée, generally known as Le Vide (The Void), opened on April 28, 1958 at Galerie Iris Clert, 3 rue des Beaux-Arts, Paris.

Le Vide is often situated within a longer history of artistic challenges to the autonomous art object: from Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain of 1917, through the conceptual practices of the late 1960s and 1970s, to later projects that understood art as a social encounter, including the discourse around Relational Aesthetics in the 1990s.

There is a commonly repeated story that the only artwork on view at the exhibition was blue cocktails made of gin, Cointreau, and methylene blue served at the opening reception which would make visitors urinate blue for up to a week. The artwork was completed by the audience, and carried away in their bodies.

Drawing on Le Vide, Andrew McClintock, Founder and Chief Taste Officer of Culture Slop has asked six contemporary artists, connected to the magazine’s inaugural issue to each create an artwork, in the medium of an ice cream flavor.

Each flavor will be made as a small batch, with fully organic ingredients, under the guidance of Nick Fisher, proprietor and le glacier of Fluffy McClouds. Artworks begin with each serving and end with each empty container.

For Le Vide, Klein had the gallery’s walls painted white over forty-eight hours, a preparation intended to clear the site’s prior history and create what he later described as “an atmosphere, a pictorial climate that is invisible but present.” An empty vitrine was also left on display. At Fluffy’s, these gestures are reversed. Each ice-cream container functions as the exhibition space for an individual artwork: a finite, material field that visitors gradually clear through tasting and consumption. As the flavors are depleted, the twelve-flavor ice-cream case becomes the exhibition’s vitrine—an accumulating display of absences. Each empty container records the audience’s participation in reducing a work to its remainder.

In 1957 Marcel Duchamp said during a lecture at Convention of the American Federation of Arts, Houston, Texas, April 1957 “ All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. "

All of this may sound very serious. It is also, simply, an invitation to eat artisan ice cream dreamed up by six different artists. Please come with your curiosity, appetite, and whomever you want to share a cone with, including your children.