I’ve heard this story a couple of times from a friend (a friend of the student in the story, in fact) who brings it up when personal or social ambition is troubling someone. As I’ve understood it, the instruction of the guru is meant as an antidote to an hidden, ego-driven desire to possess people through charm. The lesson, to be generous and give (subtly, invisibly, almost) rather than take, without imposing oneself, seems an impossible instruction. I’ve sometimes wondered if it is a Zen koan meant to quiet the mind for meditation rather than a directive for actual application. I try to imagine what would occur if one truly attempted this as a way of moving through the world? Leaving only a slight impression of one’s presence, rather than an indelible mark. I’m not referring to the question of one’s legacy (that’s out of one’s control and indicative of too high-self regard, if not hubris), but to the simple, daily interactions with people. Conceiving of a convincing way in which one could leave people with an unnamable sense of love without being overbearing (missing the mark, therefore) at worst or wishy-washy (unconvincing) at least escapes me.

Robert Morris, Box with the Sound of its Own Making, 1961. Walnut box, speaker, & three-and-one-half-hour recorded tape

As impossible as it is for me to convince myself of this as a practical approach seems, I can understand it, at least a little, when I think of artists like Yves Klein, Lee Lozano, Robert Barry and Tino Sehgal, for example. Not that they achieved enlightenment, but that their artistic practices, at least in part, turn away from the art object in favor of something less immediate. This, of course, is not a new identification. Lucy Lippard noted it decades ago in Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972.

I think of these artists and their attitude towards the art object as being one focused on an art of disappearing. In my mind, their work is a kind of inversion of Robert Morris’ A Box With The Sound of its Own Making, artworks that depict their own leaving, dispersal or intangibility. A few examples will hopefully illustrate what I have in mind.

Yves Klein Receipt for Immaterial Zone of Pictorial Sensibility, 1959

Yves Klein sold Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, indicated by a receipt, to collectors for sums of gold. To fully complete the transaction, for the collector to truly receive the immaterial zone, the collector would have to submit to a ritual in which the receipt was torn up and half of the gold (in the form of gold leaf) was disposed of in the Seine.

Lee Lozano "Dialogue Piece" 1969

Lee Lozano recorded events undertaken as art (getting high for a month, talking with other artists) in notebook pages distributed in the form of photocopies. These documents, far from providing clarity or details offer more absence than presence. Reading them underlines the fact that the moment is long gone, the conversation limited to the participants and the high felt only by the toker. She herself disappeared (in a sense) decamping from the New York art world in her Removal Piece, which lasted (at least) until her death in 1999.

Robert Barry released gasses into the atmosphere and documented these invisible acts with photographs and written descriptions.

Robert Barry "Inert Gases: Neon" 1969

Tino Sehgal, a contemporary artist, choreographs experiences, triggered by precise occurrences (entering a gallery, asking a question, engaging with an attendant) that have no physical presence outside of the performative moment. He has pushed the furthest in removing the object from his work. He produces no certificates of authenticity or documentary photographs and even prohibits wall labels to indicate works on exhibition.

It is clear that the works that I’ve described suggest that absence can be presence, but most (the exception is Sehgal) rely on documentation to refer back to the work and so are not completely disembodied. It is my contention, that this is not a failure, but an important element in the meaning of these works.

These works most clearly exist as vehicles for thought or consideration. Ultimately, they exist in the mind of the viewer, rather than in their fallible embodied forms. In this way the documentation acts like Proust’s madeleine, calling to mind important thoughts and events long gone. Furthermore, though the documentation can be sold as an artwork and, therefore held privately, the work itself is available to all who would hold it in their minds, carrying it in their memories for enjoyable or productive consideration.

Peter Paul Rubens "Neptune Caling the Tempest" 1635

As I’ve thought about these works, I’ve noticed that this is true for all art objects. I remember my experience seeing Massacio’s Trinity in Florence and can live in that memory, fully, knowing that my mind was changed by that encounter. The difference is that I then want to buy a plane ticket. When I think about, say, Klein’s zone of pictorial sensibility, I just want to think.

Finally, when I think about an art object that I love, Ruben’s Neptune Calming The Tempest, not only do I want to possess it, but I am possessed by it. When I think of a work of art, on the other hand, created with the intention of its not remaining in a fixed physical form, if it ever had any, then I am already in full possession of it, but still free.

"Joint Dialogue," Lozano/Graham/Kaltenbach, curated by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer installation view, Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles

“Becoming a human being isn’t just something you get with your birth,” novelist Zadie Smith told Bookworm’s Michael Silverblatt in 2006. “It’s an exercise and it takes your whole life.” Smith said this following the publication of On Beauty, her relentless opus in which 450 pages of identity-searching ends in disaster—slander, scandal and death, all somehow stemming from the characters’ frustrating fixation on the question, “who am I?” The better question, according to Smith, and the one art should really help us ask, is, “Do other people exist in the same way I do?”

I thought of Smith earlier this week, while viewing Joint Dialogue at Overduin and Kite. This new exhibition of old work by Lee Lozano, Stephen Kaltenbach, and Dan Graham certainly treats being human, like being an artist, as a lifelong project. But, more provocatively, it also questions whether people can exist through each other and refuse to be each other at the same time.

Curated by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, the exhibition looks deceptively pragmatic, with text pieces tastefully spaced on each wall of the first gallery and a series of old Artforum magazines placed on wall-mounted pedestals in the second.  But Joint Dialogue (the title, a double entendre, refers to joining together and smoking together) is actually irreverently curious and funny, and it  traces a convergence that would make even Lawrence Weschler proud: in New York in the late 1960s, Lozano, Graham, and Kaltenbach were all grappling with the difficulty of living honestly and using drugs, sexuality and money to pull others into conversations about being artists (and just being in general). In fact, the explorations of Lozano, Graham, and Kaltenbach seem so entwined that, at time, it’s easy to forget they are three distinctly different personalities who would go on to have three distinctly different legacies.

"Joint Dialogue," Lozano/Graham/Kaltenbach, curated by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer installation view, Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles

The psychology of Dan Graham’s Income (Outflow) Piece (1969/1973), in which Graham attempted to sell shares in himself and to become solvent by “coming on” in the right way, seems to extend into Lee Lozano’s Real Money Piece, in which she offered a jar of money to other artists, who could either contribute or extract funds at will. Lozano wryly recorded people’s reactions; some, like Brice Marden (who apparently laughed at the idea), refused to take anything; others, like Graham, took and returned money on loan.  It became a document of artists’ divergent opinions about money and its distribution. Lozano’s Dialogue Piece (1969) worked similarly (and again, Graham played a key role: “Dan Graham and I have important dialogue in that definite changes were immediately effected because of it,” Lozano wrote). She contacted, or tried to contact, art world all-stars like Robert Morris and (less successfully) Jasper Johns, simply inviting them to talk.  The openness or aversion her peers had to this idea of dialogue, coupled with the fact that Lozano made herself vulnerable in order to draw others into an undefined, possibly precarious experience, give the piece its backbone. Lozano’s diaristic descriptions, which pointedly omit the actual content of each conversation, give the piece its  charm. One of my favorites: “we discuss ‘the Revolution,’ Brice [Marden] talking almost entirely abt shitty business practices in the art world, & shitty treatment of artists by each other.“

Around the same time Lozano made her Dialogue Piece and Graham made Income (Outflow) Piece, Stephen Kaltenbach was attributing his work to others–he attributed a clock he made to Lozano–and gifting to and borrowing from the practices of his peers. His mostly steel  Time Capsules, two of which he included in Joint Dialogue and some of which he dedicated to friends or acquaintances, were often engraved with pithy instructions (one said “open before my retrospective at the Tate in London”) and gave his seemingly transient, interaction-based art a comical permanence. Like Graham and Lozano, he set himself apart by wholeheartedly engaging other people.

"Joint Dialogue," Lozano/Graham/Kaltenbach, curated by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer installation view, Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles