Jonke is a master of describing insane social contraptions such as forests you are told to fear because of an invisible enemy, lists of arbitrary laws you could never begin to keep track of with a mathematical finesse, more interested in exploring the space of the world than necessarily driving along what happens in it.
As Ingrid Schaffner, one of the show's curators, riffs in her catalog essay, this has led the artists on view (there are about 60) to investigate "absence, anarchy, the absurd, nonsense, zip, zero, infinity, atmosphere, ellipsis, negation, annihilation, whiteness, blackness, formlessness, the void, abjection, the invisible" -- the list goes on.
The show is influenced by Peggy McIntosh's 1988 essay White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, which lists 50 everyday examples of white privilege (No. 21: "I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group"; No. 32: "My culture gives me little fear about ignoring the perspectives and powers of people of other races").
You can make these lists invisible, but it remains an opt-out process instead of an opt-in one.
But this discounted apple ignores a laundry list of invisible costs.
Four in 10 could pick the name of Ralph Ellison's novel about a young man's growing up in the South and moving to Harlem, "Invisible Man," from a list of titles.
Her name is right alongside his on the Oscars and yet she is invisible on the rich list and we hear little of her publicly.
These rules derive from one of my favorite books, Selling the Invisible by Harry Beckwith, which lists hundreds of "immutable laws" that marketing types should heed as they launch new products or services into the market.
I am scared of: – being unloved – being alone – being misunderstood – being invisible... and oh the list goes on.
Certainly there had been a few artists in rock prior to this who'd gone further than idle interview chat about influences, performers whose music came attached with a sort of invisible reading and movie-watching list: Bowie, obviously, with songs about Andy Warhol and extremist performance artist Chris Burden Roxy Musicc, to a slightly less overt degree.
