ANOTHER IDEA

June 1 - July 31, 2020

Welcome to Another Idea, an actual conceptual art exhibition
The exhibition is now closed. Check back later for an archived version. Artists are listed below, along with a curatorial statement.

Artworks in Another Idea were inherently ephemeral. Many unfolded over time and appeared at various moments over the course of the exhibition. Some works were contingent on your participation, while others were iterative and transformed from one medium into another.  

The Gray Center would like to thank the artists below for their thoughtful and ambitious responses to our invitation to participate.

Zarouhie Abdalian       Carris Adams       Victor Burgin       Julia Eckhardt       Chelsea A. Flowers       Theaster Gates     

Liam Gillick       Renée Green       Susan Hiller       Kyle Bellucci Johanson       Gloria Maximo       Devin T. Mays     

Antoni Miralda       Pope.L       Cauleen Smith       Mami Takahashi       Philip von Zweck       Gillian Wearing       


Before the global pandemic broke out, it seemed for a brief moment that we might be on the verge of bidding adieu to the internet, that we once again might be social without the help of digital media, that we might be able to kick our screen addiction. But all that changed with the arrival of COVID 19 and the need (and compulsion) to spend more and more time connecting on-line resumed with urgency. In this rush to re-engage with each other on the internet, we were able to feel comforted from being in touch virtually, yet we have also registered the intense psychological strain of augmenting our quarantined existence with the virtual. What’s more, this virtual space has already been monopolized by large tele-media corporations from Google to YouTube to Zoom and back again. What recourse does art have in such a hyper-mediated and corporatized environment? The legacy of Conceptual Art seems to offer one possibility. Another Idea proposes not a virtual exhibition but an actual conceptual art exhibition.

Rather than approaching this exhibition as a virtual version of something that might otherwise live offline, Another Idea is devised specifically to question the relationship between the space an artwork occupies and what form(s) that artwork might take; i.e. conceptual art. We have our minds on early Conceptualist and Fluxus practices as well as those of artists from ensuing generations whose work begs the question: if not solely within a singular resulting output, then where is the work? Although much of this work can and does take a form, the connection between the final result and intent of the work remains malleable.

Are photos or videos of an action the actual work, or is it the thing that happened and could happen again? Is a sculpture the work or is it the people that engage with it over time? We might suggest that the answer is: yes—all of the above. So, what this exhibition seeks to do is illuminate, emphasize and/or introduce particular ways of considering the roles of context, site, time and material through the specific works of each artist and the structure(s) of the exhibition.

The exhibition is headquartered here, on the Gray Center website, while supporting the exhibition’s fluctuating presence on other platforms. The works in Another Idea also live wherever they are experienced: they can be printed at home, performed in the street, spoken in the dark, watched on screens, listened to on headsets, installed in a park, or thought about in the bath.

Conceived and organized by Zachary Cahill and Mike Schuh