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The art of disappearing: can artmaking only have meaning within the context of the art world? Johan Lundh in conversation with Krist Gruijthuijsen about the Archiving Disappearance project.

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When a successful artist decides to stop producing art, a ripple of questions ensues. Does this act announce the end of a lucrative career, or is it instead a refusal of the art world that made the success possible? Can a successful artist move away from the profession of art? Will this decision be interpreted and accepted as a private choice rather than as a public statement? Or, alternately, is it an altogether radical gesture, an attempt at fusing art and life?

For the last three years, Dutch curator Krist Gruijthuijsen has devoted himself to examining artists who have stopped creating art through his ongoing project Archiving Disappearance. The project is an archive of artists who have left artmaking and the art world behind. So far, Archiving Disappearance has resulted in two symposia. The first took place during Gruijthuijsen's residency at Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul in the spring of 2006. Among the participants were the Dutch artist duo Bik Van der Pol, Swedish curator Anders Kreuger and American curator Bob Nickas. The second symposium took place at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in the winter of 2006. In the second edition, participants included Swedish artist Andreas Gedin, German artist Hinrich Sachs and Austrian curator Hedwig Saxenhuber. The two instalments shared a similar structure where each participant presented a different artist who had abandoned art for one reason or the other. A book with texts and images from the two symposia is currently in production. Like Marcel Duchamp's The...

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