Modernist references include Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, of the 1920s, El Lissitsky’s Proun and Demonstrationsräume, and Marcel Duchamp’s installation at the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1938. another important precedent is Yves Klein’s Le Vide, staged at the Iris Clert gallery in Paris in 1958. Even if Klein’s original intention was not to make the exhibition space into his work, it is the first instance in which the bare exhibition space was presented as a work of art. In this vein, artists such as Dan Graham (Public Space/Two Audiences, 1976), Hans Haacke (Condensation Cube, 1963-1965, and Polls, 1967-1971), Mel Bochner (Measurement: Room, 1969), and Michael Asher, among others, made works in which the gallery space as well as the public became the work of art itself. In Rosario, Argentina, artist Graciela Carnevale staged an action titled Encierro, in 1968, where she locked the public inside the empty gallery space provoking an aggressive participation since the public had to break the glass façade of the gallery space in order to get out. These works, among many others, are important references for this exhibition, and the ways in which the works exhibited here all integrate, physically and/or discursively, the exhibition space into the work. Allan McCollum’s Surrogates, 1982-1992, interpellate ideas such as context and the exhibition space, functioning as tools that allow us to interpret the exchange of meaning that occurs in the relation between art and the context where it is exhibited. Meyer Vaisman’s Painting Without Context, 1986, operates in a similar way and is related to another series of works by the artist titled “Fillers” that Vaisman conceives of as paintings to be placed in the space between other paintings; these only depict an amplified image of the canvas fabric printed on the canvas. The work of John Baldessari, The Battle of San Romano, 1975, inscribes the exhibition space within the frame of the “painting”, evoking the history of representation and of painting itself. Richard Artschwager’s Untitled - Quotation marks, 1980, include the space of the exhibition and the spectators in their context. The participatory nature of the experiences that analyze and subvert the notion of the “white cube” are evident in the works of Olafur Eliasson, Hélio Oiticica and Neville d’Almeida, Karin Schneider, and Félix González Torres. When we enter the space illuminated by Eliasson’s Mono-frequency lamp (2004) we experience ourselves seeing. Eliasson employs this type of light in order to highlight the fact that the convention of the “white cube” is culturally conditioned. For Eliasson, the modification of vision effected by this type of light alters the exhibition politics of the institution and subverts the notion of the “white cube” privileging the subjective experience of the spectator. Oiticica and d’Almeida’s Cosmococa I: Trashiscapes, 1973, invites the spectator to lie on the mattresses and experience the image projection and soundtrack as well as the space that contains them in a manner radically different from the traditional experience of looking at artworks in a museum or a film in a cinema. Karin Schneider’s Slide Projector with 80 Fragments of One Photograph, 2007 is part of the artist’s installation at Orchard gallery --a collaborative artist-run gallery in which Schneider participated--in which she publicly exposed the mechanisms of production, installation and deinstallation of an exhibition and engaged in a reflection on the nature of collaboration, since each module was a collaboration between Schneider and another artist she invited. By presenting a fragment of the work, decontextualized from its original location and conditions of display, certain elements reflect its current context and through this reflection establish a dialogue with the ideas that inform this exhibition, especially the notion of the structure of an exhibition or the dispositif. Félix González Torres’ Untitled (Ross in LA), 1988, is a paper stack sculpture which gradually dematerializes as the spectators take the sheets of paper that constitute it. An outstanding aspect of the work of González Torres is the artist’s democratic approach to the object that subverts notions of uniqueness and irreproducibility. As volumes, the stacks share the aesthetics of minimalist sculpture and its particular relation to the exhibition space and the audience. However, González Torres was actively engaged in AIDS-related activism (both he and his partner Ross succumbed to the illness in the nineties), and these stack pieces, as well as the candy works, also function as a metaphor of the body that gradually fades away, wasted by the disease.