John McCracken: Zwirner & Wirth.(Critical Essay)

It's a truism that the simplest problems are the toughest to crack, and a question posed some forty years ago by the artist John McCracken is no exception: "If a piece is blue, what color is the space around it?" Scrawled into the pages of a notebook, the riddle has a slightly Wittgensteinian flavor.

(It was the author of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1921] who wrote, "This space I can imagine as empty, but I cannot imagine the thing without the space.") Yet McCracken has spent decades pondering relationships between things and the spaces they inhabit, less as ...

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