This is the last week to see Ian Wilson’s Circle on the Floor, Circle on the Wall, two 1968 works presented by Yoshi Hill at Camel Gallery in NoHo [by appt].
The circles are instruction-based objects, released in an open, numbered edition that closed at Wilson’s death in 2020. They immediately preceded, and in some ways perhaps precipitated, Wilson’s shift from physical art to art comprised of language and oral communication, which became his Discussion series. These continued until 1986, when Wilson returned to the physical by making artist books, first as editions, and then in unique sets.
In his other guise as a rare and art book dealer, Hill has at least one such set of unique volumes, Sections 195-208, was published in 1997 by Robert Ryman and belonged to Wilson’s dealer Peter Blum. Each book (or Section) has a single abstract word or phrase repeated on every page.
In his 2013 Artist on Artist talk on Wilson at Dia, Ken Lum said,
The repetition of the word or phrase takes on the effect of a mantra, which in Indian philosophies is a verbal sound considered capable of “creating spiritual transformation.” Mantra, as some of you may know, can also mean circle. The sounds are meant to engage the minds of both the one who chants as well as the one who listens.
Hill also has a copy of Ian Wilson: The Discussions, the fascinating and now-rare catalogue raisonné of forty years’ worth of these non-material artworks, which was published by the Van Abbemuseum in 2009.
Later on in his talk, Lum connected his fresh experience of a Discussion with Wilson to Circle on the Floor, which Lum made and showed in his storefront Vancouver gallery in 1983:
When I participated in Wilson’s most recent Discussion here at Dia last month, titled “The Pure Awareness of the Absolute,” I arrived about ten minutes early to find a group of people sitting in a circle that was approximate to the size of Wilson’s Chalk Circle on the Floor of 1968. This work now takes on new meaning for me as a spatial marker for a participatory dialogue in the round. It is no longer possible for me to see it exclusively as a reductivist gesture, for there is now always an accompanying image that I have of strangers seated together and opening up to one another through self-reflection.
So make your appointment at Camel Gallery before August 16.
Ian Wilson, Circles: 17 July — 16 August 2026, Yoshi Hill at Camel Gallery [jonathanahill]
Previously, related, from 2010: On Ian Wilson’s Art Objects
The Art World Has the Attention Span of a Gnat
And Who Was Writing Those Ian Wilson Discussion Invoices?