It is possible that the concept of invisible art has the conviction of a pile of vegetable peelings: its formal features are fleeting, glimpsed only in the half-light before they are gone, decomposing at a drastic rate that is relative to the weight of its own dubious suppositions. In fact, I am not entirely convinced myself that this is a real or worthy movement. I am, however, very intrigued. If art is about imagination it doesn’t seem too outrageous to propose a work where this skill is demanded of the people interacting with it, surely?

In the gallery of art that doesn’t actually exist, the hooks are hanging onto a heavy weight, but as brushstrokes are replaced by blankness, the mass is mostly in the mind. This expanse would be mere emptiness waiting to be filled, if not for the contemporary context wherein its depth endows it with potentiality, a powerful invisible presence. Well, supposedly. It’s hard to be sure when such a large selection of invisible art has been but a hoax aimed with contempt at the champagne-clinking art collectors with far too much cash floating around. At the same time, certain exhibitions such as Invisible: Art about the Unseen, 1957-2012 at the Hayward Gallery (2012) are definitely not a joke, being described with defiance as the best exhibition you'll never see.

Whilst works included a piece of paper at which an artist stared for 1,000 hours over a period of five years, as well as evidence of a movie shot without film in the camera, and a plinth upon which Warhol briefly stood before stepping off, others were more serious and solemn. For instance, an exhibition by Teresa Margolles entailed her collecting water that had been used to wash the bodies of murder victims in Mexico City's morgue before placing it in a humidifier. The sinister intimacy is difficult to imagine, pricking right to the core as the substance clung like sweat to the spectator now squirming uncomfortably in their own skin. I grant you its grossness with a retch at the ready, but shivers sent down your spine is surely more worth mentioning than something sketched in perfect alignment with aesthetic expectations, stealing but a bat of an eyelid from the busy reader whose attention is already elsewhere.

A personal favourite is Martin Creed’s Turner Prize winning piece from 2001, ‘Work No. 227: The lights going on and off’, consisting of an empty room faithful to its title with lights on a time switch flicking on and off every five seconds. While it has been valued in recent years at being worth around £110,000, the initial symphony of disappointed tuts, tabloid coverage and tossing of eggs to its blank walls in toast of disgust places a priceless value on this piece: you simply can’t purchase national outrage. This frightening installation has been described not just as a matter of mood swings, but as “something more basic and perverse: the inability to preserve joy (…) the need to measure it against a black background.” There is thus undeniably a philosophical undercurrent in what may initially appear to be petty and pretentious pranks.

Whether this all seems ridiculous or revolutionary, such ideas have been lurking in the shadows of our collective artistic consciousness for some time. It harks back to the 1950s when Yves Klein emptied a gallery space and painted every surface white, staging an elaborate publicity and entrance procedure for the opening night where 3000 people queued up, waiting to be let into an empty room to stare but at a blank wall. It was in 1952 that the seeds of silence were sown, when John Cage's notorious piano composition was first performed, consisting of four minutes and thirty-three seconds in which the performer plays nothing.

Each artwork that attempts to escape from its frame, casting aside the shackles of convention and its codes of expectation, is a spectacle of innovation that nevertheless requires a tradition to subvert. In similarity with a set of scales, such tradition requires a degree of innovation to keep the tradition alive. There is thus an interdependency between tradition and innovation, just as there is between past and present, where neither can exist nor be appreciated independently of the other.

This column then rests its conclusion upon the fact that habitude is a force from which the human mind cannot easily escape, but that there is merit in at least making an attempt. After all, as Krishnamurti said: “tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.” If nothing else, contemporary art makes sure its spectators are never more mould than mind.

@JadeCuttle