The history of art is littered with projects that never saw the light of day, from the more fantastical inventions filling da Vinci's notebooks to a never-made film collaboration between Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp. For "Unbuilt Roads," curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has assembled over one hundred proposals for such thwarted works by contemporary artists, displaying them in blue diazo prints on the walls of E-Flux's Essex Street space through May 16 (see exhibition view below).

Some of the projects--originally collected in the book Unbuilt Roads: 107 Unrealized Projects, edited by Obrist and Guy Tortosa--were derailed because of the quasi-impossible conditions they would require. British artist Jonathan Monk, for instance, suggested in 1990 that the city of Glasgow relocate the pyramids of Gaza to a Scottish park. Cai Guo-Qiang's once wanted the United Nations to have everyone on the planet turn their lights off in synch. ("We humans should give the Earth a rest," he wrote. "Let her return to the universe, dark and quiet like the other planets.") Other works were realized years later in a different form, such as a T-shaped catwalk by Sylvie Fleury that was eventually exhibited in a museum rather than outdoors as originally intended. A piece by Nancy Spero using the Aztec quote "Child birth is our mortality, we who are women, for it is our battle" as a pro-choice slogan for a 1986 art event was in fact printed on a banner, but then censored before being shown.

No matter the end result, many of these proposals can be seen as works of art in their own right. Gabriel Orozco’s rejected design for his "Acquapracasa," an architectural housing project with a semi-circular pool, looks… like a Gabriel Orozco print (see below). And Rirkrit Tiravanija's hilarious 1993 proposal for a piece requiring a museum director to work in a replica of his office moved onto the open floor of the museum ("as he would in his normal daily routine") communicates its irreverent idea clearly. The museum's response? "Silence," Tiravanija writes. "I was not included in the exhibition."

Read about another show and a book dealing with unmade artworks:
"Henry Moore Foundation to Showcase Public Art Proposals That Never Made It" [Via the Guardian]
Rejected Collection: Rejected Proposals by Chinese Contemporary Artists [Via Amazon.com]

Gabriel Orozco's design for this housing project with a semi-circular pool looks like one of his signature geometrical artworks. ; Courtesy of Gabriel Orozco and e-flux

An installation view of "Unbuilt Roads" at E-Flux. ; Courtesy of E-Flux