"Silence, From de Chirico to Dale Earnhardt Sr." in @wsj

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Menil Collection, Houston
Giorgio de Chirico's 'Melancholia' (1916) is at Houston's Menil Collection

The avant-garde artist and composer John Cage famously said, "There's no such thing as silence." But that hasn't stopped contemporary visual masters (and, of course, Simon & Garfunkel) from using silence as a subject and a symbol.

"Silence," a new exhibition at the Menil Collection in Houston on view through Oct. 21, looks at how many things the lack of sound has come to stand for, from a path to serenity to oppression to mortality.

A starting point for "Silence" lies in the Menil itself. It's home to the Rothko Chapel, a sanctuary lined with 14 of Rothko's monochromes and inaugurated in 1971. It's long been a site for acts of quiet contemplation.

The earliest work in the show is Giorgio de Chirico's "Melancholia" from 1916, a rendering of a Neoclassical sculpture in a seemingly quiet courtyard with two tiny figures whispering to one another behind its back. De Chirico and other Surrealists dealt with "the silence of the world and the isolation of the individual," says curator Toby Kamps.

From the mid-20th century on, artists took a more conceptual approach. In 1961, Robert Morris pieced together a deceptively simple wooden box. Riffing on the silence visitors might expect in a white-walled gallery space, the piece has an internal speaker that plays a recording of all the bangs and clanks that accompanied its making.

While John Cage may have denied silence's existence, his 1952 composition "4'33"" required musicians to sit in silence with their instruments for three short movements, directing the audience's attention toward any ambient noise in or around the room. The composition was a direct influence on several of the more recent works on view in "Silence," including Kurt Mueller's "Cenotaph" from 2011.

The piece is a functional jukebox filled with notable "moments of silence" sourced from YouTube and C-Span and burned onto CDs. The recordings include a remembrance of the Space Shuttle Columbia and President Barack Obama's tribute to victims of the Aurora, Colo., shooting just a few weeks back. Visitors are invited to pop in a quarter and play a commemoration of their choosing.

True to Cage's statement, many of these moments aren't silent at all. "One of my favorites is a moment of silence for Dale Earnhardt Sr., who crashed at the Daytona 500," Mr. Mueller says. "He wore the number three, and on the third lap of the race 10 years later the crowd goes silent, but you still hear the sounds of the cars and the engines, driving around the track."

—Rachel Wolff

A version of this article appeared August 4, 2012, on page C14 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Silence, From de Chirico to Dale Earnhardt Sr..