Textures of Time - Exhibition Frederick Parker Gallery - Private View 7 April 2011
Text by Rianne Groen, Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk and Catherine Y. Serrano
The artists presented in Textures of Time share a common interest in making temporalities tangible. Taking temporality as its point of departure, the artworks become agents in order to scrutinize or make palpable time’s various forms and modes of operation. The relation of art to temporality is often linked to the promise of eternity, and maintains a paradoxical relationship between the permanent object versus that of the experiential moment. Departing from this promise, the artworks here emphasize impermanence or allude to the instability of the present. As Boris Groys mentions in his essay Comrades of Time, “Contemporary art deserves its name if it manifests its own contemporaneity - and not simply if it is currently made or displayed.” One would not question how contemporary our contemporaneity is if the picture of the world were stable and well defined. Instability and uncertainty are characteristic of our time - the present ceases to be a point of transition from past to the future. Instead, present time is a site of continuous reflection and recurring iterations.
Without the confines and pressures of a termination point, the present can be perceived as autonomous, manifesting itself through numerous variations. Loop, repetition and recurrence problematize the way in which the conventions of time are understood. The loop implies sameness, a cycling and retracing over itself – the place of departure becoming that of the arrival. There is no diversion of paths, nor a change in conditions.
The nature of the loop and its infinite renewal produces a disorientating effect. This disorientation appears as a new place and time, making aware the limitations of our memory. Unable to replay instances as they originally occurred, memory is subject to the effects of repetition and relies tenuously on the security of that which has already existed. In contrast to loop and repetition, recurrence carries along the weight and detritus of the time lapsed; events and thoughts recur and accumulate new conditions. Informed by these passing intervals of time, the original moment is altered through recurrence – infinitely transgressing into new forms.
In Borges’ short story The Aleph, eternity is never one thing. By employing the Aleph, a device used to view the infinite, the eternity that the main character sees is millions of things at the same time. Borges has difficulty describing what he sees in the Aleph, “What my eyes saw was simultaneous; what I shall write is successive, because language is successive”. The description of the Aleph captures an exaggerated version of the varieties of time, a constant flux evolving around a moment.
Although the present may be regarded as an eternal loop from a cyclical perspective, the circle is not flawless. Fluctuations of time imply continuous change within the present; we can forward and rewind, freeze the frame, or slow down the image. The future is never newly planned; permanent changes in cultural trends and fashions make any promise of a stable future improbable. The past is also permanently rewritten, names and events appear, disappear, reappear, and disappear again. This cyclical phenomenon is subject to constant flux, while still moving in a circle. This constant change and passing of time has often been naively misinterpreted as a form of continuous progress and improvement. A new work of art becomes something else, existing within a new variety of time.
The subjective dimension of temporality posits the question of causality. Why do we experience variation in the perceived passage of time? Presumably, perceived duration is shaped by the interplay of self and situation. The self already constitutes many problematic aspects: we often seem to be the victims of temporality, but just as frequently we strive to control or manipulate it. Our experience of time encompasses both our desires and circumstances. One could argue that the combination of individual and external factors shape much of what we experience as the textures of time.
In the exhibition, the consideration of time and temporalities is enforced by means of artistic practice. The artworks included scrutinize both the tangible and material aspects, as well as actively engaging with various notions and tropes of time. Progressing from the formal aspect, temporalities are most of all experienced. To make this experience visible, the artworks within the exhibition space act as catalysts - making the distribution of the sensible possible.
These time-based artworks are not reliant on time as a solid foundation; rather, they document time that is in danger of being lost as a result of its unproductive character. This change in the relationship between art and time also changes the temporality of art itself, merely creating the effect of presence. Art begins to document a repetitive, indefinite, and perhaps an eternal present – a present that has always been and can be prolonged into the indefinite future. Hence, practicing literal repetition can be seen as initiating a rupture in the continuity of life by creating a non-historical excess of time through art.
Thursday 31 March 2011
N.B.K. Berlin - Karin Sander
The Sky is a Landfill
There is a hole in the ceiling. The whitish light of an office space shines through, creating a new version of an indoors Pantheon. Then slowly, instead of the expected sunbeam or occasional snowflake, a sheet of paper falls down. It ends its way on the floor, sitting snug between other sheets of paper. They are not just sheets of paper; there is no empty one to be seen. They contain information, often read, often wrong, discarded for several reasons. Among the species of paper are not only sheets, usually A4 size, but there are also other forms. The envelope is quite common, whether it is white, with a transparent window, or in eccentric occasions colored to stand out from the crowd. It comes in different sizes, made to contain several sheets of A4 sized paper, or invitation cards (often A5 sized). Some of the species are in a worse condition than others. While some sheets of paper have made the floor in an excellent condition, others have been torn before making their way down. This tattered condition reveals itself in different ways; torn from one side to another, or from the top to the bottom. Sometimes it is torn in both directions, in several small pieces.
These unfortunate papers are not always together anymore, but lie scattered amongst the other species. They contain words, maybe sentences; but are barely fragments.
In the worst case, papers are crumpled up. This expression of a failed attempt upstairs might be a typical utterance of the fear of the writer to discard his or her written text. It could also be an attempt of the occupier in the office upstairs to aestheticize his or her trash.
Several rare items can be found between the more common papers and envelopes. Items like magazines or boxes, formerly containing pastry, strepsils, or office supplies such as elastics, paperclips or staples. Unfortunately more personalized species from the world above seem extinct. Waste forms such as used tissues, chewed food or post-it notes are almost absent. It seems like the occupiers of the office above have been thinking about where their discarded items will end up; in a pile on the shiny gallery floor, for everyone to see. Another snowstorm of words will soon fall down; the sky is a landfill.
There is a hole in the ceiling. The whitish light of an office space shines through, creating a new version of an indoors Pantheon. Then slowly, instead of the expected sunbeam or occasional snowflake, a sheet of paper falls down. It ends its way on the floor, sitting snug between other sheets of paper. They are not just sheets of paper; there is no empty one to be seen. They contain information, often read, often wrong, discarded for several reasons. Among the species of paper are not only sheets, usually A4 size, but there are also other forms. The envelope is quite common, whether it is white, with a transparent window, or in eccentric occasions colored to stand out from the crowd. It comes in different sizes, made to contain several sheets of A4 sized paper, or invitation cards (often A5 sized). Some of the species are in a worse condition than others. While some sheets of paper have made the floor in an excellent condition, others have been torn before making their way down. This tattered condition reveals itself in different ways; torn from one side to another, or from the top to the bottom. Sometimes it is torn in both directions, in several small pieces.
These unfortunate papers are not always together anymore, but lie scattered amongst the other species. They contain words, maybe sentences; but are barely fragments.
In the worst case, papers are crumpled up. This expression of a failed attempt upstairs might be a typical utterance of the fear of the writer to discard his or her written text. It could also be an attempt of the occupier in the office upstairs to aestheticize his or her trash.
Several rare items can be found between the more common papers and envelopes. Items like magazines or boxes, formerly containing pastry, strepsils, or office supplies such as elastics, paperclips or staples. Unfortunately more personalized species from the world above seem extinct. Waste forms such as used tissues, chewed food or post-it notes are almost absent. It seems like the occupiers of the office above have been thinking about where their discarded items will end up; in a pile on the shiny gallery floor, for everyone to see. Another snowstorm of words will soon fall down; the sky is a landfill.
Friday 11 March 2011
Review - Lisson Gallery, SE8, Timothy Taylor
Rianne Groen
first published on www.metropolism.com
While the larger museums and institutions in London are busy determining who the most important British artists of the moment are (in exhibitions such as British Art Show 7 at the Hayward Gallery and Modern British Sculpture at the Royal Academy), commercial galleries take their chance of highlighting one of their represented artists in these shows. Haroon Mirza, whose work is currently at the Hayward, and Susan Hiller, currently at Tate, both get their chance in Lisson Gallery and Timothy Taylor Gallery. Next to the commercial galleries, some of the smaller institutions go their own way, as SE8 does with a collection of soundtracks made by artists.
Haroon Mirza - Lisson Gallery - on show until 5 March
In the first solo exhibition of the young artist in London, Haroon Mirza (1977) shows large installations with sound, light and video. The mixture of seeing and hearing is overwhelming when entering the gallery; not only do we see turning record players; we also hear the sound of the intentionally scratched record that is playing. A coin is bouncing on a speaker, and a string of little green lights is triggered by the music. Parts of the wall are covered with thick foam isolation material. Discarded household electronics, furniture and found video footage make up the installations. The gallery feels like a deserted studio space where a little boy has been messing around with the equipment.
Mirza describes the works as “unfolding compositions in time”, making the different installations become a larger musical work when walking through the gallery. The whole exhibition can be seen in parts, but can also end up evoking the feeling of a live performance by a progressive dj collective.
In group exhibitions, Mirza is very interested in curatorial concerns surrounding the effects that sound works have on other artworks, as can be seen in his work currently on show in the British Art Show at the Hayward Gallery. At Lisson, the gallery is truly Mirza’s domain, allowing his installations to develop in the best possible way, and become a grand musical performance.
The Half Shut Door
SE8, on show until 19 March
While sound and vision played an equal part in Haroon Mirza’s exhibition, the visual is completely absent in the exhibition The Half Shut Door at SE8 in Deptford. Thick black curtains have blinded the small space, and upon entering you cannot see anything. When your eyes slowly get accustomed to the dark, you can perceive a few black bean bags to sit on, and one stereo installation.
For this slightly unexpected non-visual art show, curators Nicolas de Oliveira and Nicola Oxley asked artists Hans op de Beeck, Dryden Goodwin, Stefan Brüggeman and João Onofre to create a soundtrack. Whereas a soundtrack is usually made to accompany a film, so to enhance the visual, in this case the usual gets inverted and results in sculptures of sound. The sound - sometimes pleasantly jazzy, sometimes no more than grey noise - develops in the dark space as almost being a new spatial material.
After a phase of being somewhat uncomfortable with the lack of physical work in the exhibition space, you grow accustomed to the experience of sound, as if our body is the sculptural.
Susan Hiller - Timothy Taylor Gallery, on show until 5 March
So much noise as the exhibition at SE8 makes, so quiet is it at Timothy Taylor Gallery in Mayfair. Accompanying her large survey exhibition currently on show at Tate Britain, Timothy Taylor presents, quite unsurprisingly, an exhibition with works by Susan Hiller. This does trigger the thought that the commercial gallery’s show is just on to satisfy selling demand of the now so popular artist. It can however also be an opportunity for a useful and modest addition to the more spectacular works on show at Tate. The small gallery show gives an overview of some of the recent works in Hiller’s oeuvre. The familiar aura photographs are there, as well as the fascinating Homage to Yves Klein series, but also a recent sculptural installation. Homage to Gertrude Stein (2010) is a vintage desk filled with books. Books about automatic writing, a subject that Stein as well as Hiller was very interested in. In all of her ‘homages’, Hiller seems to link the work of the person she is honouring to her own work, making that new connection into a fascinating imaginative relationship.
first published on www.metropolism.com
While the larger museums and institutions in London are busy determining who the most important British artists of the moment are (in exhibitions such as British Art Show 7 at the Hayward Gallery and Modern British Sculpture at the Royal Academy), commercial galleries take their chance of highlighting one of their represented artists in these shows. Haroon Mirza, whose work is currently at the Hayward, and Susan Hiller, currently at Tate, both get their chance in Lisson Gallery and Timothy Taylor Gallery. Next to the commercial galleries, some of the smaller institutions go their own way, as SE8 does with a collection of soundtracks made by artists.
Haroon Mirza - Lisson Gallery - on show until 5 March
In the first solo exhibition of the young artist in London, Haroon Mirza (1977) shows large installations with sound, light and video. The mixture of seeing and hearing is overwhelming when entering the gallery; not only do we see turning record players; we also hear the sound of the intentionally scratched record that is playing. A coin is bouncing on a speaker, and a string of little green lights is triggered by the music. Parts of the wall are covered with thick foam isolation material. Discarded household electronics, furniture and found video footage make up the installations. The gallery feels like a deserted studio space where a little boy has been messing around with the equipment.
Mirza describes the works as “unfolding compositions in time”, making the different installations become a larger musical work when walking through the gallery. The whole exhibition can be seen in parts, but can also end up evoking the feeling of a live performance by a progressive dj collective.
In group exhibitions, Mirza is very interested in curatorial concerns surrounding the effects that sound works have on other artworks, as can be seen in his work currently on show in the British Art Show at the Hayward Gallery. At Lisson, the gallery is truly Mirza’s domain, allowing his installations to develop in the best possible way, and become a grand musical performance.
The Half Shut Door
SE8, on show until 19 March
While sound and vision played an equal part in Haroon Mirza’s exhibition, the visual is completely absent in the exhibition The Half Shut Door at SE8 in Deptford. Thick black curtains have blinded the small space, and upon entering you cannot see anything. When your eyes slowly get accustomed to the dark, you can perceive a few black bean bags to sit on, and one stereo installation.
For this slightly unexpected non-visual art show, curators Nicolas de Oliveira and Nicola Oxley asked artists Hans op de Beeck, Dryden Goodwin, Stefan Brüggeman and João Onofre to create a soundtrack. Whereas a soundtrack is usually made to accompany a film, so to enhance the visual, in this case the usual gets inverted and results in sculptures of sound. The sound - sometimes pleasantly jazzy, sometimes no more than grey noise - develops in the dark space as almost being a new spatial material.
After a phase of being somewhat uncomfortable with the lack of physical work in the exhibition space, you grow accustomed to the experience of sound, as if our body is the sculptural.
Susan Hiller - Timothy Taylor Gallery, on show until 5 March
So much noise as the exhibition at SE8 makes, so quiet is it at Timothy Taylor Gallery in Mayfair. Accompanying her large survey exhibition currently on show at Tate Britain, Timothy Taylor presents, quite unsurprisingly, an exhibition with works by Susan Hiller. This does trigger the thought that the commercial gallery’s show is just on to satisfy selling demand of the now so popular artist. It can however also be an opportunity for a useful and modest addition to the more spectacular works on show at Tate. The small gallery show gives an overview of some of the recent works in Hiller’s oeuvre. The familiar aura photographs are there, as well as the fascinating Homage to Yves Klein series, but also a recent sculptural installation. Homage to Gertrude Stein (2010) is a vintage desk filled with books. Books about automatic writing, a subject that Stein as well as Hiller was very interested in. In all of her ‘homages’, Hiller seems to link the work of the person she is honouring to her own work, making that new connection into a fascinating imaginative relationship.
Wednesday 23 February 2011
Artistic Animals
Artistic Animals
The ethical implications of working with living animals in contemporary art
(short version based on my MA dissertation - published in United Academics magazine)
In 2008 the San Francisco Art Institute closed an exhibition earlier than planned. On show was a video work by Adel Abdessemed, that showed six animals being brutally killed with a large hammer. Protests against the work were so vast that the exhibition was stopped after a week. Members of staff of the San Francisco Art Institute were even threatened by animal rights organizations. Although the artist had just filmed the atrocities at a Mexican farm, viewers of the video started wondering what his role was in the violence against animals.
Artists working with living animals often arouse great outrage within organizations that defend animal rights. Despite protests and media attention, it seems that artist are still allowed to go a little bit further than other people in society. This is caused by the idea that art has some autonomy; we assume the artist has an artistic intention. This gives art a special place within society. However, artist that use living animals in their artistic practice are often regarded as immoral. Is this immoral aspect used by the artist with an ethical goal or is it just provocation?
That artworks making use of living animals are provocative has been proven again and again. Hermann Nitsch risked prison with his bloody rituals; Eduardo Kac bred a green glowing rabbit and Damien Hirst ordered a rare shark for his widely known work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991).
One of the most infamous examples is probably the work in which Marco Evaristti put several goldfish in food processors, plugged in and ready to go. The work Helena (2000) was on show in the Trapholt Art Museum in Kolding (Denmark). Just one push on the yellow button would create goldfish soup. In the time the electricity was on, about 16 goldfish were crushed. The protests by animal right organizations were heavy, and even a few surviving goldfish were stolen from the blenders. After two days the museum decided to pull out the plugs.
The moral dilemma Evaristti questioned here is clear. We, the audience, have the power over the life of a few goldfish. Do we let them live, or reduce them to goldfish puree? Do we need to make use of all the possibilities we have? Usually, when being in a museum, we are not even allowed to touch the artworks. Evaristti did not aim to encourage the useless killing of goldfish. He aimed to pose a moral dilemma; an experiment with human nature.
Evaristti and the museum director were summoned to pay a fine, but were eventually acquitted.
However, complaints about immoral artworks can get more serious. Recently Dutch artist Tinkebell, known around the world for once having her cat made into a handbag, had to come to court to defend one of her artworks. In her work Save the Pets (2008), hundred hamsters were put in transparent plastic balls, which are produced by the pet industry. In a living room setting, she let the hamsters roll around in the gallery for three weeks. She based her work on short films she had seen on YouTube of pet owners using the plastic balls to watch their hamsters rolling around in their house. Being accused of animal abuse, she was called to court.
Tinkebell, using her provocative work to raise attention for animal welfare, won the case. However, it were the same animal rights organizations she has said to support that sued her. This is one of the difficulties in trying to raise attention for a case through provocative art. Many people have problems with the viewing of art as something else than just real life; artists as Tinkebell are therefore often dismissed as sensational and attention seeking people.
It seems natural today that we should bother about animals, although they are still largely abused in the meat industry for our food. Throughout Western history, animals have always been regarded as subordinate to humans. In the animal kingdom we also see a certain hierarchy; not much protest has been heard about the Belgian artist and theatre maker Jan Fabre using millions of shiny beetles for his artworks, whereas Wim Delvoye has had much trouble with his work that includes the tattooing of pigs. Most of us simply do not grant a spider and a cow the same amount of respect.
The shift in Western philosophy to think of animals as creatures that deserve some ethical consideration has been very slow. Only in the last century philosophers like Levinas and Derrida started thinking about the relations between humans and animals in different ways. Although our conscience has changed in favor of the animal, the differences still remain complicated, and question the borders of our respect for the animal.
Despite this complicated relationship between humans and animals, we tend to feel aversion to artworks that show us cruelty towards animals, whether this is implicit or explicit. Should we accept an artwork that contradicts our moral? Art is made from an artistic intention and therefore also requires an artistic attitude from the spectator. Because of the autonomy of art, moral borders are stretched; when we as spectators see an artwork, we know we do not have to intervene, because it is art we are seeing, and not a scene in the street. But it is only natural that provocative art generates an inner resistance. Morality is our inner police officer; we know automatically what is right and wrong. Whether you accept something as art or not, it will still not be very pleasant to watch a work of the kind I discussed.
A good immoral work is not one that is just shocking; a shock effect is rarely lasting. A good immoral work provides ongoing food for thought. By confronting us with topics we would rather avoid or ignore, artists encourage us to think about these uncomfortable subjects. Through our own morality we can recognize the artwork as immoral and gather knowledge out of this. But despite the autonomy of art, moral borders do not cease to exist. It is the responsibility of the artist to decide how far he can go in using animals. But also the spectator has responsibility; when we watch a goldfish swim around in a food processor, it does not mean we have to push the button.
The ethical implications of working with living animals in contemporary art
(short version based on my MA dissertation - published in United Academics magazine)
In 2008 the San Francisco Art Institute closed an exhibition earlier than planned. On show was a video work by Adel Abdessemed, that showed six animals being brutally killed with a large hammer. Protests against the work were so vast that the exhibition was stopped after a week. Members of staff of the San Francisco Art Institute were even threatened by animal rights organizations. Although the artist had just filmed the atrocities at a Mexican farm, viewers of the video started wondering what his role was in the violence against animals.
Artists working with living animals often arouse great outrage within organizations that defend animal rights. Despite protests and media attention, it seems that artist are still allowed to go a little bit further than other people in society. This is caused by the idea that art has some autonomy; we assume the artist has an artistic intention. This gives art a special place within society. However, artist that use living animals in their artistic practice are often regarded as immoral. Is this immoral aspect used by the artist with an ethical goal or is it just provocation?
That artworks making use of living animals are provocative has been proven again and again. Hermann Nitsch risked prison with his bloody rituals; Eduardo Kac bred a green glowing rabbit and Damien Hirst ordered a rare shark for his widely known work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991).
One of the most infamous examples is probably the work in which Marco Evaristti put several goldfish in food processors, plugged in and ready to go. The work Helena (2000) was on show in the Trapholt Art Museum in Kolding (Denmark). Just one push on the yellow button would create goldfish soup. In the time the electricity was on, about 16 goldfish were crushed. The protests by animal right organizations were heavy, and even a few surviving goldfish were stolen from the blenders. After two days the museum decided to pull out the plugs.
The moral dilemma Evaristti questioned here is clear. We, the audience, have the power over the life of a few goldfish. Do we let them live, or reduce them to goldfish puree? Do we need to make use of all the possibilities we have? Usually, when being in a museum, we are not even allowed to touch the artworks. Evaristti did not aim to encourage the useless killing of goldfish. He aimed to pose a moral dilemma; an experiment with human nature.
Evaristti and the museum director were summoned to pay a fine, but were eventually acquitted.
However, complaints about immoral artworks can get more serious. Recently Dutch artist Tinkebell, known around the world for once having her cat made into a handbag, had to come to court to defend one of her artworks. In her work Save the Pets (2008), hundred hamsters were put in transparent plastic balls, which are produced by the pet industry. In a living room setting, she let the hamsters roll around in the gallery for three weeks. She based her work on short films she had seen on YouTube of pet owners using the plastic balls to watch their hamsters rolling around in their house. Being accused of animal abuse, she was called to court.
Tinkebell, using her provocative work to raise attention for animal welfare, won the case. However, it were the same animal rights organizations she has said to support that sued her. This is one of the difficulties in trying to raise attention for a case through provocative art. Many people have problems with the viewing of art as something else than just real life; artists as Tinkebell are therefore often dismissed as sensational and attention seeking people.
It seems natural today that we should bother about animals, although they are still largely abused in the meat industry for our food. Throughout Western history, animals have always been regarded as subordinate to humans. In the animal kingdom we also see a certain hierarchy; not much protest has been heard about the Belgian artist and theatre maker Jan Fabre using millions of shiny beetles for his artworks, whereas Wim Delvoye has had much trouble with his work that includes the tattooing of pigs. Most of us simply do not grant a spider and a cow the same amount of respect.
The shift in Western philosophy to think of animals as creatures that deserve some ethical consideration has been very slow. Only in the last century philosophers like Levinas and Derrida started thinking about the relations between humans and animals in different ways. Although our conscience has changed in favor of the animal, the differences still remain complicated, and question the borders of our respect for the animal.
Despite this complicated relationship between humans and animals, we tend to feel aversion to artworks that show us cruelty towards animals, whether this is implicit or explicit. Should we accept an artwork that contradicts our moral? Art is made from an artistic intention and therefore also requires an artistic attitude from the spectator. Because of the autonomy of art, moral borders are stretched; when we as spectators see an artwork, we know we do not have to intervene, because it is art we are seeing, and not a scene in the street. But it is only natural that provocative art generates an inner resistance. Morality is our inner police officer; we know automatically what is right and wrong. Whether you accept something as art or not, it will still not be very pleasant to watch a work of the kind I discussed.
A good immoral work is not one that is just shocking; a shock effect is rarely lasting. A good immoral work provides ongoing food for thought. By confronting us with topics we would rather avoid or ignore, artists encourage us to think about these uncomfortable subjects. Through our own morality we can recognize the artwork as immoral and gather knowledge out of this. But despite the autonomy of art, moral borders do not cease to exist. It is the responsibility of the artist to decide how far he can go in using animals. But also the spectator has responsibility; when we watch a goldfish swim around in a food processor, it does not mean we have to push the button.
Wednesday 19 January 2011
Display as Experience - embodiment, unity and space in curatorial practice
Display as Experience
1964. Three teenagers are running through the Louvre, passing famous artworks by David, Da Vinci and Gericault. They see the paintings flash by, but do not see them at the same time, mainly occupied by setting a new world record for running to the other side of the museum. An older man, quietly contemplating before one of David’s paintings, is rudely disturbed by the three restless teenagers. This scene of Jean Luc Godard’s Bande à Part (see cover image), in which the main characters see the whole Louvre in nine minutes and 43 seconds, has apparently nothing to do with the way we are used to experience art.
When looking at art, most people want to experience something that temporary lifts them up from their rushed daily life. When making exhibitions, evoking a memorable experience is therefore an important goal. Curators look for ways of integrating this in their display. But contemporary exhibitions that take up whole spaces, or that are in some way a ‘designed’ environment, composed by an artist or other people, are often dismissed as being spectacular or theatrical. Some critics even claim that the museum has turned into an amusement park, losing space for contemplation and debate in favor of quick fun and ‘snack art’. They fear for an audience that only sees exhibitions like Odile, Arthur and Franz do while running through the Louvre in Bande à Part. Is it possible to make a display of artworks which evokes an intense aesthetic experience without losing the intellectual depth we like to find in contemporary art?
In this essay I will be looking at three concepts which I think are intrinsic to the process of creating experience in display; embodiment, unity and space. Although these concepts imply much more than can be shown in this short essay, I want to use them to illustrate my starting point together with two examples. These two examples were paying a lot of attention to the evocation of experience in the way they were curated.
Embodiment
Aesthetic experience plays an important role in the phenomenological theories of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He was interested in the way that human consciousness is an embodied experience. The world is the ground of experience. His position is that subjectivity is something of the world, not apart from it, and it is provided by the “primacy of perception”. Our access to the world is through the body and not through (or not only through) the mind. Al thinking is embodied; it comes from consciousness, which develops from the subject’s bodily perceptions. Embodiment signifies the role of the body in how we experience the world. The artworks we perceive as objects in the world are the result of how our bodies experience them, not just our consciousness recognizing the object. "Our body, to the extent that it moves itself about, that is, to the extent that it is inseparable from a view of the world and is that view itself brought into existence, is the condition of possibility, not only of the geometrical synthesis, but of all expressive operations and all acquired views which constitute the cultural world.”
Merleau-Ponty had a problem with the philosophical tendency to reduce every object and phenomenon to nothing more than collected data. He saw his task in philosophy to return to relating to the world directly as it was viewed, not as science described it. The direct aesthetic experience of a work of art is utterly important for him: content and form, what we say and the how we say it, cannot exist apart from each other.
Unity
Experience is something that occurs continuously. Things are experienced but not in such a way that they are composed into an experience. We have an experience when the things experienced runs its course to fulfillment. For example, we are finished writing a book, solving a problem, playing the game, or go home after a party. Such an experience is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality and self-sufficiency. It is an experience. What I mean by this in this context is what people often call real experience; situations that you remember. This experience has a continuous flow. In a work of art, different occurrences fuse into unity, but still keep their own character. An experience has a unity, constituted by a quality that pervades the entire experience, in spite of the different parts it is made of. An experience is like a train, made up of many different wagons. As a spectator you see the train as a train, not as a collection of wagons. This unity is not practical or emotional, nor intellectual, for these terms are adjectives of interpretation, distinctions that reflection can make within it; we make use of these in discourse about an experience. In thinking of an experience after it has occurred, we may find that one quality rather than another was more dominant, following that this one property characterizes the experience as an entity. We therefore do not often think of an experience as being intellectual and emotional at the same time; however this is probably very often the case.
Space
Apart from embodiment and unity, the last concept I want to discuss as the most important parts of experience in exhibitions is space. When the whole environment participates in the viewing of a work of art, the exhibition becomes an immersive surrounding. As the actor Ben Whishaw declares in his role as John Keats in the film Bright Star: “A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought.”
The risk of creating an environment is that the viewer will become isolated. This is very likely to happen in current displays of new media. Video installations often take up whole rooms and are entirely cut off from the world through thick black curtains. When we sink into the carpet we forget the immediacy of our bodies. The spectators are cut off from each other; also the possibility of creating a dialogue with other works in the museum is eliminated.
An example in which this isolation was prevented is the exhibition Touched of the Liverpool biennale of 2010. For the biennale, a lot of different spaces were used throughout the city of Liverpool. Old warehouses, shop windows and even the cathedral participated in the exhibition. A video installation showing people in the streets throwing stones through the windows of an old industrial building was on display in the same building as it was filmed. The visitors watched it standing up, with some light coming through the shattered windows. One almost expected a stone to fall through the window with loud noises any time soon.
Another work in the exhibition was a seven meter long sword by Kris Martin that hung from the dome of the Liverpool Black-E church (see image 2). The sword would have acted in a different way if it was not hung from the church dome. The space was far from neutral; a huge sword in a church immediately and inevitably evokes a large number of references. When standing underneath the sword, we are grasped by a Lacanian gaze, feeling threatened like Damocles. This was true for most artworks in the biennale; the environment was crucial for the complete experience of the work, and since almost all the works were commissioned for the specific spaces you could say the space was a direct part of the artwork.
1. Kris Martin, Mandi XV, 2007
The biennales main exhibition, Touched, heavily depended on the emotional impact of artworks. In the biennale guide, artistic director Lewis Biggs writes: “What defines art that has this ability to communicate directly, this width of crosscultural appeal? Emotional experience is common to all humanity. Art that evokes emotion in one individual, despite all the cultural specifics that determine that person’s reactions, will reach out to many other individuals with varied cultural backgrounds. Touched presents art with emotional impact. Art that not only can gain our attention but that can move us, motivate us, allow us to find a way to change ourselves.”
The Liverpool biennale’s Touched exhibition was a collection of experiences. All the different spaces created a fragmented collective. Instead of laying emphasis on active engagement and debate, the core was emotional experience. The main goal of The Liverpool biennale was not to create discussion between people, but still did so through the very direct emotional impact of the artworks. Because of the different locations, the audience had the opportunity to focus upon a single work, being drawn into it, and to have a personal experience.
An exhibition with an often very similar starting point took place in 2009 during the Venice biennale (see image 3 and 4). In-finitum, an exhibition on show at the Grand Canal bordered Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, was created by Belgian interior designer, antique dealer and art collector Axel Vervoordt. Because of its extraordinary beauty, the exhibition attracted huge crowds to the palazzo, despite all the numerous other satellite exhibitions next to the biennale. In-finitum consisted off works from all ages; from antique Egyptian sculptures to unfinished Cézannes to commissioned contemporary works. Vervoordt put all these works together in the unusual spaces of the large fifteenth century gothic palazzo, designing the environment for the works. This resulted in dark cellars with dramatic lightning, heavy decorated ballrooms including lounge furniture and bare, light wooden spaces (see images 2, 3 & 4). In his profession as an interior designer he consciously created new homes for artworks that were not very often seen so close to each other. He gave them a chance to communicate with each other, to become new things.
In-finitum was about the infinite, the universe, but also about the mysterious and unfinished. The a-historical character of the exhibition contributed to this theme, taking the visitor on a journey through the ages. In one of the catalogue texts, Italian art historian and curator Francesco Poli writes about the hyphen in the title In-finitum: “the hyphen can be seen as a symbol of union as well as separation, which opens up the space of vision and imagination to the deeper and more inaccessible dimensions of the aesthetic experience of physical and spiritual reality.” Because of the designed environment, visitors could experience the concept of the exhibition without a necessary need for explanation.
2 & 3: Two exhibition overviews of In-finitum, bottom image showing work by Anish Kapoor and Lucio Fontana, top image showing work by Hans op de Beeck and Antonio Canova.
In contrast to the Liverpool biennale, which was under the artistic directorship of Lewis Biggs, also director of Tate Liverpool, In-finitum was curated and designed by someone from a different field. Some people might regard this non academic background as a disadvantage, but Vervoordts longtime experience with collecting, antique dealing and interior designing enabled him to put together works from different eras in a building that was very specific. His selection of art and objects displays a richness of centuries of treasures. The thing that attracted most people so much to In-finitum was the intuitive quality the exhibition possessed. It did not desire a thorough intellectual insight, but relied more on immersion in the artworks. There was no signage, labeling or printed information except for the catalogue. Respecting the histories of all the works, Vervoordt laid out an emotional territory that embraced the context of the exhibition, weaving all the works together. Negative remarks that could be heard on the exhibition were that the exhibition resembled a stage set too much. The theatricality is omnipresent in In-finitum. The different floors and rooms of the palazzo all had a different feel and look, like the subsequent acts of a play. The clear routing of the exhibition sent you in the right direction, to make sure you were reading the story in the correct order. Every work was carefully lit with a spotlight, leading you from the almost entirely dark vaults of the palazzo to the light flooded wooden attic.
This dramatic narrative might seem restrictive. The feeling of a staged exhibition would close the curtains, leaving no space for the audience to contemplate their own stories. But on the other hand, the dramatic set of In-finitum is as much curated as a show in a more ‘white cube’ environment. The only difference is that we are so used to the structure of white walls and light from above that it does not strike us as being designed anymore. With the staged environment being so explicit in the exhibition, the structure is laid bare, enabling the spectators to find their own way through the play.
Returning to Merleau-Ponty, content and form cannot be seen loose from each other. In the case of In-finitum, it is therefore vital that the surroundings of the artworks in the exhibition are completely adapted to the art, to help in the creation of new dialogues. The experience is carefully constructed. As the critic York Lethbridge writes in his review for Magenta Magazine: “the quality of the experience in seeing In-finitum is a reminder that encounters with art can be powerful and deeply personal”.
Both In-finitum and the Liverpool Biennale depart from the idea that an exhibition should be an experience. Although both exhibitions have very different content (it is hard to equally compare contemporary works with an a-historical collection of almost everything), both rely heavily on the bodily experience we have as a visitor. Whereas the biennale is a more fragmented collection of different experiences, In-finitum reaches a high level of unity in its theatrical ways of display; many different artworks, objects, things, become one in a new context. Both exhibitions would not have been the same, would maybe have been almost nothing, without their surroundings. Space is a crucial part of the means they use to reach their goal. If this is a decayed warehouse, a slightly kitsch church or a fifteenth century palazzo with its feet in the water does not really matter, as long as these spaces are used as strength and not as a burden. Spectacle and theatricality has been given a bad taste. But when used in the right ways it can add value to the way we see art. It can create new dialogues, a sense of universal oneness. As the Liverpool biennale’s artistic director writes in the catalogue: “Art without emotional force is without intellectual power.”
4.Overview of the first floor of Palazzo Fortuny during In-Finitum.
Bibliography
Books
Biggs, Lewis, ed. Liverpool Biennial, International Festival of Contemporary Art - The Guide. Liverpool: Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art Ltd, 2010.
Cherry, Deborah. “A Sea of Senses,” in Right About Now, edited by Margriet Schavemaker and Mischa Rakier. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2007.
Dewey, John. Art as experience. New York: Perigee, 2005.
Emerling, Jae. Theory for Art History. London: Routledge, 2005.
Miki, Tatsuro and Axel Vervoordt, “About In-Finitum”, in IN-FINITUM, edited by Axel Vervoordt. Gent: Vervoordt Foundation, 2009.
Meijers, Debora. “The Museum and the ‘ahistorical’ exhibition,” in Thinking about Exhibitions, edited by Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Narine. London: Routledge, 1996.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. London:Routledge, 2002.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The World of Perception. London:Routledge, 2004.
Klonk, Charlotte. Spaces of Experience. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.
Poli, Francesco. “Traces and Mirages of the Infinite in Contemporary Art,” in IN-FINITUM, edited by Axel Vervoordt. Gent: Vervoordt Foundation, 2009.
Magazines
Lethbridge, York. “Mapping the Studio & In-Finitium: Fortuny & Pinault Collections”, Magenta Magazine, Fall 2009, Volume 1, No.1. Accessed 3 December 2010. URL: http://www.magentamagazine.com/1/reviews/fortuny-pinault
Exhibitions
IN-FINITUM, Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, 6 June – 15 November 2009
Touched, part of the Liverpool Biennial, International Festival of Contemporary Art, Liverpool (several locations), 18 September – 28 November 2010
Into the Unknown: the void in contemporary art
Upon entering the room, you look for the artwork. After a quick look around the room, you notice that where you expected an object, you see nothing but a black circle. You are careful to approach it. After close examination you have to conclude it is not just a black circle, but an actual opening in the floor. You cannot see the bottom, since the hole is covered in dark pigment. The unexpected emptiness in this room is an artwork by Anish Kapoor (1954). The work, called Descent into Limbo, evokes a sense of fear upon first seeing it, but also seduces us to investigate the possibility of disappearing underground.
Anish Kapoor, Descent into Limbo, 1992, Museum de Pont, Tilburg
What is it that makes emptiness so attractive and so fearful at the same time? The Void has been a fascination of many in art history and critical theory. In this essay I will investigate the meaning of the void in contemporary art, using Kapoor’s work as a start and finish point.
“The void is not silent. I have always thought of it more and more as a transitional space, an in-between space. It's very much to do with time. I have always been interested as an artist in how one can somehow look again for that very first moment of creativity where everything is possible and nothing has actually happened. It's a space of becoming… 'something' that dwells in the presence of the work… that allows it or forces it not to be what it states it is in the first instance”(Anish Kapoor in Bhabha, 1998: 11-41).
A very short history of nothing
“The non-existent was not; the existent was not
Darkness was hidden by darkness
That which became was enveloped by The Void”
(Rigveda creation hymn, 1700 BC)
The void, emptiness, or just nothingness, has been a disturbing presence in human life since ages. The fact that people have lived before you lived, and after you have died, is a void in our consciousness that is hard to grasp. The paradox of creation from the void, of being and non-being, has come up in most past cultures. A very old example can be found in the work of Thales, a Greek philosopher who denied the existence of nothing around 600 BC. His statement was that there can only be nothing if there is no one to contemplate it. Epicurus later originated the idea of atoms, basic units common to matter. With this discovery the idea is born that there can be a void, an empty space through which atoms move. Later on the vacuum was discovered. For a long time this has been a problematic idea: God would not create nothing. Galileo, defying these religious problems, believed that a vacuum was possible and made its properties understood. In further history, scientists have always been researching the emptiness of atoms and vacuums. Modern physics now states that everything came from nothing; it is possible that the universe could have emerged out of the vacuum (Close, 2009: 1-23).
Transcendental nothing and atheist nothing
An old example that comes to mind when thinking of voids is the oculus in the roof of the Pantheon in Rome, which is an ancient way to let light into a vast space. But the sight of the beam of light flooding the church holds for most people meaning far beyond the roof of the church. The word oculus is also the Latin word for eye. In the context of the church, or in its original form of temple of all Gods, the oculus is linked directly to a heavenly realm. In this case the void has a clear metaphysical or transcendental meaning.
Pantheon, Rome, 126 AD
After the disappearance of Christianity as the most important base of daily life in the West, philosophers of the enlightenment believed the world itself to be enough, without a governing God to which we are subject. Contemporary critics now speak of the return of religion. In my opinion religion never left; it just changed names and forms. But this change left things in an uneasy way. How do we talk about a feeling that there is something bigger than us humans, without returning to visualize a man with a beard?
In the essay Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud writes about the particular feeling I tried to describe above. One of his friends wrote Freud a letter reacting to his essay on the illusion of religion. He speaks of having “a particular feeling of which he himself was never free, which he had found confirmed by many others and which he assumed was shared by millions, a feeling that he was inclined to call a sense of ‘eternity’, a feeling of something limitless, unbounded – as it were ‘oceanic’. This feeling was a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; no assurance of personal immortality attached to it, but it was the source of the religious energy that was seized upon by the various churches and religious systems, directed into particular channels and certainly consumed by them. On the basis of this oceanic feeling alone one was entitled to call oneself religious, even if one rejected every belief and every illusion” (Freud, 2004: 1-2). Freud further explains the thoughts of his friend as a loss of connection with the world around us (when a man is born, the string with his mother is cut and therefore the bonding with the surrounding world is lost). A lot of people, like the friend of Freud, feel this void in their life. Through religion they seek for connection with the universe.
This so-called God-shaped-hole originates from the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, who stated for the first time that “God was dead” in his book Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft. Nietzsche writes: “After Buddha was dead people showed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a cave,—an immense frightful shadow. God is dead: but as the human race is constituted, there will perhaps be caves for millenniums yet, in which people will show his shadow.—And we—we have still to overcome his shadow!” (Nietzsche, 2001: 108). According to Nietzsche we have to learn to live with the fact that the comforting idea of an existing personal God is no longer there, and have to let go of the shadows that remain. Gilles Deleuze writes in one of his essay on Nietzsche: “Did we kill God when we put man in his place and kept the most important thing, which is the place?” He states that instead of God burdening us from the outside, we have placed the weight on our own back. After the Reformation, the death of God became a problem between God and man, until the day humanity discovers this problem as such and chooses to carry this new weight. Humanity seems to want the logical outcome of the death of God; to replace God, to become God himself (Deleuze, 2001: 71).
A lot less transcendental views of the void can be found, for example in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Sartre sees nothingness as an essential part of being: being cannot escape nothingness. “Nothingness is the putting into question of being by being; that is, precisely consciousness or for-self. (…) Nothingness is the peculiar possibility of being and its unique possibility. Since nothingness is nothingness of being, it can come to being only through being itself.”(Sartre, 1958: 79) Nothingness is a state of non-being. Nothingness does not itself have Being, but is sustained by Being. Sartre disagrees with Hegel that Being and Nothingness are opposite, or are opposed as thesis and antithesis respectively. He says that Nothingness is the contradiction, and not the opposite, of Being. Nothingness is logically subsequent to Being. Sartre, and also Jacques Lacan, did not suffer from the God shaped hole very much. Even more so, they used this conception of nothing as the foundation of their atheist philosophy. Because nothing and being are equated in Sartre’s writings, creation also comes from nothing; therefore a God is not needed for us to exist.
The representation of nothing
Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915, Russian Museum, St Petersburg
How do we give a definition of the void in art? This seems like an almost impossible task. As Mathieu Copeland writes in the catalogue of ‘Voids; a retrospective’: “The desire to work with nothing can manifest itself in many complementary ways and generates numerous approaches: pure voids, spaces left empty, (…) voids emerging from the desire to empty everything, voids resulting from the desire to add nothing, voids as signature, unfulfilled voids and conceptual voids, voids as refusal etc”(Copeland, 2009: 167).
In the essay The Sublime and the Avant-Garde, Jean-Francois Lyotard writes about what art should do to deal with something that cannot be shown. In art, we expect something happening (for example, making a painting) to be followed by something else happening (another color, another painting). But we forget the possibility of nothing happening. The possibility of nothing happening is often associated with a feeling of anxiety. It gives to waiting, which can be a negative feeling, but also a positive (suspense, welcoming the unknown). This contradictory feeling leads back to the romantic notion of the sublime (terror and pleasure at the same time). Throughout history, the negative dialectic of ‘is it happening?’ was often wrongly translated as a waiting for a fabulous subject or identity, for example ‘is the prophet coming?’ According to Lyotard artists can represent this feeling in the right way. Art cannot show the unrepresentable, but it can hint at the existence of the unrepresentable, by negative representation or abstraction. There should always be an unrepresenatable surplus that the work cannot offer relief for, for example by way of a merely pleasant form (Lyotard in Morley, 2010: 27-41).
The problem with Lyotards view is his proposition that art should not approach the unrepresentable directly. By pointing this out, he remarkably links his own words to the biblical command to not make any images of God. By looking at abstraction as the best option, he returns to a new form of iconoclasm. Near nothingness gives more space for contemplating infinity. This attitude can be found in many protestant churches, but also in some early modern art, for example in Malevich’ black square. However, if one takes a closer look, the square, which can be seen both as a black square on top of a white ground and as a black hole surrounded by a white border, actually closely resembles Descent into Limbo by Anish Kapoor. It is nothing, but at the same time there is an immense space involved.
Descent into Limbo
“The important thing is that at a given moment one arrives at illusion. Around it one finds a sensitive spot, a lesion, a locus of pain, a point of reversal of the whole of history, insofar as it is the history of art and insofar as we are implicated in it; that point concerns the notion that the illusion of space is different from the creation of emptiness”(Jacques Lacan in Miller, 1986: 140).
What role can art play in the void we have to deal with? Let’s go back to the artwork by Anish Kapoor. Descent into Limbo is one of the best examples of how Kapoor deals with the void. The void is by most critics and authors acknowledged as one of the key elements in his work. But what happens is exactly what occurs so often; they try to fill up the void. In various essays and articles about Kapoor’s work, numerous references are being made to Eastern religions and philosophies, because the artist has partially non-Western origins. Most authors seem to be caught by the intimidating emptiness of the void, as they try to fill it up with metaphysical ideas and categories. However, this has partially to do with some of the titles Kapoor gives his work. Often he uses Sanskrit names for his works, the old liturgical language of Hinduism and Buddhism. Interesting is that the Sanskrit word śūnyatā means emptiness or void, but can also mean fullness. In Buddhism, emptiness is characteristic in Buddha’s observation that nothing possesses an essential identity. In Buddha’s teachings, the realization of the emptiness of phenomena is a key aspect of the nurturing of insight that leads to wisdom and inner peace (Williams, 2009: 124-125).
Anish Kapoor does speak about his intentions to evoke a sublime experience. On first glance this intention could justify the previously mentioned metaphysical interpretations. But for Kapoor the sublime experience is always linked with primary human sensations. Kapoor recognizes the void in many presences. The presence as fear can be seen as a fear for the loss of self, from a non-object to a non-self. This fear has to do with the idea of being consumed by the object, or in the non-object. Kapoor has always been drawn towards this notion of fear, towards a sensation of falling, or vertigo. Imagine yourself falling into the black hole of Descent into Limbo. He sees this kind of work as an inversion, a turning inside-out. Fear is like darkness, the eye is uncertain, the hand feels in hope of contact with walls. You look to see if you can find the bottom of the black hole (Van Winkel, 1995: 39-46).
Kapoor also called the void a state within. It has a lot to do with fear, in Oedipal terms, but more so, with darkness. In the case of Descent into Limbo, the Void has a phenomenological presence, but this phenomenological experience on its own is insufficient. The work creates narrative without the storytelling, which allows the spectator to be directly into contact with psychology, fear, etc. According to Kapoor this makes the void a potential space, not a non-space (Morley, 2010: 91-92). Descent into Limbo is apart from a void or a black hole above all an object, but an object able to render a space more empty than mere vacancy could ever envisage.
Reference List
Bhabha, Homi K. Anish Kapoor: Making Emptiness, http://www.anishkapoor.com/writing/
Close, Frank. Nothing – a very short introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009, 1-21
Rigveda creation hymn, 1700 BC, translation via Nothing: a very short introduction, 5.
Copeland, Mathieu. “Qualifying the Void” in Hendricks, Jon et al. Voids/Vides: A Retrospective of Empty Exhibitions, Paris: Editons du Centre Pompidou, 2009, 167.
Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche- Pure immancence: Essays on a Life, New York: Zone Books, 2001, 71.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its discontents, London: Penguin, 2004, 1-2.
Kapoor, Anish, “Interview with Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton” in The Sublime, edited by Simon Morley, London: MIT press, 2010, 91-92.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde” in The Sublime, edited by Simon Morley, London: MIT press, 2010, 27-40.
Miller, Jacques-Alain. ed., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII – The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986, 140.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001, section 108.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness, London: Routledge, 1958, 79.
Williams,Paul. Mahayana Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations, Second Edition, London: Routledge, 2009, 124- 125.
Winkel, Camiel van. “On the Sublime in the Work of Anish Kapoor”, in Anish Kapoor, Tilburg: De Pont, 1995, 39-47.
Anish Kapoor, Descent into Limbo, 1992, Museum de Pont, Tilburg
What is it that makes emptiness so attractive and so fearful at the same time? The Void has been a fascination of many in art history and critical theory. In this essay I will investigate the meaning of the void in contemporary art, using Kapoor’s work as a start and finish point.
“The void is not silent. I have always thought of it more and more as a transitional space, an in-between space. It's very much to do with time. I have always been interested as an artist in how one can somehow look again for that very first moment of creativity where everything is possible and nothing has actually happened. It's a space of becoming… 'something' that dwells in the presence of the work… that allows it or forces it not to be what it states it is in the first instance”(Anish Kapoor in Bhabha, 1998: 11-41).
A very short history of nothing
“The non-existent was not; the existent was not
Darkness was hidden by darkness
That which became was enveloped by The Void”
(Rigveda creation hymn, 1700 BC)
The void, emptiness, or just nothingness, has been a disturbing presence in human life since ages. The fact that people have lived before you lived, and after you have died, is a void in our consciousness that is hard to grasp. The paradox of creation from the void, of being and non-being, has come up in most past cultures. A very old example can be found in the work of Thales, a Greek philosopher who denied the existence of nothing around 600 BC. His statement was that there can only be nothing if there is no one to contemplate it. Epicurus later originated the idea of atoms, basic units common to matter. With this discovery the idea is born that there can be a void, an empty space through which atoms move. Later on the vacuum was discovered. For a long time this has been a problematic idea: God would not create nothing. Galileo, defying these religious problems, believed that a vacuum was possible and made its properties understood. In further history, scientists have always been researching the emptiness of atoms and vacuums. Modern physics now states that everything came from nothing; it is possible that the universe could have emerged out of the vacuum (Close, 2009: 1-23).
Transcendental nothing and atheist nothing
An old example that comes to mind when thinking of voids is the oculus in the roof of the Pantheon in Rome, which is an ancient way to let light into a vast space. But the sight of the beam of light flooding the church holds for most people meaning far beyond the roof of the church. The word oculus is also the Latin word for eye. In the context of the church, or in its original form of temple of all Gods, the oculus is linked directly to a heavenly realm. In this case the void has a clear metaphysical or transcendental meaning.
Pantheon, Rome, 126 AD
After the disappearance of Christianity as the most important base of daily life in the West, philosophers of the enlightenment believed the world itself to be enough, without a governing God to which we are subject. Contemporary critics now speak of the return of religion. In my opinion religion never left; it just changed names and forms. But this change left things in an uneasy way. How do we talk about a feeling that there is something bigger than us humans, without returning to visualize a man with a beard?
In the essay Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud writes about the particular feeling I tried to describe above. One of his friends wrote Freud a letter reacting to his essay on the illusion of religion. He speaks of having “a particular feeling of which he himself was never free, which he had found confirmed by many others and which he assumed was shared by millions, a feeling that he was inclined to call a sense of ‘eternity’, a feeling of something limitless, unbounded – as it were ‘oceanic’. This feeling was a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; no assurance of personal immortality attached to it, but it was the source of the religious energy that was seized upon by the various churches and religious systems, directed into particular channels and certainly consumed by them. On the basis of this oceanic feeling alone one was entitled to call oneself religious, even if one rejected every belief and every illusion” (Freud, 2004: 1-2). Freud further explains the thoughts of his friend as a loss of connection with the world around us (when a man is born, the string with his mother is cut and therefore the bonding with the surrounding world is lost). A lot of people, like the friend of Freud, feel this void in their life. Through religion they seek for connection with the universe.
This so-called God-shaped-hole originates from the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, who stated for the first time that “God was dead” in his book Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft. Nietzsche writes: “After Buddha was dead people showed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a cave,—an immense frightful shadow. God is dead: but as the human race is constituted, there will perhaps be caves for millenniums yet, in which people will show his shadow.—And we—we have still to overcome his shadow!” (Nietzsche, 2001: 108). According to Nietzsche we have to learn to live with the fact that the comforting idea of an existing personal God is no longer there, and have to let go of the shadows that remain. Gilles Deleuze writes in one of his essay on Nietzsche: “Did we kill God when we put man in his place and kept the most important thing, which is the place?” He states that instead of God burdening us from the outside, we have placed the weight on our own back. After the Reformation, the death of God became a problem between God and man, until the day humanity discovers this problem as such and chooses to carry this new weight. Humanity seems to want the logical outcome of the death of God; to replace God, to become God himself (Deleuze, 2001: 71).
A lot less transcendental views of the void can be found, for example in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Sartre sees nothingness as an essential part of being: being cannot escape nothingness. “Nothingness is the putting into question of being by being; that is, precisely consciousness or for-self. (…) Nothingness is the peculiar possibility of being and its unique possibility. Since nothingness is nothingness of being, it can come to being only through being itself.”(Sartre, 1958: 79) Nothingness is a state of non-being. Nothingness does not itself have Being, but is sustained by Being. Sartre disagrees with Hegel that Being and Nothingness are opposite, or are opposed as thesis and antithesis respectively. He says that Nothingness is the contradiction, and not the opposite, of Being. Nothingness is logically subsequent to Being. Sartre, and also Jacques Lacan, did not suffer from the God shaped hole very much. Even more so, they used this conception of nothing as the foundation of their atheist philosophy. Because nothing and being are equated in Sartre’s writings, creation also comes from nothing; therefore a God is not needed for us to exist.
The representation of nothing
Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915, Russian Museum, St Petersburg
How do we give a definition of the void in art? This seems like an almost impossible task. As Mathieu Copeland writes in the catalogue of ‘Voids; a retrospective’: “The desire to work with nothing can manifest itself in many complementary ways and generates numerous approaches: pure voids, spaces left empty, (…) voids emerging from the desire to empty everything, voids resulting from the desire to add nothing, voids as signature, unfulfilled voids and conceptual voids, voids as refusal etc”(Copeland, 2009: 167).
In the essay The Sublime and the Avant-Garde, Jean-Francois Lyotard writes about what art should do to deal with something that cannot be shown. In art, we expect something happening (for example, making a painting) to be followed by something else happening (another color, another painting). But we forget the possibility of nothing happening. The possibility of nothing happening is often associated with a feeling of anxiety. It gives to waiting, which can be a negative feeling, but also a positive (suspense, welcoming the unknown). This contradictory feeling leads back to the romantic notion of the sublime (terror and pleasure at the same time). Throughout history, the negative dialectic of ‘is it happening?’ was often wrongly translated as a waiting for a fabulous subject or identity, for example ‘is the prophet coming?’ According to Lyotard artists can represent this feeling in the right way. Art cannot show the unrepresentable, but it can hint at the existence of the unrepresentable, by negative representation or abstraction. There should always be an unrepresenatable surplus that the work cannot offer relief for, for example by way of a merely pleasant form (Lyotard in Morley, 2010: 27-41).
The problem with Lyotards view is his proposition that art should not approach the unrepresentable directly. By pointing this out, he remarkably links his own words to the biblical command to not make any images of God. By looking at abstraction as the best option, he returns to a new form of iconoclasm. Near nothingness gives more space for contemplating infinity. This attitude can be found in many protestant churches, but also in some early modern art, for example in Malevich’ black square. However, if one takes a closer look, the square, which can be seen both as a black square on top of a white ground and as a black hole surrounded by a white border, actually closely resembles Descent into Limbo by Anish Kapoor. It is nothing, but at the same time there is an immense space involved.
Descent into Limbo
“The important thing is that at a given moment one arrives at illusion. Around it one finds a sensitive spot, a lesion, a locus of pain, a point of reversal of the whole of history, insofar as it is the history of art and insofar as we are implicated in it; that point concerns the notion that the illusion of space is different from the creation of emptiness”(Jacques Lacan in Miller, 1986: 140).
What role can art play in the void we have to deal with? Let’s go back to the artwork by Anish Kapoor. Descent into Limbo is one of the best examples of how Kapoor deals with the void. The void is by most critics and authors acknowledged as one of the key elements in his work. But what happens is exactly what occurs so often; they try to fill up the void. In various essays and articles about Kapoor’s work, numerous references are being made to Eastern religions and philosophies, because the artist has partially non-Western origins. Most authors seem to be caught by the intimidating emptiness of the void, as they try to fill it up with metaphysical ideas and categories. However, this has partially to do with some of the titles Kapoor gives his work. Often he uses Sanskrit names for his works, the old liturgical language of Hinduism and Buddhism. Interesting is that the Sanskrit word śūnyatā means emptiness or void, but can also mean fullness. In Buddhism, emptiness is characteristic in Buddha’s observation that nothing possesses an essential identity. In Buddha’s teachings, the realization of the emptiness of phenomena is a key aspect of the nurturing of insight that leads to wisdom and inner peace (Williams, 2009: 124-125).
Anish Kapoor does speak about his intentions to evoke a sublime experience. On first glance this intention could justify the previously mentioned metaphysical interpretations. But for Kapoor the sublime experience is always linked with primary human sensations. Kapoor recognizes the void in many presences. The presence as fear can be seen as a fear for the loss of self, from a non-object to a non-self. This fear has to do with the idea of being consumed by the object, or in the non-object. Kapoor has always been drawn towards this notion of fear, towards a sensation of falling, or vertigo. Imagine yourself falling into the black hole of Descent into Limbo. He sees this kind of work as an inversion, a turning inside-out. Fear is like darkness, the eye is uncertain, the hand feels in hope of contact with walls. You look to see if you can find the bottom of the black hole (Van Winkel, 1995: 39-46).
Kapoor also called the void a state within. It has a lot to do with fear, in Oedipal terms, but more so, with darkness. In the case of Descent into Limbo, the Void has a phenomenological presence, but this phenomenological experience on its own is insufficient. The work creates narrative without the storytelling, which allows the spectator to be directly into contact with psychology, fear, etc. According to Kapoor this makes the void a potential space, not a non-space (Morley, 2010: 91-92). Descent into Limbo is apart from a void or a black hole above all an object, but an object able to render a space more empty than mere vacancy could ever envisage.
Reference List
Bhabha, Homi K. Anish Kapoor: Making Emptiness, http://www.anishkapoor.com/writing/
Close, Frank. Nothing – a very short introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009, 1-21
Rigveda creation hymn, 1700 BC, translation via Nothing: a very short introduction, 5.
Copeland, Mathieu. “Qualifying the Void” in Hendricks, Jon et al. Voids/Vides: A Retrospective of Empty Exhibitions, Paris: Editons du Centre Pompidou, 2009, 167.
Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche- Pure immancence: Essays on a Life, New York: Zone Books, 2001, 71.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its discontents, London: Penguin, 2004, 1-2.
Kapoor, Anish, “Interview with Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton” in The Sublime, edited by Simon Morley, London: MIT press, 2010, 91-92.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde” in The Sublime, edited by Simon Morley, London: MIT press, 2010, 27-40.
Miller, Jacques-Alain. ed., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII – The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986, 140.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001, section 108.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness, London: Routledge, 1958, 79.
Williams,Paul. Mahayana Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations, Second Edition, London: Routledge, 2009, 124- 125.
Winkel, Camiel van. “On the Sublime in the Work of Anish Kapoor”, in Anish Kapoor, Tilburg: De Pont, 1995, 39-47.
Towards a Critical Institution
Towards a critical institution
Daniel put up his striped posters on the street, Andrea slept with a collector, and Hans did his political poll in the MOMA. It did not work; they were all swallowed and digested. They are all part now of what they have been trying to escape so hard. I even watched Andrea sleep with the collector in the Pop Life exhibition in Tate Modern; I do not think her plan was to have anything to do with Tate or Pop art. I can hear you think; what is the point anyway, when you get eaten by the institution you try to avoid? Maybe they should have embraced it; at least they would have made more money.
It all started when Marcel put up his fountain. But that is almost an entire age ago. In the meantime we went inside the white cube and out again. We dumped our collections and moved into the Kunsthalle. We tried building stuff in nature, but came running back to the gallery in no time. Institutional critique has had its best time. I do not mean to say we should stop being critical about the institute; we should never stop being critical. But I propose we should be critical from within the wonderful institutions we have and use them as a powerful instrument in the art world.
The audience has changed a lot as well. Now that we have Wikipedia, we always want a second opinion. Educating the audience through wall texts and colorful flyers is not enough anymore. Even the Japanese tourist standing in front of Vincent’s sunflowers wants to listen to an audio tour.
To work towards a critical attitude, institutions need to move around the art itself, which is always the starting point. Maybe Andrea and Daniel should try to talk to the institute and find ways of working together instead of avoiding each other. Programming around an exhibition should not have an inherent political agenda, but create open possibilities for the audience to reflect critically on different situations. The exhibition as the center of a critical platform. As seen in institutions like the ICA, South London Gallery or the Whitechapel gallery, this often takes the form of artist talks, events and discussion nights. Interesting guests are invited to enrich the experience the audience gets in seeing an exhibition. In the case of a recent exhibition at the ICA, Olga, Pjotr and Boris from the Russian collective Chto Delat? curated an exhibition with lots of events around it, using the ICA as a host for this critical platform.
I do not mean to say seeing just the exhibition is no longer enough. There is nothing wrong with enjoying Vincent’s paintings on a Sunday afternoon. But I do think it is important that art is accessible on different levels. When you want to find out more, and are interested in deepening your experience, the possibility should be there. The institute should play a key role in working directly with the artist to create possibilities for providing knowledge and stimulating discussion about contemporary art.
Daniel put up his striped posters on the street, Andrea slept with a collector, and Hans did his political poll in the MOMA. It did not work; they were all swallowed and digested. They are all part now of what they have been trying to escape so hard. I even watched Andrea sleep with the collector in the Pop Life exhibition in Tate Modern; I do not think her plan was to have anything to do with Tate or Pop art. I can hear you think; what is the point anyway, when you get eaten by the institution you try to avoid? Maybe they should have embraced it; at least they would have made more money.
It all started when Marcel put up his fountain. But that is almost an entire age ago. In the meantime we went inside the white cube and out again. We dumped our collections and moved into the Kunsthalle. We tried building stuff in nature, but came running back to the gallery in no time. Institutional critique has had its best time. I do not mean to say we should stop being critical about the institute; we should never stop being critical. But I propose we should be critical from within the wonderful institutions we have and use them as a powerful instrument in the art world.
The audience has changed a lot as well. Now that we have Wikipedia, we always want a second opinion. Educating the audience through wall texts and colorful flyers is not enough anymore. Even the Japanese tourist standing in front of Vincent’s sunflowers wants to listen to an audio tour.
To work towards a critical attitude, institutions need to move around the art itself, which is always the starting point. Maybe Andrea and Daniel should try to talk to the institute and find ways of working together instead of avoiding each other. Programming around an exhibition should not have an inherent political agenda, but create open possibilities for the audience to reflect critically on different situations. The exhibition as the center of a critical platform. As seen in institutions like the ICA, South London Gallery or the Whitechapel gallery, this often takes the form of artist talks, events and discussion nights. Interesting guests are invited to enrich the experience the audience gets in seeing an exhibition. In the case of a recent exhibition at the ICA, Olga, Pjotr and Boris from the Russian collective Chto Delat? curated an exhibition with lots of events around it, using the ICA as a host for this critical platform.
I do not mean to say seeing just the exhibition is no longer enough. There is nothing wrong with enjoying Vincent’s paintings on a Sunday afternoon. But I do think it is important that art is accessible on different levels. When you want to find out more, and are interested in deepening your experience, the possibility should be there. The institute should play a key role in working directly with the artist to create possibilities for providing knowledge and stimulating discussion about contemporary art.
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