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.