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.

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.

The White Cube

The building rises up behind the old streets of Piccadilly like a cathedral. The only materials it is visibly made of are white painted concrete, steel and glass. The building at Mason’s Yard is the latest gallery space of Jay Joplin’s White Cube. Recently build, its name is no lie: this is the ultimate White Cube.
When you get inside, the place resembles all what comes to mind when we think of a modern gallery space. White walls, sealed windows and artificial light coming from above. The outside world is completely blocked out. Keeping out change and time of the turning world around us, the White Cube becomes a non-space. This building has no traces of life: no scratches on the walls, no faded colors or light, just white perfection. Non-space can in science be seen as the opposite of a black hole. It is not an empty space; it is a volume empty of space. It has no identity.

The high ceilings, the white walls and the light do however suggest we are in some sort of sacred place. The gallery becomes like a chamber of eternal display, almost like a church or the holy buildings in ancient Egypt. Art is ritually presented, and through the feeling of eternity we are suggested all the art we see in here is indeed a masterpiece.

The religious aspects of the white cube also have effects on us as a spectator. When we enter this building, we leave a certain part of ourselves outside the door. We switch on our artistic attitude. This is necessary for us to know how we should behave in such a space. Our artistic attitude is switched on by the surroundings of the white cube. This heavy context immediately tells us we are looking at art, we are not supposed to touch it, and we have to keep quiet. Also, we know we are expected to think about the art, before we can understand it. This means what we left outside of the white cube is our body. All we need is our eyes connected to our brains. When entering the white cube, we accept to be a reduced version of ourselves. We are just spiritual beings now.

On the one hand, the white cube draws all our attention towards the artworks, glorifying them. The space does not distract us and gives us a breath of fresh air from the busy world outside. But on the other side the white cube is a prison of social context and lacks everything that defines life and therefore art. By defining the context of art in such a heavy way, it almost becomes irrelevant if there is an empty canvas on show or a great work of art.

the spectacle

The Ladies’ Paradise
Rianne Groen

When you enter Harrods, one of the world’s most famous department stores, all your senses are sharpened at once. A door is held open for you, upon which you enter through a wade of perfume. Faces smile at you, you smile back. Your feet sink in the carpet as you see a perfectly lit Yves Saint Laurent bag. But the true spectacle of Harrods is to be found in the center of the store: the Egyptian staircase. You enter a world of splendor, kitsch and banal wealth, and you will love it. While going up the escalators, the gold shimmers and soft music plays. The smell of perfume shifts to the smell of luxury leather goods. When you get off at one of the floors, it is hard to get back. There are so many objects of desire…

Posters of celebrities are displayed all over the walls, promoting fashion or other must-haves. Their faces are comforting: they are the spectacular representations of living human beings, here to be worshipped by us.
The gold of the escalators, the Egyptian ornaments, are all as fake as you can make them. But this is exactly what we like so much about them: it is as fake as the special effects in the old Star Wars movies, but we enjoy the fake to enjoy the spectacle.
Halfway down the escalators is a reminder to perhaps one of the most spectacular events in media history: it is a monument to Dodi Al Fayed, son of Harrods’ former owner, and Princess Diana. The monument is shaped in the form of a glass pyramid. It holds a wineglass with a lipstick mark of the princess. In its sentimentality and in memory of the event it perfectly fits the spectacle of the Egyptian staircase.
When you leave the Egyptian staircase to find yet another floor of commodities, you enter a place called the shoe boudoir. In this dark place, commodity fetishism is at its best. Diamond encrusted sandals are placed on a marble base, lit by several small spots to dazzle you. The heels are so high and thin you do not even dare to touch them. These shoes are truly not for wearing.

The people at Harrods proudly claim to sell ‘all things for all people, everywhere’. When Ronald Reagan once phoned Harrods to ask if they sold elephants, the reply was “would that be African or Indian sir?”. The department store is a whole world in objects, turning into an objectified world. The manifestation of the spectacle makes us into consumers of illusions.
The spectacle sucks us in, and without noticing you are standing outside with several bags in your hand. We take our commodities to the counter, and when we have paid they ask us: “do you need anything else?”. Difficult question.

the beloved object

The sea in a shell – Rianne Groen

When you press it against your ear, you can hear the sea. At least, that is what my grandmother used to tell me when I was younger. I have seen quite some seas and oceans since, but none of them sound like this.
The shape is like a human heart, and it can just fit in my hand. On top of it is a carving of a woman, which is quite badly executed. I have no idea who the woman is; she has a sharp nose, pearls in her ears and a great haircut. Maybe she was a Greek goddess, the butcher’s daughter, or what the carver wished his wife to look like. The ugliness has something appealing in it. The kind of people who collect Swarovski crystal dogs and fake Hummel figurines would love it. The creases are filled with grey dust. It must be at least fifty years old, maybe more.

The bottom is a pink fleshy color, like a plump mouth with sharp teeth. The opening looks like a big animal growling at you. Sometimes I see it as a more sensual image, like the frightening flower vaginas in Pink Floyd’s animations. I like to feel it; it is smooth and curved, but at the same time rough and prickly. A blind man would enjoy the object, because there is so much to feel. Perhaps he would be slightly confused about the carved part on top, which mixes natural shapes with an unnatural human form.

Actually, something used to live in there, way before it got to me. I do not know what it looked like, but it probably had several little legs and a very soft body so it could squeeze in. It used to live on the bottom of the sea, surrounded by sand, shiny fishes and sharks. Sometimes it would hide. The weight would be heavy on its back, but it would be safe because this was his home. Maybe that is where it got its sound, on the bottom of the ocean. But it is now empty, and nobody lives there anymore. I do not think the carved woman was already there. She came in later.

Sometimes I like to hold it in my hand. The weight of it makes me feel like it is an important object. It makes me think of the famous book by William Golding, Lord of the Flies. The children in the book used to have something like this, which was their symbol of power. If they had it in their possession, they could talk. Since I have it at home, I am always free to speak.
I might be wrong about it being empty. To me there is still something living inside; my grandmother who used to tell me to listen to the sea.

Walid Raad: Miraculous beginnings

On Walid Raad

The new exhibition in the Whitechapel Gallery by Walid Raad has so many layers that I wonder if every visitor gets all of it.
At first it all seems like a very serious exhibition on the history of Lebanon, when we are looking at a lot of archival material of all the atrocities that happened in civil war.
But it already starts when you enter the exhibition and you see this scheme about the way ‘they’ have documented all this archive material and filed it. They, The Atlas Group, already pose a problem. Who are they? Actually, a fictional group which is only Walid Raad. So, this Atlas Group found out a lot of things on the Lebanon war. But who made the pictures of the car bombs? Who made the video tape of the hostage? Who found the pictures with the drowned people in them? Everything gets confusing. But you believe the art institute will always tell the truth. So you continue to take things seriously.
When you enter the other large room of the exhibition upstairs things start to get really confusing. A scale model of the exhibition is shown on a table in the middle of the room. Including miniatures of the car bomb series, and even smaller versions of the videos downstairs are playing. When you read the text on the wall, it says that Walid Raad refused an exhibition in a new museum in Lebanon a couple of times. When he finally agreed, and unpacked the works after shipping, he found out all of his artworks had shrunk to a very small size! So he was very uncertain about what to do. In the end he decided to make a small museum to make the shrunken artworks fit. Now, what is this all about? Did the artworks of Walid Raad actually shrink?
When I went to see Walid Raad speak last Friday at the artist talk in the Whitechapel Gallery, it was all very natural. He spoke about the shrinking of his artworks, and nobody got up to ask him what the hell he was talking about. At first I did not understand what he was talking about, but later on I just sat listening like it was completely normal his artworks had shrunk. Now this is exactly what I found so extremely interesting about Walid Raad. He is a hugely intellectual person, but also a good speaker with a very flexible mind. He makes us think: ok, so now these artworks are so small, what should we do with the museum? Can we let it shrink as well? When we were discussing the exhibition with Daniel Herrmann at the Whitechapel, he said: Is Walid Raad even Lebanese? Nobody ever checked it. He has lived almost his whole life in the United States. Are these actually pictures of smoke from bombs? Maybe it is just a barbeque.
But it is not the point. It is the way he assembles things, put them together. Creates stories. Makes people think: about Lebanon, about art, about the art institution.

FRIEZE art fair 2010

On the Frieze art fair 2010

My first time at the Frieze fair was not shockingly different from other international fairs I have visited before (Art Amsterdam, Art Rotterdam, Art Brussels, Art Forum Berlin). Many people, a lot of good art and a lot of bad art. What disappointed me was the amount of big galleries with known artists. I always like to go to art fairs to find out about new artists, to explore. But at the Frieze there was not so much to explore. Some artists keep returning in the stands of different galleries. In that way a lot of galleries keep on the safe side: show their greatest hits to be sure of good sales.

There were some interesting galleries from outside the UK: from Moscow, Amsterdam, Seoul etc. The chic galleries that represent famous artists were also there in quite big numbers (Perrotin Paris, Xavier Hufkens Brussels, White Cube London etc.).
The most expensive artwork that I saw and know the price of was a sculpture by John Chamberlain ($ 1.500.000). Also available was work by this year’s Turner Prize nominee Angela de la Cruz, which sculpture was listed for 40.000 pounds.

Interesting artists I saw were: Shirazeh Houshiary (Lisson Gallery), Sergej Jensen (Anton Kern gallery and Galerie Neu), Germaine Kruip (The Approach), Alex Buldakov (XL gallery, who were also selling the infamous ugly iPhone artwork) and Gabriel Lester (Fons Welters).