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>> A brief history of nothingness >> Nothing to say
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In Bartleby & Co., Enrique Vila-Matas wrote about those writers who have felt the negative compulsion of nothingness: the no writers, who stop writing without necessarily ceasing to be writers, who make nothingness the subject of their work. If the trend towards nothingness is a common failing of contemporary literature, it is no less so in art.
Tony Matelli is exhibiting Abandon at the CASM, where he has left the rooms empty, with just a few weeds in the corners. It is a piece that follows this nothingness trend. In view of so much emptiness, we are publishing an article by Ignasi Aballí, an artist also affected by this endemic disease, in which he takes a brief look at the history of the art of nothingness, and also at four pieces based on the void or emptiness: 0-24h by Ignasi Aballí, U r 36 by Gregor Schneider, Everythingis morning by Graham Gussin and Abandon by Tony Matelli.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF NOTHINGNESS
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IGNASI ABALLÍ
We could situate the start of this brief chronology of nothingness in the middle of 1958, when Yves Klein opened his exhibition “La vide” (The void) at the Galerie Iris Clert in Paris. On this occasion, Klein emptied the gallery completely and left it devoid of any work of art. Or rather, the work of art was precisely the emptiness; what was being exhibited was absence. This action – or this apparent inaction – on the part of the artist who presented no work to the public, as if the aim of art were literally to show what cannot be seen (Paul Klee said that art does not reproduce what is visible but makes it visible), must be analysed in the context of Klein’s earlier works and the ones he was to produce later on. His whole œuvre is a reflection on the void and absence, from the blue monochrome paintings to the Leap into the void of 1960 and his Conceptual performance at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris on 26 January 1962, consisting of taking down the pictures from the walls of some of the rooms.
Different attitudes and aims can be discerned in the artists who have developed their work in the field of nothingness (or “quasi nothingness”), absence, invisibility or disappearance. In other words, artists who have preferred the act of removing rather than adding, inaction instead of action, contention instead of expression, suggestion rather than statement, absence rather than presence, the visual rather than the visible. For instance, the intention behind certain works by Yves Klein is different from those of, for example, Marcel Duchamp. |
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| Marcel Duchamp i la seva Fontaine |
On Kawara. Un milió d’anys (passat i futur), des de 1970 |
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| While we could speak of idleness and disinclination as the principal reasons for inaction in the case of Duchamp, with Klein there was a more spiritual significance to his inaction. If Duchamp’s inaction is the result of an approach that was ironic (with a good dose of humour), unbelieving and anti-artistic, with Klein the void, the immaterial, is a way of representing the spirit in a more transcendental manner, one that is closer to the Zen philosophy. However, both attitudes involve a negative vision (of the “no”, as Enrique Vila-Matas says in his book Bartleby & Co.) which makes a work out of the non-work and an exhibition out of the non-exhibition. If the origin of a good number of the works of the conceptual period must be sought in Marcel Duchamp, with Yves Klein it can be found in the work of Kasimir Malevich. After Duchamp and Malevich, artists went from producing art objects to producing thought objects. Practically the whole of Duchamp’s work is based on this idea of “no”, from the ready-mades to the Grand Verre (Large Glass), which was left for months in a dark room gathering dust and which Duchamp only considered finished after eight years of often interrupted work; or Étant Donnés, which the artist worked on in secret for over twenty years and which did not come to light until after his death. Meanwhile, apparently, Duchamp was killing time by playing chess because, in his own words, “I had no more ideas.”
If we pull on the strings of these two attitudes – Duchamp and Malevich/Klein – we find other artists who have continued developing and adding other works to the history of the art of nothingness, the art of the minimal gesture, of the practically imperceptible, whether due to laziness, or to a philosophy of life based on the law of minimal effort that has resulted in inaction, or to an existentialist idea of trying to express the most with the least. Fundamentally, the two attitudes have many points in common and it is hard to place works in one or other category. The fact of not representing anything is not the
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| Vito Acconci. Conversions II: Insistence, Adaptation, Groundwork, Display, 1971 |
Vito Acconci. Grasp, 1969 |
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consequence of any prohibition or arrogant attitude or minimalist aesthetic – it is a matter of choice. Absence involves what is impossible and what is necessary, what is impossible to see and the need to show it. Gérard Wajcman, quoting Yves Michaud, remarked that some works belong to the group of “art to which no attention is paid”. This, said Wajcman, does not mean a secondary or decorative art, or an art without intention, but an art that in the twentieth century provides a more “lateral” vision in contrast to the great paintings and symbolic images. Art would operate as a kind of displacement that would consist in bringing into the centre of our perception what was normally on the periphery. He even asked, “Would it be exaggerating to say that in the twentieth century we very often go from an art to be looked at to an art in which to a certain extent there is nothing to see?”
If we continue with the list of authors who could be considered to follow this line, and certain typical examples of such work, we could cite John Cage and his silent composition 4'33", the paradigm of all silences (silence would be to sound what absence of the object or work would be to the visual arts). Piero Manzoni and his Base of the world (1961) turns the whole globe into a total work (this piece that considers the entire world as a work of art makes me think of a small painting by Ben Vautier in which the artist has simply written “I sign everything”) while also appropriating everything in the world and considering it his own work, an excessive extension of the ready-made. Other examples include Chris Burden and his Bed Piece (1972), an action during which he stayed in a bed in the gallery for the entire 22 days of the exhibition, without speaking or giving any instructions; or his one-man show “White Light/White Heat” at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York, in which he had a platform built just beneath the ceiling of the gallery, where he lay down for the entire duration of the exhibition without being visible to any of the visitors (in fact, there were no works by Burden in the gallery other than the one he was hidden in); the Closed Gallery piece (1969) by Robert Barry, consisting of an invitation to his exhibition on which was printed “During the exhibition the gallery will remain closed”; Jochen Gerz and his Monument against Fascism in Hamburg (1986), 2146 stones – Monument against Racism in Sarrebruck (1993) and the Living Monument of Biron (1996), all of which are invisible monuments.
The list is a long one. Lawrence Weiner, Stanley Brouwn, Bruce Nauman, On Kawara and Michael
Asher also insist on deleting any trace of the subject, just as Marcel Duchamp did in his ready-mades, for which he chose everyday mass-produced articles that he then signed. It is only after such a gesture that they have an author, the artist, who turns them into works of art.
In the case of On Kawara and Michael Asher, their works radically shun visibility and yet are highly complex. Although their pieces are very different in their formal aspects, they both share certain traits such as rigorous methodology, austerity of form and a strong conceptual quality.
On Kawara has been producing work on a single theme for years. His best known works, the Date Paintings, show nothing more than the date on which they were done. These are completely identical paintings, from the first one, produced in 1966, to the most recent. The only difference between these pictures is possibly the colour of the background and, of course, the date on them. There is no development of any style, or any originality, in the pieces. Each
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| Piero Manzoni signa una Escultura vivent, 1961 |
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is a link in a chain that so far has not been broken. On Kawara paints these pictures as if they were mass-produced objects, leaving no trace of any manual activity, annihilating any vestige of expression and remaining faithful to the strict ground rules he has imposed on himself. A picture in which all we can see is a date demonstrates the apparent contradiction between seeing everything and not seeing anything.
In the case of Michael Asher, a large part of his output is a reflection on exhibition spaces and the devices on which art is developed and displayed. His projects are always very closely related to the place in which they are to be exhibited. In fact he does not create them until he knows where they are going to be shown. Asher carries out an in-depth study of the physical features of the exhibition space, of the town in which it is located, its history and the persons related to it. So his works are inseparably linked to the place and do not exist beyond the duration of the exhibition other than as documentation. His interventions are extremely subtle and often imperceptible.
In the Galleria Toselli in Milan in 1973 he asked for all the layers of white paint to be removed from the walls and ceiling of the gallery, right down to the original structure of the building before it was converted into an art gallery. This transformation was the only thing to be seen.
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In the “73rd American Exhibition” at the Art Institute of Chicago, in 1979, he proposed changing the location of a bronze sculpture (a copy of a marble sculpture) by the French artist Jean-Antoine Houdon, dating from 1788, which was a life-size figure of George Washington. Normally the sculpture is outside the building, in the centre of the main entrance. Asher suggested placing it inside the museum, in the middle of a small room (Room 219) containing paintings and objects produced in Europe between 1786 and 1795.
And for the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1991, he described his exhibition as consisting of all the papers left by readers in the pages of the books catalogued under numbers 153 (091) to 153.4 in the Public Library at the Pompidou Centre, found between 30 June and 3 July 1990. In the show, the glass covering the scrap of paper on the wall is exactly the same size as the page in which the piece of paper was found; the position of the piece replicates its original position in the library book. The books selected by Asher all deal with psychoanalysis: writings by Freud, Jung, Lacan and other authors.
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I shall end by quoting Gérard Wajcman: “It is therefore an invitation to an exercise not in commenting but in looking. Looking and seeing. It would be wrong to add, “simply” for ourselves – for in fact there is nothing simple about it.”
(“I can’t see anything,” said Watson. “On the contrary,” said Holmes, “you can see everything. You fail, however, to reason from what you see.” |
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| Yves Klein. Monochrome
bleu (IKB 3), 1960 |
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