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.
NOTHING TO SAY
DAVID G. TORRES
1. 0-24h by Ignasi Aballí is a video that as well as providing the title for his exhibition at the MACBA, the Museu Serralves in Oporto and the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham shows the footage recorded by the museum’s security cameras while it is shut. Sixteen hours of the day during which nothing happens documented in 16 hours of video in which nothing happens. It is the materialisation of the answer to an absurd question: “What happens when nothing’s happening?” “Nothing.”
In a long conversation with Dan Cameron published in the catalogue of the exhibition, Aballí says that his works can be more or less divided into two groups. On the one hand, there are those that involve the idea of fiction and thus have some connection with the cinema and literature: film posters based on texts by Georges Perec, synopses of films just as they appear in the press without any reference to the film itself, or the final credits of films that are also absent. The second group is formed of those works that seem to be set in the opposite camp: they portray elements of real life without any alteration to them. Into this group would fall series such as the lists of languages, religions or winning lottery numbers, listings of numbers or persons or objects taken from the newspapers and grouped together, and 0-24h. But 0-24h is also concerned with fiction, precisely because of that absence and that nothingness that Aballí tries to depict, as if all possibility of figuration is contained in the act of not telling. The long hours of waiting in which nothing happens would have the same possibility of potential fiction as the pots of paint left to dry in Malgastar (Wasting). Marcel Duchamp said that since tubes of paint are ready-made objects, we could conclude that any painting is nothing more than an assisted ready-made. So if Malgastar is the possibility of any painting, then 0-24h is the possibility of any exhibition and of any interpretation of an exhibition. At all events, both are situated just before the act of doing.
0-24h attempts to provide an answer to two big questions: “What to tell?” and “What to do?” Put simply, it concerns matters that are not at all simple, such as the crisis of representation in art. Ignasi Aballí covers this in depth and takes it to the limits. So in the interview in his catalogue he quotes Catherine Millet and her statement that one cannot continue painting without taking into account Duchamp, Kosuth or Weiner. And his answer is, of course, in humorous vein. In the end, all he did was to leave the pots of paint there and leave a camera there (in fact it was already there). So: “What to tell?” Nothing. “What to do?” Nothing. |
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| Ignasi Aballí. 0-24h, 2005 |
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2 .U
r 36 by Gregor Schneider is a room that is almost empty: no windows, no pictures, white walls, an air vent, strip lighting, a curtain dividing the space, blankets, a few clothes and bits and pieces. U r 36 was shown in the Kunsthalle in Hamburg in 2003 and before that in the Krefeld museum in 2000. Earlier, this same room had formed part of Gregor Schneider’s family home in a small town in Germany near Dusseldorf and Cologne.
This house has been the fundamental subject of his work since the early 1990s, in an obsessive, intense way and as a clear objective. The rooms have been divided, replicated and repeated; he has added walls, blocked up windows or doors, and changed the layout until the original arrangement has practically disappeared. To this must be added all the exhibition activity, which has meant practically taking the house apart and re-assembling it. In fact, at the 2001 Venice Biennale he reproduced it almost in its entirety with a new layout in the German pavilion.
U r 36 describes a specific room: “u r” refers both to “umbauter raum” (reconstructed space) and to “unsichtbarer raum” (invisible space), and the number that follows classifies it both in the original house and in the reconstruction. Ulrich Loock, in the catalogue of his exhibition in Oporto, says that Gregor Schneider simply repeats the things he finds around the place; he does not make anything or invent anything. There is nothing and he makes anything. He repeats and replicates, and in this way seems to solve a crisis that no longer affects representation in art and literature alone but also in architecture too: faced with the inability to produce, the answer is to divide; an architectural practice that cancels itself out. But U r 36 is not a dry architectural space: it is an inhabited space.
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| Gregor Schneider. U r 36. Hardcore, 2000 |
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On one of the many occasions that David Sylverster interviewed Francis Bacon over the years, he asked him why he had hardly painted any exteriors but always people alone in rooms. The painter replied with an obvious answer: it is where we are born, sleep, eat, fuck, shit and die. Alfred Hitchcock used to say that surprise is a bomb exploding unexpectedly under the table, and suspense is knowing there’s a bomb under the table that is going to explode at a set time. In Gregor Schneider’s house we also know the end, our end. So perhaps it doesn’t much matter whether U r 36 is in the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, the Krefeld museum or number 12 Unterheydener Strasse in Rheydt. Is it of any importance where it is? Whether it is that number or on that side of the street, whether it is this room or another identical room in a village in Germany? Is your life less hopeless than the life of the person living there? Is it happier? Are you perhaps more alive?
3. Everything is moving is a specific installation that Graham Gussin produced in 2004 in the large central cube supported by an immense column in the imposing Post-Modern building that houses the Pontevedra Biennial. The installation consisted of two forceful interventions in space: covering the whole of the huge glass cube that forms the room with magenta filters and filling the space with seventy tons of sand. The final effect is that of a strange, abandoned space. Abandoned, because of the huge amount of sand, as if a weird desert had spread over Galicia and finally, after many years, had occupied the space. But also strange because the magenta filters imbue everything with colour, rather as if it were the surface of Mars. |
In “Terrain vague”, the article that Graham Gussin published (in Butlletí, no. 6, October 2004) about the exhibition he was preparing for the CASM, he precisely talks about science-fiction, one of the obligatory reference points in his work. And he mentions specifically the strange link between science-fiction films and pornographic films as regards the type of spaces in which the action takes place. The films in both of these two genres are filled with empty spaces: the impersonal hotel rooms found in pornographic films are not far removed from the rooms in 2001: A Space Odyssey or Solaris. They are places of no significance, absent, displaced in time and space: terrains vagues.
The abandonment in Everything is moving is that of a displaced space, out of place, in which to reproduce an experience of loss. Like that terrain vague, for example, it also concerns the experience of the infinite and nothingness. In fact, “Nothing” was the title of the exhibition that Graham Gussin curated in 2001 with Ele Carpenter in the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art in Sunderland, which was an overview of works by artists such as Fiona Banner, Yves Klein, Hans Haake and Liam Gillick. As Adrian Searle wrote in The Guardian, “A show devoted to absence, nullity, the vacant, the expunged, nothingness”.
But, finally, beyond this question of form that occurs in similar empty spaces, what does pornography have to do with nothingness? Perhaps it ratifies the urban myth of the air crash when some of the passengers started fucking away like mad as the plane plummeted earthwards: what else is there to do? |
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4. Abandon is a work that Tony Matelli began in 1999 and is now exhibiting in the CASM: two rooms are completely empty, with just a few leaves and twigs appearing like weeds in the corners where the walls join the floor. It is like a space that has been abandoned for years. They are not real plants, though, but precise, realistic, naturalistic reproductions of weeds in bronze that is then painted green.
Ernst Lubitsch said that the greatest sense of humour came from a profound existentialism. Perhaps it is inevitable to resort to big words when parading a few empty rooms. But one could also perform an exercise in the opposite direction, and link this kind of negative propulsion into emptiness and nothingness to a sense of humour. At any rate, this is almost inevitable. Graham Gussin, in a presentation of his work at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Barcelona, recalled the sketch that the American comedian Andy Kaufman – a fairly morose character the rest of the time – was most proud of. Kaufman simply came out on stage and did nothing. He just stood there, looking, without doing or saying anything. The audience obviously started laughing straight away. People even laugh at funerals.
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| Graham Gussin. Shift, 2004 |
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For some time now, Matelli has been producing a number of realist sculptures with caricatured features. In many of them, the artist himself is portrayed in unlikely situations: alone on a kind of island wearing pyjamas and playing the guitar. Others show a group of Boy Scouts or a monkey pierced by a dozen sabres and swords. All of them have an element of irony, of mockery, linked to an impossible nostalgia for a natural state that is viewed not only realistically but also as pure simulacrum.
Abandon is again an almost empty space, which could be yet another response to the inability to do anything, and could even be a dislocated space. But the supposed abandonment of the rooms of a museum – or in this case an art centre – is not what it appears to be: the rooms are filled with small bronze sculptures. It is not an abandoned space or an empty space; nor has there been no work or only a slight intervention; and nor is it a displaced space. It is more the simulacrum of an abandoned space; it simulates the fact that there is nothing to say; it simulates an empty space. What is meant by “What to do?” Nothing at all.
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| Tony Matelli. Abandon, 2005 |
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