emptiness

A philosophy of emptiness
Gay Watson, Reaktion Books 2014

chapter 7, Artistic Emptiness 
In contemporary art, the theme of emptiness manifests in the breakdown of barriers; a focus on process rather than product; playing in the space that is revealed; new forms tentatively emerging. 

A forerunner of emptiness is the idea of the sublime, defined as experience that exceeds our perceptual or imaginative grasp, that marks the limit of reason. Today the sublime has come to intimate not transcendence/other but immanence - 'The sublime is NOW' (Barnett Newman) - and which expresses wonder, a sense of complexity and beauty.

There are many western artists who have become familiar with the teachings of Taoism and Buddhism, finding in them reflections of and responses to contemporary concerns. Expressions of emptiness in their work. Others have come to some understanding of emptiness through the popularisation of physics. The western mind seems to have a tendency to interpret emptiness nihilistically, as a lack or loss, rather than as both emptiness and fullness/ potential.

                                                   '...a space
                         utterly empty, utterly a source...'
                                                 (Seamus Heaney)

Discusses writing, music and dance.

On visual art, GW argues that the most significant movements in 20th century art were away from representation and classical perspective and toward the ephemeral, formless, contingent.

Phenomenon of immersion in pure colour e.g. Reinhardt, Klein, Rothko, Turrell - resulting in the loss of sense of distance, perspective.  

Artists using light and natural world to enhance experience.  Quotes a press release for a Turrell show which says: 'Light like this is seen rarely with the eyes open yet it is familiar (similar?) to that which can be apprehended with the eyes closed in lucid dream, deep meditation and near death experiences.'  And Eliasson referring to 'what I sometimes call the introspective quality of seeing: you see whatever you're looking at, but you also see the way you're seeing.'

Other artists use their work to draw attention to attention itself: Martin, Celmins, Irwin, Tuttle, Whiteread, Viola.  Show relationship between emptiness and formation, often requiring focused attention on the abstract or silent.

Kiefer, Walter de Maria, Kapoor, Gormley.

Emptiness if ambiguous: it can hold both escape/release and loss/failure.  Art has the capacity to hold that ambiguity legitimately.

Space that is empty can be emphasised by the inclusion of a single simple object.  Or it can be the whole subject of the work.

Attention - the need for both in creation and viewing - is the common thread in these artists.

Photography - cites a number of artists working with an oriental aesthetic.  Photo as tathata; photography as a tool for challenging the assumption that the world is just the way it appears at first sight.  Camera-less photography (qv) seems to be particularly successful in expressing ephemerality.

Connection with the meditating mind which puts the space of awareness around its objects.

Challenging 'the complacency of seeing', asking us 'to look more closely, with more attention, below the surface, around and within substance, in the silence between sounds, to find an unconventional way of seeing reality - to see, hear and think afresh.'

Yinka Shonibare

The British Library

Installation in the old reference library at Brighton Museum as part of the 2014 Brighton Festival. 

I heard YS in discussion with Hofesh Schechter, artistic director of the festival, on 7 May. Lots of interesting points especially on immigration, but for me in particular:

His approach to the installation: it was low budget, he could have covered all the old bookshelves and turned the room into a gallery space, but he decided - as he put it - to let the space give him the work, to be his muse i.e he worked from what was already there, the empty bookshelves, the library environment, the vestiges of its past.  

[Although this is a well-established way of responding to site, there was something moving about the way he spoke that reinforced the approach which I connected how I want to work with my commission at Brighton Buddhist Centre.]

He also talked about authenticity: that the kind of fabric he uses everything thinks of as African and that he's making a point about colonialism when he splices it into typically British subjects.  He takes pleasure in the fact that it's in fact Dutch-Indonesian in origin, so the use of it parodies authenticity.  (Of course it still makes a point about colonialism. . . )

phenomenology

Understanding phenomenology
David R Cerbone (Acumen 2006)
Ch 4 on Merleau-Ponty
M-P's phenomenology aims to describe our embodied perceptual experience of the world, our sense of subjectivity and emerging object - before we divide our experience into subject and object.
Slogan: "I am open to the world" - to direct experience without analysing, naming, explaining, judging
This openness is however intentional in that we choose to engage with particular people, objects, situations.  What we engage with is always within a context or ground and emotional response is not separate from it; the experience is imbued with that emotion.  You can't split the physiological and psychological.
It's open-endedness means that 'nothing is more difficult than to know precisely what we see'.

Gay Watson in 'A philosophy of emptiness' ( Reaktion Books 2014) says that M-P thought we tended to take a representational view of bodily experience, and that he wanted us to question this and really see what was going on through a practice of attentiveness.  He wrote: 'True philosophy consists in re-learning to look at the world.'
The idea of presence is key; mind/body and subject/world are abstractions from this - 'reinstating the embodied subject as one that is never  distinct and separated, but always intentionally related to the world'.  A person has a dynamic relation with the world, is connected.  Being embodied one is both visible and seeing.