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.

light painting photography

Have just stumbled across this genre almost by chance while researching something else. At the moment I don't completely understand how it's done - a combination of moving light and slow exposure? - but it's as if movement and time are frozen into a single image eg.

Gijon Mili, Picasso Paints a Centaur

or illusory structures created out of light e.g.

Eric Staller, Ribbon on Hannover Street 1976

http://lightpaintingphotography.com/light-painting-history/

Matisse

The Cut-Outs at Tate Modern

Initially hard to know how to respond because the images were mostly so familiar.
I decided to jot down words in response as I walked round:

saturated colour     asymmetry     morphable     patchwork backgrounds     surprises     celebratory     rough cut edges     free     playful     rapidity     joyful     movement     decorative     big     rhythmic     sculptural     abundant     not neat     curvy     simple

His cut-outs the complete opposite of mine which are measured, geometric, mostly straight-edged, non-representational, cut on the flat with a knife, involving control and tension in my body.  I envy his freedom of working, but then I have been trying to achieve something very different; I have been cutting shapes out of the middle of whole sheets, creating negative spaces - until this week when I have experimented with placing shapes between transparent sheets.  How would it be to do some of these 'in the round'? What shapes would I choose - ones that don't need to be cut carefully?  

Cutting was a dynamic process, Matisse holding the sheet out in front of himself and moving into it.  He said, comparing this process with painting: 'The conditions of the journey are 100% different.  The contour of the figure springs from the discovery of the scissors that give it the movement of circulating life.  This tool doesn't modulate, it doesn't brush on, but it incises in, underline this well, because the criteria of observation will be different.'  This last point is interesting, hinting at the three-dimensionality of the work.  His assistant, Lydia Delectorskya, spoke of 'modelling it [a Blue Nude] like a clay sculpture: sometimes adding, sometimes removing.'

Assembly also dynamic, the shapes being adjusted in their relative positions many times over.

Rare layering of shapes:

Mimosa

Use of text:

Alastair Sooke, Henri Matisse: A Second Life

A few points about the cut-outs this highlighted for me:

They were made against a backdrop of pain - the war (begun in 1941), the extreme torture of his daughter by the Nazis, the physical pain of his illness.

He used the medium to drive what he thought of as a second life as an artist.

100s of them, most made as models for something else (book covers, scarves. . . )

He carved the paper with scissors, only closing the blades for angles; did not draw the shapes on to the paper, only as preparatory sketches.

Decorative relationship in Jazz between his handwriting and the images - large-scale; lively looping and flourishes.

M felt that what he had created before 1941 required too much effort; now he was working freely.

Saw The Lyre as his first proper, well thought-out cut-out

Oceania arose out of deeply held memories of his time in Polynesia in 1930, released during sleepless nights.  He had produced very little work during the trip itself.

Chapel at Vence: designed not just walls and windows but every decorative element from the wooden confessional door to the priest's robes. Saw its origin in Jazz, with maquettes being made out of cut paper.  Kept colours simple, no red, so they could act with greatest force on the viewer. Huge technical difficulties - finding the right colours, most of the tiles breaking at one firing - but none of this is betrayed. Very pleased with the result: 'When I go into the chapel, I feel that my whole being is there...'  

'I believe that my role is to provide calm. Because I myself have need of peace.'

Though admired in US, in France they tended to be treated as trivial, the waning work of an old man.  M considered these works the equal of his paintings.

Close study shows lots of tiny paper additions, as if something is being moulded.

Drawing on top of gouache in Blue Nudes.

Some edges torn. 

Visible pinholes.

As his own life grew more restricted, so the cut-outs evoked worlds and beings that made him happy - an imagined freedom.

Conscioulsy drew on oriental art in his use of negative space.

magic lanterns

Through the university archivist I was introduced to Trevor and his collection of magic lanterns in Hove.  I was interested in these because they were an early way of projecting light images, which is what in a very simple way I have been doing in my work.  Trevor showed his collection which ranges from the earliest and simplest candle lanterns to the most sophisticated which can overlay up to 3 images at a time.  He then gave a slide show.  Some of the points I noted:

• A magic lantern has three basic components: a source of light, a slide with an image on it and a lens whose curvature enlarges the image.
• We tend to think of lanterns as a Victorian phenomenon that was quickly superceded by cinema, but in fact they were developed in the mid 17th century and carried on being quite commonly used until the mid 20th.
• The slides, which are less than 3" in size, were initially hand-painted with varying degrees of skill, but later had photographs printed or impressed on them.
• The projected colours are vivid and the luminosity creates great depth to the image by comparison with say a painting.
• Slides were used in a different way to movies. They often had a religious, travel or scientific content and so were used educationally.  There was also a strong performance element, a relationship between the person showing the slides and the content (talking, perhaps shocking or frightening, making sounds).
• 2 or 3 slides could be made to interact to create the illusion of movement.  I found this particularly interesting in relation to my own work in the case of slides with geometric patterns which in interaction created a kaleidoscopic effect.

• Children often had their own magic lantern.
• The 19th century slides reflect their time and contain a lot of racism, cruelty to children and animals.

Source of slides: www.slides.uni-trier.de

Seeing the lanterns suggested the idea to me of adding a simple form to the areas of light I had been projecting on to tracing paper, which added to the  

Richard Deacon

Exhibition at Tate Britain
I was recommended to see this for the way it had been curated.  Here are my visit notes: