Some disjointed thoughts about voids

Various exhibitions and other things I have encountered over the past few days have made me begin to think about 'voids'…














On Monday I went to see Anish Kapoor's installation, Memory, at the Deutsche Guggenheim. I was quite surprised, actually, that I enjoyed this exhibition, because I’ve never been particularly interested in the kind of monumentality I’ve always associated with his work… and I wasn’t immediately won over when I encountered the huge egg-like steel form jammed between the walls in the main gallery. It wasn’t until I saw it from the other side that it became really interesting. At first glance it appears that you are looking a painted black square on the wall. But the two-dimensional illusion dissolves when you move closer, maybe a meter away, and it emerges as a hole in the wall, looking into the huge steel form. (Again – there is that moment where you ‘see through it’, as your focus abruptly shifts) Because of its rusty surface, I suppose, it seems to absorb so much light that the space appears at first to be endless. As people lean over the edge and peer inside their voices are echoed and amplified, reverberating out. It’s strange how in this case the illusion of emptiness or nothingness is coupled with the immense, solid materiality of the object from which it emerges. Its monumental materiality belies its apparent immateriality.














It is interesting how this illusion of the void relates to Ann Veronica Janssens’ Espace infini. (Pictures from Hans Theys' website) In this work (I speculate, since I have only seen the model, not the large version) the illusion and the reality would be visible simultaneously. Or at least, you would be aware of the illusion before you get close enough to experience the void. Somehow this lack of pretense seems to render the object almost the opposite of Kapoor’s monumentality; it is simply a structure or framework which enables a certain experience, and it is the experience rather than the object which assumes importance.

(Both of these works are also interesting in relation to James Turrell’s light installations, which create a similar experience of space as a void. I think he relates these to the Ganzfeld effect, a kind of ‘blindness’ that occurs when there is nothing for the eye to focus on. And maybe there is a similar effect in Janssens' fog installations.)















(images of fog installations from Ann Veronica Janssens - An Den Frühling, by Han Theys)

Thinking about the Ganzfeld effect makes me realise that in all these cases the illusion relates to the lack of any defined spot for vision to focus, the lack of a horizon line. Space appears either to go on forever, or to not exist at all. The horizon line seems to be not just a measure of sensory limits, but also a way to place yourself in your world. Without a horizon line you cannot sense where you are in relation to space. Your vision has no edges to focus on, and a lack of spatial cues for distance and direction leaves you spatially disorientated.

(Maybe it’s also like looking at an empty sky… I remember, as a child, lying in the middle of a football oval and staring at the sky. At a certain point, when the conditions were right, I would feel spatially disorientated, as if my body was suspended there, and I was looking down into an infinite void….)


















At Hamburger Bahnhof, they were showing Beuys, Warhol, artists from the Flick collection and work by Ayşe Erkmen, a name I seem to be encountering quite often here, but of which I know little. I missed some of her work, so I will have to go back, but of the work I did see I was particularly taken by a room in which some of the fluorescent lights from the ceiling had been removed and rehung at various levels throughout the space, creating a field of light through which one had to navigate to cross to the other side. The high frequency hum emitted from the lights surrounded you, coming from all directions at once. Then next door, was a seemingly empty room, which I walked through at first, not realising that it was significant in any way. When I read the wall text, I suddenly noticed that the far wall was moving ever so slightly. Again, on this visual cue, a high-pitched buzz became audible, presumably the machinery involved in shifting the wall. Once I noticed the initially almost imperceptible movement, the wall seemed to move more quickly. It moved in a metre or two, to the level of the door, and the retreated again.



I’m interested in how this peripheral motion functions in relation to vision and visibility. It takes more than just a quick glance around the room to see anything; it takes a degree of focus, of knowing what you are looking for. In this way the movement relates to vision: when a minute, almost imperceptible degree of movement, on the edge of sight, shifts visual focus into a kind of “all-over” vision. Although it is the opposite of a flicker or a very fast movement, this very slow movement has a similar effect on visual perception. In this case it changes your spatial and temporal relationship to the room, making every movement and mark significant.

The title of the work: 9’45”, referring to the work of John Cage (I assume), draws a connection between the temporal emptiness of his 4’33”, and the spatial emptiness of the room in which the wall moves gradually back and forth. John Cage’s work has the effect of delineating a void by circumscribing a time and space in which it becomes perceivable. (In effect actually emphasising the fullness of this void – by allowing the normally overheard sounds, the ‘white noise’, to surface) Erkmen’s room has a similar effect: by framing the space itself with its changing spatial configuration, the void suddenly seems to be full of something. Your perception suddenly becomes attuned to the things in the room that would otherwise be invisible: the marks on the white wall, pale paint drips, fingerprints, the grey gap between the floor and the wall, and the faint, high-pitched mechanical buzz…

So these artworks: Kapoor’s, Janssen’s, Erkmen’s, etc, all seemed to have something in common, in describing a certain experience of emptiness, nothingness, or at least the illusion of this. It makes me wonder, what exactly is a void? My dictionary simply defines it as an empty space, or a gap or opening, or something which has no contents. Wikipedia has no conclusive definition, and when I looked up the definition of a vacuum, I read that, in fact, a real vacuum cannot possibly exist, except as an ideal, because all space, including one that is a vacuum, consists of some kind of particle matter.















Anyway, then I came across the big Walther König bookshop on Burgstrasse, which held me captive for a few hours. I was reading the catalogue for the exhibition Un coup de dés, which was on recently at the Generali Foundation, in Vienna, featuring, among others, Joëlle Tuerlinckx. Of course, her work immediately springs to mind when contemplating matters to do with the void. The catalogue had an abbreviated form of the essay by Michael Newman, which appeared in her latest book.













He writes:

“Tuerlinckx presents not objects in space but the edge between the object and its void.” P172

Her work suggests “… a relation between infinite multiplicity and void: manifestation takes place between the two.” P170

Tuerlinckx frames space in such a way as to describe, or mark out, a void.















Some questions:
What is a void if it has not been marked out?
Is it only apprehendable at its edge?
Invisible until one sees the line between something and nothing?
Is a void still empty if one can perceive it?
How does one perceive emptiness or nothingness?

It seems to me that a void must necessarily always be just out of reach; just beyond perception or visibility… it is what is past the periphery. It defines and is defined by a limit (the edge, the threshold).

Newman writes: “…the infinite manifests itself as a void within the finite. The void is the limit of presentation – the limit that makes presentation possible but cannot itself be presented – within presence itself.” P170

So, somehow I’m interested in all this (about voids) in relation to what is perceptible and what is not, what is visible and what is invisible, and how these states are constantly in flux… but my thoughts are still disjointed...

(I’ve just started thinking about Bas Jan Ader, but maybe I’ll have to leave that for another day...)










Here are some picture of other artworks from Hamburger Bahnhof: Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers and Francis Alÿs; and some smoke in the sky over Berlin.