Drawing the void

David Edgar

David Edgar in his paper about encountering the void in drawing, reminds us that Alain Badiou regards drawing as a type of ‘seeming’ (Badiou 2014, p. 76). He suggests that Badiou believes that drawing transforms things by giving form to a particular type of understanding of the world, pointing to the relationship between imagining things in the mind, and the evolution of an image on a piece of paper. Badiou points to two ways of thinking about the sun; the real sun and the  sun as it is poetically manufactured within art. (An interesting way of saying making an image of something). I would however suggest that Edgar could have made more of the fact that between the two there is a space that you could call the perceived sun, the strange set of sense impressions that indicate to the brain that a controlled hallucination of sun-ness is occurring and which then stimulates a what to do action in response to this encounter. Today I will put on sun cream, yesterday I would have taken my shirt off and lay down to bask in its warmth. Fight or flight, is a product of the imagination and mine is now skewed by stories of global warming and ozone layer depletion. As Timothy Morton argues, global warming is a hyper-object, an almost impossible concept for one individual to conceive of, something beyond our everyday comprehension. However I am changing my behaviour in response to it, or in response to my imaginative interpretation of what I think it is. In the gap between the actuality of global warming and my inner feeling tone that has been constructed by myself in response to what I have understood of its existence, is a space, a void. These thoughts about a space between are called kū or sora in Japanese, and refer to those things beyond and yet also within our everyday comprehension, particularly those things composed of pure energy and the emptiness that the energy is made up of and which it comes from. Kū is an embodied term, in that it sits within us, and it represents spirit, thought and creative energy as well as the creation of phenomena. It can also be associated with the potential of creativity, spontaneity and inventiveness. Out of nothing, emerges something. If you are properly attuned to the void you can sense your surroundings and act without using your mind. However we are rarely attuned, because we think too much about the things of this world. Perhaps it is better to follow the example of a small bird when flying through a thick set hedge. Somehow it flies through the continuous space that sits between branches and twigs. Thought about the hedge would get in the way of its flight through the void. If it became self aware it would crash. This small bird one could imagine is a reincarnated Buddhist, it intuitively knows that in Buddhism the emptiness of the void is the ultimate reality. However the void is also a place of infinite potential. It is an “emptiness” related to the glass being half empty or half full, it is an idea, perhaps more than a thing.  The void is a space where ideas arise, which is similar to how the Zen concept of interbeing is described, which we might also think of as an aspect of non-attachment or the letting go of the self. Our western obsession with self is critiqued by the Buddhist concept of dependent origination. Early Buddhist texts associate dependent arising with emptiness and not-self. The Buddha (Choong, 2000) stated that we mistakenly depend on the dual notions of existence and non-existence, a binary reality, and that the right view was that, 'when you truly see the origin of the world with right understanding, you won’t have the notion of non-existence regarding the world. And when you truly see the cessation of the world with right understanding, you won’t have the notion of existence regarding the world.' (Sutta Central) Attraction, grasping, mental fixation, insistence, and other forms of self centred thinking are all just suffering arising, and what ceases in the emptiness is just suffering. 

Last year the UCCA Centre for Contemporary Art hosted the exhibition “Silent Thunder,” an examination of the links between Buddhism and contemporary art. The exhibition highlighted the influence of D.T. Suzuki and his teachings during the 1950s which did much to spread Zen ideas amongst post-war artists and intellectuals such as John Cage, Arthur Danto, and Robert Rauschenberg. In fact Zen visual aesthetics as reinterpreted by modern art; minimalism, austerity, and the acceptance of chance as a compositional tool, have since been re-imported into East Asia, this imposition of an aesthetic as to how Buddhism can engage with contemporary art and visual culture, being something that non western artists now have to deal with. 

Liao Fei: A straight line extended

Liao Fei's 'A straight line extended' is a classical Zen idea and as a physical drawing in space helps us to understand how the extended drawing canon has evolved to include sculptural practices. When you truly see the idea of drawing with a right understanding, you won’t have the notion of non-drawing regarding the world. And when you truly see the cessation of non- drawing with right understanding, you won’t have the notion of drawing regarding the world. 

Shao Yi

Shao’s sculpture series, Totem Producing, represents the interrelationship of his Buddhist beliefs and art practice. “Before someone studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after the person gets an insight into the truth of Zen through the instruction of a good master, mountains are not mountains and waters are not waters; but after this when the abode of rest is attained, mountains are once more mountains and waters are waters.” (Excerpt from Universal Lamp Records of the Jiatai Era, translated by D. T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, 1926) Shao's 'totems' are wooden industrial moulds, negatives involved in the forming of objects that we can only imagine. The emptiness of the mould providing the substance of the idea. These moulds are not moulds but are now totems, these totems are not totems but are now moulds. 

Of course the classical Zen drawing image is the ensō or circle form. An image that express a moment when the mind is free to let the body create. It is also an image of 'Mu', the void. Some artists draw ensō with an opening in the circle, while others close the circle. If the circle is incomplete, this allows for movement and development as well as representing the beauty of imperfection.  

Mugaku Sōen (1720-1791) 

When the circle is closed, it represents perfection, but also strength.

Ensō (c. 2000) by Kanjuro Shibata

Some years ago I tried to build this idea into a series of images I was making about the myth of the cowboy. This is the only image I have left of the sequence, but I guess the idea is still there.

The void will have many interpretations and approaches, some of which I have touched upon before, but whether it is Rachael Whiteread's negative casts, or Robert Rauschenberg's erased De Kooning, these are all ideas of negation, emptiness and space. It is what is not there that defines what is there.

Miyamoto Musashi's book 'Go Rin No Sho', the Book of Five Rings, says of the void, “By knowing things that exist, you can know that which does not exist. That is the void.

Humanity has wiped out 60% of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970, that is the hyper-void.

References

Badiou, A (2014) The Age of Poets London: Verso

Edgar, D: Agitating the void. (2019) Tracy special issue: Drawing Phenomenology: tracing lived experience through drawing Volume 14 Issue 1 ojs.lboro.ac.uk/TRACEY

Morton, T. (2013) Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. New York: U of Minnesota Press.

Sutta Central: Early Buddhist Texts 

See also:

Drawing and life

Life lines

Michael Leunig

So why for the last post of the drawing year show the work of Michael Leunig an Australian cartoonist? Cartoonists take positions, sometimes on the left and sometimes on the right, but whichever way they lean politically, they have to put their cards on the table. Never forget the cartoonists of this world, they use drawing in ways that are direct, articulate and audience aware, i.e. they are excellent communicators. They are always putting their work on the line and because they are the artists that stick their necks out, also have to take heavy flack, sometimes literally. 

Leunig made several cartoons as a personal stand against Western involvement in the Gulf War, however at times his work simply pointed out the stupidity of all wars. Our tendency to believe situations are either right or wrong, is for myself another example of the problem with definitions. Once something is defined it exists in a particular way as a thing, rather than as a process, once it is a thing, it can also be seen to have different properties to other things, it is capable of being another.  Michael Leunig's world is the world of the holy fool, which means he sometimes puts his foot right in it, as he did with his recent anti-vaccine cartoon. As a free spirit, Leunig chided against his government telling all Australian's to get vaccinated, so he made a cartoon about it, suggesting that authoritarianism has no boundaries, at one time it is telling people to be vaccinated but then at another time it could be taking away civil liberties. As a cartoonist associated with left wing views he faced a heavy back-lash and was removed from his post as cartoonist in residence. Whether or not you agree with him, he is always putting his work on the line and this is what I wanted to get you to think about as artists. Do you put yourselves up for criticism? Are you prepared to sometimes take a difficult stance that goes against the grain? The holy fool is another stereotype that has been used in the past to allow artists to say things that other members of society would not be able to. Just like Michael Leunig, Cecil Collins saw himself as a holy fool. It allowed him to accept his role as a misunderstood mystic, an image that takes us back to medieval times, as when a king used to allow the fool to operate as a sort of escape valve, to be able to say things that no one else could, but which were necessary, if the king was ever to confront any ideas that ran counter to his own. 

Cecil Collins: Holy Fool

So as this fool continues typing, he needs to remind his readers that the year is finally coming to an end, and that it has been a year of much foolishness, doubt and argument, as well as bravery and hard fought successes in the face of poor governance and venal decision making on the part of those in power. Sometimes drawing can seem to be such an irrelevant activity. However as a thinking tool, we must not forget what Tim Ingold alerted us to. He showed us the power of lines as metaphors, and of how easily a line can become a border. One of this year's posts looked at lines as false boundaries around countries and how drawing on a map with a ruler and pencil can lead to decisions out in the real world that shape the lives of millions. This shows us that lines can be very powerful ideas indeed; lines and the drawing of them can also help us to meditate on the more philosophical issues that face us in life, they allow us to think with visual languages and help us to develop alternative understandings, ones that can take us far beyond words and numbers.

But if we combine two languages we can very quickly begin to see alternative understandings. The old northern idea of the Wyrd, was centred on an invisible lifeline that threaded its way through everyone's lives, sometimes linking them together and at other times cutting lives short. From a beginning like the one above, you could easily begin to construct a woven fabric, that told a story of our lives. 

The fact is that all our lives are intertwined in many ways, some that we see clearly and others invisible to us. A decision made in haste that we don't really think about, could well impact on a life somewhere outside of our immediate consciousness. This may be a human life, but may also be another animal life or plant species. In a recent publication by David P. Barash, 'Buddhist Biology', it is proposed that the Buddhist concepts of the not-self, impermanence, and interconnectedness are built into the deep structure of the world. This means that all living things and concepts that emerge from living things, such as humans, are also impermanent and in their impermanence, they are simply part of an ongoing process of entanglement; therefore science, in this case biology, needs a re-formatting, if it is to not to eventually find itself as yet another outdated, noun led concept. Lines in this case, weaving through both types of world views in order to create a new cloth, that is much more open and caring in its use, a cloth that weaves itself into being, and as it does so, it begins to unravel itself, even before the final pattern is revealed. 

I'll leave you with Solzhenitsyn's thoughts on a line:

“(T)he line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years…. If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

Michael Leunig

Let's hope next year will be less stressful and a little kinder and that we will all try much harder to treat others as we would like others to treat us.

See also:

Cartoons and stereotypes

More on the Wyrd