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

Absence, emptiness and the void

Li Cheng: A Solitary Temple Amid Clearing Peaks 10^thCentury

David Edgar's drawing conference presentation on the void left a lasting impression on me and set my mind to thinking about the various ways that we use empty space to help us come to terms with reality. It is as if we need to think about what is not there in order to get any sort of grasp on what is there. This is not then just about drawing, it is also about religion and philosophy. 

Chinese ink wash landscape painting had by the 10^thcentury evolved to a point where clouds, mist, sky, and water were often left unpainted. Their presence was instead suggested by the carefully rendered edges of other elements such as the texture of rocks or foliage. These were treated so that their forms faded out into nothing and the way this was done could intimate the difference between mist and cloud, or water spray and sky. This approach reflected the Taoist idea of qi (chi), a recognition that the universe emanates or is constructed from some sort of formless originating energy. By leaving large surfaces of untouched silk or paper, the artist could help the observer think of the ink washes as forming representations of rocks, foliage and mountains, as well as facilitating an awareness of nothingness or the potential of the void to engender somethings. The bare surfaces of silk being the spaces out of which forms emerge. In the West we sometimes refer to this as “negative” space, but perhaps it would be a better idea to call it ‘positive’ space. The Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching expressed the idea like this in Chapter eleven:

Thirty spokes unite around one hub to make a wheel.
It is the presence of the empty space that gives the function of a vehicle.
Clay is molded into a vessel. It is the empty space that gives the function of a vessel. Doors and windows are chisel out to make a room.
It is the empty space in the room that gives its function.
Therefore, something substantial can be beneficial.
While the emptiness of void is what can be utilized. 

Below is a different translation and when centred rather than ranged left the gap between stanzas is a much more satisfactory resolution of the idea of the poem as visual form. 

We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want

We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it liveable

From: Mitchell, S (2006) Tao Te Ching: A New English Version  London: Harper

 

Pine Trees: Hasegawa Tōhaku, Tokyo National Museum

In Japanese art there is a concept of 'yohaku no bi', (余白の美), sometimes translated as ‘the beauty of the remaining white’, or ‘the space left empty’. This is a concept that was borrowed in about the 12^thcentury from Taoist influenced Chinese images of landscapes, such as Li Cheng's. 'Yohaku' describes the white space in a drawing as an unfilled space, a gap or in certain cases a margin or edge-land. In Japan these spaces were seen as related to the Zen Buddhist concept of emptiness; kū 空 (the void) and mu 無(absence or nonexistence). Space was central to the creation process, and was reflected in the Buddhist notion of emptiness as being the ultimate reality and therefore a field of infinite potential. Pine Trees by the 16th century artist Hasegawa Tōhaku is a wonderful example of how visual images could reflect this way of thinking. It is as if these images of trees emerge unaided from the stretched membrane of silk, their oscillation between solidification and dissolution being both a product of the artist's awareness of atmospheric conditions and a religious moment of contemplation on the transience of all things. Transience is frozen in time by another image that embraces emptiness Maruyama Okyo's 'Frozen ice'. This image is painted on a low two-fold screen ('furosaki-byobu') and would have formed a backdrop to a Tea Ceremony. Its minimalist composition is typical of the visually austere taste of the Edo period. The minimal rendering of the ice cracks is beautifully controlled and suggests an absolutely flat surface of ice receding far into the distance. Each brush stroke has to be therefore executed with a sharp, unwavering precision. This is a wonderfully spiritual work.

It is interesting to look at Robert Rauschenberg's erased De Kooning in this context.

 

Rauschenberg: erased De Kooning

Instead of a conceptual move, it could be read as a spiritual riposte to De Kooning's worldly success. By erasing the drawing he was removing the artist's ego. Ego creates desire and greed, which leads us to dissatisfaction and suffering. To eradicate ego, you need to practice non-attachment, to things, people or ideas and Rauschenberg, it could be argued was in making this gesture, demonstrating that it was possible to move beyond our attachment to the idea of art. 

Rauschenberg on the erased De Kooning episode

Absence can become very personal. A few years ago I found myself standing alone in the Polish pavilion in the Venice Biennale. It was 2011 and the Israeli-born artist Yael Bartana was exhibiting three films about Poland and the absence of Jews.

Yael Bartana: And Europe Will Be Stunned (2007–11)

I found myself staring at a video sequence that struck deep. I was suddenly caught up in a call for the return of 3,300,000 Jews to the land of their forefathers. Poland was empty of Jews and my father's family were of Polish Jewish heritage, my grandmother, Lily Lucy Singer dying when I was very young, too young to find out anything from her about her history. Bartana's films occupy a space between documentary, propaganda and fiction and as you watch them you become unsettled as to what is real and what is a construction. There was one sequence in particular that got to me. A young activist, played by Sławomir Sierakowski (founder and chief editor of Krytyka Polityczna magazine), was delivering a speech in the abandoned National Stadium in Warsaw. In this speech he speaks to all the Jews that have left Poland and urges them to come back. I was suddenly overcome with an existential loss. I was for a moment defined by a lost past, a past I had not experienced, and could only reconstruct by looking at old marriage certificates and one single photograph of my great great grandfather Shepsel Sanderwitch's grave in Manchester.

Shepsel Sanderwitch: Memorial stone

Sometimes when trying to open out possible pedagogic approaches or positions that can be taken in relation to art work I can forget that these things can get very personal and go beyond rationality and a balanced position taking.

The concept of representing empty spaces has been at the centre of Rachael Whiteread's work for many years and the void of negative casting was used by her to create a "counter monument" to the loss of European Jews because of the Nazi genocide. 

Rachael Whiteread: Drawing for Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial: Vienna

Rachael Whiteread: Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial: Vienna

This use of negative space was personally very poignant but I would hope it is also something that resonates far beyond my own personal feelings and illustrates how by working sensitively with absence, gaps and spaces, a void can become full of meaning. 

See also these related posts

On marks and stains and our need to get rid of them

Facing a blank piece of paper

David Edgar's presentation on the void

Non Western Aesthetics

David Edgar's PhD thesis

Erasers and pencils

Drawing the void

The gap between perception and reality