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)
Ensō (c. 2000) by Kanjuro Shibata
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
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