Rachel Cusk, “Rachel Cusk: ‘Aftermath was Creative Death. I was Heading into Total Silence’ by Kate Kellaway, The Observer 24 August 2014
I’m certain autobiography is increasingly the only form in all the arts. Description, character — these are dead or dying in reality as well as in art.
Brian Dillon, “The Revelation of Erasure,” Objects in this Mirror: Essays 2014
… Erasure is never merely a matter of making things disappear: there is always some detritus strewn about in the aftermath, some bruising to the surface from which word or image has been removed, some reminder of the violence done to make the world look new again. Whether rubbed away, crossed out or reinscribed, the disappeared entity has a habit of returning, ghostlike: if only in the marks that usurp its place and attest to its passing. But writing, for example, is already, long before lead hits pulp, a question of erasure, an art of leaving out. Every painting, said Picasso, is a sum of destructions: the artist builds and demolishes in the same instant. Which is perhaps what Jasper Johns had in mind when he said of Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953) that it embodied an “additive subtraction”: after a month’s sporadic destruction, and forty spent erasers, what is left is a surface startlingly alive, active, palimpsestic (pp. 309-310).
… A painting — at least a figurative painting — which is, as it were, too deep, risks becoming a glutinous mess, erasing itself by its very urge to completion. In Honoré de Balzac’s story “The Unknown Masterpiece,” the great painter Frenhofer labors for years at a picture of a young woman, until she disappears, leaving only a tiny, perfect foot looming out of the surrounding chaos: “Colors daubed one on top of the other and contained by a mass of strange lines forming a wall of paint.” By unintentionally erasing his painting, Frenhofer has in effect produced the first modernist monochrome, but he has done it by larding his canvas with too much significance, not too little: excess is a form of erasure too (p. 312).
… If the erased face always conjures the image of some primal violence, the expunged word inevitably attests to a repression of some kind, whether psychological or political. In the coy ellipses with which, in the novels of the eighteenth century, readers were invited to imagine undescribed erotic adventures, on the blacked-out pages of classified documents, or in the cancelled lines of a prisoner’s censored letter, the lost word denotes the intercession of authority (p. 311).
… Two works by Joseph Kosuth, entitled Zero & Not and One (1985, 1986) point out both the psychoanalytic attitude to language and the tendency of Freud’s words to assert their authority despite our efforts to wipe them out. A Freudian text is printed on the gallery wall, then struck through with black tape, so that it is erased but still insists, remains more or less readable: its lesson — the lesson of psychoanalysis — a lesson, after all, about the impossibility of erasure — simply won’t go away (p. 312).
The fondest, least plausible dream of modernist art and literature was of a world without memory: a cultural tabula rasa from which all trace of the styles of the past had been erased. The arts of evacuation imagined by the likes of Samuel Beckett, Yves Klein, and John Cage aspired to a deliberate vacuity: a vacant stage, an empty gallery, a silent orchestra. But in each case the project is impossible: some sound, image or word will intervene to recall the world left behind. …
“What we require is silence, but what silence requires is that I go on talking,” declared Cage in his “Lecture on Nothing”: the silence dreamed of by the art of the last century is always expectant, about to be spoken into. In 1996, the artist, writer, and curator Jeremy Millar interviewed the novelist J. G. Ballard, set to duplicating the tape before getting it transcribed, and accidentally erased hours of the great man’s thoughts. The ruined cassette, one long pregnant pause, could only become an artwork: Erased Ballard Interview (1996–2001). You listen, heart in mouth, just as Millar must have done, hoping that Ballard’s cultivated tones will, any second now, interrupt the hiss. And at the same time, you hear everything in this piece: the whole history of the avant-garde affair with emptiness, the dematerialization of the work of art, its evanescence into pure idea or gesture, up to and including Rauschenberg’s erasure of de Kooning’s drawing: all of it, suggests Millar’s blank tape, merely an absurd error (pp. 315-316).
Maybe the total erasure of a work of art, or the making of a work that had an utter absence at its heart, was never possible to begin with, or maybe it’s simply a fantasy to which contemporary art is no longer willing to give itself over, except playfully (p. 316). …
Linder Sterling, “Linder Sterling: ‘Lady Gaga Didn’t Acknowledge I Wore a Meat Dress First’ by Sean O’Hagan, The Observer [The New Review, p. 5] 12 January 2014
You attended the now famous Sex Pistols performance at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester in June 1976. Was it as exciting and galvanising as received wisdom has it?
Oh yes. It was a docking station. The first time I could plug into something new and exciting in its confusion. You just knew something was going on just because it was so different to anything else. There was no attempt at professionalism or entertainment. Things were always on the verge of disintegration onstage and yet there was also this incredible energy emanating from these very glamorous urchins. It was a radical change of gear. I remember thinking, “Oh, I have not been here before and I don’t even have the language to describe what it is.” It really was the last great British underground.
Laura Cumming, “Invisible: Art About the Unseen 1957-2012 — Review,” The Observer 17 June 2012
[Empty promises: Invisible Labyrinth (2005) by Jeppe Hein at the Hayward Gallery. Photograph: Tony Kyriacou / Rex Features]
Invisible, the Hayward Gallery’s new exhibition, has a theme so novel and provocative one cannot help rising to the challenge. What kind of art would be sufficiently invisible (as it were) to appear in this show? Perhaps there will be glowing after-images, or mirages conjured out of nothing by the American light artist James Turrell. Perhaps there will be sound works by Bruce Nauman or the Turner prize-winner Susan Philipsz; or maps to buried treasure such as Robert Smithson’s great Spiral Jetty, long since vanished beneath the waters of Lake Utah.
Perhaps the show will concern itself with lost art, destroyed art, or art that was never made in the first place, such as Leonardo’s colossal bronze horse or Vladimir Tatlin’s stupendous Monument to the Third International, which would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower had his dreams been achieved. Perhaps the Hayward Gallery will be showing Marcel Duchamp’s nostalgic vial of Paris air, or an evocation of Yves Klein’s 1958 Paris exhibition, empty of everything except (he claimed) the artist’s own spirit.
[…] What is there to see? Quite a lot, as it turns out, otherwise there wouldn’t be much to add to Ralph Rugoff’s excellent catalogue. The paradox is, of course, that an artist can only be represented here through something visible: a film, a photographic record, typed instructions about leaving a blank canvas outside overnight until it’s suffused with pink dawn light. By the time you’ve read Yoko Ono’s prose-poem, the image is in your head.
There is a blacked-out gallery (supposedly haunted by The Ghost of James Lee Byars, to use its title) that makes darkness visible. Visitors to Jeppe Hein’s wall-less labyrinth collide as if their regulation headsets made them blind to the existence of others. The Taiwanese artist Lai Chih-Sheng has made an immense chalk drawing (the largest in the world, he claims) for those who have eyes to see it; which might be the crux of this show.
Even the nod to Klein involves a vivid archive film of the artist striding about his empty gallery contemplating the bare (but curiously glowing) walls as if there really was something to see. Which there was at this stage, of course: namely the artist filling the room with his artistic sensibility, parodying the Romantic tradition, displaying his aura.
Even when Klein wasn’t there, visitors insisted they could still feel his presence. This was a proposition tested by Chris Burden in a 1975 performance. Burden lay on a concealed platform in a New York gallery for 22 days during which he saw nobody, and nobody saw him. Yet visitors became palpably infuriated by the lurking sense of his presence; or so it is claimed.
Invisible is a show replete with claims and assertions — that the artist was present; that this white canvas was primed with mountain snow; that these stones were once inscribed with water: they sound like confidence tricks, and certainly turn upon trust of a sort. You have to believe that the Chinese artist Song Dong was too poor to afford ink and wrote his diary in water instead, otherwise those stones are meaningless, aren’t they? In fact, the stones are irrelevant as visible objects. As soon as the idea of that poignant act begins to grow in one’s mind, it is only the thought that counts.
Some assertions can be tested. I could see no sign of Chih-Sheng’s immense drawing in the central gallery until I ran a finger beneath a balustrade and found the chalk line transferred to me. But there is no way of knowing whether Maurizio Cattelan’s hilarious police report concerning the theft of an invisible artwork from his car is genuine or not. What is the difference between fiction and not-fiction in art? This is art as unreliable evidence.
One room of the Hayward is empty except for an eavesdropping device (according to the wall text). But it’s nowhere to be seen. Uneasiness sets in, which is apt since this is the work of Roman Ondák, born in former communist Czechoslovakia.
Another gallery is devoted to all-white canvases including a sharp send-up of the genre by Tom Friedman entitled 1000 Hours of Staring. But Bruno Jakob’s works are a challenge to cynics, made as they are with not much more than canvas or paper exposed to the elements. There are no images but each bears faint traces of its making that inspire unexpected landscapes in the imagination.
[…] There is, for instance, an immense gap between Jay Chung’s project — a movie entirely shot without telling cast and crew that there was no film in the camera and thus no record of their mutual labour — and Claes Oldenburg’s buried monument to John F Kennedy. Neither work is visible, indeed neither was fully realised. But Oldenburg’s idea was to evoke the sense of loss through a hollow colossus: the space Kennedy occupied in life now sealed beneath the ground. Even the drawing for the proposal is poignant. Chung, by comparison, is working at the dead end of conceptualism.
This show puts its faith in the audience, in our willingness to think and our openness to ideas. But it cannot quite escape the trap of its own theme for not one of these works achieves total invisibility. Even in the black room there are discernible figures, pinpricks of light and visible forms. As long as our eyes are open, we continue to make pictures of the world.
[Invisible: Art About the Unseen in pictures.]
Elizabeth Day, “Sadie Jones: ‘You Imagine a Cathedral and on the Page it’s a Garden Shed’,” The Observer 1 April 2012
“I’m never happy with what I’ve written,” she says. “You imagine, before you start, there’s a cathedral, and the moment it starts on the page, it’s a garden shed. And then you just try to make it the best shed you can.”
From Paul Morley, “On Gospel, Abba and the Death of the Record: an Audience with Brian Eno,” The Observer 17 January 2010 (Features section, p.10)
“A way to make new music is to imagine looking back at the past from a future and imagine music that could have existed but didn’t. […] One of the innovations of ambient music was leaving out the idea that there should be melody or words or a beat… so in a way that was music designed by leaving things out — that can be a form of innovation, knowing what to leave out.”
Hermione Hoby, “Nothing Ventured, Something Gained,” The Observer 16 August 2009 (page 3)
As one band asks fans to fill an album of silence, Hermione Hoby looks at the history of blank art
How to proceed when your eight albums have already plundered pretty much every musical landscape out there? The unflaggingly experimental brother-sister duo, the Fiery Furnaces, have an answer: a silent album – or Silent Record to give their recently announced project its proper name. Yet those seeking balm for overstimulated minds and ears might be disappointed – the “record” is in fact a book of music notation, reports and illustrations and includes plans for a series of “fan-band concerts” where fans will “perform, interpret, contradict, ignore, and so on, the compositions that make up Silent Record.” Sounds noisy. But the history of emptiness is a rich one …
John Cage’s 4’33, 1952
The avant-garde composer’s four-minute, 33-second recording of a pianist not playing the piano wasn’t, in fact, the sound of nothing: its unavoidable ambient sounds indicated the impossibility of silence. And, in a stroke of etymological irony, Cage’s explorations of silence paved the way for the genre of Noise music.
Yves Klein’s The Void, 1958
Klein’s empty, white-painted room at the Iris Clert gallery in Paris had just one concession to colour: blue cocktails at its opening. Thousands queued to see it.
Anne Lydiat’s Lost For Words, 2000
The only words in Lydiat’s book of 100 empty pages are those on the dustjacket: “About this book I have promised myself to say nothing,” is the sagely evasive declaration from philosopher Maurice Blanchot. Many parted with £9.99 to own a copy.
My Penguin, 2007
Judging a book by its cover becomes a tempting exercise when the cover’s drawn by the reader. Penguin’s blank-cover editions of eminently illustratable classics – Alice in Wonderland and Animal Farm among the most popular – drew on the irresistible desire to scribble all over a white space.
Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse’s Dark Night of the Soul, 2009
It was a legal impasse rather than artistic high-mindedness that prompted this pair to bypass their record company and flog a blank CD, including a note encouraging punters to illegally download their album. No marks for meditations on emptiness but all props for so craftily dodging a lawsuit.
ANDREW GALLIX 