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Suzanne Kite December 10th, 2013 Critical Reading

Empty Vessels & Empty Rooms

Fashion earth to make a vase from it: where there is nothing, there is functioning of the vase.

The Laozi says great fullness is seemingly empty. The parallels found between the concepts of Brassiers concept of nothing , Francois Julliens discussion of emptiness in Chinese painting, and empty art such as empty galleries, blank canvases, and silence, are all empty vessels through which we can access the unseen & out-of-field. How is the perception of fullness and emptiness a way to access the unknown and that which is imperceptible to human consciousness? The blank slate and the empty frame, when presented to an audience, does not exist as a closed system of emptiness. In film, the significance of a completely white shot, which is very difficult to achieve in the film medium, is a framing of a filled nothingness. In order for this white to exist, it must be framed, as Deleuze suggests in his essay Cinema 1.1

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. London: Continuum, 2005. Internet resource.

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Does this filled-nothingness represent something real? Brassier calls the real already-undivided rather than the transcendent unity which is posited and presupposed as undivided and deployed in order to effect the transcendental synthesis of the empirical and the metaphysical.2 However, this real, in an undivided form, is nearly inaccessible without a frame. Similarly, silence in sound art, most famously highlighted by the work of John Cage, exemplifies the dichotomies that arise within seemingly empty space. While the space that emerges when sound is not present is silence, there is no such thing as true silence. 433 is not a piece of silent music, but a frame with which to hear with. What is framed is conceptually silence and empty because the player is tacet. However, the performance obviously includes the sounds of the concert hall, the environment, and ultimately, the universe. Inasmuch as this silent music is not yet broken up into distinct sounds--one opposition to another--it allows them to coexist and maintains the full harmony among them. 3 The art is only experienced because of the frame. Without human perception of the frame, the sounds that exist in 433 will still exist, and eternally exist, but the sound object, the sound waves and their acoustic properties, do not exist as art, unless placed within the frame that is a construct of human perception. Another form of emptiness in sound art is the rest. Ferruccio Busonsi addresses the rest in music, and the break between movements: That which,

2 3

Laurelle, 1989, Philosophie et non-philosophie Jullien, Franois, and Jane M. Todd. The Great Image Has No Form, or on the Nonobject Through Painting.

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009. Print. Page 48.

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within our present-day music, most nearly approaches the essential of the art, is the Rest and the Hold (Pause). Consummate players, improvisers, know how to employ these instruments of expression in loftier and ampler measure. The tense silence between two movementsin itself music, in this environmentleaves wider scope for divination than the more determinate, but therefore less elastic, sound.4 Busonsis point is that the emptiness of the pause is filled to the brim with music. Sound in music is a practice in subtraction of human focus. When the human ear hones in on certain sounds, it no longer hears the rest of the universe. However, as soon as the silence is the focus, whether as a rest, a break in movements, the space before or after a piece, or the piece itself, allows for emptiness to be filled by fullness. Invisible Art also emerged in the 1960s as a facet of emptiness being explored. For example, Robert Barry's 1969 piece, Inert Gas, uses an invisible medium. While gas is not nothing, the concept of nothing can be interpreted as the subject of the piece. Barry is quoted as saying Nothing seems to me the most potent thing in the world. 5 While Barrys other works deal with intangible objects outside of human perception, the physical, but invisible, aspect of Inert Gases, deal in the absence of human perception of even the physical parts of our reality. Inert Gases was performed for an audience in the desert, none of whom could see the gases dispersing, nor could they be sure the gases were there to begin with.

Schwartz, Elliott, and Barney Childs. Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music. New York: Holt,

Rinehart and Winston, 1967. Prin. Page 10. 5 Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (New York, Praeger, 1973), p. 40

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Thus, Barry is seeking to create a possibility of emptiness, seeking to frame the possibility of the unseeable. Brassier says, The axiom of separation stipulates that every assertion of existence concerning a set necessarily presupposes a pre-existing set. Thus there must be an originary set whose existence provides the precondition for every subsequent set. This is the empty-set: the set to which nothing belongs.
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By framing anything, be it invisible or even visible, we can become aware

of the set we are dealing with, and therefore step into the ability to access every other set inside, surrounding, and out-of-field. Whatever the reality evoked, it had only to be permeated by absence to emerge distilled, emancipated from whatever was keeping it sterilely shut up within itself, freed from the obstinate tautology in which it was absorbed, thereby giving access to the profundity of things. 7 When the human consciousness is able to conceive of a glimpse of emptiness, it is only accessible through the frame or the set. The frame allows humans to create an organized reference point out of normally inaccessible perceptions. Deleuze points out that, a closed system is never absolutely closed; but on the one hand it is connected in space to others systems by a more or less fine thread, an on the other hand it is integrated or reintegrated into a whole which transmits a duration to it along this thread. 8 What is made conceptually accessible through this framing of a closed system is the frame itself, and therefore the system within which the frame is existing. The system draws attention to what is not frame,

Brassier, Ray. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print. Jullien, page 10. Deleuze Page 17

Page 104.
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what is out of frame and therefore outside of our perception. Even if this gives rise to a new unseen set, on to infinity; and an absolute aspect by which the closed system opens on to a duration which is immanent to the whole universe, which is no longer a set and does not belong to the order of the visible. 9 While some sets are unseen, and will remain unseen, the existence of sets we come to know is contingent upon all those we do not know. Thus these objects seize that in the world which concerns it exclusively, and which makes it be born to the world.10 This is the codependence of emptiness and fullness. Empty galleries attempt to do the same framing, but with a much more physical space, as seen in Yves Klein's 1958 exhibition La spcialisation de la sensibilit l'tat matire premire en sensibilit picturale stabilise: Le Vide. He removed everything in the gallery space except a large cabinet, painted every surface white, and then staged an elaborate entrance procedure for the opening night; The gallery's window was painted blue, and a blue curtain was hung in the entrance lobby, accompanied by republican guards and blue cocktails. Thanks to an enormous publicity drive, 3000 people were forced to queue up, waiting to be let into an empty room.12 The gallery becomes the frame for nothing. It is like Francois Julliens discussion of the vase: an empty vessel with which to hold everything.
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Deleuze Page 17 Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Print. Page 106.

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The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility: The Void, Klein.
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Beale, Jason. "Yves Klein, The Void". Jasonbeale.com.

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The vase holds, collects, and manifests--three verbs inflected by the altheia--the symbolic Quadripartition: of earth (from which the vase is made); heaven (towards which it rises); the world of the divine as a result; and the world of mortals, who perform libations with it. In the short the vase organized the great mythologico-religious scene of humanity. 13 This empty vessel, or empty vase, is a necessary step in human perception, because we cannot perceive without a frame. This ritual of creating an empty vessel from the earth is played out again and again within attempts to organize the imperceptible. Brassiers discussion of the source of nothing takes us back to a time before science and enlightenment thinking, where the ritual is of and for nothing. Sacrifices magical power consists in establishing a correspondence between things for which no ratio, no proportion of conceptual equivalence yet exists. This is its quite literal irrationality.14 Similar to the vase, the sacrificial object is an empty vessel, imbued with meaning. It becomes a signifier for anything and everything, completely outside the grasp of rational thought. By virtue of the void it creates, the vase is pure signifier, since, in its emptiness, it is not the signifier of a particular signified.
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Essentially formless, and meaningless, this void is essential

for a human to perceive anything outside the correlation. What is discovered in the experience of these empty galleries, is never their emptiness, but their fullness. Through these empty spaces the full dependant

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Jullien Page 82 Brassier Page 35 15 Jullien Page 82

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status of fullness comes to light. 16 If fullness exists, where does the nothing exist? Nothing exists as the void that hollows out the space for fullness to emerge. Without this void, we would have no contact with fullness. Emptiness proceeds by hollowing out fullness, just as fullness, in turn, is opened wide by the void. Far from forming two opposing and separate qualities or states, emptiness and fullness are structurally correlated; each exists only by virtue of the other and opens the natural to the spiritual, and the visible to the Invisible. have access to the humanly inaccessible. When entering the space of a gallery, the first experience is of physical presence. What is known is the physical emptiness, the art itself is first known through the physical emptiness, then it is known through the mental experience of the emptiness. What is experienced is the void, where the mind must struggle to place itself in time and space. The physical space exists without the mental struggle, and the void exists without the discovery of it, but the gap that is bridged is the art. The void, a place both intangible and immaterial, exists at once as the vacant space between bodies, permitting their displacement, and as interstitial space mingled with things themselves. 18 The gap that bridges to the void, since it is inaccessible, is the root of art, is the art in itself, and is only accessible through art. The Laozi calls that undifferentiated Fount of the invisible, from which forms and beings continually proceed and to which they return to resorbed, the unnameable.19
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It is through this void that we

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Jullien Page 84 Jullien Page 83 18 Jullien Page 80 19 Jullien Page 19

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In order to lay bare the unseeable, it is necessary to create gaps, silences, and emptiness in order to expunge that which hidden: if you want the water to flow far into the distance, do not show its entire course. 20 The essential existence of art, the only access to completeness and fullness, is through nothing. If we are to know an art object, it is to reach within that indescribable and unknowable place. Qualities which are more beautiful, colours more brilliant, stones more precious, extensions more vibrant; because, being reduced to their seminal reasons and having broken with every relation to the negative, they shall remain forever affixed onto the intensive space of positive differences then Platos final prediction in the Phaedo shall be realized; the one in which he promised to the sensibility which has been freed from its empirical exercise temples stars and gods which have never been seen; unheard of affirmations. 21 Thinking itself is still an unavoidable tool by which art is reached. Thought reaches toward the art object, but in identifying it as such, the thought itself becomes reframed and objectified. Since being-nothing is foreclosed to thought, and since thinking presupposes a minimum degree of objectifying transcendence as its element, it is not the real which causes thought, but rather objectifying transcendence. Thinking needs to be occasioned by objectifying transcendence in order for it to be able to assume the real as its unobjectifiable

cause-of-the-last-instance. For thinking to effectuate the foreclosure of its real cause, it must first be occasioned by its ideal cause. 22

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Jullien Page 22 Deleuze, 1968, Page 314 22 Brassier Page 140

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While connected, fullness and emptiness cannot be melted in on themselves and become a concept of unity. Rather, these states exist in a dependant state of simultaneity. If the emptiness of the set is a formed through its framing, the set has become separated through a subtraction, similar to the rest or pause in sound art. How does the negation of belonging which establishes the existence of the voids being-nothing differ from the negation of unity through which Badiou asserts the non being of the One? The logical import of the axiom of the empty-set is neither that non-belonging exists, nor that the unpresentable exists, nor that inexistence exists. Rather the axiom asserts that there is a set B such that no set A belongs to it. 23 Brassier further address the issue of Oneness by addressing the functioning of the rupturing of the traditional figure of the bond; unbinding as the form of being of everything which acts as a semblance of the bond...That everything that is bound testifies that is unbound in its being; that the reign of the multiple is, without exception, the groundless ground of what is presented; that the One is merely the result of transitory operations24 We experience art through the emergence and submergence of our own experience of the void, Not only does fullness come into actuality from emptiness (or fail to come into actuality by remaining within emptiness); it is by virtue of emptiness--and through emptiness by hollowing-opening wide--that fullness can

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Brassier Page 105 Badiou 1989, Page 10

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ceaselessly produce its full effect. 25 By entering an empty gallery, we come to know fullness and emptiness, and by listening to 433 we come to know it as well. Nothingness is therefore essential to perception as a whole, and we come to know art objects through our perception of nothingness and fullness. Following the logic of meaning, ultimately we are freed from meaning through discovering the nothing that lies at the end of the logical path. As such, the empty gallery is all galleries, and all galleries are empty galleries, and through them we dissolve our own presence into absence.

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Jullien Page 84