N O T H I N G : A User's Manual

An Introductory Essay and Preliminary Bibliography

Compiled by Information As Material

Yoko Ono's 1963 Tape Piece II/ Room Piece instructs: "take the sound of the room breathing."1
It goes on to stipulate an evenly-spaced frequency of daily auscultations, as if the participant
were a nurse on rounds, tasked with monitoring the interior architecture's vital signs: "1. at
dawn/ 2. in the morning/ 3. in the afternoon/ 4. in the evening/ 5. before dawn." Like
contemporaneous compositions by La Monte Young and John Cage, Room Piece takes part in
the development of what Seth Kim-Cohen has termed a "non-cochlear" sonic art:
interactions that extend beyond mere hearing and might not be humanly audible at all.2
From another perspective, Ono's figuration of pulmonary chambers recognizes the ambient
frequencies deflected by any architecture in its capacity as a resonant space. Those same
properties of wave reflection and interference were later amplified by Alvin Lucier's
landmark I Am Sitting in a Room (1969) and more recently by Jakob Kirkegaard's 4 Rooms
(2006), in which a recording of the ambient sounds in an empty room are played back into
that empty room and rerecorded, with the process repeated until the initial silence returns as
swells of surf-like hiss above a rumbling sonic wash. What appears to be empty space, Ono
and Kirkegaard reminds us, is alive with something to which we were simply not paying
sufficient attention. Furthermore, the final imperative of Ono's score, "bottle the smell of
the room of that particular hour as well," aligns her work with two of Marcel Duchamp's
enigmatic late readymades: the empty 50cc ampoule Air d'Paris (1919) and the relabeled
perfume bottle Belle Haleine eau de Voilette (1921). 3 One could continue to trace other
associations, but the point is that for a work which seems to have nothing to it, Room Piece
gestures toward a surprising number of intertexts. Moreover, implicit in Ono's diurnal
schedule is the assumption that whether audible or not, the sound of the room will fluctuate
that "nothing" is in fact fluid and variable and varied and multiple.
With that assumption of multiplicity in mind, the bibliography that follows this essay
presents a theoretical and historical context for the recurrent turn to various modes of
absence and absenting in contemporary art. It is meant to serve as a prt--lire syllabus for
an introductory open-learning module and as a resource for seminars in art history, theory,
and praxis. In part, it seeks to indicate the surprisingly wide range of significations that have
been assigned to apori which might on first thought all seem to be indistinguishably alike:
from a proxy communication of the unspeakable to an existentialist surrender in the face of
a dire sense of emptiness; from metaphysical refusal to a spiritual meditation; from the
structural conditions of form to a range of metaphoric and allegorical themes; from the

social and institutional focus of anti-object practices to the exaggeration of a substrate's

facture; from the overwhelmingly excessive to the nearly insufficient. In short, as these texts
collectively attest, any single definition of nothing collapses under the weight of the competing
and contested meanings of the various multiple nothings that have been made available to
contemporary artistic practice by a host of theorists, writers and artists. The texts listed in
our preliminary bibliography document how squarely the concept of nothing lies at the heart
of a number of otherwise quite different aesthetics: from Dada to Abstract Expressionism;
from the Cage circle and Fluxus to monochrome abstraction; from minimalism to
conceptual art; from Western metaphysics to Eastern cosmology; from performance to
institutional critique, artists' books to cinema. Since contemporary art practices either trace
their lineages to these modernist and post-modernist traditions or emerge as a reaction
against those traditions, a clearer understanding of the dynamic operation of nothingness in
those twentieth-century movements can lead to a richer and more nuanced understanding of
the arts today.
The bulk of the material listed below, however, focuses on the twenty-first century,
where one can see how the continued symbolic power of nothing motivates, underwrites,
and frames the diversity of contemporary art and critical thought (indeed, an entire issue of a
scholarly journal was recently devoted to the topic).4 Unleashed into arenas that all have their
origins in figuration, presentation, and communication (work that in one way or another
puts something forward, issues a statement, instigates a dialogue, or merely purports to offer
some thing in some way), nothing a refusal to offer, an offer without object, a full
negation or partial withdrawal poses a challenge to those assumptions about the
fundamental operation of the arts, and it proposes a radical alternative to work grounded in
figurative, communicative, or semantic models. In the process, moreover, an insistence on
the paradoxically positive value of "nothing" sets into motion a series of provocative and
productive dialectic operations between a number of charged poles: dissolution and
materiality; form and content; format and form; evacuation and a plenitude; the blockage of
participation and the invitation to fill in a blank; censorship and assertion; the impossibility
of witness and the witnessing of the unspeakable; nihilism and spiritual faith.
To begin with, focusing on nothing invites one to speculate on what might have
been there in place of the announced or recognized absence, as well as on what remains
despite that absence. Lucy Lippard famously characterized the period from 1966 to 1972 as

the time of the "dematerialization" of the art object.5 Those anni mirabiles announced the
revolution in artistic forms and modes of exhibition which set the terms for our current art
world by reconceptualizing the relationships between thinking and viewing, object and
process, artists and audience. That reconceptualization shifted the focus from merely looking
at objects to thinking about ideas, and it nominated the intellectual sophistication of a
project over and above the aesthetic craft of a polished product. In the process, the
denigration of art objects ("secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious," as
Lippard described their demoted forms) pointed towards the logical conclusion that an
objects' attributes and ultimately even the object itself might be dispensed with
entirely, leaving nothing behind.6 Ironically, however, the most abstract and minimal works
of conceptual art depended precisely on their material supports and the specifics of their
environments, which were only cast into greater relief by the withdrawal of other elements.
Consider, for an iconic instance, Robert Rauschenberg's 1951 White Paintings. Decades before
Lippard's "six years," his series of paintings themselves were deprecated in the same way as
her "dematerialized" objects: simple, unremarkable stretched canvases with a layer of white
commercial house-paint unpretentiously distributed with a roller in a deskilled application
(Rauschenberg insisted that anyone could apply the paint). But the minimal simplicity of that
uninflected achromatic object is precisely what allowed John Cage to notice the shadows and
dust motes that transformed the paintings into animated works that could enter into
dialogue with film and dance as much as with easel painting.7 When the ostensible "content"
of a work is absent, its formal properties step up to assume the role; where nothing is
proffered, nothingness itself becomes the subject. From Kasimir Malevich's White on White
(1918) to David Batchelor's Found Monochromes (1997, ongoing), the history of the
monochrome plane repeatedly demonstrates this law of conservation within the symbolic
economy of the artwork. At its most abstract, art reveals the most literal and material
conditions of its own possibility.
Similarly, clearing away any particular concrete image or object allows one to focus
on a work's abstract categorical status, its cultural context, and its social function. If one of
the defining roles of the avant-garde is to interrogate the category of art, then a means of
focusing on that category without being distracted by particulars will be one of its most
effective tactics. The epistemological deployment of nothing where the art object is expected
is one of those means. By the same token, nothing has been an effective tool in the critique

of institutions. In 1974, for example, Michael Asher had the privacy wall separating the
exhibition space and the office space of the Claire Copley Gallery (Los Angeles) removed,
thereby architecturally and visually connecting the otherwise segregated commercial and
aesthetic activities taking place in the gallery, putting office work on display as performance
art and foregrounding quotidian commercial activities as special events. More subtle
removals had been proposed a few years earlier by Lawrence Weiner. The descriptive titles
of two works in his 1968 textual exhibition Statements stipulate the dimensions of their
absences: A Square Removed from a Rug in Use, and A 36" x 36" Removal to the Lathing or Support
Wall of Plaster or Wallboard from a Wall. As Benjamin Buchloh observes:
Both interventions [. . .] inscribe themselves in the support surfaces of the
institutions and/or the home which that tradition had always disavowed. The
carpet (presumably for sculpture) and the wall (for painting), which idealist
aesthetics always declares as mere "supplements," are foregrounded here not
only as parts of their material basis but as the inevitable future location of the
work [. . . .] neither one of these surfaces could ever be considered to be
independent from their institutional location, since the physical inscription
into each particular surface inevitably generates contextual readings
dependent upon the institutional conventions and the particular use of those
surfaces in place.8
Given the particularity of those contextual readings, and the visual bias that still pertains to
terms like "display" and "exhibition," the curatorial problems posed by works predicated on
nothing are both challenging and revealing. As the second section of the bibliography
illustrates, such works force curators to confront fundamental questions about the limits of
authenticity, documentation, replication and re-enactment, and the specificity of sites. As
with Weiner's geometric removals, those sites have aesthetic as well as political resonances.
Matt Sheridan Smith's exhibitions of empty museum display plinths, for instance, reminds us
that the supports for vitrines and sculptures pieces of furniture we are not normally
meant to contemplate beyond trying to avoid knocking into them bear a striking
resemblance to the minimalist sculpture that populated galleries in the late 1960s. Moreover,
exhibitions of nothing have foregrounded not only the role of the audience in creating or
completing a "work," but also the conventions and implicit contracts that silently define
norms of participation and interaction, as well as an audience's own expectations of what
they are owed in a cultural economy by galleries, artists and art. Graciela Carnevale's Accin
del encierro (Buenos Aires, 1968), for instance, begins like many of the "empty gallery" exhibits

mentioned in the readings here, but rather than leaving gallery-goers to puzzle over what
they were meant to see, or locking them out of a closed gallery altogether, she locked the
unsuspecting audience inside the gallery. Carnevale's Action turned the exhibition "opening"
into an enclosing, and by doing so she redefined the social event of privileged spectatorship
as a kind of false imprisonment.
Even in less violent and physically extreme circumstances, when faced with nothing
audiences often realize that the totalizing impassiveness of an absence can seem like a
foreclosure or refusal; but the space opened by nothing can also provide the ground for
intervention and new activity. The audience attending a performance of John Cage's
notorious 4'33", for instance, might feel cheated, or deprived of hearing a virtuoso musician
play an instrument; but they might also feel liberated and promoted by the reversal that puts
them effectively on stage, making them responsible for the sounds they would normally
attempt to suppress and ignore in other concert settings. With the same dual power of
blocking and opening, nothing can be a method of censorship, an exercise of silencing
power, but it can also be a resistant refusal to play along according to the rules of a dominant
discourse. Ken Gonzales-Day's Erased Lynching Series (2000-2013), for example, engages some
of the public silences and historical under-representations in American history by reprinting
photographs of lynchings in which the image of the victim and rope have been removed.
With a similar logic, allegories of nothing can offer a way out of the logical impasse of how
one might express the inexpressible and give voice to what has been rendered unspeakable
through trauma, ethical prohibition, historical amnesia, or affective extremes. With logics
similar to the typographic design of Grard Wajcman's novel L'interdit (1986), which prints
only fragmentary footnotes running below otherwise blank pages as one response to the
manifold problems of representing the Shoah, a number of public memorials have made
recourse to sculptural absences and architectural voids. 9 Horst Hoheisel's negative-form
monuments, for instance, include a 1987 Kassel project memorializing a fountain destroyed
by Nazi's, but rather than rebuilding the fountain or raising a monument Hoheisel sunk an
inverted, hollow-concrete cast of the original fountain form twelve-meters deep below the
site of the vandalized original. Similarly, Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz's Monument
Against Fascism (Hamburg, 1986) began as a galvanized-steel column that the public could
inscribe as a petition against fascism while it slowly sank into the ground over the course of a
decade. With even less to show, Gerz's 2,146 Stones: Monument Against Racism (Saarbrcken,

1990) surreptitiously repaved the cobblestones of a public square after secretly inscribing the
underside of certain cobbles with the names of Nazi-desecrated Jewish cemeteries, leaving
nothing on display but everything underfoot.
As our preliminary reading list demonstrates, nothing has been fetishized as the
ensign of existentialist despair and nihilist denial, but it has also served as a foundational
principle for religious and spiritual affirmation, from Jewish mysticism to Buddhism to
personal expressions of faith. Eva Hesse's Hang Up (1966), for instance, consists of an oversized, excessively cloth-wrapped vacant frame with a looping cable awkwardly protruding
into the gallery as if making an haphazard bid to impound the spectators' space in front of
an absent picture where the insistent frame frames nothing other than a view of the
gallery wall behind it. Hesse declared the work to be:
the most ridiculous structure that I ever made and that is why it is really
good. It has a kind of depth I dont always achieve and that is the kind of
depth or soul or absurdity or life or meaning or feeling or intellect that I want
to get.10
With a similar combination of casual sweep and sequester, Mira Schendel's Trenzinho (1965)
a delicate concatenation of blank Japanese paper sheets strung on nylon thread between
adjacent gallery walls has been described as an expression of Schendel's "own
interpretation of the meaning of nothingness, of loneliness, of being alone in the world."11
The similarly lyrical repetitions of Agnes Martin's abstract geometry of parallel lines on offwhite canvases have also been understood as manifestations of a philosophical reflection of
nothingness and an emptying of the ego, or as a visualization of the ideas voiced in her
notes: "humility, [. . .]/ she does not do anything/ all of her ways are empty." 12 An
experience of negation without lack has also been described as the encounter with
nothingness elicited by Martin's canvases, which shape the awareness of their own
contemplative viewers until they achieve "a fluid, pacific, and expansive state of
concentration, or a kind of full emptiness."13
Nothing, accordingly, serves as a litmus test for our cultural assumptions and
ideologies, and it provides a secure purchase on the poetics behind a range of Non-Western
art and its Western derivatives (including Martin's Taoist evacuation of the ego and the Zen
resonance of Ono's Room Piece, which directly inflected the ostensibly "blank" works of
Ono's Fluxus colleagues Ken Friedman, Nam June Paik, and John Cage). "I have nothing to

say," as Cage famously put it, taking up the idiom and following it with a dismantling turn
and koan-like twist: "and I am saying it." Echoes of Eastern philosophies aside, the torque
on Cage's sentence comes from the double duty nothing performs as both a metaphorical
concept and literal state. This duality between "the nothing that is not there and the
nothing that is," as Wallace Stevens puts it in the final line of his poem "The Snow Man"
was one of the key concepts animating the radical modernism toasted by Stphane Mallarm
in a salute to "n'importe ce qui valut le blanc souci de notre toile [whatever was worthy of
the white attention of our canvas]."14 Recall, for instance, the second section of T. S. Eliot's
The Waste Land, which theatricalizes the "nervousness" that for many exemplified the
modern condition:
What is that noise?
The wind under the door.
What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?
Nothing again nothing.
Do
You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
Nothing?15
Or, as Virginia Woolf narrativized the disquieting, unheimlich indeterminacy of a personified
modernist Nothing in the second section of To the Lighthouse: "Nothing stirred in the
drawing-room or in the dining-room or on the staircase...."16 A decade later, in Everybody's
Autobiography, Gertrude Stein would retain a similarly palpable and positive sense of
"nothing," insisting on its value: "it takes a lot of time," Stein explained, "to be a genius, you
have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing"; later in the book, Stein
avers: "generally speaking anybody is more interesting doing nothing than doing anything."17
All of these statements, however, are complicated by a pervasive modernist racial rhetoric
that equated nothingness with blackness. 18 In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, for
example, Stein declares that African-Americans "were not suffering from persecution, they
were suffering from nothingness."19 William Carlos Williams, similarly, asserts: "When they
[sc. African-Americans] try to make their race an issue it is nothing. In a chorus singing
Trovatore, they are nothing. But saying nothing, dancing nothing, 'NOBODY,' it is a quality."20
The ability of nothing to receive such strong and paradoxical cultural coding, and to
undertake so much political work, should remind us to read the texts in the following
bibliography with a critical, historicist ear and to refrain from too hastily imposing our

own preconceptions about nothingness on the surprisingly heterogeneous significations and

symbolic powers the concept has held.
In the end, we should also remember that if everything has been said before, nothing
has as well. In the early eighteenth century, Louis Coquelet penned an entire book as an
encomium to Nothing, in which he argued:
Mais non seulement il vaut mieux parler de Rien, prfrablement tout ce
qui de dit et s'crit parmi nous la plupart du temps, mais j'ose encore soutenir
que Rien est digne de toutes nos louanges par lui-mme, et qu'on ne doit
jamais oublier Rien, quant il s'agit de prconiser le mrite et la vertu [. . . .]
Rien souvent nous parat quelque chose, et quelque chose souvent nous
parat rien. Rien se trouve partout, et ne rside nulle part.
But not only is it better to speak of Nothing, better in fact than most of what
is said and written in our society, but I venture to propose that Nothing is
worthy of all our praises on its own terms, and that we must never forget
Nothing when it comes to advocating for merit and virtue [. . . .] Nothing
often appears to us as something, and something often seems in the end to
be nothing after all. Nothing is everywhere and resides nowhere.21
Even as it can never quite be fixed, since it "resides nowhere," Nothing, for Coquelet, is
ubiquitous, and in structural terms an overwhelming plenitude often has the same effects as
nothingness' complete evacuation. To put this in concrete terms, like the difference between
anechoic silence and white-noise static, the practical difference between Yves Klein's Le Vide
(1958) and Arman's Le Plein (1960) was negligible; the former emptied a gallery of objects
while the latter heaped it so full of detritus it could not be entered, but both obviated the
ostensible function of the Galerie Iris Clert in Paris: to accommodate spectators who wished
to view art. These twin poles the absence of particulars and the overwhelming abundance
of details so that nothing in particular can be properly comprehended work dialectically
toward the same end. Accordingly, nothing and everything can operate as interchangeable
terms in certain systems, and so many of the claims that follow here in the name of nothing
might apply equally as well to the sublime of the infinite. "Every something," as John Cage
argued, following a metaphysics long familiar to Indian and East Asian philosophies, "is an
echo of nothing."22 Furthermore, a similar exchange also operates contextually. As the idea
of the artwork came, over the course of the twentieth century, to engage and accommodate
the everyday, merging with quotidian experience via deskilled activities and relational
aesthetics, art praxes that might conceivably encompass anything including nothing at all

ultimately threatened to evacuate themselves into the extremes of their own possibility.
As Cuban filmmaker Julio Garcia Espinosa predicted in 1969: "el arte no va a desaparecer en
la nada, va a desaparecer en el todo [art is not going to disappear into nothingness, it is going
to disappear into everything]."23
Like Coquelet's eloge, the curriculum mapped by the following bibliography refuses
to nothing nothing (to employ the rare transitive use of the verb: "to reduce to nothing; to
consider or treat as worthless or unimportant").24 Instead, this preliminary course of reading
attempts to sketch the kind of volume that Gustave Flaubert dreamt of one day writing.
Flaubert confessed: "ce qui me semble beau, ce que je voudrais faire, c'est un livre sur rien
[what seems beautiful to me, what I would like to make, is a book about nothing]."25
Flaubert had closely studied the work of the stern seventeenth-century critic Nicolas
Boileau-Despraux, and he would have known Boileau-Despraux's well-turned phrasing of
the popular maxim: "quand on n'a plus rien, il faut tout hasarder [when you have nothing,
you must risk everything]."26 What follows are thus the tokens of a series of serious wagers,
however playfully their games are engaged.

Why is there something rather than

nothing?
Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibniz
[G. W. Leibniz: Philosophical Essay, trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel
Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989): 210]

10

Nor is there any void, for void is

nothing, and nothing cannot be. Nor
does it [sc. what is] move, for it has no
place to which it can withdraw, but is
full. If there were void, it would
withdraw to the void; but since there is
not void, it has nowhere to withdraw
to.
Melissus of Samos
[A History of Greek Philosophy Vol. 2: The Presocratic tradition from Parmenides to
Democritus, ed. WKC Guthrie (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1965): 104]

11

It seems that when we say that which is

not, we don't say something contrary to
that which is, but only something
different from it.
Plato
[The Sophist, 257b Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1997): 280]

12

Section I: Thinking Nothing of It

Roy Sorensen: from "Nothingness," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2012),
Edward N. Zalta (ed.) <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/nothingness/>.
Parmenides (Fragment 6), trans, David Gallop: Parmenides of Elea: Fragments (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1984): 61.
Blaise Pascal: from Penses, in Thoughts, trans. W. F. Trotter (NY: Collier, 1910): 28.
Immanuel Kant: from Critique of Pure Reason, in Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Lewis White
Beck (New York: Free Press, 1966): 288-289.
Martin Heidegger: from Letter to Ernst Jnger, "Concerning 'The Line'," in Philosophical and Political
Writings, ed. Manfred Stassen (NY: Continuum 2003): 120-142.
Bracha Ettinger Lichtenberg: "This is the Desert, Nothing Strikes Root Here: A Talk with
Edmond Jabs," Routes Of Wandering: Nomadism, Voyages and Transition in Contemporary
Israeli Art, ed. Sarit Shapira (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1991): 246256.
Rachel Elior: from "Hasidism: Historical Continuity and Spiritual Change," Gershom Scholem's
Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism: 50 Years After, ed. Peter Schaeffer and Joseph Dan
(Tbingen: Mohn, 1993): 321-323.
Daniel Matt: from "Ayin: The concept of nothingness in Jewish mysticism", Problem of Pure
Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy, ed. Robert K. Forman (Oxford, 1990): 121 to 125,
i.e. opening to "even being cannot be there" (125) and 127-128 i.e. from "Maimonedes
did not endorse" to "is negated of every conception" and 131-134, i.e. "the deepest
mystery of the Sefirotic process" to "becomes visible for a fleeing moment."
Ludwig Wittgenstein: from Philosophical Investigations 55-59, in Philosophical Investigations, trans.
G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958): 27-29.
Roland Barthes: from "The Bourgeoisie As a Joint-Stock Company," Mythologies, trans.
Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972): 137-145.
Roland Barthes: from Neutral, trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005): 38; 39; 69.
Friedrich Nietzsche: "The Genealogy of Morals, Essay III, Section 28," The Genealogy of
Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989): 162163.
Gilles Deleuze: "Nihilism," Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1983): 147-159.

13

Jean-Paul Sartre: "Presence to Self," Being and Nothingness: an essay on phenomenological ontology
trans. Hazel Barnes (NY: Philosophical Library, 1956): 73-79.
Julia Kristeva: "The Semiotic Chora Ordering the Drives," and "Husserl's Meaning: A
Natural Thesis Commanded by the Judging Subject," Revolution in Poetic Language, trans.
Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984): 25-37.
Jacques Derrida from "The Double Session," Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London:
Continuum, 2004): 254-262 and 264-265; i.e. from "What we will thus be concerned with
here" to ".language whose gambol this is" and from "In the constellation of blanks" to
".very act of separating from it".
Jean-Franois Lyotard: from "Avant-Garde," The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and
Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991): 89-93. i.e. from "In 1950-1,
Barnett Baruch Newman." to "sublime any more."
Michel Foucault: from "Madness, Absence of Work," Critical Inquiry 21: 2 (Winter, 1995):
293-296; i.e. from "To say that madness is disappearing today" to "where nothing is
said."
Luce Irigaray: from "The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry," Speculum of the Other
Woman, trans. Gillian Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985): 40-43; i.e. from "The
reproach against the mother." to "only if a single desire is in control."
Judith Butler: from "The Rock of the Real," Bodies that Matter: on the discursive limits of "sex"
(Oxon: Routledge, 1993 ): 148-158; i.e. from "Zizek begins his critique" to
"manageability of unspeakable loss."
Theodor Adorno: from "Meditations on Metaphysics," Negative Dialectics (Bloomsbury, 1981):
379-381; i.e. from "Associated with the slogans of 'Emptiness' and 'senselessness' is that
of" to "what is damned as nihilism."
Paul Virilio: "Cryptic Architecture," in The Paul Virilio Reader, ed. Steve Redhead (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2004): 16-18.
Moran Pearl: "Negative Casting as a Container of Memory," Transgressing Boundaries:
Humanities in Flux, ed. Marija Wakounig and Markus Peter Beham (Berlin: LIT Verlag,
2013): 138-141.
Margarita McGrath: "Mapping Architecture's 'White Space'," Feminist Practices: Interdisciplinary
Approaches to Women in Architecture, ed. Lori Brown (Farmham: Ashgate, 2011): 218-223.
Jean Baudrillard: "Conspiracy of Art," in The Conspiracy of Art, trans. Ames Hodges (New
York: Semiotext(e), 2005): 25-29.
Griselda Pollock: "Introduction: Trauma and Artworking," After-Affects / After-Images: Trauma
and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2013): 1-11.

14

The scientific imagination ultimately

suffers the same fate as 'e-tainment' ; it
comes to resemble that of those TV
viewers who thought the attack on the
World Trade Center on September 11
was merely another disaster movie, or
that of the Islamist suicide attackers no
doubt dying happy at becoming actors
on a global super-production in which
reality would tip over once and for all into
electronic nothingness.
Paul Virilio
["Ground Zero," The Paul Virilio Reader, ed. Steve Redhead (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2004): 251]

15

Contrary to the discourse of reality and

rationality, which counts on the fact
that there is something (meaning)
rather than nothing and therefore
claims to have its final foundation in
the guarantee of an objective and
decipherable world, radical thought
wagers on the illusion of the world. It
claims to be illusion restoring the nonveracity of facts, the non-signification
of the world, making the opposite
hypothesis that there might be nothing
rather than something, and tracking
this nothing running underneath the
apparent continuity of meaning.
Jean Baudrillard
["Radical Thought," The Conspiracy of Art, trans. Ames Hodges (New York:
Semiotext(e), 2005): 166]

16

D. T. Suzuki: "Is Zen Nihilistic," An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (NY: Grove Press, 1964):
48-57.
Ueda Shizuteru: "The Core of the Kyoto School: Nishida's Nothingness and Nishitani's
Emptiness", in Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School, eds.
Bret Davis and Brian Schroeder and Jason Wirth (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2011), 22-31.
Lee Joon: from "Void: Mapping the Invisible in Korean Art," Void in Korean Art (Seoul:
Leem/Samsung Museum of Art, 2007): 18-21.
Franois Jullien: from "Allow Effects to Come About," Treatise on Efficacy: Between Western and
Chinese Thinking, trans. Janet Lloyd (University of Hawai'i Press, 2004): 109-113 i.e. from
"There are two ways of understanding emptiness" to "like a great bellows."
Franois Jullien: "Empty and Full," The Great Image Has No Form, Or On the Nonobject Through
Painting, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009): 75-90.
Brian Rotman: "Number, Vision, Money," Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1987): 7-26.
David Darling: "Empty Set" entry in The Universal Book of Mathematics: From Abracadabra to
Zeno's Paradoxes (Hoboken: Wiley, 2004): 106.
E. J. Lowe: Section III from "Number, Unity, and Individuality," Philosophy 78: 3 (2003): 330334.
Nick Montfort: from "Null Code Programs," Trope 13: 3 (Cambridge: Trope Tank, 2013): 48. i.e. from "Programs are most typically" to "are not really possible."

17

I said that what was most exciting was

when nothing was happening, I said
that saints should naturally do nothing
if you were a saint that was enough and
a saint existing was everything, if you
made them do anything then there was
noting to it they were just like any one
so I wanted to write a drama where no
one did anything where there was no
action and I had and it was the Four
Saints and it was exciting. [.] After all
the business of an artist is to be really
exciting and he is only exciting, when
nothing is happening.
Gertrude Stein
[Everybody's Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1937): 292]

18

Well, it seems to me that there is an attitude that tends

toward McLuhanism, and this attitude would tend to
see the museum as a null structure. But I think the
nullity implied in the museum is actually one of its
major assets, and that this should be realized and
accentuated. The museum tends to exclude any kind of
life-forcing position. But it seems that now theres a
tendency to try to liven things up in the museums, and
that the whole idea of the museum seems to be tending
more toward a kind of specialized entertainment. Its
taking on more and more the aspect of a discothque
and less and less the aspect of art. So, I think that the
best thing you can say about museums is that they
really are nullifying in regard to action, and I think that
this is one of their major virtues. It seems that your
position is one that is concerned with whats
happening. Im interested for the most part in whats
not happening, that area between events which could
be called the gap. This gap exists in the blank and void
regions or settings that we newer look at. A museum
devoted to different kind of emptiness could be
developed. The emptiness could be defined by the
actual installation of art. Installations should empty
rooms, not fill them.
Robert Smithson
["What Is a Museum?: A Dialogue between Allan Kaprow and Robert
Smithson" Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996): 43]

19

Section II: Nothing to Show for It

Lucy Lippard: "The Dematerialization of Art," in Changing Essays in Art Criticism (NY:
Dutton, 1971): 255-276.
Michael Baldwin: "Remarks on Air Conditioning: an extravaganza of blandness," Arts
Magazine 42: 2 (November, 1967): 22-23.
Keith Arnatt: "Is it Possible for Me to Do Nothing as My Contribution to This Exhibition,"
I'm a Real Photographer: Keith Arnatt, Photographs 1974-2002, ed. David Hurn and Claire
Grafik (London: Chris Boot, 2007): 142-143.
Stanley Brouwn: "How Empty Is This Space?" (Stdtisches Museum Mnchengladbach,
1970).
Robert Smithson: "Some Void Thoughts on Museums," Arts Magazine 42: 2 (November,
1967): 41.
Gustav Metzger: "Years Without Art," Art into Society / Society into Art (London: ICA, 1974).
Sally Yard on Sophie Calle's "Last Seen," The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect, ed. Kynaston
McShine (MoMA, 1999): 136-138.
Kathryn Hixson: "Truth or Dare: Losing Control of How Things Mean," New Art Examiner
23 (Summer 1996): 18-23.
Francis McKee: "From Zero to Nothing in No Time," Nothing, ed. Graham Gussin and Ele
Carpenter (Sunderland: Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, 2001): 16-30.
Mathieu Copeland: "Qualifying the Void," Voids: A Retrospective, ed. John Armleder, Mathieu
Copeland, Laurent Le Bon, Gustav Metzger, Mai-Thu Perret, Clive Phillpot, and
Philippe Pirotte (Zrich: JPR|Ringier, 2009): 167-171.
Ingrid Schaffner: "Doing Nothing," The Big Nothing, (Philadelphia: ICA, 2004): 17-33.
Ralph Rugoff: "How to Look at Invisible Art," Invisible Art about the Unseen 1957-2012
(Hayward Gallery, 2012): 5-27.
Pierre Bismuth: "Never Believe an Artist Who Says Their Work Is About Nothing: The
Culture Consumer's Fear of the Void," Nothing, ed. Graham Gussin and Ele Carpenter
(Sunderland: Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, 2001): 180-182.
Michael Asher, from "December 30, 1969 -- March 1, 1970 / Spaces / Museum of Modern
Art, New York", in Writings 1973-1983 on Works 1969-79, ed. Benjamin Buchloh
(Halifax: NSCAD, 1984?): 24; 30.

20

You'll never get anyone to pay for the

Guggenheim to stay empty all year,
though to me that would be a
marvelous idea.
Allan Kaprow
["What Is a Museum?: A Dialogue between Allan Kaprow and Robert
Smithson" Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996): 48. Copyright Estate
of Robert Smithson]

21

Performances only life is in the

present. Performance cannot be
saved, recorded, documented, or
otherwise participate in the
circulation of representations of
representations: Once it does so, it
becomes something other than
performance. To the degree that
performance attempts to enter the
economy of reproduction it betrays
and lessens the promise of its own
ontology. Performances
beingbecomes itself through
disappearance.
Peggy Phelan
[Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993): 146]

22

From the birth of conceptual art in the 1960s down to the

immediate present visual artists have constantly been
addressing the idea of nothing. Despite its permanence in
the artistic field, however, nothing is still an act of bravado
that has to be ventured again and again. These works of
art present challenges for both the curator and the
exhibition installation. What frame of reception is
appropriate for works that take the void and silence as
their themes? The question that all these artists raise, from
their various perspectives namely, if and how nothing
can be communication becomes particularly explosive
within the framework of an entire exhibition. How does
one present nothing? The same understanding proves to
be a tightrope act in that it demands a certain concession
of the viewers. They have to be prepared to get involved
in omission, in intermission, in a moment of concentrated
reflection. Faced with the overflowing variety of images in
our society, however, this moment of experience can have
a cathartic effect. The daily overstimulation is replaced by
a selective sensitization, the focusing of specific sense
organs on highly concrete works that demand
concentration and quiet, even silence. Many of the works
are only constituted in the imagination, the view in ward
of the person perceiving silence inevitably remains an
element of the dialogue, of the exchange between work
and the person confronting it.
Max Hollein
["Preface," Nichts/Nothing, ed. Martina Weinhart and Max Hollein (Frankfurt:
Hatje Cantz, 2006): 5]

23

Maria Eichorn and Mai-Thu Perret : "Institutional Exposure," Voids: A Retrospective, ed. John
Armleder, Mathieu Copeland, Laurent Le Bon, Gustav Metzger, Mai-Thu Perret, Clive
Phillpot, and Philippe Pirotte (Zrich: JPR|Ringier, 2009): 145-151.
Anne Mglin-Delcroix: "Neither Word nor Image: Blank Books," Voids: A Retrospective, ed.
John Armleder, Mathieu Copeland, Laurent Le Bon, Gustav Metzger, Mai-Thu Perret,
Clive Phillpot, and Philippe Pirotte (Zrich: JPR|Ringier, 2009): 397-407.
Michael Gibbs, from "All or Nothing," All or Nothing: An Anthology of Blank Books
(Derbyshire: RGAP, 2005): 7-23.

24

"I can see the whole room!

...and there's nobody in it!"
Roy Lichstenstein

25

It is from zero, in zero, that the true

movement of being begins.
Kazimir Malevich

26

Part III. The Empty Set

Kazimir Malevich: from "God Is Not Cast Down," Bog ne skinut (1922): np.
Honore de Balzac: from "The Unknown Masterpiece," trans. Peter Collier (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012): 57-66.
Wassily Kandinsky: "Empty Canvas," in Complete Writings on Art (Da Capo, 1994): 780-783.
Thierry de Duve: "A Critical Reinterpretation," Kant after Duchamp (MIT, 1998): 248-263.
Ulrike Ghering: "Reinventing the White Icon," Nichts/Nothing, ed. Martina Weinhart and
Max Hollein (Frankfurt: Hatje Cantz, 2006): 71-77.
Branden Joseph: from "White on White," Critical Inquiry 27: 1 (Autumn 2000): 90-96.
Robert Rauschenberg: transcription from untitled interview, Robert Rauschenberg: Man at Work,
dir. Chris Granlund (London: Phaidon Video, n. d.).
John Cage: "Lecture on Nothing," Silence: Lectures and Writing by John Cage (Middletown:
Wesleyan University Press, 1961): 109-126.
Dylan Trigg: from "Silence, Violence, and Nothingness," The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness,
Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason (NY: Peter Lang, 2006): 11-13.
Elizabeth Zuba: "Introduction," Not Nothing: Selected Writings by Ray Johnson, 1954-1994 (New
York: Siglio, 2014): 2-6.
Natalie Kosoi: "Nothingness Made Visible: The Case of Rothko's Paintings," Art Journal
(Summer 2005): 21-31.
Antonio Tapies: "Painting and the Void," trans. Cathy Douglas and Patricia Matthews, in
Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings, eds. Christine
Stiles and Peter Selz (1996): 57-58.
Josip Vanista: "Gorgona: What's That? (this is what I think)," Gorgona (Berlin: Zak |
Branicka, 2013): n.p. [pamphlet to accompany the exhibition "Please Attend"]
Yves Klein "Hotel Chelsea Manifesto," Yves Klein: Long Live the Immaterial, ed. Gilbert Perlein
and Bruno Cora (Delano Greenridge Editions, 2000): 85-88.
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh: "Yves Klein: Abstraction's Afterlife," in Neo-Avantgarde and Culture
Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955-1975 (Cambridge: MIT, 2000):
263-269.
Ad Reinhardt: "Art in Art/ Is Art-As-Art/ (Art-As-Art Dogma Part III)," Lugano Review 5-6
(1966): 85-89.

27

Write Nothing!
Read Nothing!
Say Nothing!
Print Nothing!
Suzanne Mar, Elena Nikolaeva, Alexandr Ranov, Riurik Rok, Oleg Erberg
["Decree Concerning the Nothingists of Poetry," Dog's Box: or, Works by
the Creative Office of the Nothingists during the 1920-1921 r.r., ed. Sergei
Sadikov (Moskow: Khobo, 1921)]

28

Douglas Huebler: "Untitled Statements, 1968," in Art Povera, ed. Germano Celant (New
York: Praeger, 1969): 43.
Robert Barry and Patricia Norvell: "May 30, 1969," Recording Conceptual Art: Early Interviews
with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Smithson, Weiner by
Patricia Norvell, eds. Alexander Alberro and Patricia Norvell (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2001): 89-92 (ending with the sentence ". . . "sciences and philosophy
don't enter."
Robert Smithson and Patricia Norvell: "June 20, 1969," Recording Conceptual Art: Early
Interviews with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Smithson, Weiner
by Patricia Norvell, eds. Alexander Alberro and Patricia Norvell (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2001): 126-134.
Graciela Carnevale: "Statement," in Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s, ed. Andrea
Jiunta and Ines Katzenstein (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004) 299301.
Christine Kozlov: "Untitled Statement," in Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects, ed. Donald
Karshan (New York Cultural Center, 1970): 9.
Briony Fer: from "Bordering on Blank: Eva Hesse and Minimalism," Art History 17: 3
(September, 1994): 424-435.
Robert Pincus-Witten: "Barry Le Va: The Invisibility of Content," Arts Magazine 50 (October
1975): 60-67.
Antoni Tpies, "Painting and the Void," trans. Cathy Douglas and Patricia Matthews, in
Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings, eds. Christine
Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996): 57.
Denis Lejeune "Chance in the Thought of Franois Morellet" The Radical Use of Chance in 20th
Century Art (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012): 157-160.
Ulises Carrin: "The New Art of Making Books," Kontexts 6-7 (1975): n.p.
Robert Filliou, "Good-for-Nothing-Good-At-Everything," in Teaching and Learning as
Performance Arts (Cologne: Verlag Gebr. Konig, 1970): 79-80.
Yuir Sobelev: "Design of a Trap to Capture the Emptiness," in Primary Documents: A
Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art Since the 1950s, ed. Laura Hoptman and
Thoms Pospiszyl (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002): 25-27.
Ilya Kabakov: "On the Subject of 'The Void'," Total Enlightenment: Moscow Conceptual Art
19601990, eds. Boris Groys, Max Hollein, and Manuel Fontn del Jundo (Ostfildern:
Hatje Canty Verlag, 2008): 366375.

29

I think one likes to think there is no

difference between the experience of
looking at a work of art and looking at
not a work of art...One can face the
work and have that sense of
emptiness..., of nothingness, when in
fact there is a great deal to be seen.
One can look at a wall and have a
similar experience of nothing of
interest or one can find great interest in
looking at an area of wall, or at
anything.
Jasper Johns
[David Sylvester: Interviews with American Artists (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2001): 168]

30

RB: Why the void and not the created

space? There is something about void
and emptiness which I am personally
very concerned with. I guess I can't get
it out of my system. Just emptiness.
Nothing seems to me the most potent
thing in the world.
CA: I would say a thing is a hole in a
thing it is not.
Carl Andre and Robert Barry
[Arts Magazine 47 (1972): 46]

31

I try to deal with things that maybe

other people haven't thought about,
emptiness, making a painting that isn't
a painting. For years people have been
concerned with what goes on inside the
frame. Maybe there's something going
on outside the frame that could be
considered an artistic idea.
Robert Barry
[quoted in Lucy Lippard, Six Years (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1997): xii]

32

Mikhail Epstein: "Emptiness as a Technique: Word and Image in Ilya Kabakov," Russian
Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture, ed. Mikhail N. Epstein, Alexander A.
Genis, Slobodanka M. Vladiv-Glover (New York: Berghahn, 1999): 299-337.
Anthony Gardner: "Aesthetic of Withdrawl," from "Aesthetics of Emptiness and Withdrawl:
contemporary European art and actually existing democratization," Postcolonial Studies 13:
2 (2010): 185-191.
Miks Erdly: "A History of Chance," trans. John Btki, Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for
Eastern and Central European Art Since the 1950s, ed. Laura Hoptman and Thoms
Pospiszyl (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002): 96-97.
Miks Erdly: from "Theses for the Marly Conference of 1980," trans. John Btki, Primary
Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art Since the 1950s, ed. Laura
Hoptman and Thoms Pospiszyl (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002): 101.
Tehching Hsieh: "One Year Performance (1985-1986)," [transcribed from his website:
http://www.one-year-performance.com].
Adrian Parr: "Berlin and the Holocaust," Deleuze and Memorial Culture: Desire, Singular Memory
and the Politics of Trauma (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008): 143-158.
Fred Camper: "Shoah's Absence," Motion Picture 1: 3 (Winter/Spring 1987): 5-6.
Ivone Margulies, "Nothing Happens: Time for the Everyday in Postwar Realist Cinema,"
Nothing Happens: Chantal Ackerman's Hyperrealist Everyday (Durham: Duke University Press,
1996): 21-41.
Kuan-Hung Chen: "Text and Context (II): A Religio-Philosophical Articulation of Tianshu,"
Xu Bing and Contemporary Chinese Art: Cultural and Philosophical Reflections, ed. Hsingyuan
Tsao, Roger T. Ames (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011): 80-84.
Thomas Kellein, from "Interview with Hiroshi Sugimoto," Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Exposed, ed.
Thomas Kellein, trans. David Britt (London: Thames & Hudson, 1995): 91-95.
Guy Brett, "Activamente o Vazio," No Vazio do Mundo: Mira Schendel, ed. Snia Salzstein (So
Paolo: Editora Mara d'Agua, 1996).
Craig Owens: "Allan McCollum: Repetition & Difference," Art in America 71: 8 (September,
1983): 130-132.
Lynn Cooke and Allan McCollum: "Interview," Carnegie International Volume 1 (1991): 100.
David Batchelor and Jonathan Re: "Nothings," Found Monochromes, Vol. 1: 1250, 1997
2006 (London: Ridinghouse, 2010): 297-99.
Martina Weinhart: from "Seeing Nothing," Nichts/Nothing, ed. Martina Weinhart and Max
Hollein (Frankfurt: Hatje Cantz, 2006): 11-25.

33

Dada smells of nothing, it is nothing,

nothing, nothing.
It is like your hopes: nothing.
Like your paradise: nothing
Francis Picabia
["Manifest Cannibale Dada,"Dadaphone 7 (March, 1920): 3]

34

I am anti-artistic. I am anti-nothing. I
am opposed to making formulas.
Marcel Duchamp
[quoted in Michale Langer: Kunst am Nullpunkt: ein Analyse der Avantgarde im
20. Jahrundert (Worms: Werner'sche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1984): 71]

35

Gorgona is serious and simple.

Gorgona is for absolute transience in art.
Gorgona seeks neither work nor result in art.
It judges according to the situation.
Gorgona is contradictory.
It defines itself as the sum of all its possible
definitions.
Gorgona is constantly in doubt. . . .
Valuing most that which is dead.
Gorgona speaks of nothing.
Undefined and undetermined.
Josip Vanista
[Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art Since the
1950s, ed. Laura Hoptman and Thoms Pospiszyl (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 2002): 136]

36

Eleonora Fabio: "History and Precariousness: In Search of a Performative Historiography,"

Perform, Repeat, Record, ed. Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2012): 122-134.
Maria Vassileva: "Where There Is a Woman There Is no Silence," Gender Check: Femininity and
Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe (Kln: Walther Knig, 2010): 319-322.
Maurizio Cattelan and Bob Nickas: "Interview," Index 20 (September, 1999).
Wendy Lotterman: "Sophie Calle, Absent," Bombsite, 11 February 2013:
http://bombsite.com/issues/1000/articles/6999. Accessed 8 February 2014.
Homi Bhabha: "Anish Kapoor: Making Emptiness," Anish Kapoor (London: Hayward
Gallery, 1998): 11-41.
Mr. Greg: "Art and Politics: An Interview with Peter Mlakar of the NSK"
[http://www.3ammagazine.com/entarchives/2002_dec/interview_peter_mlakar.html]
Nicolas Bourriaud and Kim Sooja: "Interview," Kim Sooja: Conditions of Humanity (Lyon:
Contemporary Art Museum, 2003): 45-59.
Claire Lui "Being & Nothingness," Print 58: 2 (March/April 2004): 90-95.
Mark Cooley: "Absence / Presence: a Conversation with Artist Charles Cohen"
[http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/23105/]
Klaus Besenbach: "Measuring the Universe" [interview with Roman Ondk], Flash Art No.
268 (October, 2009).
Laurie Anderson and Charles Seife: "Talk About Nothing" (Rubin Museum of Art, 19
December, 2010).
Vincent Broqua: "Quand la Lettre Migre: Le Rien Intensif de Caroline Bergvall," partir de
rien: esthtique, potique, politique de l'infime (Paris: Michel Houdiard, 2013): 103-126.
Derek Beaulieu: "A Box of Nothing," A Box of Nothing (Calgary: 100 ttes press, 2011).
Wu Hung, from "Qui and Xu: Erasure and Remembrance," A Story of Ruins: Presence and
Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2012):
21-30; 202-203.
Martin Creed and Viestarts Gailtis: "The Fear of Emptiness"
[http://www.arterritory.com/en/texts/interviews/1732-the_fear_of_emptiness_/]
Alessandra Cianetti: "What Is Nothing? An Interview with Li-E Chen"
http://flaneur.me.uk/06/what-is-nothing-an-interview-with-li-e-chen/ [2012]

37

Bert Greene: I was very impressed and

I was equally impressed by what he
said. A close friend of ours, Aaron
Fine, was dying of cancer. He had
wanted to come and see Andy but
couldn't, so sent a question in his place.
I said, "Andy, Aaron wants to know
why you picked the Campbell's soup
can to paint." "Tell him," he said, "I
wanted to paint nothing. I was looking
for something that was the essence of
nothing and the soup can was it."
[quoted Victor Bockris: Warhol: The Biography (Cambridge: Da Capo Press,
2003): 154]

38

[Reinhardt's] painting of 'the last

paintings anyone can make,' like the
circularity of his writing, began []
that self-reflexive spiral which was also
painting's self-erasure in its very act of
completion.
Joseph Kosuth
[American Art of the 1960s, Studies in Art No. 1, ed. John Elderfield (New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 1991): 36, n. 52]

39

Miya Ando interview:

http://www.nondualitymagazine.org/nondualitymagazine.2/nonduality_magazine.1.miy
aando.interview.htm
Neha Choksi and Craig Dworkin (interview): "We Are All Meat, Striving to Be Human," Art
India XXIX: 5 (2015).

40

The Tibetans have a nice word for

emptiness: when they speak of 'full
emptiness.' There is a void but its a
positive void. In our culture you get
information all the time, reading
papers, watching television. There is
always something coming in. All my
work is about emptying the mind, to
come to a state of nonthinking.
Marina Abramovic
[Bernard Goy: "Interview with Marina Abramovic," Journal of Contemporary
Art 3: 2 (1990): 49-50]

41

A white sheet of paper is for us

primarily a symbol of the void, a part of
the universe we have selected, not
simply a sheet upon which pictures are
drawn. Here we are working above all
in a symbolic void and space and only
secondarily on paper. [. . . .] Form and
the void are not opposites, they are two
aspects of the same reality which always
function together.
Leonhard Lapin
[Thjus ja raum Void and Space (Tallinn: Estonian Art Academy, 1998);
quoted from Art of the Baltics: The Struggle for Artistic Expression Under The
Soviets, 1945-1991, ed. Alla Rosenfeld and Norton T. Dodge (New
Brunswick: Rutgers, 2002): 138, n. 158]

42

The pictures are intended to operate in

the mind above all: to come back when
they're no longer visible. It's the
representation of the invisible, the
omitting that opens deeper layers of
significance. No work of art should
have a clear-cut meaning, it must have
many, and that's why you have to bring
in this area of void.
Luc Tuymans
["Luc Tuymans in Conversation with Udo Kittelmann" Ende (Cologne:
Salon Verlag, 2009): 27]

43

Realizing that the work cannot be

planned, but only carried out, that it
has value, truth, and reality only
through the words which unfold it in
time and inscribe it in space, he will
begin to write, but starting from
nothing and with nothing in mind
like a nothingness working in
nothingness.
Maurice Blanchot
["Literature and the Right to Death," Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte
Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995): 304]

44

One day, when I was studying with

Schoenberg, he pointed out the eraser
on his pencil and said, "This end is
more important than the other."
John Cage
["Indeterminacy," Silence: Lectures and Writing by John Cage (Middletown:
Wesleyan University Press, 1961): 270]

45

Nothing stirring anywhere. Nothing to

be seen anywhere. Nothing to be
heard anywhere. Room once full of
sounds. Faint sounds. Whence
unknown. Fewer and fainter as
time wore on. Nights wore on. None
now.
Samuel Beckett
["Krapp's Last Tape," Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove, 1984): 266]

46

Notes to the Essay

1

Yoko Ono: Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings (Tokyo: Wunternaum, 1964): np.

Seth Kim-Cohen: In The Blink Of An Ear: Toward A Non-Cochlear Sonic Art (London: Continuum Books, 2009).

Ono, Grapefruit, np. One might think as well of Piero Manzoni's deflation of artistic inspiration or what is
often regarded as so much hot air in his Fiato d'artista (1960): the remains of a collapsed balloon no longer
containing the eponymous artist's breath that once gave it a sculptural, volumetric form.

Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, ed. Antti Salminen and Sami Sjberg 17: 3 (2010).

Lucy Lippard: Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972: a cross-reference book of information
on some esthetic boundaries: consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents,
interviews, and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of
such vaguely designated areas as minimal, anti-form, systems, earth, or process art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe,
England, Australia, and Asia (with occasional political overtones), edited and annotated by Lucy R. Lippard (New York:
Praeger, 1973).

Ibidem, vii.

John Cage: "On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work," Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown:
Wesleyan University Press, 1961): 102.

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh: "Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique
of Institutions," October 55 (Winter, 1990): 135.

Grard Wajcman: L'Interdit: roman (Paris: Denol, 1986).

10

Cindy Nemser: "An Interview with Eva Hesse," Artforum VIII: 9 (1970): 60.

11

Geaninne Guimaraes, audio program Museum of Modern Art (New York) to accompany the exhibition
Tangled Alphabets: Leon Ferrari and Mira Schendel (5 April 15 June, 2009).

12

Quoted in Anna C. Chave: "Agnes Martin: 'Humility, the Beautiful Daughter . . . . All of Her Ways Are
Empty,'" Agnes Martin, ed. Barbara Haskell (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992): 138.
Writing about Agnes Martin, Arthur P. Shimamura explains that her "almost completely white canvases,
suggested a representation of nothingness" [Experiencing Art: In the Brain of the Beholder (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2013): 69].

13

Ibidem, 150.

14

Wallace Stevens, "The Snow Man," Poetry XIX: 1 (October, 1921): 4.

15

Thomas Stearns Eliot: The Waste Land (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1922): 10-11. For an overview of the
culture of neurasthenia, see Tom Lutz: American Nervousness, 1903: an anecdotal history (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1993).

16

Virginia Woolf: To The Lighthouse (London: The Hogarth Press, 1930): 196.

17

Gertrude Stein: Everybody's Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1973): 70; 112. Kim Sooja's A Needle
Woman (2001) articulates the same sentiment by focusing on Sooja's back while she stands immobile among
the commotion of various locations, the rest of the world revolving around her deliberate inactivity.

47

18

Aldon Lynn Nielsen: Reading Race: White American Poets and the Racial Discourse in Twentieth Century (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1988); see especially the end of the Introduction and Chapter 3.

19

Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl van Vechten (New York: Vintage, 1990): 224.

20

In the American Grain (New York: New Directions, 1965): 209.

21

Anonymous [Louis Coquelet]: L'Eloge de Rien, ddi a Personne, avec une postface: Troisime Edition, peu rev,
nullement corrige, & agumente de plusieurs Riens, ou on joint L'Eloge de Quelque Chose (Paris: Antoine de
Heuqueville, 1730): 10-11.

22

John Cage: "Lecture on Something," Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press,
1961): 131.

23

Julio Garcia Espinosa: Un largo camino hacia la luz (Havana: Ediciones Unin, 2000): 30.

24

The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, ed. John Simpson and Edmund Weiner (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989).

25

Gustave Flaubert: Correspondance, vol. 2, ed. Jean Bruneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1980): 31.

26

Nicolas Boileau-Despraux: "Trait du sublime," uvres compltes de Boileau Despraux (Paris: Didot, 1865):
327.

48