How Negative Void Complements the Positive Object - Essay Example

Academia - Research December 2009 Combination, not contradiction: How Negative Void complements the Positive Object Without spaces between words, this essay would make no sense. Without spaces between lines, a whole chapter could be crammed into one page: but it would be unreadable, and meaningless. When Schubert wrote his music, he was so mindful of the ‘rests’ that he paid them as much attention as the notes. Rests, in music, are silence. Music lovers realize they listen to a lot of silence. Artists pay a lot of attention to the distances in their paintings: the spaces with nothing in them - negative space - are vital for figuring out perspective and proportion. So ‘nothing’ in art, is a very important part of ‘everything’. Here, an effort will be made to determine the importance of ‘nothing’ in art, and how ‘nothing’ can be sold and bought along with ‘everything’. Art has always had value: when modern auction houses announce sales in tens of millions few are surprised. A Van Gogh or a Modigliani or a Pollock changes hands so rarely, and pieces by these artists are so rare (there will never be another Van Gogh, Modigliani or Pollock or a new painting by any of them) that their worth is very nearly incalculable. But what are art connoisseurs and museums really buying? Every painting consists of objects - or at least splashes and streaks - of paint, and lots of empty space. A glance through a catalogue will reveal square yards of empty canvas: the spaces around things. It is obvious that the art could not exist if there were no space. The two are inseparable. Andy Warhol stuck a print of Marilyn Monroe’s face onto the centre of a canvas almost as high as she was tall, and coated the rest with bronze paint. To all intents and purposes it is empty space, but its effect - giving Monroe an aspect of isolation, a suggestion of despair, and a hint of royalty - is tremendous. Art lovers are conscious of the fact they gaze at a lot of space. Readers, when faced with minimalists such as T S Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Annie Proulx and Mary Robison are aware that ‘less is more’ in more than just a superficial way. The concise sentences of these literary giants can paint visual pictures of impressive emotional volume, sometimes using as few as four words. ‘Weeping into a napkin.’(Robison 2002 p97) In context, these four words pack as much punch as, ‘Reader, I married him.’ (Brontë 1847). It would have been easier, perhaps, to fill a page with emotional sentences, descriptions and narration. Less is harder. But the concept of spending just as much money on a slim volume, rather than a heavy tome, might seem ridiculous to the inexperienced. Commercialized art is expensive art, since the buyer is spending money on the artist’s creative time. This highly debatable concept is visible in a number of genres and disciplines: even music albums with tracks intentionally left blank are bought and sold. These statements that consist of nothing: is there more to them than we cannot see, or hear? They are statements of an artistic nature, turned commercial: and rather than being duped, we are being shown an invisible truth. Negative space photography is a well-known concept that illustrates the importance of distances in art: the distances between objects, and the distance between the viewer and the object. Commerciality puts great importance on popularity: a picture of a soaring eagle in a wide spacious sky was so popular that the idea took hold, and money is being made on similar pictures. (Schlosberg 2007) Photos of faraway objects, and photos of objects so tiny they are magnified many times against a totally empty background, are sources of such marvel, awe and admiration that they are generally accepted as Art with a capital A: fans part with a lot of money to hang them on their walls. They win art awards, and are critiqued in art columns on important journals. ‘Unable to talk right now,’ I say.’ (Robison p41) Short sentences like this one call up a variety of possibilities. In context, it is a woman speechless with anger or grief. It is possible to compare this sentence to the nude picture of Sien by Van Gogh which he titled Sorrow. Here is a similarity in feeling: one can compare the economy of words with the economy of pencil strokes. One can hold up the similarity in feelings so strong (in both the narrator and the sitter) there is little to say. The tragedy exists in that which is not said, or not shown. There is also contrast in the fact Robison intended her art to be viewed and sold publicly, but there is great doubt - as there was in his day - of the commercial appeal of Van Gogh’s sketch. Although it is valuable today, it is not because of his intentions when he created it. That which is not written, not painted, not sung and not played: the missing words, notes or brushstrokes are what makes the rest valuable. Robison contracts and shrinks the events of her novel into 527 chapters or segments. An enormous number which surely is an outward or misleading indication of value for money. Some of the segments, however, are hardly 50 words long. Robison uses practical silences. She sketches a few lines and lets the reader join the dots. There are hardly any readers who would argue that economy on this scale is like genius. Proulx, in her The Shipping News, startled critics when she wrought sentences so brief and terse one had to read them twice to fully grasp the notions. Attending any writing class these days will have students edit and re-edit, write and re-draft their writing, cutting as they go. The very word ‘edit’ has taken on the meaning ‘to make shorter’, and not only ‘to improve’ or ‘to correct’. There cannot be many writing classes where the economic style of Hemingway is not studied and copied. The cutting room floor is a place where yards and yards of film would end up, discarded as being extra after the many takes and re-takes of a movie are shot. Film editors pride themselves in interpreting a director’s work by cutting off as much of it as they possibly can: to tell the whole story of a book such as War and Peace or Gone with the Wind in under four hours is a challenge. Artistic cutting and editing, then, makes something shorter more saleable. This must be equal to commerciality needing things to be short. Something must be small, or short, or brief, or terse, to be worth watching or listening to. One would be forgiven of thinking this is the case today. Certainly, the trend is not that new. Henri Matisse, when he conceived the idea of cutting out shapes from colored paper, did much the same. Although art critics call it a visual vocabulary, (Vox Art Blog 2009) there are precious few ‘words’ here. The method was developed while the artist was planning a mural, but he found it fascinating that there was more paper on the floor than he used in his figures: the more he cut away, the more expressive his figures became.(Schlosberg 2007) Eventually, the figures Matisse pasted up had no fingers or toes, no faces, no hair. And yet they dance, and seem to sing to the viewer. Sculptors work in much the same way: they shave, whittle, carve and scrape away material to ‘find’ their form in what is left. Less is more. American minimalist sculptors of the 1960s and 70s Richard Serra and Donald Judd use the space around the objects to express their art: ‘that which is not sculpted’ is just as important as the real material inside the space. (Vox Art Blog 2009) Similarly, or perhaps in contrast, Michelangelo’s slaves, which many scholars say were intentionally ‘unfinished’, seem to be struggling to free themselves of the marble that surrounds them: they require more space. Less marble. Humans have found sculptures with ‘less’ - or missing - pieces fascinating since ancient times. Headless fertility goddesses in the Mediterranean, Venus de Milo at the Louvre Museum in Paris with her missing arms, Laocoön and His Sons at the Vatican Museum and the debate over the missing arms, and Herman Henniger’s statue in Texas (Doran 2009) are all enchanting mysteries. Would they fascinate just as much if they were whole? Would less entrance tickets be sold to the places where they are exhibited with such pride? Commerciality does not seem to depend on quantity. The shortness of some very slim novels is well-known. Silk, by Alessandro Baricco, The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, Hunger by Knut Hamsun, Everyman by Philip Roth and The Portrait by Iain Pears are famous for their shortness. True, they have thousands fewer words than some other novels: but perhaps they say more. ‘That which is not written’ has a lot of power to persuade keen readers to spend time on these works. Are they commercial: the answer is a resounding yes, and this would be confirmed by their publishers, who still enjoy income from these titles. ‘Left 85, right 12, left 66.’ (Robison 2002, p1) This is self-explanatory: a safe combination. No fancy words necessary: not even a verb. Without going into the debate of whether this is or is not a sentence, the reader does not bother to analyze, because the sound of the tumblers is almost audible. Writers with the talent of using so few words, yet conjure out of nearly nothing a vision or a sound for their readers, are magicians the commercial world has a lot of time for. And there is no doubt this is art. So there is no question that commercial art is worthwhile and does generate money for those involved in it. Rather than being commerciality versus art, it is art with the added encouragement of commerciality. Art for art’s sake is a worn-out expression which one could apply to the lives of those who spent their lives in a symbolic or real garret, suffering penury because of their art. Undiscovered genius, misunderstood talent, before-their-time artists, and other complex combinations have been explaining away lack of success for many centuries. Whole books and other works of art, such as the opera La Boheme, by Giacomo Puccini, have their whole reason for being based on this basis. It is a widely-believed premise, but it is not totally true. And it is a simple thing to show that the opposite is much fuller of the truth: art sells, and can make artists a lot of money. Money is the first name of the main character in Robison’s novel Why did I Ever - which at first strikes the reader as an attempt at irony by the author. ‘No one doesn’t ask.’ Another 4-word sentence speaks volumes. Naturally, if someone had a name like Money, no one would not ask why, or how, or who named her that. If it were her real name, readers would automatically think of what kind of parents she had. What were they thinking? How did she manage at school? The mind goes off on many options, all projected and created out of nearly nothing. None of the sentiments, questions, guessing or wonder is expressed: that 4-word sentence says it all. ‘No one doesn’t ask.’ It feels like an advertising jingle. The world is used to jingles of eight words or less. Many short sharp jingles are memorized forever in the public’s collective understanding of the commercial world. Smartie People are Happy People... The taste is gonna move ya... Please don’t squeeze the Charmin. It’s the real thing. Mr Bubble gets you so clean your mother won’t know you. Chocolate tastes like Bosco. And so on: we all know a dozen or two, and hearing old ones has the power to stir memories of accompanying events, sights, and sounds from the past. But is this art? Of course: as much attention has gone into creating visual and audio advertising into the number of nameable works of art. Letter-art, coining of phrases, combinations of colors, placement of objects, composition of posters and film clips: the creative process is provable for all these things and many more. It is possible to take a famous work of art, such as one of Matisse’s cut-out collages, and compare it with a poster ad for Pan Am from the 1970s. All aspects, rules and standards are obeyed. There is also the added factor that many poster collectors would pay an enormous amount of money for a rare advertising poster such as the ones Pan Am airline published in its time. Advertising posters are an art in themselves: an acceptable kind of art that started a long time before jet airplanes hit the skies. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Alphonse Mucha both made a marvelous living from their inspired (and inspirational) posters. The beauty, proportion, color choices and ground-breaking composition are legend today. Toulouse-Lautrec invented new phrases, both real and metaphorical, when he designed theater posters that not only amazed those who looked at them, but attracted crowds, as was their intention. Mucha’s definitely commercial art-nouveau twirls and whirls were created to catch the eye and sell things like soap, perfume and cigarettes. That they were also beautiful and artistic was part and parcel of the whole operation: the outcome or product was larger than the sum of the various parts that went into the process. ‘One thing I have never owned and would never own is a teensy spindly-strapped lady’s wristwatch. Whyever? When I need to know the time.’ (Robison p95) These words form an entire segment of this book: Part 258. It occurs to the reader that more space is required around the watch hands, perhaps! Seriously: this segment appears almost without rhyme or reason between two other segments that are narratives of events. Short enough to be a mere punctuation in the series of segments, this is one that makes the reader wonder about anger, statements of style, self-expression and stubborn avoidance of trends. All are features that compose the complex character of the creative person. Complexity of this nature is to be found both in the artistic and the commercial world: it almost seems as if one cannot do without the other. It is a marriage of more than just convenience: art needs to sell and be sold. Commerce requires art to reach its audiences. It is a combination rather than a contradiction. Just like objects and space, the two are inseparable. ‘Commercial art exploits what is most familiar, changing it only slightly in order to make it seem new.’(Price 1999) This is a debatable statement, where a guess is made that there are separate arms of ‘Art’: commercial and non-commercial. One could be right in saying that nowadays, and for centuries now, it would be a rare artist who did not want to make some financial gain from their work. So a trace, no matter how small, of commercialism, resides in every artist’s heart, close to the other wish that puts space around objects to give them form. Inspiration behind creativity is hard to analyze, but the traces of commercialism are present in the large majority of cases. Negative space, not negative gain, is planned for, and in many fortunate cases, there is success. * Sources Cited Coleman, William P. 2007 Michelangelo’s Slave Awakening Accessed 12/17/2009 Doran, David 2009 Restore Texas History Accessed 12/17/2009 Price, Bob 1999 Birdman Accessed 12/17/2009 Robison, Mary 2002 Why Did I Ever Counterpoint Schlosberg Jason 2007 Negative Space Accessed 12/17/2009 Vox Art Blog 2009 Accessed 12/17/2009 Read More