Negative Space: The Art of the Void

About

This temporary exhibition, curated with the help of Lorenz Homberger (Zurich) and Julien Flak (Paris) as well as others, subject to confirmation, shall provide an overview of the use of “Negative Space” as an aesthetic element in art, from antiquity to current. Following AsianArt:Future’s successful temporary exhibition dubbed “Juxta:Position” (Manila, February 2019), we intend to show selected tribal art pieces of Chinese and Japanese origin, as well as a range of modern and contemporary art pieces, and examples in architectural design. All such examples will illustrate effective use of “negative space” as an aesthetic concept and element.

1. Background

In 2019 the Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany presented an impressive exhibition and catalogue under the title “Negative Space,” investigating what distinguishes twentieth- and twenty-first-century sculpture from the traditional sculptures of earlier centuries. What sculptures and what conception of sculpture were non-existent, even unimaginable, before 1900? What makes modern sculpture so very different from the traditional sculpture of preceding millennia?”

They then explained their concept: “The exhibition and catalogue seek to present sculptures that exist – and could exist only in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, sculptures of earlier periods.” ¹ The transition from “volume” to “void”, from “mass” to “vacuum”, and from “figurative” to “abstract”, as the makers of the exhibit called it was attributed to certain developments in the 19th century, namely the Industrial Revolution and its influence on artistic expression. ²

However, the makers of such exhibition essentially looked at the development of Western art, and that – to the extent discussed in the catalogue – without looking at the use of “space”, “void” (or “vacuum”), and abstraction as a means of expression in Primitive, Japanese, or Chinese art.

Gay Watson, in his study “Philosophy of Emptiness” ³ observed: “In the contemporary Western world, emptiness is commonly considered, if at all, an absence of something. When I mentioned to friends that I was writing about emptiness, their first reaction was either that this was a Buddhist matter or, more often, puzzlement.” ­⁴ We are not surprised: Despite the fact that in art the concept of showing the “void”, dealing with “emptiness”, with “negative space”, and the value thereof, had arrived more than a century ago, in “real life” of the vast majority of people, particularly of those whose main experience and connection to the world is the smart phone, it is still “content”, not “emptiness” which rules the life. Just like noise trumps silence. We will not be able to change that, whatever efforts we may put into explaining the value of dealing with the “void”, using our favorite version of display, sort of dialectic: Juxta-position.

The idea of the value of the void, or here: silence, can also be found in philosophical writing of the 20 th century. Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus explains: “My work consists in two parts – the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one… In short, I believe that where many others today are just gassing, I have managed in my book to put everything firmly in place by being silent about it. ⁵

But we would like to show that the concept of “space”, “negative space” the “void” was quite common in non-Western cultures, namely in Primitivebcultures, in Japanese and Chinese art long before the 20 th century. That maybe the influence of the movement of “Primitivism” in the 20 th century, when some of the artists whose work we want to discuss, and juxtapose here, “discovered” Primitive art, may have also helped to create the change in aesthetics as described by the makers of the above-mentioned exhibition “Negative Space”. ⁶

We will show a range of works from leading artists of Modern and Contemporary art, including those of Henry Moore who had a very deep relationship with Primitive art, juxtaposed with works from the Traditional Philippine Cordillera art, but also many works from the Oceanic and African regions, as well as Chinese and Japanese works of art.

¹ XXX Catalogue, pp. 13, 14., ² Ibid., page 16, ³ London 201t, ⁴ Op. Cit. p. 11, ⁵ Ludwig Witttgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philisophicus, London 1971 (translated by D. Pear and B. McGuiness), pp. 15-16, ⁶ Alberto Giacometti, see https://www.fondation-giacometti.fr/en/event/36/alberto-giacometti; Henry Moore: discussed in detail further below; Picasso XX, OTHERS