Imagining The Void

In his book Courbet�s Realism Michael Fried describes a kind of quasi-corporeal merger that is facilitated by the structure of the image.   I would like to look at more material qualities of the artwork that assist the viewer to enter the image imaginatively or to enter a state of reverie through sensory experience of the painting.

The permeable membrane of the surface may be thought of as a veil that both reveals and conceals in the manner of the Temple Veil.  This permeability invites imaginary passage from the material world that is accessible to our senses to the immaterial world that can only be imagined or as we will see from consciousness to unconsciousness, knowing to un-knowing.  

Our perception and understanding is always contingent and partial, knowledge lies alongside the world more or less closely but it can never be the thing itself.   The painted surface sometimes mimics this theoretical membrane and on occasion may be momentarily ruptured to give the sensation of transcendence. 

Frank Auerbach claimed that it was first necessary for him to become the thing in order to be able to make it in paint.

�What one hopes to do is somehow become the subject, and out of that identification to make a vivid memorial�

This transference to the inanimate is analogous to the beholder�s absorption and must entail a moment of occlusion or loss of consciousness.  This occlusion may also be represented as the horizon always lying at the limit of sensibility or even as an event horizon or black hole - a portal to other universes or the nexus between voids.

Intimacy through the hand of the artist

Modernism�s emphasis on the surface and on the hand of the artist seems to deny transparency in terms of mimetic illusionism; we are constantly made aware of the painted surface and thus denied the fiction of the frame as a window.  I am going to suggest that imaginative and sensory absorption depends on this paradoxical situation.  A different kind of transparency is invoked through our engagement with the materiality of the surface and the fact that the image must always be completed in the imagination of the beholder.  Hence the image is at once more present and yet forever illusive.

The intimacy engendered by artists from Courbet and Monet in the 19thC to Lucien Freud today is supported by brushwork that metaphorically and literally opens the figure for our engagement.  Comparing the brushwork of these artists with Courbet�s academic contemporaries dramatically illustrates this difference. 

1.L.  Alexandre Cabanal Birth of Venus 1863
1.R. William Bouguereau Birth of Venus 1879

Artists like Bougereau and Cabanel not only project their subjects into an exotic scenario, they also brush away any trace of their hand.  It is as if they distance themselves from the voyeurism facilitated by their art.  Theirs is not realism but illusionism, a distinction that I hope becomes apparent as we look at works that I would characterise as realist in this context.

2.L.  Gustave Courbet The Trout
2.R Gustave Courbet  l�Origine du monde 1856

By contrast Courbet�s paint seeks a material equivalence with flesh, water and stone.  You could say Courbet evokes eidetic memory rather than the textual or semantic memory provided by visual illusion.  The academic painters by contrast distance themselves from the flesh and blood world, allowing voyeurs aesthetiscised fantasies of otherwise repressed subjects of lust and violence.  I include this somewhat controversial example of Courbet�s figure painting, L�Origine du Monde not just as an example of his paint handling which we will come back to but also because it anchors the idea of passage in a metaphor of the creative/productive body and associates this with the material world.  This paper attempts to envision the void from within the world rather than as a purely immaterial imaginary.  We will look at Anish Kapoor later as a contemporary manifestation of this approach.

3. L. Lucien Freud Young  man Lying 1977
3. R. Lucien Freud Naked man on a bed  1977
Like Courbet, Freud gives us paint that insists on its own materiality and brush marks that almost seem to contradict the illusion of form.  Experiencing the tactility of the Realist works, in contrast to the salon images, entails a full sensory engagement because in tracing the form, the viewer�s eye follows the gesture of the artist.  This is a process that brings the viewer very close to the artist and to the subject matter.  In a way it is as if the viewer recreates the moment of production with each glance.  By replacing the objectifying and distancing conventions of academic painting with an emphasis on sensory and emotional engagement, certain works weaken the boundary between art and life. 

4.L. Claude Monet Waterlillies, the clouds 1903
4.R.  Claude Monet Branch of the Seine Nr Givernay 1897
Monet�s loose brushwork in the late waterlily paintings from Givernay exemplifies the dual experience of surface and space.  The openness of the layered brushwork is literally transparent although the many layers of colour make the surface quite crusted and materially assertive.  In some of the greatest paintings at the Orangerie and in MOMA, NY the large scale of the paintings extends the surface beyond our cone of vision and this allied to the loss of horizon and ground sets us adrift in space.  In order to see the whole work we must move our head or even our entire body as if we were in a landscape rather than looking at a framed image of one.  This movement enhances our kinaesthetic experience of the work.  Monet�s marks resolve and dissolve into form as we move our gaze across the surface, they might simultaneously represent ripples in the water, reflected light and objects floating on the surface.  At the same time they present us with a kind of veil through which we can imaginatively project.  

Peter Fuller in his discussion of paintings by Robert Natkin invoked D W Winnicott�s theories in which the painted surface is identified with a security blanket that allows the weaned child to maintain some tactile contact with the undifferentiated/oceanic world from which it has been ejected and which might be the precursor to our engagement with the void.  There may be some truth in this that helps us to enter a state of reverie in front of certain kinds of painting, but there are many other associations with veils, curtains, arras etc that make it a very powerful metaphor at least.   Monet certainly sustains this tactility and the authentic experience that it is supposed to facilitate.

5.L.  Bonnard The Bath (1925)
5.R.  Bonnard Nu de dos � la toilette (1934
Bonnard is an artist who invites us to imaginatively project into the pictorial space.  These paintings depict his wife Marthe de M�ligny in the privacy of their home.  The brushwork is open his loose dry strokes always transparent to our eye.  For example Nu de Dos � la Toilette, 1934 where the openness of the painted surface makes the flesh glow with an inner light.  Not only is the surface open but also the boundary of the figure is very softly defined.   The back of the figure virtually merges with the brightly lit wall behind her.  Our visual comprehension of the figure is only possible when it is seen as a whole with the rest of the composition.  If you were to isolate any portion of the figure it would become unreadable.  By opening the figure to the passage of light and dissolving figure - ground distinctions Bonnard parallels aspects of Analytic Cubism.  Like Picasso, Bonnard makes the figure merge with the painted field.  The figure is quite literally opened up for our gaze.

Merger or passage from consciousness into unconsciousness

6. L. Courbet  La Source 1862 ( Metropolitain Museum) 
6. R. Courbet  La Source 1868  (Musee d'Orsay)

The following images suggest passage through the pictorial surface.  Courbet�s La Source from the Metropolitan museum is particularly relevant to this narrative more so than the admittedly more important version in Mus�e d�Orsay.   Here she is pressed up against the waterfall her arm moving through the surface as if she is about to slide through �Alice�s mirror� or the veil.   Her dark hair is already blending with the shadowy trees beyond

The luxurious paint that Courbet always applied for water lubricates the implied merger of figure with landscape.  Courbet mixed varnish and other thinners into his oils to make the paint more transparent and also more liquid.  Applied with a palette knife this produced a fluid, buttery texture.  The drier brush marks that make up the figure enhance this lubricity by contrast.  Courbet is not just absorbing the woman into the water and the land itself, he is equally drawing the viewer into an imaginative penetration, not of the woman as Linda Nochlin suggests but of the veil of representation that separates art from life.  (Nochlin�s critique of Michael Freid�s analysis in her catalogue essay for the exhibition Courbet Reconsidered at the Brooklyn Museum 1988)

7.L. Edward Hopper Nude crawling into a bed 1903
7.R. Francois Sall� The Anatomy Class at the �cole des Beaux Arts  (1888)
This tiny and atypical painting by Edward Hopper returns us to the main theme of passage or absorption. The intimate subject matter, the dark tonality and the broad-brush work are more typical of a study by Rembrandt.  Hopper has brought the figure very close to the picture plane.  The figure faces the same way as the viewer and moves into the space of the painting.  This proximity to the viewer, and the insistent quality of the painted surface makes for a strong kinaesthetic bond between the figure and the viewer. 

The room is divided by the play of light and shade, creating a screen of illumination parallel to the picture plane (and metaphorically reproducing it). 
The figure of a woman moves through this screen.  Her buttocks and legs are brightly illuminated as is the near edge of the bed but all beyond is dark and mysterious.  The woman passes into the dark recesses of the bed and the space beyond.  This implied movement from the illuminated surface into the veiled interior evokes a movement from consciousness into reverie or sleep.  Because of the strong visual association between the viewer and the figure there is also an implied sense of embodiment or merger on the part of the viewer. 

Fran�ois Sall�s, The Anatomy Class at the �cole des Beaux Arts  (1888) depicts a half naked male model being examined as if he were a piece of flesh.  His sturdy muscled torso and rough trousers attest to his lower class status thus rendering him available for objectification by the gentlemen at the academy.  The student in the foreground stares at the model with no hint of embarrassment.  It was as if the man did not exist as a subject in his own right.

The man himself has his eyes closed.  He is removing himself from the possibility of meeting the intrusive gaze of the students.  He has withdrawn into himself, into a state of reverie perhaps.  The blackboard that is behind them frames the figures of the doctor and the model.  It is of course a literal depiction of the Academy as it still is today but the coincidence of the man�s reverie and the black space behind him is striking.  While Duval the anatomy lecturer leans out towards the students and the theatre lighting illuminates his baldpate, the model leans back, his dark hair merging with the black field.  As an artist�s model in the early 1960s I met many colleagues who practiced meditation and trance induction in order to get through the day. 

Another oblique connection to this discourse of consciousness lies in the fact that Duval was an admirer of Charcot and attended his demonstrations of hysterical behaviour at the clinic in Saltpetri�re.  States of consciousness were the subject of much fascinated speculation in the 19thC.

It was with great interest that I recently read an essay by Paul Barlow on the English painters Watts and Millais who attempted to register authenticity by elaborately reworking the painted surface to emphasise its materiality so that it might act as a metaphor for the primordial sludge out of which animate life arose.  In Millais� portrait of Lord Salisbury for example the dark brown field and the subject�s coat recede while the shining pate of the sitter even brighter than Duval�s surges upward symbolising consciousness arising from inanimate matter and unconsciousness.  Authenticity was also considered to be achieved by this visibility of the artists hand in that the act of the artist in the presence of the subject is felt by the viewer thereby bringing them into a proxy presence that is not afforded by the smooth surface of illusionism.

8.L.  Gustave Courbet The Grain Sifters 1854
8.R.  Gustave Courbet Burial at Ornans  1850
The black hole in Sall�'s painting acts as a reminder of occlusion suggested by Courbet�s Tarare in The Grain Sifters or the open grave in the Burial at Ornans that Fried identifies as a possible point of merger.  Fried argues for the sifters as an allegory of the act of painting, the sticky red dots of paint representing the grain as both menstrual blood and paint splashed on the canvas stretched on the floor.  The child peers into the Tarare into the dark as a metaphor for the occlusion that would necessarily accompany merger. 
The grave in Burial at Ornans is right at the edge of the canvas as if the hole were a gap between the painted space and the viewer�s world into which we might again be drawn and thus pass through unconsciousness into what state beyond?

Sensing the void

The story here divides into two strands.   The first includes artists who make it possible for us to imaginatively pass through the veil into the void and the other is more literal starting with the intensified trace of the artist on the surface and then bursting through into the performing body. 

9.L. Kasimir Malevich Black square 1929
9.R. Kasimir Malevich White on white  1918

The Russian Suprematist Kasimir Malevich first painted a black square in 1912 and exhibited it in 1915 While it could be seen as a revolutionary gesture or a negation of representation it was also a kind of event horizon a portal onto the infinite and as such a space for contemplation of the void.   The parallel between the �clean slate� of a revolutionary manifesto and the idea of the plenitude of the void is a striking one.  It should also be noted that Malevich paid obsessive attention to the facture of his paintings the black is layered and intimately touched by the artist this is not only a conceptual statement it is intended as an experiential one.  White on white painted in 1918 initiated a whole genre of utopian painting in Europe and later in America from the Polish Unists in the 1940s to The German Zero group and Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin in the post war period.  In all these paintings the white or light beyond the void is seen not as a blank but as potentiality.

10. L. Brian Blanchflower Canopy XXII   The Generative Eye  (triumph over time) 1990
10. R.  Brian Blanchflower Canopy XII   Traces/Glimmers

Brian Blanchflower attempts nothing less I would suggest than the void made implicit (I am almost ready to say manifest) in matter.  I am thinking about the void in a Gnostic sense something like the darkness before the word and the light.   It may be easier just to think of the sky and infinity or what lies over the horizon but the void is never an absence it is the potential for everything and as such a space for meditation as well as terror.  Human consciousness is utterly dependent on and bound up with material existence and yet it too refuses definition or spatial coordinates, it is as if we have a void within that is the double of the void out there. How can mortals contemplate the infinite?  Our sensory equipment is not intended for this quest and yet we desire to experience it and will try anything to get some inkling of its totality.  The artist may just be the conduit through which matter is transformed even if only momentarily into a medium for joining these voids through sensation in consciousness.

11.L. Agnes Martin Untitled #8 1977
11.R. Ad Reinhardt Abstract painting black 1954-56
Agnes Martin and Ad Reinhardt both create meditative spaces.  Martin proposes her minimal grids on white as quiet interludes that slow down the rush of consciousness by providing a space for contemplation.  The content of the experience here must rely heavily on the mind and spirit of the viewer. 

12.L. Mark Rothko Earth and Green 1955
12.R. Yves Klein Monochrome IKB 1958
Yves Klein�s blue monochromes provide pure sensation of the colour that he believed constituted a material manifestation of the void.  Something similar happens with Rothko except that his spaces are imbued with emotion.  Rothko like Klein railed against expressionism (self expression) but was unable to keep his spirit out of the work, nonetheless his paintings seem to ignite a fire in the viewer�s heart through the artist�s pain and joy.

13.L. Brian Blanchflower Canopy LI (Scelsi I-IV) 2001
13.R. Brian Blanchflower Canopy LII  2001
Blanchflower�s near monochromes since the late 1990s generate an extraordinary sense of space and intense yet subdued light that invite visual absorption.  It is as if we could almost walk into their mist and emerge in Monet�s garden or in some unimaginable void.  And yet they are intensely material objects. They are painted on coarse hessian sheets that have been stiffened with binder till they are like boards.  The paint layers are then built up almost as if they were accidental accretions revealing the coarse support and successive layers of colour.  The paint includes metallic and pearlescent media that glint like minerals in the soil but also contribute to the transparency and inner light that the surface radiates at certain viewing distances.  As one approaches the paintings the surface comes to dominate the attention they are like the rocky surface of the earth itself and yet as you retreat the colour transforms back into infinite space.   For me this is the most marvellous manifestation of infinity in the mud. 

14.L.  Anthony Gormley Field for the Art Gallery of NSW 1989
14.R. Anthony Gormley  Field for the great Australian outback 1989

In these two works Gormley has manifested an image of consciousness emerging from the earth and returning to the earth therefore in a way it is also an image of transcending boundaries or permeable membranes.  When one stands at the centre of these brain like hemispheres all the little eyes are staring directly at you; the earth judging its conscious progeny and in turn awaiting judgement.

15. L. Anthony Gormley in Mootwingie 1989
       15. R. Anthony Gormley making the field for AGNSW 1989

I was lucky enough to spend some time installing his work in the desert and collecting red dust for the 1100 figures back in AGNSW.  Anthony introduced me to the phenomenology of Hiedegger during those freezing desert nights.  It was a perfect place to start thinking about the horizon that separates the material world from consciousness.  I don�t know if I will ever get on top of these mysteries but I can never escape the memory of first hearing them.

Stephen Bann has introduced another related and interesting concept in discussion of Gormley�s earlier hollow lead figures.  He has shown how such works question our traditional understanding of representation by substituting Gadamer�s concept of �ontological communion� between the image/object and the subject of the work. 

Gadamer proposed that the religious icon was the exemplary model of the artistic image precisely because it reveals something that cannot have a source in reality i.e. it is non-mimetic.  He proposes another kind of association between art object and the imaginary subject.  

Anthony Gormley provides an especially clear example of ontological communion in recent art.   Not only is the auratic quality of the figure paradoxically enhanced by its absence, after all there is no mimetic intention here, but these body cases have literally been formed about the absent body of the subject.  They are traces almost like insect pupae left as evidence of a transformation. 

The idea of the ontological communion differs from iconic representation in that it involves direct experience or some equivalent phenomenon to the object represented.   This can be realised through the presence of the object which reveals its material qualities and the process of production and also through the possibility of an indexical relation, in other words the object may integrate part of the thing for example the shin bone of the saint in a medieval icon or in some way be a trace of the thing a footprint or a stain on a bed sheet.

The literal breakthrough

This brings me to the second strand where the idea of the surface is first made painfully present and then gives way under the pressure to bring forth the body of the artist.  This presence may be partly attributable to the processes I have just outlined.

16. L. Francis Bacon Lying figure with hypodermic syringe 1963
16. R. Francis Bacon  figure with meat 1954

Bacon articulated the principle that paint should be made to function as an equivalent to the sensations of the body rather than merely reproducing the body�s appearance. 
In his last filmed interview, with Melvin Bragg, Bacon said, �I wanted to bring about the sensation of the thing without the boredom of its conveyance.�  This is, in part achieved by the direct response, which I am proposing between hand and eye that binds artist and viewer through the action of the body, and our bodily response to that action.

17.L. Arnulf Rainer.  Overpainting-Totem 1983/84
17.R. Jackson Pollock, Blue poles 1952
Overpainting-Totem (1983/84) by Arnulf Rainer is a photographic self-portrait that has been almost completely covered over with daubs of paint.  The trace of the artist�s fingers has virtually overtaken his visual representation.  In this image the artist scrabbles against the surface as if it might actually part and allow passage, like Alices mirror.

Jackson Pollock can easily be discussed in terms of performance art.   Only when you see Namuth�s famous film of him working or read TJ Clark�s account of the process do you really understand the full implications of the painting as a trace of an event.  Pollock puts pressure on the idea that the painting is always a kind of self-portrait and brings us up to the point of the artist�s body becoming the site of the action.  

18. L. Lucio Fontana Concetto Spaziale attese 1962 
18. R. Caravaggio Doubting Thomas
Lucio Fontana�s slashed canvases literally enact a kind of breaking through this boundary of representation.  The crisis in representation that is often thought of, as a modern dilemma is however an ancient one that is a consequence of our condition � suspended between matter and consciousness. 

Fontana was born in Latin America and subsequently lived in Italy.  The Catholic iconography of the wound can hardly have escaped his attention.  It is an easy step to consider the slash in the pure skin of the monochrome canvas as a wound and then to associate it with the crisis Doubting Thomas resolved by plunging his hand into Christ�s side. 

The visual associations between these cuts and wounds rupture the veil or screen of representation at the brink of the void.  Because this veil is metaphorically related to the skin that separates the body from its surroundings, the orifices created by Fontana naturally evoke the openings of the body itself.  Thomas� doubt perfectly expresses our anxiety at living in a world that is only available to us through the mediation of visual appearances and the word. 

Recall the shinbone of the saint or the true cross incorporated into the frame of an icon thereby literally bringing us into the presence of the thing itself while also providing an iconic reference.

19. L. Mike Parr Unword performances 1996
19. R. Gina Pane Aktione sentimentale 1973
The literal action of Fontana comes very close to performance art.   Indeed since Pollock painting contained this possibility.  These images of Mike Parr and Gina Pane suggest exploring and rupturing the skin as border between the bounded self and the world.

20. L.  Yves Klein�s Leap into the Void  1961
20. R.  Courbet�s Man Mad with Fear 1843. 
Man Mad With Fear (1843) is a graphic image of the potential terror of representation that is entrapment through merger, on the wrong side of the glass. 
In Courbet's self-portraits the artist is usually shown pressing up against the pictorial surface or the frame of the composition as if he was about to burst through the viewer�s side of the canvas. 

In this painting the figure of the artist leaps into the pictorial void�signified by the cliff at the lower right hand side � and into the viewer�s space. Michael Fried has argued that such voids at the margin of a composition are linking spaces that provide entry for the artist and the viewer.  In Man Mad With Fear the void is �fortuitously� left unfinished: precisely at the point where the artist is about to leap through the pictorial surface the paint breaks down into an abstract scumble.  Representation is seen dissolving in front of our eyes. 

Yves Klein was a keen Rosicrucian and followed rigorous spiritual exercises combining this with his considerable expertise in judo to work towards a literal physical transcendence.  In 1961 the year before his untimely death he made a gesture that acted out this metaphysical aspiration by leaping into the void from a second floor window.  He believed that the material world was approaching an end and that by diligent spiritual exercise mankind could break down the distinction between matter and spirit.  This leap then is another form of slash in the metaphorical veil. 

This is an image of extreme optimism, utopian, crazy, but an act of faith to demonstrate the truth of human longing that breaks through conscious suppression into our dreams.

21.L. Yves Klein PR3 Portrait relief of Claude Pascale 1962
21.R. Yves Klein Monochrome YKB and sponges
Our own portrait relief and all the monochromes are essentially about manifesting the void here and now, the �Bachelard blue� of infinity adopted by Klein as YKB is as phenomenologically close to the immaterial as a material can be.  It is amusing to think that it is also the colour used in video montaging because it virtually disappears when overexposed with another image. 

22. L. Anish Kapoor  Untitled  1992 
22. R. Anish Kapoor Void field 1989
In his homages to Yves Klein Anish Kapoor�s greatest achievement has been to manifest the experience of the void in an extraordinarily concrete way.  If Blanchflower creates the possibility of sensory merger Kapoor creates a literal and phenomenon void. 

Kapoor is an Indian artist living in London.  He grew up in the state of Kerala but went to school in Bombay.  His background incorporates Hindu, Jewish and European traditions.  In 1989 Kapoor discovered a new way to imagine the infinity of the void.  He created a portal onto the void within blocks of incredibly dense and ancient Cambrian sandstone, possibly the oldest sedimentary rock on earth.  At first glance the spots on top of these great stones seem like applied black velvet but on closer inspection they are revealed as holes in the rock.  There are no apparent sides to the holes and there is no visible end to the space.  He has created the experience of a black hole within matter by hollowing out the stone leaving only a thin shell at the top at the brink of the void.  The hollow has been lined with a dark blue pigment to give spatial depth to the darkness.

The American critic Thomas McEvilley wrote for Kapoor's catalogue at the Venice Biennale in 1990.  He played upon Kapoor's Indian background to characterise these black holes as the womb of Kali.  More recent variations on the theme make it apparent however that this void is like Black Square 1915 by Kasimir Malevich, This painting of a black square has become a powerful symbol in modern art for a portal onto the infinite.  It is a deep space for contemplation in which we project our imagination of the unknown.

23. L. James Turrell Light House at Echigo Tsumari 2000
23. R. James Turrell  Arcus 1989
James Turell is an American artist whose installations use light to create a sensation of infinity but he also frames actual space.  He has built houses to frame the sky producing a rectangle of literally endless and ever-changing blue, he has even modified a volcano to allow the viewer to lie and look up at a vast framed circle of infinity.   Some are built into gallery walls and give the initial appearance of luminous blue paintings - however on closer inspection they begin to appear as space beyond the wall.  The viewer experiences a degree of disorientation or of floating in space.  In time it becomes a manifestly meditative experience realising the imaginative space of Klein in concrete form.

It is both an extreme abstraction and a concrete manifestation of pure sensation.  Unlike the sublime it does not depict grandeur or moralise on the power of the creator it simply IS.