Nothing Doing
Houston, TX, USA
Spring 2016
Fusing Nicholas Bourriaud’s conceptualization of postproduction to Michael Rock’s provocation for a thesis about nothing per se, this project utilizes conflicting material rubrics synthesized from a study of the practices of prominent twentieth century artists working with the concept of Nothing: one approach exemplified by key works by Yves Klein, Ad Reinhardt, and John Cage; and another by those of Robert Rauschenberg, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Michael Heizer.
Nothing can be material. In Yves Klein’s blue works physicality is treated as a mere substrate; the alchemical International Klein Blue, he claims, transcends the material existence of its physical characteristics, sublimating them into the experience of the color. We are instructed that the incidental ‘something’—the painting, the sponge, the nude woman—is nothing more than a prerequisite for the “real” something, the experience of the color. Very Greenbergian.
Revisiting Klein’s blue work one recalls Rock’s prompt: ”in defining what you mean by Nothing I hope you will reveal something specific about your thesis.” The means marshalled by an artist, author, or designer in the task of actually making nothing produce an unanticipated something in the accretion of layers of assumptions: what survive as the traces of Klein’s assumptions are a selection of objects coated in overwhelming pigment.
Nothing can be contextual as well, an operation prototyped in Robert Rauschenberg’s first major work, Erased de Kooning. As an artistic tool, erasure constructs a void in a predetermined context: for Rauschenberg, a lack of drawing where there should be one, whereas Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect and Michael Heizer’s Double Negative add identifiable form to literal nothing, objects virtualized by the impressions they appear to have left on their context. Where the introversion of Klein’s work leaves us with beguiling artifacts, Matta-Clark produces a participatory, readable, spatial void. In Marshall MacLuhan’s terms, accretion is cool, while erasure is hot.
This project’s building blocks are anonymous rather than iconic building fragments sourced from the freely available raster image, digital model, and vector drawing repositories of contemporary architecture and construction media and isolated using erasure. Reaggregated dumbly, serially, they propose a Nothing project: a space for ephemeral tattoo and body art—both difficult to show in an exhibition context and historically denied by the academy as a valid medium.
A pregnant pause, the project animates public understanding and usage of art space by subtly alienating the symbolic meanings of these commonly repeated building elements from their functional logics. Unheroic in the general architectural imagination, doors, sign surfaces, and arena seating are employed as both real functional components and as facilitators to an extraneous symbolic significance: that of repetition and emptiness, of thick white noise.