It just occurred to me that one of the elements in my favorite poetry that appeals most to me is that notion that something is missing or gone.
Examples would include the emptiness expressed in Shelley’s Ozymandias with
“…Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Another is that chilling image of silence in Walter de la Mare’s The Listeners with
“…Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.”
I’ve even posted these passages in other threads about favorite poetry, etc.
Many of the haiku that affect me most have similar imagery.
But that’s poetry.
I’m curious if other art works – paintings, music, movies, sculpture, even architecture – capitalize on the notion of something missing or absent. As if the thing one seems to focus on, whether immediately or after some buildup, is what’s NOT in the scene.
I can’t think of anything offhand so I thought I’d ask you folks.
There’s always John Cage’s famous composition 4’33". In literature, the later works of Samuel Beckett often deal with the absence of something–be it a love, a sense of identity, a plot, characters, etc. In visual art, the notion of negative space is quite well-established.
The music of Helmut Lachenmann makes extraordinary use of pauses and silences. Late Schnittke compositions are another case - I remember reading a very good description of his last symphonies as being like ‘structures of Mahler symphonies, stripped down to their essential skeletal components’.
Okay. I did a bit of checking through searches about the meaning of “negative space” in 2D art like paintings and drawings. My take is that it refers to the situations like those “fool the eye” things like the two goblets where you see profiles or the “Jesus” appearing as white space among black lettering. Perhaps it even includes things like the picture that looks like a young woman but then if you stare at it or pick some other details it switches to looking like an old hag.
While these examples seem sort of trivial by comparison to the emotional impact I was referring to in the OP, I am curious if there are paintings or drawings where the real focus seems to be on the absent item and its very absence causes some emotional response.
Think I’ve mentioned this before but I’ll risk repeating myself. Unfortunately it never came to fruition, but it was a great idea.
Back in the days when Ireland was under British rule, the Brits put up Nelson’s Pillar, a large column dedicated to the British hero, in the middle of Dublin. It remained in place after Irish independence, to the annoyance of many.
During the beginning of “The Troubles”, in the 1960s, the IRA blew the top off it, and the next day the Irish Army demolished the rest.
The gap in O’Connell street remained empty until the 1990s, when Dublin Council put out a tender to fill it. The winning entry was a 120 metre spike.
However, one of the entries, I thought, was brilliant. It was a perspex column, hollowed out in the exact size and shape of Nelson’s Pillar: it was to contain the absence of the pillar.
I don’t know if this is going to come across well on a computer screen as opposed to viewing it in person, but I’ve always been intrigued by Giorgio de Chirico’s L’ angoisse du Depart.
There’s stuff there, but the middle space is empty. That white puff in the background is usually read as the steam from a departing train (the translation of the title is “the anguish of departing”), although it’s not that specific in the actual painting. Every time I see it, I feel like it’s a painting of the space where something has happened, but the artist chose to capture a moment after the significant event. Hopefully you’ll take my word for it that this painting is downright haunting in person.
Other paintings from de Chirico’s metaphysical period have a similar tone – they feature industrial landscapes and architeture that seems curiously abandoned.
Beautiful example, but I suspect the knowledge of the significance of the original monument (and its demise) would be required before a viewer would get the same chill that the knowledgeable person would have. This is not meant to demean the value of that entry, but I could relate to the choice not to have it win the commission. Similar considerations are probably in play with whatever will eventually replace the Trade Towers.
To be fair, I suspect that anyone who would be moved by the awareness that something was absent from a work of art and that the absence was the real focus of the work, would have to have some prior knowledge of that item’s meaning. That seems almost to defeat the idea that something’s not being there has inherent meaning.
Surely some clever artist has examined this issue and done something to test the idea.
How about the scene in * The Godfather Part II * where the kids are sitting around the table waiting for Don Vito to come in for his birthday party? It’s the one where Michael has confronted Sonny and Tom about his plans to go into the Marines.
Moviegoers would be aware that Brando was not in the production of that movie for reasons that had little to do with the movie itself. But knowing that he wasn’t the one coming into the next room, out of view of the camera, and causing the family to start into “For he’s a jolly good fellow…” must have had a similar effect to others as it did for me.
Over and above the relevance that this flashback was meant to have, that those “good old days” were gone, there was something extra missing in Brando’s almost palpable absence.
To be fair, “nothingness” was not at all Cage’s intention with 4’33’’; nor is that the experience of the audience, if you’ve ever seen it performed. His point was to move the focus off of the stage; away from the musician. That music is all around us, all the time. When you sit in silence for 4 minutes and 33 seconds–especially in a place like a full concert hall–you’re forced to start noticing the textures of sound all around you: you hear the presence of people, no matter how silent they’re trying to be. You hear a truck go by outside. Your thoughts supply the “libretto” of the piece. 4’3’’ is actually a pretty uplifting piece about community and connectedness, if you’re open to it. It’s only about “nothingness” on paper; in performance it’s an entirely diffferent thing.
Not to pick on you, UF, but I read Beckett differently. He’s not nihilistic at all. His emblematic message is the final sentence of the first part of Molloy: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” There’s darkness in Beckett, but it’s a kind of joyful darkness. The more negative Beckett gets, the wider his evil grin gets; the funnier he gets. For me, Beckett’s central message is that no matter how bleak life may seem, it’s always gonna be worth the struggle. Pretty much the opposite of nihilism. Although, since he engages nihilism before overcoming it, it’s easy to get bogged down in the first part of that equation.
What the heck; I guess I am picking on you UF . Negative space in visual art is also not about nothingness; it’s about context, complement. The concept of negative space is to remind us to engage with the entire work, including its context, and the space around the object, the complement of the object.
It’s also not about “fool the eye,” Zeldar. It’s about seeing the light and air that passes through the crook of a statue’s arm, and not stopping at the arm. The black and white examples that Google conjures up for you are not examples of negative space in art, literally; they’re schematicized exaggerations to show you the area under discussion. Negative space is the part of the Mona Lisa that isn’t the Mona Lisa.
It can be illusory, like the light areas in a Franz Kline painting, or literal, like in this Moholy-Nagy photograph. The problem with looking for examples of negative space is you end up finding mostly stuff that’s ALL about negative space. Almost every image has some negative space in it. Abstract paintings that are all about the surface of the canvas can be, to a certain extent, mostly a “look ma, no negative space!” trick. That’s the struggle of such a painting: fighting to keep the viewer’s focus on the surface, and not to fall into any negative space.
Anyway.
Dorothy Jackson’s stuff is all about emptiness and nothingness to me.
Makes me think of the Holocaust Memorial (I think it is) in Vienna (I think): a concrete cast of the inside of a building, with the building removed and nothing left but the cast of its negative space.
I didn’t read the OP closely enough, so my examples are bit off. Still, the most prominent feature of 4’33" is the absence of music–not that there’s a sense of nothingness or loss, but that there is no music being played. Similarly, Beckett’s best works are notable for their lack of traditional story elements (I’m thinking particularly of “The Unnameable” and “Company” here). Escher was a master of using empty space to draw attention to what should be there.
The first stanza of Bunin’s “Люцифер”, describing the church Hagia Sophia around the turn of the century:
A literal translation:
In Hagia Sophia pigeons flew,
a mullah bowed down. It was the Erectheon,
and the gods of Homeric poems
in empty museums were frozen and yearning.
It describes very well, I think, the Orthodox perspective of what was done to Hagia Sophia under the Turks – it went from being the greatest church in Christendom, to a run-down mosque, to a run-down museum. It could even be applied to Constantinople itself – from the New Rome, the glory of eastern Christendom and the jewel of Hellenic culture, to the capital of the Turkish barbarians, its treasures looted, its mosaics whitewashed, its church bells and semandrons replaced with minarets and the call of the adhaan.
Berlin’s Bebelplatz (formerly the Opernplatz) was the site of one of the largest mass book-burnings in the 1930s. The memorial art is an empty library, located underneath the square and visible through its ceiling. It’s an excellent and meaningful use of empty space. Picture here.
Of course, without context such art is more difficult to understand. When I visited this memorial, I saw two incidents that struck me : A couple of Chinese tourists who’d wandered off from their guide to see why people were staring into the ground, took a look and chuckled uncomprehendingly. Then a mother and small child came up, and the mother explained what had happened, but could not respond when the child asked, “Why’d they do that?”
Doesn’t the end of Waiting for Godot kind of contradict that? Waiting for Godot actually is a really good example for this thread though. Godot’s absence is a big part of it.
It would only be contradicted if Didi and Gogo had killed themselves. Instead, they wait for Mr. Godot every day, despite the fact that he never comes.
. Negative space in visual art is also not about nothingness; it’s about context, complement. The concept of negative space is to remind us to engage with the entire work, including its context, and the space around the object, the complement of the object.
