"I believe in empty spaces, they're the most wonderful thing." Anselm Kiefer (1)
As an architect who has a deep affinity to and relationship with the arts, as well as teaching architecture and interior architecture in an art school, I discovered artists have found the manifold expressions and concepts of ZERO to be a rich ground for experimentation. Ranging from making works that are formally incomplete to taking on subversive inaction, and amplifying the different conditions of ZERO, the works re-orientate our comfortable and cherished view of authorship, ownership and the production of art. It is especially inspiring for me as an architect since use value is so tied to architecture that it can sometimes create a myopic view of the role an architect plays in society.
Yoko Ono once said that art is not about creation or destruction but changing the value of things. (2) The simple statement opens up fascinating insights into what constitutes art, how we judge and value its place in society beyond that of a commodity to be traded globally in the art market.
ZERO, or silence as espoused by American composer John Cage becomes a composition strategy of pauses and intervals between sounds. Cage’s 4’33” is a composition that amplifies and awakens our sense of ambient sounds around us. Unlike music, which is transferable when recorded, 4’33” is grounded on a specific time and place of the performance and no two performances are the same. Furthermore, sound in John Cage’s works is no longer just a medium for music. It becomes the material itself and expands our awareness that even noise can be considered as music. (3)
Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube questions the perception of art as an absolute and aesthetic object shaped by traditional media of paint and sculpture. The work is absent of any expressive, formal ambition. Instead, it relies on the everyday, natural process of condensation to transform a thirty-centimeter transparent Plexiglas cube in time. A thin layer of water is hermetically sealed within the cube, which reacts to the difference in air temperature and dew point to activate the condensation process. Hans Haacke’s work, despite its simplicity, sets up a condition where the hidden organic systems within our environment are revealed and amplified in a hermetically sealed context of the museum.
In 1993, Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco presented a work titled, The Empty Shoebox in the Venice Biennale. Passive viewers are turned into a participants by kicking an empty shoebox around in the exhibition space. Orozco’s doing almost nothing and the cost of almost nothing strategy of art making re-configures our passive engagement with art works, and our perception of its preciousness.
Marina Abramovic staged a performance piece where she did nothing but sat silently on a chair, with a table and an empty chair opposite, in the atrium of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The empty chair invited the ‘viewer’ to come sit and share the moment of silence with her, staring into each others’ eyes and confronting the ‘work’ as it gazes back at the viewer. Serendipitously, as far back as 1968, Robert Smithson in his essay A Sedimentation of Mind: Earthworks wrote, “A great artist can make art by simply casting a glance. A set of glances could be as solid as any thing or place, but the society continues to cheat the artist out of his “art of looking”, by valuing only 'art objects'." (4)
1. Needam, Alex. (8 Dec, 2011). Anselm Kiefer: 'art is difficult, it's not entertainment'. Retreived 2011, Dec 8 from The Guardian online website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/dec/08/anselm-kiefer-art-white-cube.
2. This remark was made by art curator Takashi Serizawa in the Crisis Design Network dialogue session in Yokohama in Jan 2008.
3. Gann, Kyle. (2010). No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage's 4'33". New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
4. Flam, Jack. (Editor). (1996). Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. University of California Press. Los Angeles, California.
As an architect who has a deep affinity to and relationship with the arts, as well as teaching architecture and interior architecture in an art school, I discovered artists have found the manifold expressions and concepts of ZERO to be a rich ground for experimentation. Ranging from making works that are formally incomplete to taking on subversive inaction, and amplifying the different conditions of ZERO, the works re-orientate our comfortable and cherished view of authorship, ownership and the production of art. It is especially inspiring for me as an architect since use value is so tied to architecture that it can sometimes create a myopic view of the role an architect plays in society.
Yoko Ono once said that art is not about creation or destruction but changing the value of things. (2) The simple statement opens up fascinating insights into what constitutes art, how we judge and value its place in society beyond that of a commodity to be traded globally in the art market.
ZERO, or silence as espoused by American composer John Cage becomes a composition strategy of pauses and intervals between sounds. Cage’s 4’33” is a composition that amplifies and awakens our sense of ambient sounds around us. Unlike music, which is transferable when recorded, 4’33” is grounded on a specific time and place of the performance and no two performances are the same. Furthermore, sound in John Cage’s works is no longer just a medium for music. It becomes the material itself and expands our awareness that even noise can be considered as music. (3)
Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube questions the perception of art as an absolute and aesthetic object shaped by traditional media of paint and sculpture. The work is absent of any expressive, formal ambition. Instead, it relies on the everyday, natural process of condensation to transform a thirty-centimeter transparent Plexiglas cube in time. A thin layer of water is hermetically sealed within the cube, which reacts to the difference in air temperature and dew point to activate the condensation process. Hans Haacke’s work, despite its simplicity, sets up a condition where the hidden organic systems within our environment are revealed and amplified in a hermetically sealed context of the museum.
In 1993, Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco presented a work titled, The Empty Shoebox in the Venice Biennale. Passive viewers are turned into a participants by kicking an empty shoebox around in the exhibition space. Orozco’s doing almost nothing and the cost of almost nothing strategy of art making re-configures our passive engagement with art works, and our perception of its preciousness.
Marina Abramovic staged a performance piece where she did nothing but sat silently on a chair, with a table and an empty chair opposite, in the atrium of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The empty chair invited the ‘viewer’ to come sit and share the moment of silence with her, staring into each others’ eyes and confronting the ‘work’ as it gazes back at the viewer. Serendipitously, as far back as 1968, Robert Smithson in his essay A Sedimentation of Mind: Earthworks wrote, “A great artist can make art by simply casting a glance. A set of glances could be as solid as any thing or place, but the society continues to cheat the artist out of his “art of looking”, by valuing only 'art objects'." (4)
1. Needam, Alex. (8 Dec, 2011). Anselm Kiefer: 'art is difficult, it's not entertainment'. Retreived 2011, Dec 8 from The Guardian online website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/dec/08/anselm-kiefer-art-white-cube.
2. This remark was made by art curator Takashi Serizawa in the Crisis Design Network dialogue session in Yokohama in Jan 2008.
3. Gann, Kyle. (2010). No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage's 4'33". New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
4. Flam, Jack. (Editor). (1996). Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. University of California Press. Los Angeles, California.