“Making Beyond Nothingness: An Artistic Challenge to the Unaesthetic Language of the Public Space.”
This project constituted a practice-based research enquiry of two interrelated components: an exhibition of creative work, Nothing Matters, and an accompanying exegesis. The creative work on exhibition comprised a range of small- and large-scale outputs that incorporate drawing, photography, sculptural work, and re-imagined ‘found’ objects, all produced between 2017-2021.
The overall title of the project, Making Beyond Nothingness: An Artistic Challenge to the Unaesthetic Language of the Public Space, embodies the paradox at the heart of the pursuit. How to create ‘something’ of conceptual and aesthetic compulsion from a language of nothingness, whether it be ‘found’ in the surrounding temper of the public space or, in art, in various manifestations of the ‘dematerialised object’: the void; the empty canvas or gallery; the ‘invisible’ work; or the detritus of the everyday?
The written component – the ‘dissertation’ – traces my style through points of reference in the development of Conceptual Art (Chapter 1) before turning, more generally, to examples of my previous work (Chapter 2) and, in Chapter 3, specifically to my reflections on the creative works that form the exhibition.
The phrase, Nothing Matters, embodied the paradox at the heart of my endeavour. At one level, the words suggest negation; at another level, the phrase invokes a more philosophical consideration that is linked to a history of artistic thought and practice. How to create artefacts that use the language of nothing, the void, the blank, the omitted, the interpretation of nothingness, as a vehicle to oppose the ‘unaesthetic’ language of the public space? What has been called ‘nothingness in art’ suggests not so much a homogeneous movement as a trajectory that began in the early part of the 20th century and which has retained notable markers in various art movements, since.
They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of per sons-a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.”
– Bernays E.L. 1928. Propoganda. p 8-10. New York. Horace Liveright.
“The culture industry misuses its concern for the masses in order to duplicate, reinforce and strengthen their mentality, which it presumes is given and unchangeable. How this mentality might be changed is excluded throughout. The masses are not the measure but the ideology of the culture industry, even though the culture industry itself could scarcely exist without adapting to the masses. The cultural commodities of the industry are governed, as Brecht and Suhrkamp expressed it thirty years ago, by the principle of their realization as value, and not by their own specific content and harmonious formation. The entire practice of the culture industry transfers the profit motive naked onto cultural forms. Ever since these cultural forms first began to earn a living for their creators as commodities in the market-place they had already possessed something of this quality.” – Theodor Adorno from “The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture” London: Routledge, 1991
“If we have brains or courage, then we are blessed and called on not to frit these qualities away, standing agape at the ideas of others, winning pissing contests, improving the efficiencies of the neo-corporate state, or immersing ourselves in obscuranta, but rather to prove the vigor of our talents against the strongest opponents of love we can find.” – Julian Assange
– Sheridan, Connor, “Foucault, Power and the Modern Panopticon”. Senior Theses, Trinity College, Hartford, CT 2016. Trinity College Digital Repository, http://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/theses/548
work in progress: Dark Matter (Political Landscape 2017-)
“It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.” – Yevgeny Zamyatin, A Soviet Herectic
“It isn’t a coincidence that governments everywhere want to educate children. Government education, in turn, is supposed to be evidence of the state’s goodness and its concern for our well-being. The real explanation is less flattering. If the government’s propaganda can take root as children grow up, those kids will be no threat to the state apparatus. They’ll fasten the chains to their own ankles.”
― Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.
― Noam Chomsky
“THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME.”
– Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (1849)
Theodor Adorno argued that humans in modern society are programmed at work and in their leisure, and though they seek to escape the monotony of their workplace, they are merely changing to another piece of the machine – from producer to consumer. There is no chance of becoming free individuals who can take part in the creation of society, whether at work or play.
Leonard Cohen - The Night Comes On
We were fighting in Egypt
When they signed this agreement
That nobody else had to die
There was this terrible sound
And my father went down
With a terrible wound in his side
He said, Try to go on
Take my books, take my gun
Remember, my son, how they lied
And the night comes on
It’s very calm
I’d like to pretend that my father was wrong
But you don’t want to lie, not to the young
…
We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teacher leave them kids alone
Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall
“For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.”
– Noam Chomsky, Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on Post-9/11 World
“Things are not always what they seem; first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden.”
– Phaedrus
“It should not really be surprising that modern artists are fascinated with nothing. It is a very human attribute to be beguiled by what we do NOT have, often more than what we do have. In the world of exploration, nothing would be the ulimate unknown area: across the frontier from where we are to where we and everything else disappears. To where we cannot be.”
– Ronald Green, Nothing Matters
Nothing Matters - Solo Exhibition
A Practice-Based Research for the degree of PhD in Visual and Performing Arts
400 Sydney Road, Durban, South Africa
September 2021 – June 2022