END OF NOTHING

Do you still remember the ending of Antonioni's Blow Up? A bunch of dumb show actors were playing an nonexistent tennis match. Their eyes were so intently focused on the ball pretending it was real.

In 1948, John Cage, the American composer composed his famous piece 4'33" in the name of silence. 4'33" is consisted with three movements. Each movement has some small units of silent rhythmic durations. When the music is played, audience could be immersed in the huge silence and could feel what John Cage insisted that "There is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound".

And still fifty years ago, Yves Klein, the young French artist only 30 years old, put himself in a void space and tried to graspe the every subtle change happening around. He called this experience a La spécialisation de la sensibilité à l’état matière première en sensibilité picturale stabilisée, Le Vide (The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, The Void). The exhibiton was hold in 1958, at Iris Clert Gallery in Paris. He removed everything in gallery except a large cabinet, painted every surface white, and then staged an elaborate entrance procedure for the first night.

Klein's void exhibiton astonished the mass and more than 3000 people were forced to queue up waiting to invite his empty room. And now, another void exhibiton is hold in Pompidou Centre for reviewing the 50 years history of Voids.

As what news described the exhibiton: A re-creation of different exhibitions spanning 50 years, the retrospective stretches through nine rooms, all of which are unashamedly devoid of content. The freshly painted walls are uniformly white, the floors all pale wood parquet. The only features that stand out – a thermostat here, an exit sign there, a piece of tissue lying discarded in the doorway – take on a strange and surely unprecedented significance.

The exhibiton reminded me of something about ZEN. There is one sentence in the Buddhist Scriptures, Form is emptiness. Though it is different meaning in the philosophy and in exhibiton Voids, in my view, silence or emptiness may be the most power thing in the world coz it is the beginning of the world and also it will be the end of the world even every person self.

So, a void exhibiton gives people a lot of private space and time to rethink the meaning of life. It appears in a art form and end in a philosophic way.


Various
Voids, a retrospective
Pompidou Centre,
Paris