empty vessels & empty rooms

8/13/2019 Empty Vessels & Empty Rooms

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Suzanne Kite

December 10th, 2013

Critical Reading

Empty Vessels & Empty Rooms

Fashion earth to make a vase from it:

where there is nothing,

there is functioning of the vase.

The Laozi says great fullness is seemingly empty. The parallels found

between the concepts of Brassiers concept of nothing , Francois Julliens discussion

of emptiness in Chinese painting, and empty art such as empty galleries, blank

canvases, and silence, are all empty vessels through which we can access the unseen

& out-of-field. How is the perception of fullness and emptiness a way to access the

unknown and that which is imperceptible to human consciousness?

The blank slate and the empty frame, when presented to an audience,

does not exist as a closed system of emptiness. In film, the significance of a

completely white shot, which is very difficult to achieve in the film medium, is a

framing of a filled nothingness. In order for this white to exist, it must be framed,

as Deleuze suggests in his essay Cinema 1.1

1Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. London: Continuum, 2005. Internet resource.


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Does this filled-nothingness represent something real? Brassier calls the

real already-undivided rather than the transcendent unity which is posited and

presupposed as undivided and deployed in order to effect the transcendental

synthesis of the empirical and the metaphysical. However, this real, in an 2

undivided form, is nearly inaccessible without a frame.

Similarly, silence in sound art, most famously highlighted by the work of

John Cage, exemplifies the dichotomies that arise within seemingly empty space.

While the space that emerges when sound is not present is silence, there is no such

thing as true silence. 433 is not a piece of silent music, but a frame with which to

hear with. What is framed is conceptually silence and empty because the player is

tacet. However, the performance obviously includes the sounds of the concert hall,

the environment, and ultimately, the universe. Inasmuch as this silent music is not

yet broken up into distinct sounds--one opposition to another--it allows them to

coexist and maintains the full harmony among them. The art is only experienced 3

because of the frame. Without human perception of the frame, the sounds that exist

in 433will still exist, and eternally exist, but the sound object, the sound waves and

their acoustic properties, do not exist as art, unless placed within the frame that is

a construct of human perception.

Another form of emptiness in sound art is the rest. Ferruccio Busonsi

addresses the rest in music, and the break between movements: That which,

2Laurelle, 1989, Philosophie et non-philosophie3Jullien, Franois, and Jane M. Todd. The Great Image Has No Form, or on the Nonobject Through Painting.

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009. Print. Page 48.
http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FFerruccio_Busoni&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGJfSPR-Py6iLDLLQkMTNCuG7iKgg


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within our present-day music, most nearly approaches the essential of the art, is the

Rest and the Hold (Pause). Consummate players, improvisers, know how to employ

these instruments of expression in loftier and ampler measure. The tense silence

between two movementsin itself music, in this environmentleaves wider scope

for divination than the more determinate, but therefore less elastic, sound. 4

Busonsis point is that the emptiness of the pause is filled to the brim with music.

Sound in music is a practice in subtraction of human focus. When the human ear

hones in on certain sounds, it no longer hears the rest of the universe. However, as

soon as the silence is the focus, whether as a rest, a break in movements, the space

before or after a piece, or the piece itself, allows for emptiness to be filled by fullness.

Invisible Art also emerged in the 1960s as a facet of emptiness being

explored. For example, Robert Barry's 1969 piece, Inert Gas, uses an invisible

medium. While gas is not nothing, the concept of nothing can be interpreted as the

subject of the piece. Barry is quoted as saying Nothing seems to me the most potent

thing in the world. While Barrys other works deal with intangible objects outside 5

of human perception, the physical, but invisible, aspect ofInert Gases, deal in the

absence of human perception of even the physical parts of our reality.Inert Gases

was performed for an audience in the desert, none of whom could see the gases

dispersing, nor could they be sure the gases were there to begin with.

4Schwartz, Elliott, and Barney Childs. Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music. New York: Holt,

Rinehart and Winston, 1967. Prin. Page 10.5Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (New York,Praeger, 1973), p. 40
http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FLucy_R._Lippard&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHhqirBZm4qFyfcglkN8HeA_8pfBw


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Thus, Barry is seeking to create a possibility of emptiness, seeking to frame

the possibility of the unseeable. Brassier says, The axiom of separation stipulates

that every assertion of existence concerning a set necessarily presupposes a

pre-existing set. Thus there must be an originary set whose existence provides the

precondition for every subsequent set. This is the empty-set: the set to which nothing

belongs. By framing anything, be it invisible or even visible, we can become aware6

of the set we are dealing with, and therefore step into the ability to access every other

set inside, surrounding, and out-of-field. Whatever the reality evoked, it had only to

be permeated by absence to emerge distilled, emancipated from whatever was

keeping it sterilely shut up within itself, freed from the obstinate tautology in which it

was absorbed, thereby giving access to the profundity of things. 7

When the human consciousness is able to conceive of a glimpse of

emptiness, it is only accessible through the frame or the set. The frame allows

humans to create an organized reference point out of normally inaccessible

perceptions. Deleuze points out that, a closed system is never absolutely closed; but

on the one hand it is connected in space to others systems by a more or less fine

thread, an on the other hand it is integrated or reintegrated into a whole which

transmits a duration to it along this thread. What is made conceptually accessible 8

through this framing of a closed system is the frame itself, and therefore the system

within which the frame is existing. The system draws attention to what is not frame,

6Brassier, Ray.Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print.

Page 104.7 Jullien, page 10.8 Deleuze Page 17


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what is out of frame and therefore outside of our perception. Even if this gives rise

to a new unseen set, on to infinity; and an absolute aspect by which the closed

system opens on to a duration which is immanent to the whole universe, which is no

longer a set and does not belong to the order of the visible. While some sets are 9

unseen, and will remain unseen, the existence of sets we come to know is contingent

upon all those we do not know. Thus these objects seize that in the world which

concerns it exclusively, and which makes it be born to the world. This is the 10

codependence of emptiness and fullness.

Empty galleries attempt to do the same framing, but with a much more

physical space, as seen in Yves Klein's 1958 exhibition La spcialisation de la

sensibilit l'tat matire premire en sensibilit picturale stabilise: Le Vide. 11

He removed everything in the gallery space except a large cabinet, painted every

surface white, and then staged an elaborate entrance procedure for the opening

night; The gallery's window was painted blue, and a blue curtain was hung in the

entrance lobby, accompanied by republican guards and blue cocktails. Thanks to an

enormous publicity drive, 3000 people were forced to queue up, waiting to be let

into an empty room. The gallery becomes the frame for nothing. It is like Francois 12

Julliens discussion of the vase: an empty vessel with which to hold everything.

9Deleuze Page 1710Deleuze, Gilles.Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Print. Page 106.11The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility: The Void,Klein.

12Beale, Jason. "Yves Klein, The Void". Jasonbeale.com.
http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jasonbeale.com%2Fwriting%2Fklein.html&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNElr3K26HVa50DnLsEF66n43LjRCg


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The vase holds, collects, and manifests--three verbs inflected by the

altheia--the symbolic Quadripartition: of earth (from which the vase is made);

heaven (towards which it rises); the world of the divine as a result; and the world of

mortals, who perform libations with it. In the short the vase organized the great

mythologico-religious scene of humanity. This empty vessel, or empty vase, is a 13

necessary step in human perception, because we cannot perceive without a frame.

This ritual of creating an empty vessel from the earth is played out again and again

within attempts to organize the imperceptible.

Brassiers discussion of the source of nothing takes us back to a time

before science and enlightenment thinking, where the ritual is of and for nothing.

Sacrifices magical power consists in establishing a correspondence between things

for which no ratio, no proportion of conceptual equivalence yet exists. This is its

quite literal irrationality. Similar to the vase, the sacrificial object is an empty 14

vessel, imbued with meaning. It becomes a signifier for anything and everything,

completely outside the grasp of rational thought. By virtue of the void it creates,

the vase is pure signifier, since, in its emptiness, it is not the signifier of a

particular signified. Essentially formless, and meaningless, this void is essential 15

for a human to perceive anything outside the correlation.

What is discovered in the experience of these empty galleries, is never

their emptiness, but their fullness. Through these empty spaces the full dependant

13Jullien Page 8214Brassier Page 3515Jullien Page 82


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status of fullness comes to light. If fullness exists, where does the nothing exist? 16

Nothing exists as the void that hollows out the space for fullness to emerge.

Without this void, we would have no contact with fullness. Emptiness proceeds by

hollowing out fullness, just as fullness, in turn, is opened wide by the void. Far from

forming two opposing and separate qualities or states, emptiness and fullness are

structurally correlated; each exists only by virtue of the other and opens the natural

to the spiritual, and the visible to the Invisible. It is through this void that we 17

have access to the humanly inaccessible.

When entering the space of a gallery, the first experience is of physical

presence. What is known is the physical emptiness, the art itself is first known

through the physical emptiness, then it is known through the mental experience of

the emptiness. What is experienced is the void, where the mind must struggle to

place itself in time and space. The physical space exists without the mental struggle,

and the void exists without the discovery of it, but the gap that is bridged is the art.

The void, a place both intangible and immaterial, exists at once as the vacant space

between bodies, permitting their displacement, and as interstitial space mingled

with things themselves. The gap that bridges to the void, since it is inaccessible, is 18

the root of art, is the art in itself, and is only accessible through art. TheLaozicalls

that undifferentiated Fount of the invisible, from which forms and beings continually

proceed and to which they return to resorbed, the unnameable.19

16Jullien Page 8417Jullien Page 8318Jullien Page 8019Jullien Page 19


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In order to lay bare the unseeable, it is necessary to create gaps, silences,

and emptiness in order to expunge that which hidden: if you want the water to flow

far into the distance, do not show its entire course. The essential existence of art, 20

the only access to completeness and fullness, is through nothing. If we are to know

an art object, it is to reach within that indescribable and unknowable place.

Qualities which are more beautiful, colours more brilliant, stones more

precious, extensions more vibrant; because, being reduced to their seminal reasons

and having broken with every relation to the negative, they shall remain forever

affixed onto the intensive space of positive differences then Platos final prediction in

the Phaedo shall be realized; the one in which he promised to the sensibility which

has been freed from its empirical exercise temples stars and gods which have never

been seen; unheard of affirmations. 21

Thinking itself is still an unavoidable tool by which art is reached. Thought

reaches toward the art object, but in identifying it as such, the thought itself

becomes reframed and objectified. Since being-nothing is foreclosed to thought, and

since thinking presupposes a minimum degree of objectifying transcendence as its

element, it is not the real which causes thought, but rather objectifying

transcendence. Thinking needs to be occasioned by objectifying transcendence in

order for it to be able to assume the real as its unobjectifiable

cause-of-the-last-instance. For thinking to effectuate the foreclosure of its real

cause, it must first be occasioned by its ideal cause. 22

20Jullien Page 2221Deleuze, 1968, Page 31422Brassier Page 140


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While connected, fullness and emptiness cannot be melted in on themselves

and become a concept of unity. Rather, these states exist in a dependant state of

simultaneity. If the emptiness of the set is a formed through its framing, the set has

become separated through a subtraction, similar to the rest or pause in sound art.

How does the negation of belonging which establishes the existence of the voids

being-nothing differ from the negation of unity through which Badiou asserts the non

being of the One? The logical import of the axiom of the empty-set is neither that

non-belonging exists, nor that the unpresentable exists, nor that inexistence

exists. Rather the axiom asserts that there is a set B such that no set A belongs to

it. 23

Brassier further address the issue of Oneness by addressing the functioning

of the rupturing of the traditional figure of the bond; unbinding as the form of being

of everything which acts as a semblance of the bond...That everything that is bound

testifies that is unbound in its being; that the reign of the multiple is, without

exception, the groundless ground of what is presented; that the One is merely the

result of transitory operations24

We experience art through the emergence and submergence of our own

experience of the void, Not only does fullness come into actuality from emptiness (or

fail to come into actuality by remaining within emptiness); it is by virtue of

emptiness--and through emptiness by hollowing-opening wide--that fullness can

23Brassier Page 10524Badiou 1989, Page 10


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ceaselessly produce its full effect. By entering an empty gallery, we come to know 25

fullness and emptiness, and by listening to 433we come to know it as well.

Nothingness is therefore essential to perception as a whole, and we come to

know art objects through our perception of nothingness and fullness. Following the

logic of meaning, ultimately we are freed from meaning through discovering the

nothing that lies at the end of the logical path. As such, the empty gallery is all

galleries, and all galleries are empty galleries, and through them we dissolve our own

presence into absence.

25Jullien Page 84

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