Poetic Interaction- Openness, Emptiness and Poetic Space

Yuan Zhang

Sculpture and Environmental Art

Year 4

6646 words

Contents

Synopsis 1

Introduction 2

Chapter 1. Mono-ha and Openness 6

Chapter 2. Anish Kapoor and Emptiness 11

Chapter 3. Francesca woodman and Poetic Space 16

Conclusion 20

Bibliography 22

Introduction

The terms poetic interaction for me means the communication between fantasy and reality,its

magic value of it is indeed a great treasure. Through the human being’s positive reactions,

imagination comes in and out of reality, making itself not only a fiction but also a happening or

a tool to fight for liberty and transcend actuality. This is the same as Sartre, who used to study

the aesthetics from the basis of imagination and freedom, and discussed the aesthetic subject

and experience images from emotional state. The issues I’ll talk about all have ambiguous

and poetic qualities, so I’d prefer to build my images that is also originated from emotional

space. The key theories I’d like to discuss always possess both ambiguous and poetic

qualities.

One of the key theories I’m going to elucidate is the poetics and the space from the book ‘The

Poetics of Space’, written by one of the Europe’s leading philosophers, Gaston Bachelard.

Here Bachelard looks at where poetic interaction can take place. “In the house Bachelard

discovers a metaphor of humanness”1, space is not only a container, which is filled up with

objects, but also a home of human consciousness. Barchelard once talked about how

important the role of imagination is playing, “I propose, to consider the imagination as a major

power of human nature. To be sure, there is nothing to be gained by saying that the

imagination is the faculty of producing images.”2 Because of the imagination is from the

person’s being, this makes it the major power of human nature and the most important mode

to make aesthetic experiences happen.

As poetics are actually born from imagination, the ambiguious sense within poetics always

emerged from a kind of openness in which, poetic interaction occurs

For example, in aesthetic activity, both author and viewer find freedom and try to realise it

positively. Then the corroboration of people’s interrelationship comes true. The process could

be almost regarded as a way through which artists find freedom and start to make artworks

first. Once the narrative is finished, he steps back, and, of course, has leaving a lot of

freedoms for the viewer. The openness is regarded as the communication between the viewer

and the artwork. Indeed, the author achieved poetic interaction between human individuals as

this openness remains in the artwork. Therefore, we can see that poetics are born from

openness, but what is openness? Before I clarify this point, I think its necessary to mention

where this openness comes from or what the precondition that openness should carry. For

open works, I think the openness should be based on the equal balances between the author

and the reader, or between the artist and the viewer.

1 John R Stilgoe, ‘Foreword’, in The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard , ed. By Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), p. vii2 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p.xxxiv

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I think the theory of demoting the author and elevating the status of the reader, as mentioned

in one of Roland Barthes3’s essays ‘The Death of the Author’, exemplified an excellent

solution to address this question. Barthes begins to rationalise this assumption of authorial

importance by noting that “… it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through

a prerequisite impersonality… to reach that point, where only language acts, ‘performs’ and

not ‘me’.” 4To my understanding, Barthes regards the author as chef, the text as food, and the

reader as the organ to ingest and digest what chef has prepared. In Barthes’s opinion, only by

entering the reader’s mouth does the food take on any flavor, and only in his stomach does it

release any energy. “Before …the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death,

writing begins. The sense of this phenomenon, however, has varied. In ethnographic

societies, a person never assumes the responsibility for a narrative. In stead, a mediator,

shaman or relator whose performanc (the mastery of the narrative code) may possibly be

admired but it never comes from his ‘genius’. The author is a modern figure, a product of our

society insofar as…the author ‘confiding’ in us.”5

However, I think although Barthes’ ‘The Death of the Author’ made a great contribution to

elevate the status of the reader, I’d rather regard the status of the author and the viewer

equally rather than think of the viewer as more important. What I suggest, is that the author

stepping back instead of dying.

As we know, the openness is actually based on the equal status between the author and the

viewer. Then, what is openness?. To step forward from ‘The Death of the Author’, I would like

to quote the Italian philosopher Umberto Eco’s book ‘The Open Work’, which would serve as

one of the best references for the topic artwork openness. He explores a set of issues in

aesthetics that still remain central in critical theory. He proposes a powerful concept of

openness in which the artist should decide to leave arrangements of some constituents of a

work to the public or to chance. Besides, his theory becomes significant for its striking

anticipation of two major themes of contemporary literary theory: the element of multiplicity

and plurality in art, and the insistence on literary response as an interactive process between

reader and text. I refer to his chapter ‘The Open Works in Visual Art’ as the most relevant to

my fine art study, in which Eco says: “ ‘Openness'...is the guarantee of a particularly rich kind

of pleasure that our civilization pursues as one of its most precious values, since every aspect

of our culture invites us to conceive, feel, and thus see the world as possibility.6 We can see

for Eco, communication in the open work is therefore an interactive, ongoing, dynamic

process that is full of possibility. We now know why poetic interaction is based on openness,

3 French writer and critic4 Roland Barthed, ‘The Death of The Author’, in Image-Music-Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1987), pp.142-148 (p.143)5 Barthes, ‘The Death of The Author’, p1426 Umberto Eco, ‘The Open Work in the Visual Art’ in The Open Work, trans. by Anna Cancogni (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp.84-104 (p.104).

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and we will see openness do as a key quality work on the artworks that we will display later in

this essay.

The poetic interaction is achieved by the wish to define openness. If we look at the openness

within the space from certain artworks, it frequently appears as emptiness.

The reason why I’m interested in the emptiness within the poetic interactions between fantasy

space and reality is my deep influence from Chinese philosophy, especially from ‘Tao Te

Ching’ (道德经 ), a Chinese classic text. Its name comes from the opening words of its two

sections: 道 dào "way," and 德 dé "virtue/power," plus 經 jīng "classic". According to tradition,

it was written around the 6th century BC by the sage Laozi (old master), a record-keeper at

the Zhou Dynasty court, by whose name the text is known in China. The text's true authorship

and date of composition or compilation are still debated, although the oldest excavated text

dates back to the late 4th century BC.7 The text is fundamental to the Philosophy of Taoism.

Many Chinese artists, including poets, painters, calligraphers, and even gardeners have used

‘Tao Te Ching’ as a source of inspiration. In chapter 22, it mentioned, “Hollow becomes full…,

Crippled becomes whole”8. Laozi used to regard contradiction concepts as whole. In another

word, the things exist within their own opposites. ‘Tao Te Ching’ discusses about the dialectic

between emptiness, void and fullness: “The eternal void is filled with the infinite possibilities” 9.

We will try to elucidate this text later in artist Anish Kapoor’s artworks and see how it is

integrated within certain artworks.

The qualities I’m interested in are poetic space, openness and emptiness. I believe that these

qualities existed within the three artworks I’m going to discuss. Defining this quality implicated

the works on the three terms: openness, the one should be the fundamental aspect that exist

both spiritually or physically; space, which should always be a poetic space; emptiness:

either the artwork is made within a empty space or spiritual state, or, the emptiness already

being inside it.

This essay includes 3 case studies, I’ll establish my idea of the poetic interaction between

poetic space, openness and emptiness through Mono-ha artists, Anish Kappor and

Francesca Woodman’s artworks.

In the first chapter I’ll discuss about Mono-ha artists in relation to openness, particularity in

Lee Ufan’s installation work ‘Space-Dialogue’. Mono-ha artists make open works by

presenting things by its simple forms and single materials, making new arrangements which

7 Alan Chan, ‘Laozi’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/laozi/>, Spring 20098 Lao Tzu, ‘Qu Ze Quan’ in Tao Te Ching, trans. by Stephan Addiss and Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co, Inc, 1993) Chapter 229 Lao Tzu, ‘Dao Chong’ in Tao Te Ching: An Illustrated Journey, trans. by Stephen Mitchell, (London: Frances Lincoln,1999), Chapter 4

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create new relationship instead of new works, which would accord the viewer much more

freedoms. I will relate this work to the idea of Barthes’s ‘The Death of the Author’ and Eco’s

‘The Open work’, they all think that the artwork existes before being created, Mono-ha artists

believe that they don’t create the artworks, but found and view the artworks from different

angles. This philosophical guidance also promotes the the use of simple material in those

works.

In the second chapter I’ll discuss how the British sculptor Anish Kapoor regards the emptiness

as having the most important role in many of his works, I will link this to how I understand the

concept of emptiness from Eastern philosophy, especially from ‘Tao Te Ching’. I think the

emptiness within his works reflects a state of supernormal; the function of non-object is the

way of extending the space and conceiving another layer. Through his artwork ‘When I am

pregnant’, we will see how he uses the emptiness to create a space within a space.

American photographer Francesca Woodman’s artwork is used below to illustrate how people

interact within space through his/her own imagination, filling up space with dreams. Her

photography contains strong willing of returning: the returning to her old house that only exists

in her memory. Woodman expresses her aesthetic on the body’s relationship versus space as

inhabitant to house. The space is a metaphorical uterus, a symbols to return to mother’s

womb. We will analyse the relationship between Woodman’s ‘Space 2’ and Bachelard’s ‘The

Poetics of Space’ in the third chapter.

Chapter 1

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Mono-ha and Openness

There are two aspects that are important for my discussion on Mono-ha. First, Mono-ha

happened in the late sixties and early seventies, and acted an important role in

phenomenology; Second, it’s about the openness and space and Eastern philosophy plays

active role in forming this idea.

According to the essay ‘What was Mono-ha?’ by Minemura Toshiaki from 1986 catalogue of

Monop-ha exhibition at Kamakura Gallery, “Mono-Ha is the name given to a number of artists

working in Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s, using mostly found or natural materials”,

we can see that a Mono-ha artist makes 'things' appear on the stage of artistic expression, no

longer as mere material, but allowing them a leading part. The points of similarity between

Mono-ha, taken in its broader sense, a heritage of anti-art and anti-formalism from the early

sixties, shows some influences from American Minimal Art. From these Western influences,

Mono-has consist of making very simple works similar to earth art, but they have very

different purposes. The Mono-ha’s emphasising on spiritual considerations from Eastern

perspective marks the major difference in comparision with the one exisiting in American

Minimal Art.

The term minimalism is used to describe the subject which is reduced to its necessary

elements. “Minimalist architects consider not only physical property of the building but also

look deeply into spiritual dimension and invisible, by listening to the figure and paying regard

to the details, people, space, nature and materials.”10 Mono-ha, with the same philosophical

concerns, opts for basic geometric forms, elements without decoration, simple materials and

the repetitions of structures that represent a sense of order and essential quality.

Minimalism's features included geometric, often cubic forms purged of metaphor, equality of

parts, repetition, neutral surfaces, and industrial materials. Such were the elements that went

to form a common background ripe for the emergence of the Mono0ha school in Japan, and

enabled it to become a common phenomenon spreading over several groups. American

minimalism has more technical considerations, their products follow the sprit of less is more.

I think the reason why Mono-ha artists were thinking about the same as Minimalism’s less is

more is consistent with what Barthes wrote in ‘The Death of the Author’: “… it is language

which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality…”11 They are

both in agreement with the idea that it is the artwork which speaks, not the artist. In addition,

as Umberto Eco says “…The open work assumes the task of giving us an image of

discontinuity. It does not narrate it; it is it…it almost becomes a sort of transcendental scheme

10 Franco Bertoni, Minimalist Architecture, (Florence: Birkhauser, 2002). p.21.11 Barthed, ‘The Death of The Author’, p. 143

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that allows us to comprehend new aspects of the world.”12 By creating open works, Mono-ha

artists draw attention from the interdependent relationships between things and surrounding

space. They think that the artwork already existes before it is made, it does not narrative it; it

is it. The aim of Mono-ha artists was to challenge the pre-existing perceptions of such

materials and relate to them on a new level, similar to what Eco said, “(it) allows us to

comprehend new aspects of the world”. In Mono-ha artworks, the interdependence between

the space and those things are comparable to the things themselves.

Making the viewer aware of his position in relation to the work is also what the Mono-ha

artists aimed for. They bring things together, as far as possible in an unaltered state, allowing

the juxtaposed materials to speak for themselves. Hence, the artists no longer creates but

rearranges things into artworks, focusing on the interdependence between these things and

the surrounding space. Mono-ha artists deal with the openness of the situation/location. Their

key consideration about their works is where do they exist, or the basis of their existence.

In this context, it is not surprising that we can find a certain amount of intellectualism that is

still present. In particular, the early works of Sekine and Lee that were often cited for its

similarity to the conception of Surrealism. As we have no time here for disserting on the

dropouts, I try to grasp in a very broad sense the group evolution that took place within the

Mono-ha for a relevant period of time after the exhibition of Sekine's ‘Phase- Mother Earth’.

We shall consider for this purpose, from two following steps:

First step, antithesis of all substances. There is a method that consists of becoming aware of

the reality of existence through the impact caused by the relativisation of a thing's accidental

quality, aspect, mode, attribute, etc. Then, reduce these to nothingness, by means of

encountering with the things that contrast with its heterogeneity. As things were summoned to

appear on stage instead of pictures, the former necessity to perform those visual

manipulations had of course already disappeared. However, as one keeps one's eyes fixed

at specific characters things have imbedded in term (for instance softness and hardness,

lightness and heaviness), there is a tendency to trail in a more conceptual manner that

manipulative method of separating to be from to see which was prevailing in the previous

period. This is a kind of exfoliation though it hardly goes as far as the depaysement

advocated by Surrealists. As a concrete example, Sekine's sponge and steel plate, megalith

and mirror post, Lee's cotton and iron plates, cotton and stones, glass panes and stones, are

quite typical of that kind of assemblage.

Second step: aspect differentiation from mono-substance or mono-space. To be concerned

only with things that are congenerous (i.e. of the same kind) and homogeneous, thereby

depriving the artist of his power to manipulate things on a conceptual basis from a third

12 Eco, ‘The Open Work in Visual Art’, p. 90

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party's standpoint, he is allowed only to extract the naked truth from things from a mode of

positive involvement with them.

The emergence of Mono-ha has its roots in many social, political and cultural factors of the

1960s, and to trace its origins in detail is a complicated matter. However, the moment that is

most often viewed as Mono-ha’s starting point came in October 1968 with Sekine’s creation of

the work ‘Phase – Mother Earth’ in Kobe’s Sumarikyu Park for the First Open Air

Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition.13 The work, emphasizing the relationships through the

gestures of man and things14, consisted of digging a hole into the ground, 2.7 meters deep

and 2.2 meters in diameter, with the excavated earth compacted into a cylinder of exactly the

same dimensions. Sekine producing an unusual fusion of Western mathematics and ancient

Eastern aesthetics and philosophy. He described the moment when they removed the mould:

“Faced with this solid block of raw earth, the power of this object of reality rendered

everybody speechless, and we stood there, rooted to the spot…I just wondered at the power

of the convex and concave earth, the sheer physicality of it. I could feel time elapsing with

quiet emptiness… That was the birth of ‘Mono-ha’.”15

Lee Ufan is well known as one of the precursors of the Mono-ha (School of Things)

movement, which focuses on the nature of objects and their interrelations as opposed to the

Western ideas of representation. In November 1968 Sekine met the Korean-born artist Lee

Ufan, who was soon to be of central importance to Mono-ha and the articulation of its ideas.

He absorbed the phenomenology, structuralism and the American minimalism and Zen. He

had studied ‘Asian thought’, including the philosophy of Laozi and Zhuangzi and after moving

to Japan in 1956, had studied modern Western philosophy. In a similar way to Sekine, Lee

took natural materials and presented them in juxtaposition, so as to reveal the physical

materiality of the work and allow the materials to establish their own relations independent of

artistic intervention. Lee promoted his idea of an original world. He boosts the viewer

concretes the concept, and makes the image materialized. Though he lived through a time of

turmoil, Lee Ufan’s pieces emanate a sense of peace. I think If we look at something simple,

rather than something complicated, we are much more aware of ourselves; although there’s

not a lot to Lee Ufan’s work it gives viewers a lot to think about. In Lee Ufan’s works the

smaller elements become links in the chain of larger themes. It explains the reason why his

exhibitions resonate strongly with the visitor and why his sculptural works tend to create a

different dialogue when placed in a natural context.16

13 Ashley Rawling, ‘An Introduction to Mono-ha’, Features, 8 September 2007, p.1314 Minemura Toshiaki, ‘What was 'MONO-HA' ?’, Catalogue of MONO-HA exhibition at Kamakura Gallery, Sept 8 1986, chapter 4, p.10 15 Rawling, ‘An Introduction to Mono-ha’, p.13 16 ‘Japanese-Korean artist Lee Ufan gets Guggenheim retrospective - review round up’ in Art Radar Asia, <http://artradarjournal.com/2011/07/27/lee-ufan-retrospective-marking-infinity-at-guggenheim-review-round-up/>, 27 July 2011

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‘Dialogue—space’, 2011 Acrylic on wall Dimensions vary with installation

Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, June 24–September 28, 2011

Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

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The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City opened ‘Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity’

in June 2011. The artist-philosopher’s first American retrospective features over ninety

sculptures, paintings and installations and spans fifty years of his career. ‘Lee Ufan: Marking

Infinity’ features pieces that are on loan from several galleries and institutions from the United

States, Asia and Europe. The whole exhibit is installed throughout the entire museum, from

the rotunda floor up to two annex-level galleries. The part of Lee Ufan’s exhibit that has been

eliciting the most reactions by publics is his installation entitled ‘Dialogue-space’.17 It was

described as such: “‘Dialogue—space’ sets up a rhythm that exposes and enlivens the

emptiness of the space, creating what Lee calls ‘and open site of power in which things and

space interact vividly’18. “

When I stepped into this space in Guggenheim Museum this summer I felt that I dropped into

a void where I instantly lost the sense of time and reality. His markings in space elicit

momentary, open-ended situations that engage the viewer viscerally. As myself stand in the

middle of the room, the grey square in front of me seems to become detached from the wall,

floating into mid air and resonating with a strange intensity. The room had a special power.

It’s a room where I have to hope that my fellow visitors never make the same visit.

This installation is not a static work; it involved the artist himself painting directly on the walls

of the museum with single grey-black brush strokes, emphasizing the white, empty space of

the room. He paint directly onto the wall instead of a canvas, guaranteeing the work interacts

with the gallery space. Lee Ufan’s appeal lies mostly in the fact that his pieces are not merely

works of art but also present to their audience a deep artistic meaning. My own experience to

the work is about open site of power in which things and space interact vividly work is based

on the openness and it is a poetic interaction between the things and space.

17 ‘Japanese-Korean artist Lee Ufan gets Guggenheim retrospective - review round-up’, Art Radar Asia18 Alexandra Munroe, ‘Marking Infinity, Jun 24-Sep 28, Lee Ufan’, Exhibition Catalogue Guggenheim Museum June-Oct 2011, p. 6

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Chapter 2

Anish Kapoor and Emptiness

Anish Kapoor (born 12 March 1954) is a British sculptor of Indian birth. Born in Mumbai

(Bombay),19 Kapoor has lived and worked in London since the early 1970s. Kapoor first

became known in the 1980s for his geometric or biomorphic sculptures made using simple-

often elemental - materials such as granite, limestone, marble, pigment and plaster20. These

early sculptures are frequently simple, curved forms, usually monochromatic and brightly

coloured, using powder pigment to define and permeate the form. In the late 1980s and 90s

he was acclaimed for his remarkable explorations of matter and non-matter, specifically

evoking the void. Kapoor had begun his void pieces around 1985, and in 1987, he begun

working in stone.21 His later stone works are made of solid, quarried stone, many of which

have carved apertures and cavities. Similar to what Laozi elucidated in ‘Tao Te Ching’,

Kapoor plays with dualities. Since 1995 Kapoor has worked with the highly reflective surface

of polished stainless steel. These works are mirror-like, reflecting or distorting the viewer and

their surroundings. The use of red wax is also part of his current repertoire, evocative of flesh,

blood and transfiguration. Kapoor's recent work increasingly blurs the boundaries between

architecture and art. In 2008, Kapoor created the sculpture ‘Memory’ in Berlin and New York

for the Guggenheim Foundation. The piece calls to mind Richard Serra’s huge rusty steel

works, which also invite viewers into perceptually confounding interiors22 In spring 2011,

Kapoor's work, ‘Leviathan’, was the annual ‘Monumenta’ installation.

Kapoor’s work was dominated by exteriority, though it was an exteriority of delicate tissue that

seemed properly interior, ‘like a vagina or a womb turned inside out,’23 and often have carved

apertures and cavities and playing with dualities. He thinks that ‘He who is about to be born is

in a state of transition: he will literally come out on the other side. Having emerged from the

void, he will exist in the pure power of fullness. He will emerge as a temporarily kindled

energy in a journey between life and death, between physical and metaphysical, between

conscious and unconscious,24… as everything is a unity of opposites, material and spiritual,

brightness and darkness, body and mind, male and female; the convergence of introversion

and extroversion, of feminine and masculine”25. The one always followed by its own opposite.

Anish Kappor see this concept very clear and he once said ‘the void is potential space, it’s not

19 Sita Wadhwani,‘Mental metal: Mumbai-born Anish Kapoor's senses-bending sculpture’, <http://www.cnngo.com/mumbai/play/anish-kapoor-810204>, 14 september 200920 Tishman Speyer, ‘Anish Kapoor, Sky Mirror’, Public Art Fund, September 19 - October 27, 2006,21 Germano Celant, Anish kapoor, (Milan: Charta, 1998) Introduction22 Ken Johnson, ‘Inside, Outside, All Around the Thing’, New York Times, October 23, 2009, p. C123 Thomas Macevilley, ‘The Darkness Inside a Stone’ in Anish Kapoor XLIV Venice Biennale May - September 1990, (UK:British Council,1990) p.2324 Celant, Anish Kapoor, p. XXXVI25 Celant, Anish Kapoor, p. XVII

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non-space.”26 To make the understanding deeper and clearer, I would like to look at what

Laozi talked about the void in ‘Tao Te Ching’: “Crippled become whole, Crooked becomes

straight, Hollow becomes full, Worn becomes new, Little becomes more, Much becomes

delusion…”27 In addition, according to Homi K. Bhabha’s essay ‘Anish Kapoor: Making

Emptiness’ also stresses this point:

“The Emptiness…may be the most valuable insight into Anish Kapoor’s work to suggest that

the presence of an object can render a space more empty than mere vacancy could ever

envisage. This quality of an excessive, engendering emptiness is everywhere visible in his

work. It is a process that he associates with the contrary, yet correlated, forces of withdrawal

and disclosure…”.28

Kapoor described his work as: "A single object, a single form, a single colour... My ambition is

to create a space with in a space. Visitors will be invited to walk inside the work, immersing

themselves in colour, and it prompts, as I hope, a contemplative and poetic experience".29 In

the interest of presenting these contradictions Kapoor often generate a space within the

space. Similarly to concepts discussed in the ‘Tao Te Ching’, Kapoor is dealing with the

powers of nothingness, the contradiction between emptiness, void and fullness. His works

reflect a state of supernormal, The function of non-object is the way of extending the space

and concept into another layer. In another word, his works reflect the communication between

the imagination and reality.

26 Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton, ‘Mostly Hidden’ in Anish Kapoor XLIV Venice Biennale May - September 1990, pp,44-51 (p. 44)27 Lao Tzu, ‘Qu Ze Quan’ in Tao Te Ching, trans. by Stephan Addiss and Stanley Lombardo, Chapter 2228 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Anish Kapoor: Making Emptiness’, Hayward Gallery, London, April 30 to June 14, 1998, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).  29 Mark Hudson, ‘Anish Kapoor Leviathan Monumenta 2011 Grand Palais Paris review’, Telegraph, < http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/8506594/Anish-Kapoor-Leviathan-Monumenta-2011-Grand-PalaisParis-review.html> 11 May 2011

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‘When I am Pregnant’, 2011 Sculpture

Anish Kapoor: Absolutt Installation, Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Norway, 14January–

15January 2012

Photo: Zhang Yuan

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I still remember the impression of time slowing down at the moment when I entered into the

white project room for the work ‘When I am Pregnant’. I stepped slowly towards her, and I

saw this empty space filled up with emotions. I could feel how quiet and peaceful the world

was I even thought that I was her, or she was me. It recalled me some memories and I

couldn’t help imagining if I was her. I remembered, when I was standing face to her, I saw a

space inside her within this big exhibition space. As I left, I knew that she was already

imprinted in my memory and had become a part of me. That was poetic interaction indeed. I

felt that we complemented each other. This is an artwork of which the real experience is must

for the understandomg. In the exhibition’s booklet, Kapoor wrote: “The idea that if I empty out

all the content and just make something that is an empty form, I don't empty out the content at

all. The content is there in a way that is more surprising than if I tried to make a content.”30

That inspires me a lot. In this piece, Kapoor use the space behind the pregnant wall within the

exhibition space as a material, he set up the emptiness or the void inside the space, and,

“void...they show the void as a great darkness, a primal darkness, the darkness of the womb

and the tomb, of the ocean before the first sun rises and after the world has redissolved itself

at sunset. Darkness has become a material: only here it is maddeningly separated from the

viewer, who can see it but not enter it. It is neatly contained within a package as if it were

black ink in an inkwell.”31

Here we can feel how strong are the power of nothingness, emptiness and or void. They are

deeper than the ocean. You have to view this work in the same way as read a poem, because

“this is art that to be strictly understood is to miss the point entirely.” 32 The poetics of the work

appears ambiguous. He always try to present a fantasy side that doesn’t exist in this world. It

comes from the mind and soul, perceived this way out by sculpture.

To see the void as a contained negative space indented in the material is only to apprehend

its physicality. To figure the depth of the void as providing a perspectival absence within the

frame or the genre is to linger too long with the pedagogy of manufacture or the technology of

taste. The practice of ‘true making’ occurs only when the material and the non-material

tangentially touch. The truly made thing pushes us decisively beyond the illustrational, the

‘look of the void’; the sign of emptiness expands the limits of available space. To get to the

heart of Kapoor’s thinking and making we must register the difference between physicality of

void space, and truly made emptiness. In Laozi’s beautiful parable of the vessel for these

purposes:

30 Ahnikee Qstreng, ‘Anish Kapoor - When I Am Pregnant’, Absolutt Installation, p. 3231 Macevilley, ‘The Darkness Inside a Stone’, p. 2932

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“Thirty spokes join one hub the wheel's use comes from emptiness. Clay is fired to make a

pot. The pot's use comes from emptiness. Windows and doors are cut to make a room. The

room's use comes from emptiness. Therefore, Having leads to profit, not having leads to

use.”33

33 Lao Tzu, ‘Wu chih i wei yung’, Tao Te Ching, trans. by Stephan Addiss and Stanley Lombardo, Chapter 11

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What does the potter make when he shapes the jug? Of what material is the jug made? The

potter forms the sides and bottom of the jug in clay to provide the means for it to stand, to be

vertical. To make the jug a holding vessel, however, he has to shape the void. If I might coin a

term suited to emptiness, then I would say that in the be-holding of the pot, there is no simply

discernible outside (clay) nor a penetrative inside (void), no easily distinguishable negative

and positive spaces. These apparent binary oppositions bear a liminal relation to each other.

They are held together with the sheer, glancing force with which the surface of a sheet of air

intersects the line of the sea’s horizon, the elements spliced, stapled together in a slanted

slash of a white sail that stands the pressures of wind and water, just precariously out of

balance? A tense textile, holding the void, withstanding the vessel. During that impalpable

moment or movement in which material and non-material touch in the pot, there is the

exertion of an oblique relation of force: the clay is rooted by gravity to stand, while the void,

enlightened by emptiness, becomes empowered to hold air or water. They come together, in

this uncanny relationship, by virtue of the difference that holds them apart; a contest between

surfaces, elements, materials or meanings that conjures up one, or the other, through a third

dimension. This is the dimension of doubling and displacement: the jug is double in the sense

that it is no longer a unitary object but at once a relation through clay (material) to void (non-

material). And once we restructure the unity of the jug in this way, then the standing (material)

and the holding (non-material) are related through an otherness, an alterity, an unabsolvable

difference. The truly made work finds its balance in the fragility of vacillation. It is the

recognition of this ambivalent movement of force, this doubleness or othernes of the literal

and the metaphoric, the empty and the void, their side-by-side proximity that inhabits

Kapoor’s work. Such an articulation through displacement allows us to decipher emptiness as

a sign, where we have really an exteriority of the inward, rather than to pander to the look of

the void as it signals its need to be fulfilled.

Chapter 3

Francesca woodman and Poetic Space

Francesca Woodman (1958–1981) has become one of the most talked about, most studied,

and most influential of late twentieth century photographers. She started taking photographs

when she was nearly thirteen and in less than a decade created a body of work that has now

secured her a reputation as one of the most original American artists of the 1970s, before her

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tragically early death at the age of 23 by suicide.34 Both in her work with models, and in

sometimes disturbing self-portraits, Woodman made a thoroughgoing challenge to the

certainties of photography. She combined her role as author of the images and set director,

controlling the recording even when she was also the model. Interested in how people relate

to space, and how the three-dimensional world can be reconciled with the two dimensions of

the photographic image, Woodman played complex games of hide-and-seek with her camera

because of continuing self doubts. I think Woodman in her images asks such questions:

where the boundaries of our bodies and our body image? Much further, Who am I? What

relationship between me and image is? Will a person really disappeared if he/she

disappeared in the image? If human being will always gone with the wind one day, were we

really existed before? These questions are like strange pictures, snapshots where

photography becomes suspended in the moment between life and death.

Putting aside the psychological point-of-view about her suicide which is likely to be irrelevant,

I’m more interested in her hide and seek psychological manifestation and the way she react

with the space that comes out on her photography. I’ll put the work of Francesca Woodman

into practice using Bachelard’s ‘The Poetics of Space’. Pushed by her poetic imagination, the

desire of returning to the womb within the space, she depicts herself seemingly fading into a

flat plane, merging with the wall under the wallpaper, dissolving into the floor, or flattening

herself behind glass. Woodman constantly compares the fragility of her own body with the

physical environment around her. “Fascinated by transformation and the permeability of

seemingly fixed boundaries, Woodman’s work conjures the precarious moment between

adolescence and adulthood, between presence and absence.”35

34 Chris Townsend, Francesca Woodman (London: Phaidon 2006) p. 635 Townsend, ‘About the book’, Francesca Woodman

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‘Space 2 ’, Photography printed in 1977, gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 inches, Providence, Rhode Island

Francesca Woodman, Phaidon Press, London 2006 p. 106

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In the ‘Space 2’ shown above, Francesca Woodman’s legs, arm and belly - which is all that

we see of her - are naked. ‘She seems to be emerging from the wall, tearing the flowered

wallpaper into large, uneven pieces as she achieves embodiment.’36 The relationship between

her and the wall is loose, the boundary is unclear, seems no longer has any estrangement;

they embrace each other, and have no distance. Woodman’s body seems a part of the walls,

the subject lost in the picture. Only a space is left, there is no object that can be observed or

watched in this space, only the state of the space. Inside such a space, the track and the

existence of the body disappear, leaving only one kind of ancient memory. The object of the

gaze has been lost, we all can all sense this empty space has filled with possibilities and

openness, the unstable statues, in which anything could happened in any second. In this

unbounded space, Woodman expressed a wish of returning to the old house, the materialised

form of the memories and the dreams with deep nostalgia. I think the reason why she

attempts to mould her body to the corners and walls of a derelict domestic space is because

“the corner is a haven that ensures us one of the things we prize most highly - immobility.” 37

Her desire to return to the womb emerges as an image, turning her spirit inside out. She

created the sense of memory and familiarity. Here, the space is a metaphor of uterus,

symbolises the desire of the returning to the mother womb.

Woodman finds her aesthetic on the body’s relationship to space as like inhabitating as

house. As Bachelard makes clear, “No dreamer ever remains in indifferent for long to a

picture of a house.”38 Her body often seeming to blend into her surroundings: caught in a state

of metamorphosis she is not quite here, not quite there. It shows that Woodman always

attempts being in the other spaces she extended by her own imagination within the actual

room. ‘The Poetics of Space’ explained this imagination functions as: ‘…we shall see that the

imagination functions in this direction whenever the human being has found the slightest

shelter: we shall see the imagination build “walls” of impalpable shadows, comfort itself with

the illusion of protection- or, just the contrary, tremble behind the thick walls, mistrust the

staunchest ramparts.’39 In others, she uses a variety of props to create strange and dreamlike

tableaux tinted with melancholy.

36 Arthur C Danto, ‘Darkness visible: Francesca Woodman’. The Nation, 2004 November 15, p. 3637 Bachelard, The Poetics of space, p. 13738 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 4939 Bachelard, The Poetics of space, p.5

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Actually, ‘being becomes manifest at the very moment when it comes forth from its corner,’ 40

but from Woodman’s photography, which is mostly Interested in how people (mostly herself)

relate to space, we can see that she barely to find a way that comes out from the corner. It

made her existences barely can be manifested, She wasn’t able to find a dependence and

maternal staying successfully after a long term of seeking and self-doubts by combining her

role as author of the images, set director and model, and playing complex games of hide-and-

seek with her camera; she still wasn’t able to find a dependence and maternal staying

successfully. In contrast, the little girl Emily in Richard Hughes’s novel A High Wind in

Jamaica “…had been playing houses in a nook right in the bows…and tiring of it (she) was

walking rather aimlessly aft…when it suddenly flashed into her mind that she was she…”41

Emily found herself so that she’s able to come out from the corner,”…the lightening-like

thought that the little girl in the story has found in herself, comes to her as she leaves her

‘house’.”42

40 Bachelard, The Poetics of space, p.13841 Bachelard, The Poetics of space, p.13842 Bachelard, The Poetics of space, p.138

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Conclusion

If I defined poetic interaction, I would say it had to be related primarily to openness, viewer

should have the freedoms to experience an artwork. All the artworks I mentioned above all

have this open quality that means they can be experienced almost by the viewers’ various

self-experiences. This is a sort of contradiction, it also has the quality of emptiness, the void

exists within the artworks as fullness. Also, It has to deal with the space but the space within

imagination rather than any kind of actual space. What I’ve learned is the qualities of

openness from ‘The Open Work’ and ‘Death of the Author’. The imagination function within

the spaces from ‘The Poetics of Space’ and the powers of nothingness from ‘Tao Te Ching’

all exist in the certain artworks such as Mono-ha artworks, Anish Kapoor’s sculpture and

Francesca Woodman’s photography.

Mono-ha artworks are as much about the space and the interdependence between those

things as the things themselves. Recalling viewers about their position in relation to the work

is a part of Mono-ha artists’ aims. I think what Roland Barthes talked in ‘The Death of the

Author’ is indeed similar to what Mono-ha artists thinking about. Barthes once wrote: “… it is

language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality… to

reach that point, where only language acts, ‘performs’ and not ‘me’.”43 Mono-ha artists deal

with the openness of the situation/location. Umberto Eco says, “the open work…does not

narrate it; it is it. It takes on a mediating role of our sensibility; it almost becomes a sort of

transcendental scheme that allows us to comprehend new aspects of the world.”44 Mono-ha

artists drawing attention to the interdependence between things and the space surrounding

them. Mono-ha artists challenge pre-existing perceptions of such materials and relate to them

on a new level, allows us to comprehend new aspects of the world.

Anish Kapoor is not only sees the void physically as a contained negative space but also

figure the depth of the void in spirit. He regards the emptiness as material and extended the

space into other levels. Kapoor lets us register the difference between physicality of void

space, and truly made emptiness. Laozi’s ‘Tao Te Ching’ is always the book which inspire me

a lot, and I found the way he talked about the powers of nothingness and the usefulness of

emptiness, for example, the way he talks about the vassals is, “thirty spokes join one hub the

wheel's use comes from emptiness. Clay is fired to make a pot. The pot's use comes from

emptiness…”45, are indeed could describe the philosophy considerations about emptiness

within Kapoor’s artworks.

I think for Woodman, whom make the space filled up with her own imaginations and always

trying to figure out the basic answers of self-existence, space is a place to allow her to catch

43 Barthed, ‘The Death of The Author’, p. 14344 Eco, ‘The Open Work in Visual Art’, p. 9045 Lao Tzu, ‘Wu chih i wei yung’, Chapter 11

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the moment of self-questioning. When Woodman pressed the shutter she was thinking Who

am I? The questions make her snapshots become suspended in the moment between actual

space and imagination. To analyse and understand Woodman’s photography, we can find

many examples and theoretical explanations from ‘The Poetics of Space’, the book which

could make every reader thinking about the spaces we live and will never see ordinary

spaces in ordinary ways, we will see how we use our imagination to fill the spaces.

In conclusion, poetic interaction is an activity taken place in between fantasy and reality

spaces, which has the quality of openness, it allows the interaction between artworks and

viewers to reach maximum potential by offering the least information in visual aspect.

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