Touching the Void

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Is it possible to think about nothing? And then to create art from the result?

Null Object: Gustav Metzger Thinks about Nothing edited by Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson

What do you think about when you think about nothing? This sounds like a badly put question, as though it doesn’t quite get what nothing is (is?). When we step into this territory we move in a world of paradox. But ‘nothing’ is something that has fascinated artists since the early days of the modernist project. Malevich set the ball rolling in the visual arts with his Black Square on a White Background (1915) which, refusing all representation (‘the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless’), strangely becomes an object in its own right. At its zero-point, painting becomes sculpture.

Minimalism was to be marked by a similar stubbornness with respect to representation, and its sculptures will celebrate the ‘objectness’ of the object – a thing in itself with no (or minimal) referential function. For the avant-garde artists of the late 1960s and early 1970s, this ‘objectness’ was already too much – we find here the dematerialisation of the artwork into conceptual, performance-based ‘productions’. So when London Fieldworksasked Gustav Metzger to let them strap an EEG scanner on his head so that they could collect data as he attempted to think about nothing, they were drawing on a rich heritage.

Metzger, it should be noted, brought his own context with him. In the early 1960s, he was a front-runner of the avant-garde as he pioneered his auto-destructive art.[Pete Townsend of the Who, later to destroy his guitars on stage, attended one of Metzger’s lectures on the subject.] Just ten years earlier the Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno had said ‘there can be no poetry after Auschwitz’, and Metzger, a Polish-Jew who came to Britain as a refugee in the 1930s, seconded this motion in profound fashion when he put on a gas mask in 1963 and set to work destroying a canvas with acid.  It might have been anyone wired up to the computer, but how much more poignant that it should be this man.

So what is Null Object? The work is the performance (Metzger attempting to strip away all his thoughts), which disappears as it happens. But this process is recorded by the scanner. The data is then ‘translated’ into a three-dimensional shape, modelled by a computer drawing on a database. The shape is then carved by a robot out of the centre of a block of Portland Roach stone, and the void that is left is the final ‘residue’ (the Null Object itself if you like). A 3D print of the shape has also been produced, so it exists both as a positive and a negative.

What a strange thing to do, and one that is fraught with the possibility of being quickly dismissed: he couldn’t think of nothing, so the whole thing doesn’t work; what’s this ‘translation’ process, and how does that work conceptually? And so on. But this would be to miss what is happening here. There is a sense in which London Fieldworksare attempting to recuperate a fragment from the disasters of the 20th century. Absolute destruction is never quite absolute. The project is looking for that point where the signs change and a negative becomes a positive. They are revisiting what was called above the ‘zero-point’. Twentieth-century art was studded with these returns, as though from time to time we had to reassure ourselves that it was still there. The fact that this time an extraordinarily sophisticated technical apparatus was mobilized for this purpose changes little.

In the book published by Black Dog to accompany this project you will find, among other things, an essay filling in London Fieldworks’ trajectory towards this work, an essay giving an account of Metzger and his context, and critical reflections on the work. Altogether, it is a very rich document, and one that underlines the central paradox of the work – Gustav Metzger thinking about nothing does nothing but make us think.

Null Object: Gustav Metzger Thinks about Nothing  edited by Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson is published by Black Dog Publishing, 2012