NEGATIVE SPACE
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THE BEHOLDER’S SHARE
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The artist’s state of mind–including intentions–are ultimately manifest as an artifact. Ideally, ART includes the beholder’s response–their perception and expectation converge with those of the artist to create the complete experience. Read Delacroix’s understanding of this [link]. In a complementary manner, ART consists of what is not seen (or heard) as much as what is seen (or heard), and that negative space is a compelling invitation to beholder.
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THE BEHOLDER’S RESPONSE. SO the successful artist must invite the the observer in, evoke the beholder’s response. E.H. Gombrich wrote in his masterpiece, ART and ILLUSION, of “how the incomplete painting can arouse the beholder’s imagination and project what is not there” (A&I, p208), and then comments on why some of us find Asian art so compelling: “no tradition of art had a deeper understanding … than that of the Far East. Chinese art theory discusses the power of expressing through absence of brush and ink.” Gombrich quotes Sze from The Tao of Painting (I,104): “Figures, even though painted without eyes, must seem to look, without ears, must seem to listen . . . There are things which ten hundred brush-strokes cannot depict but which can be captured by a few simple strokes if they are right. That is truly giving expression to the invisible.” (p208-209).
In Western tradition we speak of NEGATIVE SPACE … Wikipedia on Negative Space can provide a launch pad for thinking about this (the article is rightly flagged as having multiple issues) Can you fix them?– you could probably at least improve the page.
- BUT for A&O today, make a psychosemantic mind map and the meaning of the idea will quickly expand to every art form and large parts of science, particularly in the infinitessimal and cosmic realms.
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A very appealing corollary is the Japanese concept of MA in which beauty is sought in the spaces between things (e.g., the You Tube comments on ma)
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Is absence the same as non-existence? Nothingness? the opposite of presence? can we have an absence of reality? Is absence even possible?? On a phenomenological level, consider Bethany Vaccaro’s (2014) essay in The America Scholar about “The Presence of Absence.”
It seems that in cognition, what is must always be complemented by what is not. This is a curse and a blessing…