“...if mankind was put on earth to create works of art, then other
people were put on earth to comment on those works, to say what they think of
them. Not to judge objectively or critically assess these works but to
articulate their feelings about them with as much precision as possible,
without seeking to disguise the vagaries of their nature, their lapses of taste
and the contingency of their own experiences, even if those feelings are of
confusion, uncertainty or-in this case-undiminished wonder.” -Geoff Dyer in ‘Zona’
A man sweeps the floor. Slowly and carefully he gathers
loose bits of debris and confetti from the bar’s previous festivities into a neat pile.
We are witness to this scene for around three maybe four minutes. Unusual and
slightly voyeuristic enough to watch this anyway, perhaps even more so when I
reveal that this scene takes place during the minutes of a prime-time
television show. The character and action are (depending on how much or not you want to read into it) irrelevant to the story
that is being told. This is one scene in the new series of David Lynch’s ‘Twin
Peaks: The Return’ and is in part the influence in writing this post.
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| David Lynch. 'Twin Peaks: The Return' Still. 2017 |
I have always wanted to write about nothing (some may
think I already do), but even as I type the word ‘nothing’ in the header for
saving this file on my computer I am already committed in deciding to write about something.
Nothing, is something I have been interested in for a long time. Please stay
with me on this… One of my earliest experiences of school in which I can
remember being frustrated was in a maths lesson, presented with the sum of [0 +
4=]. I was four or five at the time and had never seen a 0 before so didn’t
know that it stood for nothing. Once told it was nothing, I found it confusing
to comprehend that we would invent a symbol for nothing, when in fact it wasn’t
really nothing, it was a round circle. Why have a symbol for something that represented nothing? Such began an existential debate in my
brain, that nothing is always in fact something. What that something that
defines nothing is exactly remains the subject of philosophical mystery, some degree of absurdity and fascination.
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| Kurt Schwitters 'Opened by Customs' 1937-38 |
Imagine therefore my excitement when on this journey into
nothing I discovered, ‘The Mezzanine’ by Nicholson Baker a short novel written
in 1986 that chronicles the musings of an office employee as they escape their
workplace to ponder why one shoelace always runs out before the other and whose
genius lies behind the folding spout on the milk carton? It is as absurdly
mundane but genuinely pedantically amusing as it sounds. Like a literary version of
observational comedy when I read ‘The Mezzanine’ for the first time it struck
me, in the way that comedy also can, how uniting these thoughts are. We all
think, we all notice the same odd, irritating, impractical or genius bits of
design, everyday interactions with people in our daily lives; yet how often do
we think that those thoughts and observations can be quite amusing or even
interesting.
“And third, the felt crunch, like the chewing of an ice cube, as the
twin lines of the staple emerge from the underside of the paper and are bent by
the two troughs of the template in the stapler’s base, curing inward in a
crab’s embrace of your memo, and finally disengaging from the machine
completely,” -Nicholson Baker
If you read this, firstly you will wonder how it is
possible that you have spent the best part of five minutes reading two pages
about a stapler; secondly you will either find this incredibly sad or as I did
amazingly perceptive. Once again, I reiterate, “it is not easy writing about nothing”.
“That was the
problem with reading: you always had to pick up again at the very thing that
had made you stop reading the day before.” – Nicholson Baker
From great boredom comes great possibility! Nothing and a sense on nihilism is explored in René Daumal’s ‘A Night of Serious Drinking’ in which a narrative beginning with a bout of copious drinking between a Anthographer (whatever that is), a Fabricator of useless objects (otherwise known as an artist) and others soon descends into a very surreal almost William Burroughs style description into the depths of some imagined hell. It is an amazing book whose mention here comes from its mundane origins as a start point into something altogether wonderful and bizarre. ‘Nothing’ also as a meditation, when running, yoga, gardening or another activity become a means to think about nothing, spiritually without consciously being so. It is ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’ and Murakami’s ‘What I think about when I think about running’. In Murakami’s words, “What exactly do I think about when I'm running? I don't have a clue.”
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| Andrei Tarkovsky, 'Solaris'. Still Gif. 1972 |
“If the regular length of a
shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, a
new quality emerges, a special intensity of attention.' At first there can be a
friction between our expectations of time and Tarkovsky-time and this friction
is increasing in the twenty-first century as we move further and further away
from Tarkovsky-time towards moron-time in which nothing can last—and no one can
concentrate on anything—for longer than about two seconds.” -Geoff Dyer in ‘Zona’
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| Chardin 'The Copper Cistern' Oil on Panel. 1735 |
Time and nothing seem to be two things that sit hand in
hand, that to experience, understand and possibly appreciate nothing we need
the time to do so. I have often enjoyed the challenge, though not always succeeded at comfortably watching these scenes in films that seem to take forever or have
little baring to the immediate progression of the story, though debatably they
are the closest thing to life and are the parts in films that allow you to
think or not. It is the incidental conversations about hamburgers, a goldfish
or Spider-man in Tarantino’s films. It is long first-person shots travelling in
a car on a highway at night so often used by David Lynch or described in Michel
Faber’s brilliant novel, ‘Under the Skin’. It is all the stuff that happens
when nothing is happening. A lot of Japanese animation does this very well for
example the depiction of cooking and food in any one of Studio Ghibli’s
animations along with the most highly detailed, hand painted shots of an empty
train station or school desk in animations such as ‘5mm per Second’ are notable
in their change of pace as well as being more often than not completely unnecessary to anything to
do with the plot but show us so much about what Japanese life is like in the
same way a painting would. It is the intensity and love of looking in a Chardin
still-life, the personal desire to possess of a Jim Dine tool print or drawing.
The absurdity of a soft toilet made by Claes Oldenburg that makes us consider
the real thing, the Duchamp snow shovel, the readymade and consumerist, glossy,
pop-culture noticed in a Warhol or James Rosenquist. It is the things that make us stop
and notice. The magic illusionary and seductive powers of surface, form and narrative created in art that make audiences want to look closer.
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| Studio Ghibli 'When Marnie was There' Still.2014 |
“One approach is to use the arts to develop a new perception, an
imaginative relabelling of the everyday world. It is not what you look at that
matters but what you see....it is not so much that we see art as that we see by means of art....appreciating art is
not passive but active, not reverential but familiar....”
A thousand words later and I am still writing about
nothing. I may be interested in it for some time to come.
