Getting rid of stuff before we moved into our present home has given me a new appreciation of uncluttered visual, mental, temporal, and aural space. I’ve gained capacity to think and imagine with fewer distractions; I can prize the space between things rather than the things.
The Japanese have a term for this: ma, negative space.
Art is absent from most of our walls. Pictures from our former home sit in the master closet, stacked against the wall. For now, we like it that way: nothing is better than anything, less is more. We may eventually hang some, but most are destined to leave our lives.
The creative process can be the art. An artifact resulting from the process can be just one step in the creation of art.
Two installations I’ve seen in recent months drive this idea home.
September, 2019, I stood within the first exhibit in the Minneapolis Walker Art Center’s I am, you are too exhibition.
I had become part of an artistic and political statement, creating something new in the process.
November 2019, at Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis, I stared at nine rectangular sheets of paper arranged in 3 rows on the floor. The sheets were blank. On the wall, instructions from artist Yutaka Matsuzawa (1922-2006) specified what to visualize while looking at each individual sheet. The juxtaposition of my interpretation of ideas within a matrix on the floor became my personal artistic creation.
This idea that visual art does not need to be physically present extended to other pieces. I’m realizing all art can be considered from a perspective of what’s absent.
For now, I choose to see our unadorned walls as unconstrained space for our minds, rather than opportunities to hang more stuff.