VA505 Addressing Studio Creative Practice | Fall '21

Susan Sontag, defines art as a form of consciousness, and says that art gets the role of religion and mysticism previously held in human life to satisfy “a craving for the cloud of unknowingness beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech”. And in her essay “The Aesthetics of Silence”, she also mentions art that is silent engenders a stare which is as close to eternity as contemporary art can get. Hiroshi Sugimoto - North Pacific Ocean, Stinson Beach (1994)   In May, an exhibition called “Silence and Space” was held in Axel Vervoordt Gallery in Belgium. The show was a play on the idea of the ‘fullness of the void’ ( volledig in Flemish). Anne-Sophie Dusselier, elaborates on the correlation between silence and space saying, “Like a musician uses pauses between the notes to enrich a composition, an artist does the same. Actually, it's from a blank canvas that significance and meaning can emerge. A space where there are a lot of things to discover. Where this world of creation

Max Picard, indicates “Silence contains everything in itself. It is not waiting for anything, it is always wholly present in itself and it completely fills out the space in which it appears.”(1). It is not an absolute absence. Even in an anechoic chamber, there are at least two sounds: one’s heartbeat and the coursing of the blood. Silence has been called “rest”: music’s in-between space. Parallel to the idea of “ma” in Japanese music, Debussy wrote that the music is not in the notes, but in the spaces between them.  Before Western notation system, the length of these silences were often dictated by spaces. When  groups of monks chanted in a chapel, they inserted a pause determined by the acoustics of the chapel to prevent the next line from getting mixed by the last one’s resonance trail. But these pauses also created a meditative space and provided “the unity of the monastery breathing and singing together.”(2)  In much of early Baroque music, in a literal way, silence often depict s