Artworks in Vantablack: void, emptiness and fertility
Exhibition of artwork by Anish Kapoor
Adventuring in territory of artistic creativity, I’ve recently seen an exhibition of work by Anish Kapoor at the Hayward Gallery in London.
Featuring works in mirrors, Vantablack – the blackest known substance in the world – and visceral red (literally: evoking entrails and blood, they’re not easy viewing), it’s the black that captures my attention. Anish Kapoor holds the exclusive artistic license to use Vantablack, a super-black nanomaterial that absorbs over 99.96% of visible light.
Holes, hollows – and no perspective
The simple black shapes – oval, circle, square and others – are deceptive. Utterly simple, the shapes are fascinating because they seem to be void, with no sense of depth or perspective. In a sense they may seem to offer the viewer nothing – and yet at the same time they are rich, inviting and intriguing. It turns out they’re actually holes or hollows, including a black shape on the floor that’s cordoned off – presumably to save visitors from falling into the hole. I found all these shapes both confronting and arresting, challenging my habitual and unconscious perceptions and interpretations: what looks like a mere shape actually does have physical depth and character. It’s just that you can’t see it, so it appears to offer no perspective. I’m intrigued by the shapes, and by my experience of both disorientation and awe.
Be with what is
Being present to the experiences inevitably and directly invites me to be with ‘what is’: I can’t impose or take for granted any of my own interpretations or assumptions. I find it really refreshing – and it reminds me that when I’m with a coaching client, I can’t and mustn’t take anything for granted about them, their perspectives or their interpretations. I can’t and mustn’t assume that my interpretation of a sentence, a question or a situation, and any meaning I might attach to them is mine alone. My role is to invite my client to explore their meaning or interpretation: mine is actually irrelevant until and unless the client’s exploration might (but not necessarily) be usefully broadened by my sharing my perspective. Until then, the risk is that sharing my view closes down the client’s horizons.
Nothing to say
Anish Kapoor, as creator, innovator and artist, is famously reluctant to share any verbal interpretations of his work: he is quoted as saying ‘I have nothing to say as an artist’. This prompts me to question the extent to which I have nothing to say as a coach, and the extent to which any changes that the client makes are a result from the way I ‘be’ and ‘be with’ rather than anything I might do.
Void as emptiness
I’m intrigued by Kapoor’s approach to the concept of ‘void’ – the hole that some of his Vantablack works are. Far from viewing the void as nothingness, he sees it as pregnant emptiness – while separating void from emptiness.
Homi K Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University (Anish Kapoor: Making Emptiness) notes that Kapoor’s view is that to see the void as a contained negative space indented in a material surface is only to engage with its physicality.
The difference between void space and emptiness
‘To get to the heart of Kapoor’s thinking and making’, says Bhabha, ‘we must register the difference between physicality of void space, and truly made emptiness. Let us use Heidegger ‘s beautiful parable of the jug for these purposes……The potter, to make the jug a holding vessel, … has to shape the void. From start to finish the potter takes hold of the impalpable void and brings it forth as the container in the shape of a containing vessel….. The vessel’s thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that it holds.’
The Fertile Void
All of which brings to mind for me the Gestalt principle of the fertile void: John Leary-Joyce (author of ‘The Fertile Void: Gestalt Coaching at Work’ AoEC Press 2014) talks of the Fertile Void as ‘the paradox that someone or something could be simultaneously empty or full….. Trusting the process and staying with the void of the ‘not knowing’ allowed the space and time for something new and amazing to emerge’.
This notion feels to me directly pertinent to these extraordinary artworks, as they invite and enable us to remember that what may seem like a void, a silence in a conversation, a lack of data or a not-knowing, is not necessarily emptiness, but rather a place of rich, albeit undiscovered, fertility.
Photo courtesy of Lisson Gallery, New York. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/anish-kapoor-vantablack-2391684
