An invited talk about the content and themes of Nothing: A User's Manual, an preliminary bibliography about ideas and examples of nothingness in the modern and contemporary arts.
The talk focussed on image-led practices, including photoworks by Ken Gonzalez Day, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Erica Baum.
The User's Manual was edited by Information As Manual and a preliminary version was published on the Eclipse Archive, Salt Lake City, in 2015. It can be downloaded for free via this link.
It opens with a long introductory essay about some of the many and often paradoxical (if not contrary) cultural values ascribed to the concept of 'nothing' by radical art in the modern and contemporary periods. The second section offers a preliminary bibliography of key readings that frame common ideas of nothing and nothing-ness as they relate to contemporary art practice, divided into three sub-sections: ‘Thinking Nothing of It’ gathers modern philosophical perspectives from various cultural traditions on the idea of nothing; ‘Nothing to Show for It’ gathers the opinions of art theorists and historians who have considered the dilemmas of representing nothing in the context of the plastic arts; and ‘The Empty Set’ gathers example declarations and statements of action by artists and curators who have tried to produce absences, removals, voids and nearly too little.
