Nothing matters very much (warning: long!)

[Martin Leith]

A friend of mine calls his company Idea Space, and he has discovered a
tendency in people to find the concept of "space" a little anxiety-inducing.
This got me thinking about the fear that the thought of Open Space sometimes
evokes.

I was reading the Sunday paper yesterday and came across an article by
Stephen Bayley, an erudite commentator on the topic of design. For some
tiome now there has been an empty plinth (a base for a statue) in London's
Trafalgar Square, and there has been much discussion about what shoud be
displayed on it. A decision was made recently to place a statue of a
pregnant woman with no arms and deformed legs on the plinth, and this was
what precipitated Bayley's article.

The bit of the article that really struck me was this: <The medieval
Scholastics, mixing Christian dogma with primitive science developed the
concept of horror vacui or what in more stately English we would call
abhorrence of the void>

I'm wondering if "horror vacui" is hindering the uptake of Open Space
Technology. If it is, then hats off to the Indian gentleman who added the
word "Technology"!

Bayley likes to show off his cultural credentials, and this makes reading
his stuff a little tiresome at times, but "A monument to nothing" includes
some useful insights, and I've copied it below (scanned, so please excuse
any undetected scanning errors) in case you are interested in reading it.

Warm wishes to all,

Martin

Martin Leith
www.martinleith.com
Open Space UK: www.openspaceuk.com (interim website)

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A monument to nothing   now that would be something
By Stephen Bayley

Source: The Independent on Sunday, 28 March 2004

There has been ample piss and wind swirling about the empty plinth in
Trafalgar Square, but no commentator has made any connection between the
poorly co-ordinated circus troupe of pseudo-artists so amusingly, if
cack-handedly, contesting the space and Aristotle or St Bernard of
Clairvaux. So let me be the first.

Aristotle s philosophy did not allow for the existence of nothing, still
less was he able to attribute a value to it. The medieval Scholastics,
mixing Christian dogma with primitive science developed the concept of
horror vacui or what in more stately English we would call abhorrence of the
void: theology could not tolerate emptiness, but then science took over. In
the 17th century, experiments with vacuums by the Dutchman Isaac Beeckman
and the Italian Evangelista Torricelli brought horror vacui into scientific
conversations.
Now that we have progressed from Beeckmans bellows and his furnace to the
arcane abstractions of astrophysics, the notion of the void is more
familiar, if not more accessible. It may be logically and scientifically
impossible to measure nothingness, but on the other hand 1 have found myself
wondering whether a taste for the pleasures of emptiness may be a definition
of sophistication in our messy world. Here, then, is a case for amor vacui.

St Bernard of Clairvaux (Bernardo da Chiaravalle), a handsome aristocrat,
sought escape from the temptations of the world (cf Trafalgar Square) and
entered the monastery at Citeaux, an establishment of the Reformed
Benedictine Order, later under his example becoming the Cistercians. In
Early Tuscan Art, Sir Martin Conway describes Bernard(o) as  the greatest...
moral force in Europe . He practised austerities and favoured stern
privations, but his monasteries were self-dependent institutions of
exceptional architectural beauty. A simple inspiration was described in his
Epistles:  You will find more in woods than in books... trees and stones
will teach what you can never learn from masters .

After his death the Cistercians began to drift away from the severity of
Bernard s Rule, but a strict observance splinter group formed the Trappists.
Their vow of silence - perhaps matched by their determination to brew
exceptionally strong beer - greatly impressed Patrick Leigh Fermor whose A
Time to Keep Silence (1957) describes his retreats in northern France. Of
amor vacui (not to mention the beer), Leigh Fermor writes:  The troubled
waters of the mind grow still and clear.

There was a tune when even the BBC saw benefits in our minds growing still
and clear, rather than have them continuously contaminated by garish,
patronising rubbish with an imponderably high signal-to-noise ratio. Younger
readers will he amazed to learn that once television had intervals wherein
the viewer was invited to contemplate a turning potter s wheel. Gloriously,
Radio Three used to broadcast silences if there was a gap in the
programming. I often reflect on this when 1 am listening to my bootleg copy
of John Cage s 433, or reading Kingsley Amis s irrefutable remark that more
television win mean worse television.
This applies just as well to design where more design certainly means worse
design. In his Moral Essays (1731), Alexander Pope satirises the
extravagances of Baroque architecture:  Something there is more needful than
expense, And something ev'n to Taste - 'tis Sense.

The desire for simplicity reaches a more profound part of the soul than a
taste for beads and jewels. A Massachusetts St Bernard, Henry David Thoreau
retired to the woods to research the simple life. We may concede that his
primitive hut was, indeed, at the bottom of his mother s garden, but here he
was nevertheless able to formulate a persuasive case for absolute
simplicity.  The most interesting buildings;  he wrote in Walden (1854),
 are the most unpretending.  He admired plainness in buildings and people,
finding that same link between personal morality and aesthetics that
impressed the Greeks. Straining after effects with decorative excess rarely
achieves beneficial results.

All this was the basis of the architect Mies van der Rohe s dictum  weniger
ist mehr , the famous  less is more . But the love of emptiness or
simplicity is not a denial of pleasure, more a means of enhancing it. A
plain Winch white plate with a single branch of braised celery is a very
much richer aesthetic (and gastronomic) experience than a Shvres platter
piled with hors d oeuvres from M&S which look, withal, as though Mickey
Mouse had just puked up the entire Magic Kingdom.

The product designer Dieter Rams was of the same persuasion as Mies. His
early work for the Braun electrical company was so austere that critics
described his cabinet work for what, in those days, were called
record-players as being like  Snow White s Coffin . Rams defined the white
box and, in a radical later development, the black box. His explanation was
that the best design was as little design as possible. Design, he said,
should be like the  gut English butler: always there, but never visible.
Amor vacui, indeed.
The great thing about nothingness is how very valuable it is, emotionally
speaking: empty canvases, blank sheets of paper, vacant plinths are
beautifully promising. And the amor vacui of Mies or Rams is complex and
subtle, not reductivist. As art critic Hilton Kramer knew,  the more minimal
the art, the more maximum the explanation.  I mean, The Rape of the Sabine
Women is more-or-less self-explanatory.

And we return to Trafalgar Square and the Livingstonian horror vacui that
demands  public art  and piazzas to put it in for listless tourists to
wander about. How much more confident and amusing it would have been to
leave the fourth plinth vacant. That it has been deserted for so long does,
let us admit, speak volumes about the real-world vitality, or rather insipid
irrelevance, of contemporary sculpture. An empty plinth would have been more
attractive than an empty gesture.

Funnily enough it was the Conservative statesman Arthur James Balfour who
had the wittiest summation of amor vacui:  Nothing matters very much and
very few things matter at all . Balfour perhaps did not recognise his
delicious ambiguity . Of course, the value of nothing has at its polar
opposite the price of everything. Marc Quinn s filling for the plinth
probably cost a fortune.

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