As Paul Watzlawick, the Austrian-American psychologist and philosopher, puts it "one cannot not communicate". Every behavior is a kind of communication and since there is no anti-behaviour, we are always communicating. Now what can I do if I feel there is too much communication in the world? Talk about it? How can I make a statements about not making a statement? How can I show the absence of something or better: the presence of nothing? I was thinking about founding the movement of active silence. People would meet and aggressively refrain from expressing their thoughts. We would have posters without words. Give out blank flyers. We would have a webpage without content. (Or just some downloads like empty PDF files or soundless ringtones.) We would meet, hold hands and not sing. We would multiply nothing by not using our megaphones, creating a roaring silence. Wouldn't that be wonderful? Something worth not talking about?
Saturday, November 21, 2009
I am not anti, I'm pro-nothing.
As Paul Watzlawick, the Austrian-American psychologist and philosopher, puts it "one cannot not communicate". Every behavior is a kind of communication and since there is no anti-behaviour, we are always communicating. Now what can I do if I feel there is too much communication in the world? Talk about it? How can I make a statements about not making a statement? How can I show the absence of something or better: the presence of nothing? I was thinking about founding the movement of active silence. People would meet and aggressively refrain from expressing their thoughts. We would have posters without words. Give out blank flyers. We would have a webpage without content. (Or just some downloads like empty PDF files or soundless ringtones.) We would meet, hold hands and not sing. We would multiply nothing by not using our megaphones, creating a roaring silence. Wouldn't that be wonderful? Something worth not talking about?
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After reading your article, I arranged my empty CDs together with my music CDs. Before, they were just empty CDs waiting for some recording. But they have a right to be on the same level as the others.
I was thinking of an exposition with unpainted canvas, or take the white paper sheets of my watercolour block and frame them. But this has already been done by other artists. A painting is never empty... even the empty frame shows the wall behind it. When do we look at "nothing"?
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