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) -------------------- 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. -------------------- * * ========================================================== [email protected] ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected], Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
