Brain Food #868: Occupying the negative space
'There's no such thing as silence'
Many of you may be currently planning or already taking a summer break, creating space for a new chapter to unfold on your return—perhaps more room in the mind for fresh ideas, or the energy to carry on with life’s larger and smaller projects.
To some, this may feel uncomfortable at first, inducing feelings of guilt or inadequacy. As with all clichés, there is truth in what Josef Pieper wrote in Leisure: The Basis of Culture: “Leisure is only possible when we are at one with ourselves. We tend to overwork as a means of self-escape, as a way of trying to justify our existence.”
And so, empty spaces in our calendars can make us anxious, much like the eerie quality of empty rooms or roads. We tend to have an aversion to silence and space, identifying our worth only in what is, and not what isn’t. Wired to lean towards the comfort of productivity, we perceive empty spaces as negative.
In art, negative space frames the subject, or primary object, while the area occupied by the primary object is referred to as positive space. Primary objects exist within the positive space and become the focal point because of the negative space around them. In other words, negative space leads to a positive perspective. It can help us see what might be otherwise overlooked if the canvas is too busy.
Life in its broader shape may also contain negative spaces—points of stuckness, where nothing substantial happens, where it often feels like you are cycling on a stationary bike, trying to move forward.
In these moments, it is tempting to want to just switch on the light, as David Lynch said, for the negativity and darkness to go away. But we need the spaces, even the negative ones, for life to work, for the positive to come into the foreground.
When those periods in between occur, whether voluntary or not, they are moments between stories, an essential part of the whole. Philosopher Alan Watts described them as a form of necessary silence, even if our attention tends to drift towards the noise:
“the general habit of conscious attention is, in various ways, to ignore intervals. Most people think, for example, that space is “just nothing” unless it happens to be filled with air.
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Because of this habit of ignoring space-intervals, we do not realise that just a sound is a vibration of sound/silence, the whole universe (that is, existence) is a vibration of solid/space. For solids and space go together as inseparably as insides and outsides. Space is the relationship between bodies, and without it there can be neither energy nor motion.”
The avant-garde musician John Cage made silence a central component of his work, not as a pause, but as substance. When his 4’33” piece premiered, a composition made of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, the audience felt cheated, and probably a little impatient. But Cage disagreed with the sentiment:
“They missed the point. There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.”
Silence does not exist as a gap, but as an essential, vibrant part of the final story.
A common misnomer for negative space is the more futile-sounding ‘dead space’, but there is a significant difference between the two. Dead space is truly empty, unused, and serves no purpose. Negative space exists to create purpose and to focus on what matters. Like silence, it is filled with the life of potential.
Kris Martin is a Belgian visual artist whose work explores the passage of time, and the difficulty of capturing it via art. His ongoing ‘End Points’ series consists of numerous A4 pieces of paper, which are mostly blank save for a handwritten line at the bottom, and a cutout of a full stop placed in the middle of the page.
The line contains the title of a literary work, while the cutout is the final full stop, or end point, of each tale. Before that end point is reached, there is an entire story that we know exists, even if not visible on the paper. And with the end point removed, the ending itself is absent, making the story open-ended and ever-evolving in the space that opens up.
