About Nothing and Something

A characteristic of our present urban life is the variety and intensity of its noise. Noise is just a less genteel word than sound. Sound, after putting some order into it, is the main component of music. But the musician does not employ the squeal of brakes or the chugging of a motor; we do not expect him to incorporate, even in a pastoral, the grunting of pigs. He uses a kind of sound that we do not associate with nature.

The painter, the sculptor, and the architect have an equally intangible but powerful means of expression in space. The schoolboy described a hole as nothing with something round it, so we might describe space as nothing with something in it.

To convince us that space can be organized into something significant and can then be used as a personal means of expression we need only mention two examples. Almost all the major problems that have faced mankind have been centred round finding a workable solution to the organization of space; the vastness of Australia and her white-Australia policy;

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Germany and Japan seeking for lebensraum (room to live); slum-clearance; town-planning; immigration; ribbon development. Air travel, in reducing space, has intensified its problems.

The artist's main purpose is to convey by means of his work, the slant of mind that possesses him at the time. For such an objective there is not a more effective means than the description of organized space. Space has a deep and radical effect on our state of mind. How much less selfconfidence we have in a vast hall than in a small room? How much less self-importance on the top of a hill than in our office? If we doubt the ability of space to express a personal viewpoint we need only re-arrange the furniture in our house during our wife's absence. On her return it will become clear that her organization of the space in the house is a personal expression of her particular mind. Who would deny that the organization of space in the average country town gives a complete picture of the minds of those responsible?

To give the impression of space the artist would need only to paint his canvas evenly all over in blue; to use space as a means of expression something must be placed in that space to delineate and organize it. As a single chair placed in an empty room defines and conditions its space, so a figure serves, as in the illustration, to define the space.

In painting the first artist to exploit the organization of three dimensional space by disposing solid volumes into it was Giotto in the fourteenth century. Since his day it has remained not only a constant but the main feature of European painting. The white man as explorer, soldier and man of action has always been discontented with his own share of space. Feeling it was his antagonist he has battled against it. To depict solid volumes which defined a limited space provided the European artist with the most perfect means to express the drama, dynamic action and monumentality that were the predominant features of the white man's way of living. Broadly speaking we may say that European painting since Giotto has been the expression of drama and action by means of a rhythmical organization of space by solid volumes.

The forms of art referred to above have dealt with the delineation of a defined extent of space. The Chinese landscape painter concerned himself with space for centuries, if not millenia, before the European artist. His aim has been to create not a defined extent of space but infinity. This marks the difference in outlook between East and West. The Chinese, whose ideal was meditation, have always had a profound contempt for Western man's busy, quarrelling, fighting, shoving restlessness. The infinity that is characteristic of the Chinese painting is the symbol of his ideal of meditation, and occurs seldom in European art. Turner is the exception. To him infinite space was the perfect means of expression and his whole technique was directed to achieving it. In the picture of Schaffhausen every detail of the foreground is painted in what appears a haphazard position determined by chance. On the contrary the position of every detail is subtly organized and painted in a rhythmical plan. The distance from one object to another can be estimated in feet, with the ultimate purpose of creating space that lies beyond and reaches to infinity. No Turner landscape is a portrait of a locality, in spite of its title. All are essays in the delineation of infinite space.