The Art of Blank Space

First, I’d like to introduce myself to the wonderful machine of information that is the Internet. My name is Taylor Portela, I’m a junior studying English and Philosophy, and I work at the Spectrum Center. I love cheese, I read everything I possibly can, I dance and sing on the way to class, and I’m attached to the elliptical most days. But for this brief time, every Friday, I will discipline myself to keep my fingers typing, words a-spewing, and thoughts forming into a web so dense that it might, just maybe, make sense.

Living in Ann Arbor has many great advantages: the food, the trees, the people, the free things. However, one thing that is lacking in most places is blank space: the one wall that extends forever in a rhythm constant and defined by one color. Or no color. Or the sky that has no clouds in it that looks as if you are looking at the bluest blue. Or the ground without grass, without dirt, but only a foundation to stand on.

October 19^th is stressful and hectic for me, shoot, this whole “mid-semester” business is. When I try to escape to the library, I’m bombarded by signs on the wall, when I flee to the café, I’m surrounded by people, and when I go home, I’m encased in vegetables. There is no finding blankness in life, so I crave blankness in art.

Now I am no stranger to the critiques of so-called contemporary art: the loosely defined squares, the canvas with nothing on it, the lone light-bulb hanging from the ceiling. But it is no critique of mine. Now I will withhold, for the present, a lengthy theory-ridden discussion of why it not only is art, how they could be deconstructed further, what meaning is even there, or what that upside-down-urinal says about your unconscious, instead I will say that what they all have are  instances of blankness.

Why blankness? Why is the absence of color, of shape, of obvious meaning, of everything so important to living? (Yes, bold claim, but just wait….I’ll get bolder.) Because we get no space that is just pure space. Even outer space isn’t space, dammit. There are comets and planets and dark matter and aliens and before long there is more out there than in here and then there is nothing else to do besides light a candle drink some tea and cry as you listen to Tchaikovsky. Once that gets old though, and believe me it does, I’ve looked for the supposed instances of “empty.”

The third floor of Angell Hall, near the English Professors offices, and the large room on the second floor of UMMA in the travelling exhibit space have some of the blankest, emptiest spaces I have stared at.

“What are you doing? Are you ok?”

“Oh yes, I’m just staring into the blank, into the void, no worries.”

So, I admit that I’m crazy. If you see someone staring at nothing, surprise! It’s me. But there is something so exhilarating and so calming to look at nothing. The nothing acts as the medicine I need for modern day society. If I have to continually look at naked people trying to sell me plastic bags or animals trying sell me cars that don’t guzzle gas like I guzzle coffee, I’ll let the world on fire! So to tame the beast that is my troubled soul, I stare at nothingness.

Blankness allows you to project your own images on them. It allows you to slow your breathing and calm down. It lets you take a pause from the day. It acts as an extreme form of meditation in that I’m not in my mind, or outside of my body, there is no me involved but I’m embedded in the act of gazing at surface. It is the ultimate transcendence rooted in pure aesthetics of the other.

Or it really is just blank space.