The Void
What is between a no place and a good place? Is it utopia or simply Nothing? One autumn afternoon in 1960, Yves Klein put on a suit and jumped off a roof. It was a leap of faith, a soaring vault out of suburbia, hurling the artist into a metaphysical realm he termed The Void. He published this image in his self-produced one-day-only newspaper with the headline, “The painter of space leaps into the void!” (Klein, 1960). I am particularly called to the avant-garde that lies with what the photograph evokes, questions, and beckons in its metaphysical sensibilities. I am broaching this interest with the simple question: is Yves Klein flying or falling with the implication, do we fly or fall into utopia? Into our possibilities?
There is a stillness that waifs through, the atmosphere, the environment, with the man on the bicycle in the most mundane, everydayness of the Parisian suburb living, that is abruptly interrupted by Klein’s leap. Klein’s head is tilted up, his arms raised to the sky in a near embrace and his back unnaturally arched. His upper half is curved upwards as if swimming to the surface, but his lower half is mostly perpendicular to the ground, like a diver jumping off a cliff. This photograph presents a certain surrealism with an intricate mingling of visual and immaterial signifiers, rendering utopian tensions: one of intention and spontaneity, of inquiry and escape, of joy and fear, of material and immaterial, of something and nothing, of inversions and subversions, of reaching and falling, of determinism and indeterminism and of beyond the Beyond. If one stands firmly because one stands upon nothing (Hixon & Thurman, 1993), what is the Nothing that Klein leaps into?
How does one display, demonstrate or mark the terrain of Nothing? The Nothing that ought to have remained hidden in this photograph has now been teased into and under the light through its composition. In art, the Void is stipulated to be both the occurrence of absence and presence simultaneously. The Japanese concept of nothingness, Ma, furthers the aesthetic regard by paying attention to the sensibility of Nothing. Nothing is esteemed as everything is something because of nothing. Ma represents the beauty in the negative spaces, where the negative denotes a materially unoccupied space (Prusinski, 2012). Ma invites the seer to become attuned to the intention of the unoccupied formless, boundless and immaterial Nothing, like silence between the notes which makes the music, both physically and perceptually. In doing so to not just see its existence but perceive an emptiness full of possibilities, like a promise yet to be fulfilled. Both the not-yet and the yet occupy this liminal time-space and are held in tension with anticipation, and expectation, against the horizon of time. This liminality seems to hold space and non-space, event and non-event, being and becoming. In his nonconformity, audacity, and ingenuity, Yves Klein presents a certain act of defiance by presenting and leaping into the voyage between material and immaterial.
So, is Klein flying or falling into nothingness, into a certain utopia, upon which the perpetuity of the initial action blatantly displays the namelessness, formlessness, voicelessness, and silence of possibilities that are not yet? The entrance into the liminality of the void involves stepping into a perpetual state of groundlessness that is only defined by how we meet the anticipation of the not yet which is also the possible, the future that is still to be discovered. Heidegger detangles fear and angst as moods of how one meets the anticipation and recognition of nothing to be authentic beings. He exposes their fundamental difference through his definition that fear is bound by that in which one finds himself — an appropriate response to a real situation, and angst in the face of the unknown, full of possibilities (Heidegger, 2008). It is an immobilising yield to things that go bump at night. Angst reveals nothingness from whence dasein can confront its utmost possibilities.
Heidegger seems to share a vein with Freud’s model of anxiety where according to Freud (2014), Angst has an unmistakable relation to expectation: it is anxiety about something. It has a quality of indefiniteness and lack of object. Fear has found an object whilst angst is absent of one. He further splits anxiety to a realistic one that is about a known danger which one could also simultaneously be in fear of, and a neurotic anxiety that pertains to an unknown danger, a danger yet to be discovered, an instinctual danger. Hence, if Klein is falling, his fall becomes oriented towards fear, fear of the real danger of the concrete pavement and road below him, where our understanding of gravity and possibly previous experiences of falling inform us of once the inevitable pain upon reaching the material ground. If Klein is flying, his flying becomes oriented towards the very real fear of flying (or rather the knowledge that humans are unable to do this yet and the neurotic angst of flying into the immaterial, where the danger, the instinctual danger has still to be discovered. It is an angst of the unknown nothing.
The experience of fear, angst or both results in anguish, where I understand anguish to be something that cannot be provoked but is the result of the provocation of fear and anxiety. It is the pain/suffering in the material, physical sense in the metaphysical immaterial one that causes the experience of fear and angst, especially in the face of the unknown Void, the place where the sidewalk ends. Is anguish a necessary coordinate of nothingness, where the trust in one’s self becomes murky and untrustworthy? Sartre (1943) seems to think so when he outlined in Being and Nothingness, “It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.” Perhaps the “leap” in leaping into the void is not just simply an invitation to jump per se, but also a revelation of being as being-in-nothing, nothing of nothingness, and a certain beyond nothingness. Inspired by Bachelard (2014), Klein separates them as the, “the empty, the deep empty, the depth of the blue”. Sartre furthers anguish as the mood and mode of the being of freedom as its consciousness of being in existence. It is in anguish that being of freedom is for itself and also constrained to make continuous, consciouses choices.
In Nausea, Sartre’s main character feels dizziness towards his existence “in the face of his freedom and responsibility for giving meaning to reality.” If at the depth of the void and nothingness lies the possibility of one’s freedom as consciousness of being, could it be said that the angst experienced in the unknown danger of Klein’s flying leap into the Void is the being of freedom that is constrained to make continuous, consciouses choices? The responsibility of being-free as a consciousness of being is ultimately one’s choice and this is the cause of the angst felt in the dizzying existence of the Void. “I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire”, Sartre says (1943). In this circuitry of existence in the Void, what conducts its electricity? It’s kill switch? Would the human attitude towards inquiry be able to conduct its plasticity, of metamorphosis, of change in the depth of the nothingness of nothing?
The constant demand for authenticity and intentionality by consciousness (which is the requirement of the being of freedom that is found in the no-thingness of anguish in the space of the nothingness of the nothing manifested) asks questions about its relatedness to its time-space occupancy as a being existing in this world with others. The potential to step out of inauthenticity and dishonesty lies in clear-eyed inquiry, which would support one’s maintenance of balance between existence, roles, and nothingness for the project to become authentic beings, at least in a Sartrean sense. It also be fitting to say that fugitivity, subverting, distancing, disengaging, excusing, and the inquiry of the Void would be an act of bad faith and acts as an existential kill switch.
Pertyna's (2022) concept of the invisible present as “a kind of scientific nowhere in which observations of change can be out of sync with physical reality (“even when observed, many of these changes are understood by no one”)” (41) can be seen through this lens. The nowhere that Pertyna speaks about is akin to the nothingness of the void where reality and change are abruptly and asymmetrically plastic. This notion reveals a disjuncture between expectation and reality due to the irrational behaviours of both parties. For Pertyna, this expectation is hinged upon factual probability in the physical world, though this can also be said for expectations in the political, social, and cultural worlds that we also live in.
There is a present lag of information and imagination between catastrophic events that renders possibility as a passive responder after the fact. This asymmetry upholds a “limited predictive horizon” in the physical and social world as possibility is projecting backwards or afterwards trying to catch up to its previous potentiality of being possible. This disrupted movement falters projections and halts horizon work, rendering increasingly alarming anxiety over physical or social extinction. This warped temporal projection can be noted as, “the great derangement” (Pertyna, 2022) where the existential self is divided by its instinctive orientation for the possible and its rudimentary reduction to probability because it appears that one has to choose. The divided self appears schizophrenic in its attempt to reconcile its existential dilemmas, “out of step with the dimension and pace of these feedbacks” (Pertyna, 2022) of false epistemology. Yet, is it possible that these asymmetrical, schizophrenia-inducing events hold metaphysical and existential clues for patterns of flux on the inside, particularly inside nothing? Perhaps. R. D Laing (1967) explains how madness need not be all breakdown because it may also be a breakthrough, holding potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death. If that is so, how does one walk the line between liberation and death? Between yesterday and tomorrow, between change and sameness? Could it be that one’s desperate attempts to hold onto oneself and create new methods of holding onto oneself does not allow the space for one to change and be liberated? In the space of nothing which is also the silence between the omnidirectional noises of the umwelt, is the silence of the form to show the immaterial possibility that calls for becoming not yet. It is still dependent on one’s will and openness to listen in the first place. This call is otherworldly but still of this world, calling not as a mirror but as an uncanny mood that compels one to lose one’s comfortable ‘home’ of knowledge and to become homeless as it constructs its utmost possible existence.