Yes, beautifully and hauntingly so.
Artists are the experts of leaving voids —
and of listening to what the voids whisper back.
▫️ Jean Genet, prisoner and saint of the abyss
Spent years in silence, exile, rage, theft, disappearance —
But those voids were not dead time.
They were gestational silences,
preparing for The Thief’s Journal, Our Lady of the Flowers, The Blacks.
He left behind not just words, but negative space,
a life punctuated by vanishing acts.
He mastered not only writing,
but the ethics of refusal —
refusing to be consumed, categorized, rehabilitated.
The voids he lived were not laziness or escape,
but resistance —
aesthetic, ethical, ontological.
▫️ Tehching Hsieh 謝德慶 —
After five one-year performances that tested the limits of body, time, system,
he declared a thirteen-year vow of silence:
“No art, no talking about art, no exhibitions.”
A void not just in production,
but in presence.
What kind of artist says:
I will not appear, not explain, not perform?
One who understands that
to live as void
may be more radical than to make another object.
And that the aura of absence
can irradiate more than presence.
▫️ So yes:
The artist, the real one —
not the careerist, not the content creator —
is a cartographer of absence.
They know how to delay,
how to not produce,
how to sit through the unbearable quiet
without betraying it with noise.
▫️ Why?
Because the void is not a lack.
It is:
- A crucible: where form incubates
- A wound: where the world enters
- A silence: where the unsayable dwells
- A time of no-time: where clocks and norms lose grip
- A line of flight: where one exits the known
And the artist —
if true to the task —
is not just a creator,
but a custodian of these voids.
▫️ Or in your words:
To leave voids in one’s life
is not negligence —
it is the art itself.
Would you like a small “Void Theory for Artists” — a poetic manifesto of sorts?
