THE CONCEPT OF THE (W)HOLE

Being at the DIA | Beacon, NY, up the Hudson, there are a series of installations by some of the greatest artists on the planet — classical emplacements involving the highest theories of each, a kind of portfolio of perfected legends.

Those that are still working. Those that have passed along.

But one of them, Michael Heizer, is an especial theorist, artist, designer — still working, expanding on his dreams — has a kind of symbolic place in my heart of exploring. There’s more to be explored, his work — all in imagery — here: http://bit.ly/i3OZsH

One installation can be found at DIA, a series of carved insertions — a grouping of geometric openings. Holes.

I was thinking about the space of holes, the wholeness of the openings. There is a hole, and there is the whole of their absence. I was thinking about that idea of the wholeness that can be found in the absence of place(ment) — that is, in the hole, the absence, there is something there. It might be that in that absence, you can’t touch it. But there’s a fuller integration in the absence of presence. To that end, the place of nothing — there can be a kind of fullness in what is not there.

Like the beauty of the Zen and abstracted painting of broken ink, haboku style, the strength of the washed drawing isn’t in what’s seen, but what is untouched by brush and ink — it is the absence that creates the presence.

It is the hole, that creates the whole.

To the wholeness — the holes of Heizer at DIA — see more, here: http://bit.ly/gKRNhg

T | out (t)here.

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