In 1958, Yves Klein’s exhibition La spécialisation de la sensibilité à l'état matière première en sensibilité picturale stabilisée, Le Vide (The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State of Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, The Void) firmly embedded artistic notions of the void within a specifically Western, modernist framework of absence and the immaterial. Klein’s exhibition can be situated as part of a continuum of formal experimentation in the twentieth century that was preceded by the pictorial holes of Rauschenberg's “blank” white canvases and Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), and later succeeded by numerous examples of individual works and entire exhibitions evoking empty space or palpable absence. Within this field of what might be considered the “aesthetics of absence,” Andrew Finegold’s Vital Voids stands as an important counterpoint, highlighting an aesthetic and metaphysical system that positions the void as a space of creation, fecundity, and transformation.
Books about Indigenous aesthetics in...
University of California Press