Authority asserts through removal, forced marginalizations of whichever the system undesires. Diligently working to author a history and impelling charge for the piousness of their singularity. Oppression of otherness is inhuman.

Wresting back and expanding the agency of absence is necessary to resist the deafening and drowning abundance, and defeat the violence of certainty. Absence is indeterminacy and ambiguity of subject, allowing for an oscillation of object while retaining its thingness. By establishing absence as a thing, it becomes a creative activity as opposed to merely a destruction or negation. It is an actant both in form and as tool. Absence provides for greater interpretation, not less.

The method of erasure or removal, as a tool for creating a work of art, is at least as old as sculpture itself. The artist is entasked to release the form contained within the material, a subtraction reveals the hidden. Aristotle would have accident and essence here, the essence waiting to be released, aided by the craft of the human hand. There is a critical difference as it relates to removal for the purpose of revealing and representation, and removal as the action and object unto itself.

Absence as resistance manifests a public and poses a threat to systems of power. Our collective ability to remove allows for the appropriation of otherwise restrictive handed-down narratives within public spaces. This initiates a spatial counter-practice that births a commons that is more than simply not private property. It becomes a critical tool in an ever-evolving system of defense, that includes aesthetic practices and tactical vernaculars that disrupt and offer new ways of moving toward a future of possibility multiplicity. New futures require oppositional gazes of the present to provide radical and actionable imagination against the dystopic, utopic or iterative models that hold us here.

Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing is a physical record of a performative act, yet it would not exist without its frame and didactic. Absence requires a platform, an empty plinth, a pedestal, an engraving, a frame. These are the clues that something is not there. It fixes the gaze, providing a thin invisible skin to position it within a time and space. This permeablility allows for the osmosis of meaning to flow in and out of its void, a void that is both subject and object.

History and memory are similar devices, thought to be less permeable though oft-manipulated by those in positions of power. The accumulated veneer of sanctioned and unsanctioned symbolic public attacks, rooted in art practices and methodologies, purport to offer new meaning and interpretation and liberation from of our visual landscape. The underlying signs and that what is signified, the language and symbolism and spatial practice of power, remain ever present. Covering up hegemony in a patchwork of new meanings does not prevent the haunting and possession by the gray ghost of authoritarian capitalism and its privatizing forces. 

[see also]

Gutierrez, C. (2016). Inhabiting Shadows. Kyiv, Ukraine.

Brest van Kempen, M. (1996). Column of Earth and Air. Sproul Plaza. UC Berkeley, California, USA.

Argote, I. Horse. (2011). Paris, France.

Klein, Y. (1958). The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, The Void. Iris Clert Gallery. Paris, France.