Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski are artists, architects,
designers, authors, educators, and co-founders of:
WAI Architecture Think Tank, Intelligentsia Gallery, POST-NOVIS,
and Garcia Frankowski
On Nothingness
by Garcia Frankowski
Nothingness has the virtue of surviving through any battle. Modern warfare not in the format of drones or cyber espionage, but in the polarization of a materialist dialectic, absorbs everything into its insatiable vortex. Nothingness is the ungraspable matter that is left after everything has been consumed.
Nothingness is that dessert of hard, irreverent edges. Nothingness waits indifferent at the other side of a door opened a hundred years ago in an attempt to reach the ultimate sublime. In a world plagued with opportunistic ideologies and temporary systems, passing regimes and totalitarian dogmas, Nothingness remains immutable.
This Nothingness looks past the dialectical relationship between the existence-driven non-consciousness of objects in their being-in-themselves state and self-conscious subjects that through being-for-themselves become aware of their existence in their deprivation of autonomy from a world consisting of predetermined systems and objectivized matter. When rationale and logic, when the visceral and the subconscious are transformed in the grammar of commoditized matter, Nothingness speaks an unintelligible language. Nothingness looks past structures of reason, however pure, dialectical or cynical they might claim to be. Nothingness has no method and denies any praxis.
Confronted with an ever-expanding black hole that absorbs whatever manifestation of everyday life, Nothingness is freed by its inherent lack of light. In a world without qualities, Nothingness is enlightenment as self-preserving darkness. Absolute Nothingness strives in absolute obscurity. Nothingness exists in the words of this manifesto and in the basic manifestations of its formal articulations. Its processes and actions, shapes and outlets are the inherent, universal language of silence. Without uttering a word, Nothingness communicates undecipherable dictums.
Operating as a critical project since the creation of the Readymade, and as a post-critical axiom since the first Black Square, Nothingness inhabits an interstitial space invisible to the shortsightedness of current aesthetic-political values. Nothingness is the ultimate goal of its own project. Nothingness is self-sufficient, absolute.
However clear its cartographic characteristics, and its intellectual makeup, Nothingness is not a doctrine, or a regime, or a dogma. Nothingness obliterates any stereotype, preconception, and expectation. It implodes any structure. It destroys the crushing weight of paraphernalia of superfluous authenticity, be it of the superficial metaphysics of awareness and responsibility, or the hypocritical forms of empathic aesthetics and altruism. Nothingness refuses to carry the fictional weight that has been thrown to in order justify volatile relevance, fluctuating value, and oscillating legitimacy. Nothingness is all that is left after humankind has been sequestered by its self- imposed conditions. Nothingness is pure freedom; Art as Nothingness.
January 2015
Image:
Confluence 1915