The Art of Nothing

Sharing More Love of Nothing

“Nothingness”
painting by Joanna Borkowska

Excerpted from Joanna Borkowska’s thoughtful essay on The Philosopher

“At some point I began to perceive my paintings as an extension of my consciousness, as a part of a feedback loop between me and my surroundings, an idea that has been explained by Tam Hunt and Jonathan Schooler in their resonance theory of consciousness.

Six years ago, Swiss artist and curator Andreas Heusser came to Warsaw, Poland, in order to transform an old Swiss postal van into his No Show Museum, a mobile platform that presented artists whose practices dealt with the concepts of nothing in the broadest senses of this term.

Because of his interest in religious dissident movements, we spent a lot of time debating nothingness. In fact, we were both obsessed with it, but each of us from a different perspective. He talked about the origin of evil and the existence and non-existence of God. I was more interested in a scientific perspective, in nothingness before the Big Bang and creation of the Universe. I imagined that black holes could play a role in the creation of different universes and that we live in a multidimensional, multiversal, reality.

Then, in my mind, two words appeared: absolute nothingness. I could not really make sense of them and then I came across an article by Robert E. Carter about Meister Eckhart and Nishida Kitarō. I was excited to come back to Eckhart’s writings, but most of all I was happy to discover a Japanese philosopher that inspired me to read more about nothingness and then consciousness.”