HOW TO SAY A LOT IN LESS/ Gregory Owcarz

How to Say a Lot in Less:

On the Various Notions from Prior to Antiquity through Post-Contemporaneity Involved with the Concept of the Superminimum in Terms of Artistic Intention and Practice that Span the Visual and the Auditory, the Performance-Based and the Multi-Medial, the Foundational and the Conceptual, in a Word the Whole of Artistic Endeavor, Including in a Sense - Yet by no Means in Every Sense - Those Would-Be Creative Processes Either Stifled at their Outset or Misconstrued in their Execution or Lost to Prosperity by Chance Events, and Minor Subsequent Scientific Remarks to Follow, and Then Hegel

John Cage notoriously recorded four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, the three movements of which are performed without a single note being played. In the Seventies a Los Angeles record company issued something called "The Best of Marcel Marceau" with forty minutes of silence followed by applause. And it sold really well. Perhaps Tom Waits revealed the legitimacy of such material best by getting really annoyed at people who talked through it when being played. Like with Stockhausen's avant garde stuff, one might playfully claim that such music is better than it sounds.

Over the years some all black and all white paintings - Malevich, Reinhardt, Ryman - have made ‘better than they look' contributions to a similar conversation. Sol Lewitt meanwhile won't even touch some of his work, mailing off brief drawing instructions instead to whoever is up for the job. In "The Madonna of the Future" Henry James depicts an ambitious but dejected painter sitting paralyzed for years before his blank canvas, now worn and cracked with age, after a lifetime exhausted in preparations to create the ultimate masterpiece. Philosopher Arthur Danto suggests that today's art world would marvel at the bold emptiness of the piece, his achievement lacking nothing from the absence of any artist's hand.

Of course ‘better left unsaid' is a skill writers also work hard to master, maybe yearning to one day imply ‘no message is a message' when turning down an important literary prize tactically without comment. Samuel Beckett for instance once turned down a big one for a dramatic piece called "Breath" which lasted thirty-five seconds and had no characters.

But must the superminimum cease when reaching these points? One might wonder if getting started itself is not already a stretch, art in any form being just too much. Consider science then. Half of creation it seems is anti-matter, a creeping nothingness calling all the shots, even telling time where to go. There's nothing actually out there. Or turn inward only to discover that small is the new big. The amount of space between nucleus and spinning electron is proportionally greater than that between our green Earth and the far reaches of the next galaxy over.

So apparently neither art nor science have enough on offer. Being philosophically thus reduced, like Hegel one might turn to God under such circumstances, but back perhaps at the superminimal beginning, before the Word. Before it was Good.

- Gregory Owcarz, 6 April 2009