ART MAGAZINE MOSCOW ART MAGAZINE
An unwritten text as a text is not in itself something unheard of. In the history of art, silence as a piece of music, blank sheets in graphic albums, white pages in books, and many other things of that kind have long been known. By the way, the name of this unwritten text, which includes the concept of silence, appeals to the well-known progressive television program of the last decade of the last century. Probably, the comment to the unwritten text on the place where the text itself should be located is also not something completely unheard of.
This commentary on the unwritten text about the art of the zero years of the 21st century does not claim either unprecedentedness or programmatic meaningfulness of the apophatic practices of artistic concealment and silence. Rather, it’s just an entirely appropriate pun with an intellectual touch. Puns about zero met repeatedly. Most often paid attention to the number of zeros in the unusually high in those years, the price of works of art. A radical pun would be to answer zero years with zero text, that is, not to write it.
Obviously, less radically – to keep silent, but at the same time to comment on your silence. Pure sublime silence is indifferent that it, unheard of and not noticed by anyone, drowns in the infinity of cosmic silence. Silence, however, cravenly desiring to be identified as such, encloses itself in a certain framework, the role of which can be accomplished by a comment-argument or a comment-justification.
The story as silence or silence (silence) is a long-used, but not fully explored and, of course, inexhaustible resource. The resource is, of course, more rhetorical than heuristic or cognitive, but as a stimulus to knowledge or inquiry, it is not without interest.
Surely it was before, but it is remarkable that at the very beginning of the new millennium, in the zero years, polemical philippics began to appear, very targeted, in which there was a minimum of specific facts and names, and sometimes they were not at all! At the same time, the complete absence of names and specifics – this is a paradox – can only sharpen the polemic and excite interest in the essence of the problem! If the proposed text about the history of null would still be written, its internal zero pun could consist in systematically not recalling proper names. Of course, this would resemble a dubious intellectual game — stating problems without a single mention of the problem name or the name of the theorist who formulated the problem. And yet it could be useful as an experiment that would allow us to understand whether we are engaged in simple playing with words (and sonorous names) or are really able to focus on the problem. Even in the comments you can try to do without proper names, and some of those without which it is impossible to do, or, conversely, taken arbitrarily, to make comments.
