Non-Meaning
(Toward the Possibility of Genuine Discovery)
The root word nihil is everywhere in the culture. Perhaps the word nihilism comes to mind first, a pejorative in its everyday usage, commonly understood as the idea that life is meaningless and therefore not worth preserving. It’s the great cultural anathema, a kind of soul-eating bedevilment that explains civilization’s every spiritual malaise. We used to believe in something and now we don’t.
I have asked myself, am I a nihilist? Perhaps the reason that nihilism is so vilified is precisely because we sometimes fear that, indeed, life is meaningless. This is nihilism then, not out there, but right here, in each of us. So I wonder, is contempt for life related to whether or not we believe it to be meaningful? I myself do not know whether meaning exists independently of me in the universe, but neither do I regret if it doesn’t. If the universe is meaningless, then I have compassion for all of us who feel lost and alone in the world. We have only each other in the vastness of space. In the absence of meaning, I am reliant only on the quality of my experience in the world to lead me to the freedom necessary to discover it naively each day. I should not limit my experience only to what matches the meaning I make of it. Nihil doesn’t insist that life is meaningless, but neither does it insist the opposite.
In painting, if I insist meaning is real and that it should operate in a particular way, I am in the business of messaging through art. In fact, this is what I’ve done most of my life. But in Nihil, messaging works against the process because the process is enfolded in the values of not-knowing and of genuine discovery. It implicitly disbelieves the meaning maker; I mistrust my own desperation to make the world appear the way I would like it.
If my touch of the surface is just as likely to be peeled off or scraped away, then no one touch insists on its own superiority; the touch is for the sake of touch, not for a picture. The image it might have contained is half-missing now. The color gone. Unexpected colors from earlier layers now pop through the new holes made, and not necessarily in an immediately useful way. Absence is present because it overtakes earlier intentions in a kind of figure-ground reversal. Yet the intentions themselves had only ever been provisional, their futility anticipated.
In the accumulation of actions that forms the object, a trace of consciousness seems available. This feels meaningful to me, though I don’t know what it means. There are times, when an image survives the process, that it would seem to the viewer that I am imparting a meaning, but that’s not true in the Nihil project. To be sure, part of what constitutes my humanity is that I make meaning out of patterns in the world — either discovered or invented — which I receive as a detective receives clues in a murder case. Nihil is not an insistence that meaning doesn’t exist, nor a denial of my own ordinariness; it’s merely a philosophical preference to resist a kind of flat intellectual meaning making for the possibility of a genuinely revelatory discovery, the sort of which can only come about through the process itself.