Silence

Just as artists and thinkers have made strong connections between color and sound, many have also contemplated the connection between color and silence. As we've been doing silence experiments in class, we've also been playing with how to interpret silence visually. Thus far, the results have been varied and inspiring.

Other artists to look at on this theme include Agnes Martin, Mark Rothko, Vija Celmins, Diane Szczepaniak, Wolfgang Laib, James Turrell and Mary Temple. Rothko, Szczepaniak, and Laib create intensely vivid works, rich in color with a very silent presence. Martin works with very subtle palettes (which makes them somewhat challenging to grasp via a computer monitor) and Celmins's represenational achromatic drawings capture a breathtaking stillness.

It is also interesting to look at artists like Marina Abramovic and Kimsooja who have worked with silence in a performative way. Kimsooja's video A Laundry Woman documents her standing at the banks of the Yamuna river as flotsam from funeral pyres drift by. It is a complex and exquisite contemplation of our mortality.