*The definition changed after some group discussions*

White space is a technique employed by designers or artists to create a vacuum between the message and the audience. Visually it would look uniform, having a clear division between subject and background; conceptually it needs to have the audience anticipating for the message.

Examples:

•  Volkswagen Beetle Commercial 1997 (Print)
• Franko B I Miss You (performance)
• Rachel Whiteread Table and Chair Clear (sculpture)
• Bruno Jakob Breath, invisible but containing many ingredients (painting/performance art/sculpture)
• Truffaut's 400 Blows (film)

Volkswagen Commericial

The Beetle was making its comeback, and they needed something big to attract its Californian fanbase. Instead of the usual you-will-be-cool if you buy this, the agency in charge decided to market the new Beetle by appealing to the customer's frame of mind. For example, instead of you'll be fun if you buy this, it's you are already fun, that's why you should buy this. Witty wordplay combined with what VW means in the minds of everybody was essential in selling via the frame of mind approach.

White doesn't need to be present, but it is useful for isolating the subject for easier recognition. Negative space is powerful because it put whatever's there on a podium, and the audience is obligated to see it.

Franko B's Mother

 A performance piece where Franko (A Camberwell and Chelsea college alumni) painted himself white and walk around the catwalk with cannulas in the crease of his elbow. Over time the blood from his elbow would accumulate on the white tarp of his catwalk, especially at both ends of the catwalk where he stood for a while before continuing walking. Going back to what w.s means, the close proximity of the audience to Franko, the silence, the stark contrast of blood on his paint encrusted skin, and the fact that he is bleeding out in front of the audience, all contributed to this vacuum between him and the audience. Audience can really really emphasise with Franko's pain, "The action of the work could be read against the title as an evocation of the pain of loss....Might provoke a biographical reading relating to Franko B’s personal experience of being an orphan, an immigrant and a queer man, I Miss You also offers a representation of what it is to be human, flesh and blood." (Gormley) 

Franko "sterilised" an environment to make the pain he felt tangible for the audience. He channeled all their attention to himself, as he carried on doing somewhat monotonous thins like walking up and down the catwalk. You combine the slow progression of blood swelling on the floor, with a lack of narrative and you'll get audience scrambling to make sense of what is happening. In a state of confusion I believe people will fall back to how they feel, because it's the only thing that isn't wrong. In other words, lack of narrative or "What am I supposed to look at" forces audience to do some reflection...basically what W.S is about.

(Clare Gormley, 'Franko B, I Miss You 2003', case study, Performance At Tate: Into the Space of Art, Tate Research Publication, 2016, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/performance-at-tate/case-studies/franko-b)

Bruno Jakob, Breath, invisible but containing many ingredients, 2011

Taking "what am I looking at" to the very extreme, Jakob uses light, water, energy and even touch to create his invisible paintings. Jakob captures the world just like any visual artist, however his results are not really visually graspable. Jakob explores what is the fundamental difference between an "idea-painting from a normal piece of paper whose surface is visually identical with that of the artwork". It could be inferred that visually transcribing a real world object using materials is not as accurate as idea painting, because an idea painting actually uses properties of the object. In Breath or the Horse painting audience is confronted with a more-or-less white surface, and just like before, that makes us put on our investigation caps and analyse it beyond what's visible. 

• While digging up on Jakob, I finally found out who started the monochromatic canvas thing
  • Yves Klein and Nouveau Realisme, I think I opened a can of worms because both are so magnificently huge and impossible to summerise without omitting its core...
  • 
  • REALITY is a funny thing, there are numerous movements on it, yet reality is something we see as objective, then why are there so many different types of it????

Nouveau Réalisme Movement Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. 2017. TheArtStory.org
http://kunst.ricola.ch/en/price/Bruno-Jakob_Katalog-Langenthal_EN.pdf

Truffaut's 400 Blows

Now ok I'm no film expert, and yes I did watch the entire movie but not for the purpose of W.S (just because I know it's a classic). Aside from how it's a masterpiece and all that stuff, the ending leaves us the audience going "now what?"; Antoine escaped the observation centre, then saw the ocean, and while all this is happening the background becomes less cluttered and more open then at the end he stares at the viewer. Visually, well, this was a B&W movie so there were white chunks everywhere but this is besides the point, main thing is anticipation and empathy with Antoine we get from this scene. Similar to Franko's I Miss You, Truffaut gradually reduces the scene's details and weight(makes it easier to see subject from background basically) so we can feel how Antoine feels.

In film you've got to consider the angle of the shot and what's not being shot, in comparison to a performance piece where everything we need is right in front of us. French New Wave is similar to Nouveau Realisme as they both strive to depict reality, just that French New Wave used equipment that required little preparation due to post war economy. Films were like documentaries, often ending with questions than answers, shots were long and "rough" and "unpolished". A movement is always in response to whatever's before it, sometimes it could be an 180 from it or simply the reaction to whatever events that happened (WWII, Puritanism). 

Whiteread's exhibition in Tate Brit (2017~2018)

Ok biggest questions/thoughts from this show:

• are we too transfixed in figuring out what something is? and not how and why it is?
• selectively depicting which "side of reality" to show

Visiting this was my biggest frustration, because most of the time I was figuring out how she cast it, rather than why. It took me some time to figure out that her sculptures were not 100% of what they are, more specifically:

• In Room 101, pipes were removed and the plaster revealed more than what we normally see
  • The space the window takes up, individual cracks along the wall
• The space between the legs of her chairs and table don't exist, yet she casts them, giving something invisible a tangible quality now
• Yet on the other hand, square Sink shows only the underside, or just an incomplete version of the sink, leaving us to guess what it looks like in full

It's crazy how we all know reality is universal for everybody (or is it), but here Whiteread still manages to use reality to show off areas and spaces that doesn't really exist. The common theme I realised in all these works are their interpretations, and reactions of reality; taking something that is right in front of you and finding a way to convey its rawness in the least processed way. This is something I want to pursuit too, I have my pinhole so that's a start.

De Stijl (1917~1931)

Key ideas from the manifesto:

• There is an old and a new consciousness of time. The old is connected with the individual. The new is connected with the universal
  • Nobody enjoyed WWI, everybody wanted to distance themselves from the horrors.
  • Dutch painter Theo Van Doesburg published De Stijl magazine to recruit artists who shared his vision:
    • Utopian vision where design, art and architecture all merged together
    • A new aesthetic, a new order and some harmony after witnessing the tragedy of WWI    
• The artists of today have been driven the whole world over by the same consciousness, and therefore have taken part from an intellectual point of view in this war against the domination of individual despotism. They therefore sympathize with all who work to establish international unity in life, art, culture, either intellectually or materially.
  • Collectivist approach, sought art to be a unifying force in creating an utopian society
  • Geometry and primary colours represent modern society 
  • "Art can never return to representation. Art must eliminate the “profanity” of the illusion in its search for the absolute truth. The “absolute” is the cornerstone of De Stijl, for the absolute can be expressed only through abstraction. " (Jeanne S. M)

Rietveld Schroder House (1924)

Important house because it provided the basis of Bauhaus inspired International Style, the house demonstrated that De Stijl isn't limited to just art. Exterior adheres to the aesthetic, inside there are movable walls and it's all changeable.

Diasporism (1989?~)

This isn't a movement (ish), instead it's a term coined by R.B Kitaj after he realised he hasn't done much about his Jewish heritage. To sum it all nicely, "Diasporist painting, which [Kitaj] just made up, is enacted under peculiar historical and personal freedoms, stresses, dislocations, rupture and momentum. The Diasporist lives and paints in two or more societies at once. Diasporism, as [he] wish to write about it, is as old as the hills (or caves) but new enough to react to today's newspaper or last week's aesthetic musing or tomorrow's terror.'' (Russell)

Diaporism is interesting because only Kitaj (as far as I know) is part of it, there wasn't any specific visual connotation to it, well aside from all looking like Kitaj's paintings. Instead it addresses an issue that all international students know very well--creating art and living in somewhere far from home, but then again what exactly is home? Kitaj's nomadic lifestyle resonated with me, his manifesto is a diary and the struggle is real.

Cecil Court, London W.C.2. (The Refugees) (1983-4)

We see Kitaj chilling on the foreground at his favourite place with a bunch of performers everywhere. The Yiddish troupes was inspired by stories from his grandparents, and it was around this time he more aware of his Jewish heritage; " 'I have a lot of experience of refugees from Germany and that's how this painting came about. My dad and grandmother ... just barely escaped.' 

Vorticism (1913-1915)

The British version of Futurism, they still encapsulated the love of technology but instead of removing pasta from the cuisine, they embraced the energy from modern technology and saw themselves as a creative vortex. While the Italians saw war and fascism as patriotic and favourable (they believed in destruction of the past), Lewis and Pound (two founding members) used Blast to chip away old ideals through bold rhetoric, and even bolder typography. Other members took Vorticism and applied it to sculpture (Henri Gaudier-Brzeska) and other fields, but primarily it was Lewis and Pound who dictated the manifesto. The movement died when one of the members died in WWI, then suddenly the realities of war crept in.

A page from the first issue of BLAST (1914)

Vorticism and Futurism were both overly optimistic, and in a way De Stijl too; all were doing away the past because it was oppressive, and they achieved that by always having this bombastic utopian vision, that was only achievable if they start this massive upheaval of aesthetics and how art affects the lives of everybody. All were trying to unite art and make it assessable by all, yet if they really achieved it then why are still struggling to combine design with information nowadays? Instead of declaring making art assessable by all, people should direct their attention into education, primarily the curriculums of <18. ILEA was on the correct path, but to really incorporate the good design mentality it cannot be its own subject--art and creativity needs to be present in all subjects to successfully make art assessable by all.