The Silent Image
Written for Sanell Aggenbach on the occasion of her solo show, The Heart Has Many Rooms, at Everard Read, Johannesburg, July 2019.
“We are too often suspicious of silence, distrustful of its secrets. In its quiet emptiness, meaning is lost and found and never certain. There, in the ellipses written on a page, a rest between notes, a beat, a breath; there, in those pauses. Silence is never vacant; we imbue it with significance, with interpretations and speculations, and in this way, we give to silence the language it denies. ‘Something is always echoing in the space left by words unsaid,’ Susan Sontag wrote in Aesthetics of Silence (1982). To listen to silence is still to be listening, to be hearing something – if only the ringing in one’s ears, ‘if only the ghosts of one’s own expectations.’
Still, we seldom let silence be. We feel compelled to describe and understand the world in words, to delineate its meaning, define its significance. We give to experience the shape of sentences; we order it syntactically. What we might know by sight, we wish to understand, to confirm, in speech.
Art does not lend itself to language. We might describe a painting in perfect detail, might tell in words what it tells in oil, but still we will find something essential to the work has failed to translate. ‘The only thing that matters in art,’ the Cubist painter Georges Braque once said, ‘is what cannot be explained.’ But still, we try to describe the ineffable, pressing up against language as we reach for words. ‘What is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express),’ Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in Culture and Value (1970), ‘is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.’ Which is to say, we arrive at the inexpressible by way of the expressed; that in describing art, language necessarily arrives at its own edge, at the edge of silence, which, as Michel Foucault suggests, offers ‘not the intimacy of a secret but a pure outside where words endlessly unravel.’ There are no words and only words.”
View the full catalogue and accompanying essay here.
