06. Lauren Klatzman: Raw Notes On Blankness

05. Daniel Kopel: In the Studio with N. Dash

That I had my first meeting with N. Dash at a raw food restaurant is a poignant reflection on her vision and her work. There is an underlying purity and simplicity of means that runs through it and her life. When interviewing artists in the past, I have always felt guilty or embarrassed to ask…

04. Nalina Moses On Rachel Whiteread And Rendering the Void

The English sculptor Rachel Whiteread made a name for herself in 1993 by rendering the inside spaces of a demolished East London house in concrete and exhibiting them on the empty, sandy lot where that house had once stood. The project, House, was direct, imposing, lyrical and politically suggestive. In the most literal sense, House makes an absence…

03. Anna Khachiyan On John Cage, Silent Partner

In the issue of October 82 (Autumn 1997), Ian Pepper recounts an odd exchange that occurred between John Cage and the serialist composer Pierre Boulez. Cage and Boulez had met in Paris in 1949 and continued their friendship by correspondence, a selection of which was published in October 65 (Summer 1993). A curious footnote to this story is the…

02. Michael Pepi on Joseph Havel (A Short History of Blankness)

By taking the very conventions of their medium as their subject matter, Modernist painters stripped out every reliable practice associated with painting. Over time, this achieved a logical conclusion in the blank (or white) canvas, or so goes the story of post-war American formalism. In 1948, Clement Greenberg had already recognized that the "all-over" tendency…

01. A Letter from the Editor

Dear Reader, "Focus on Blankness" is unlike any other previously published edition of Artwrit. Though in past letters to the reader I have marveled at the is-it-chance-? attraction on the part of our writers towards related ideas, this is the first themed edition of the journal. Our mission here was deliberate: to address, from various focal…