An essay by Bob Billington inspired by conversations with his friend Peter Venn

           and the quick witted animals knew long ago
          that we are not quite securely at home
          in the interpreted world

          Rilke, Duino Elegy

The morning walk on a freezing February day of bright sunshine. Moving out of the wood on to the edge of a stubble field, land set aside, sheltered by surrounding trees. A flock of curlew, driven inland by the cold, rise calling and the dog takes off after a startled roe deer that runs out on to the field. The dog, a quarter the size of the deer, runs his fastest; the deer does enough to increase steadily the gap between them. They run on and out of sight. A few minutes later the dog is back, panting, exercised. I know exactly at what point he gave up the chase, which was when the deer ran straight into and over the undergrowth of a new plantation two fields away.

It's happened this way many times and always there is the question of what the dog would do if the deer didn't run, or if the deer were to stop running. But even if he had the voice to answer with it would be a question too far, inappropriate, to enquire what his intentions towards the deer were.   

I want a new word, a word like sensation , the word Cézanne used, to override the narrow view of what thinking is and challenge from the outset an understanding which separates and sorts towards polarisation;   the usual subjective–objective, the splitting of mind and body, thought and action, and so on. Positions are assigned and become fixed. Science assumes an inflated authority in the testing of knowledge. Art, meanwhile, turns itself into entertainment or a kind of low-grade therapy. Polarisation isn't useful but is   pervasive, painting everything in black and white. In the end east becomes west; difference is a smaller, more interesting thing.

Some subjects demand the wider view. Love, for instance, or colour. Here I want, need, the new word to mean a kind of   felt-thought, a kind of thinking which is itself feeling, and vice versa. Embodied, integrated. Action which flows through, at once neither exclusively internal nor external, abstract nor concrete, which reflects a more rigorous inter-subjectivity, a sharper subjectivity and a wide-ranging, free-floating objectivity that might have the capacity to dream.

Love? Colour? How do scientists choose their partner? Where is colour located? Colour is neither here nor there, but both; at once neural and material. Receiving colour, what happen? How is one to separate and understand the difference between thinking and feeling? If thoughts are something we like to imagine ourselves originating, what is felt might seem to be something done to us by the object. There is an astronomy and an astrology of colour; 1 an exclusively theoretical, analytic approach given in terms of absorption profiles and wavelength, the systematised mysticism of Kandinsky. What is called for, to extend the stellar metaphor, is a kind of navigation. If this is true of colour, then it's true of other things.

I want to go further. I want to say that thought, in the way spoken of above, is a kind of action, and action a kind of physically manifest thought which comes about in response to a call. The complex of actions, mental and physical, that is the action of working extends itself beyond immediate tasks to include everything that feels important – activity preceding purpose, work bestowing meaning; at the best of times it embraces taking a walk with the dog, looking at things, making and eating a meal, coming home and going to bed; everything ordinary. The range of mental and physical activity coheres into a complex of integrated behaviour. Life and work, thoughts and actions, become a whole thing; inclusive, embracing. There is plenty left outside of the complex, outside experience, but inside everything that might be is incorporated.

I look at something I did and wonder, "I must have lived that'. Heidegger – who walked the field path, went skiing, considered what to wear, made big mistakes, met his lover, conducted seminars, wrote things down, read poetry, watched the snow – how could his view of thinking not be an embracing one? He used a word – dwelling . I can't be sure if my understanding is quite the same as his meaning but perhaps dwelling is what I want instead of thinking . I want to live inside my interests, responding to the call of things.

This is how it feels. Cézanne is exemplary here.

Thankfully most – sometimes all – of the thousands of things we see each day are quickly identified, read, understood and disposed of. In a sense, once seen they become invisible. A small proportion will be seen and take part in the activity of the day. Then occasionally one is alerted, some thing insists. The plain physical facts take care of themselves but beyond that there is no ready interpretation, no reading, no understanding. The usual role for the thing as container for history, memory, association, metaphor is refused and in its place there is a sensation in the experience – blankness.

Blankness always arrives as a slight shock. I used those words many times before coming to understand what it was I thought shocking. I get the sense of this experience in meeting things as that of a "blankness in the face of'. Whence the blankness? In galleries, in people's workspaces, walking the coast, these encounters with blank things. The occasion of meeting something is amplified. Is it my blankness in the face of a dumb object, or is it the object's blankness before a dumbed me? That sounds like too much of a confrontation, better to think of it like colour. As the object is encountered, two things happen.

First the object comes forward into view, it can't be ignored, it offers itself and there are recognitions – it does not present as a previously inconceivable alien presence; even with only a split-second look, information is gathered, one would have the beginnings of a description.

Then the momentary and considerable gathering of information and recognitions is overridden by the sensation of blankness. There is no corresponding understanding. Commanding attention, refusing interpretation.

It's important to notice that these blank things don't have to be searched for. They offer themselves as present, they come forward as something. There is no hiding, anonymity or camouflage; they come forward blankly as something that cannot be ignored; persistent, opaque, refusing interpretation. To handle this thought it helps me to find a complementary situation where an object effectively disappears. Consider a mirror. An object that is precisely not to be seen itself but to be looked through; an object with a capacity for invisibility. In use the mirror becomes – literally – so transparent as to be invisible and only at certain special moments, when choosing in a mirror shop, when weighing up the merits of some interior design, when fixing to a wall – moments when the thing is not being used – do mirrors regain their share of opacity and presence.

I think of a work by Don Judd, Untitled (1965), number 12 in the catalogue to the Tate Show of February 2004.   An elongated (69-inch) horizontal wall piece comprising a long, thin box of galvanised iron with several (ten) rounded protrusions projecting forwards to make intervals (nine) that decrease in size to the right as the widths of the rounded elements increase. Sprayed with a transparent red lacquer, the crystalline surface of   zinc shining through.

That bald, quickly gathered information, along with a few dimensions, would be enough to take away and make the piece anew. It is gathered almost instantly, in a few moments; in terms of information, facts, there is little more to say or find. The experience of the work is bigger. One looks: at how the colour changes over the various angles and curves of the surface; at the shadows and reflected colour within the piece and on the wall: at the sequence of interval and projection; to wonder what arrangement fixes the piece to the wall. The degree of projection relative to height, a certain bulk. Soon this turns into recapitulation; speculations, observations, all return one to the piece on the wall. The sensation is of a thing simply and clearly present but which, at the same moment, resists and opaquely refuses to reveal its self, presenting blankly. And then, looking, the sensation arrives that one is held very particularly in a place. Between the quickly apprehended facts and the blank refusal of the thing's withholding is the place of the experience of the uninterpreted thing.

Now, months on from seeing it, to recall the Judd is to find myself returned not to an image of a red metal bar along the wall,   but to the place of the experience found in the encounter with the work; not to the memory of that place, but to the place of that experience, a kind of locale.

Each morning, sitting drinking tea in the kitchen, I look to the familiar view through the window of the big apple tree and the orchard behind it. This place, I cannot use it up. The sensation is of an initial blankness, arising out of a refusal on the part of a thing, a refusal to be used,   where used might mean being appropriated to some purpose or theme elsewhere – all those things where looking stops at mere naming or identification, invisible beyond being read.   A refusal to be used up, to become invisible, and therefore a persistence. The essence of interpretation is using up.

It's a gift, that things should volunteer themselves in this way; itness must usually be worked for; the repeating of a word over and over until it becomes like a brick in the mouth; or in looking hard and long, perhaps when drawing, to arrive at a sudden point of non recognition. Blankness comes to the fore when the object is most insistently itself. The familiar thing which one is intent upon becomes mute, unrecognised. This is something felt, a way in which an object insists as a presence and persists – resisting interpretation. Here a link between works of art and things which are not works of art comes in.   Refusing to be pinned down to a reading, refusing to lead one along a train of thought. This refusal and alongside, an invitation.

Heidegger speaks of withdrawal.

What must be thought about turns away from man. It withdraws from him. But how can we have the least knowledge of something that withdraws from the beginning, how can we even give it a name? Whatever withdraws, refuses arrival. But – withdrawing is not nothing. Withdrawal is an event. In fact, what withdraws may even concern and claim man more essentially than anything present that strikes and touches him. Being struck by actuality is what we like to regard as constitutive of the actuality of the actual. However, in being struck by what is actual, man may be debarred precisely from what concerns and touches him – touches him in the surely mysterious way of escaping him by its withdrawal. The event of withdrawal could be what is most present throughout the present, and so infinitely exceeds the actuality of everything actual ...

What calls for attention – "what must be thought about' – withdraws and leaves the "thinker' pointing in the direction of the withdrawal. The blankness confronting one a consequence of this withdrawal and also, I would say, an invitation.   A sign, says Heidegger, which cannot be interpreted. A thing which refuses both invisibility and reading.

The blankness of withdrawal opens up a potential space; in the case of art, music, a landscape, one is presented simultaneously with a refusal and an invitation. Anyone interested in these difficult matters would do well to look to writers from the world of psychoanalysis, where a similar dichotomy arises; the analyst offers a place, an occasion and his practice, manifest in his own mute presence, and into that space the analysand is invited, required, to place whatever comes to the surface. One might imagine in the early stages of an analysis, the beginning of some of those subsequent hours, blankness reigns and, as Heidegger puts it, "the event of withdrawal could be what is most present'.   An insistent mute presence and the need to break the silence, occupy the space, with a babble of facts – the CV, the biography, the story. Something similar happens in the studio; perhaps those who cultivate a practice of meditation or prayer find the same.

I noted earlier that when this refusal is met, the sensation is one of a "slight' shock. On a different scale analysis has discussed the effects of trauma. Major trauma is arresting, closing its subjects down and leaving them with nowhere to go; growth and development are brought to a stop. The body goes on, an aging container for someone stuck behind events; disintegration. Interestingly Christopher Bollas has proposed a complementary category of experience – genera – trauma's positive, enabling, mirror image. 3 Experiences which are integrative. When blankness is met in this good way, generatively, a potential space opens up and something can happen.

Potential, intermediate space; these terms borrowed from Donald Winnicott 4 and from Object Relations, the school of analysis that emerged from the work of Melanie Klein, alludes firstly to the kind of space occupied by transitional objects, real objects found in the world which are picked up and used internally in particular ways; objects defined not by their actuality, but by their relation to the user, the child's piece of chewed blanket is the best example. Secondly, it is the space used as transitional objects are used, the space for the dialogue between me and myself, the space of the consulting room, the studio – anywhere we find ourselves using in these ways. It is what happens there which identifies it, rather than where or what it is.

An intermediate space is opened up in the withdrawal of the thing, the thing seen, the thing being worked. This is a kind of exemplary existential moment. If the encounter is not handled well something else happens, a kind of side-slipping that often looks like a regression forwards; a regression towards a finish, to some previously successful position; a closing down. Everyone has been there in some way. When this slipping is recognised it may be left to stand or it can be rejected, often aggressively. This is the point at which tempers are lost, things get broken. Gesture is in here somewhere and there are gestures which knock things forward into blankness as well as those which close down the space of withdrawal. In practice, what arises out of these moments is the sense of an ethic which moves around, working to sustain the practice itself.   When the practice itself is weakened the shock of insistent mute presence, still valued, leads to an urge to preserve the shock, leads to an impulse to be shocking. Then the less works are mute, the more they have to say: art is left behind and we are in the territory, called by Heidegger "routine cultural phenomena'.

The resources available to the artist working in the space of a withdrawal are the same as those used in analysis. Some are formal; a medium, a process, some rules, perhaps a timetable, and some are what we can call food for thought, "what must be thought about'. Together they make a practice. The practice offers something to attend to when there is nothing to be done. Simple rules; sweep the floor, move dried things along, repeat, repeat. In analysis it's one hour, same time, same place, today, the day after. Pay up, hold nothing back. A practice is a holding environment, itself a potential space likened by Winnicott to the "holding' of the child by the mother. A holding close without having to deal directly with what might seem to be demanded.

The analysand is held in the formality of the analyst's practice and this enables their mutual work on unknown, unseen things. (How unhelpful and perverse the language is – "analysis', "interpretation'). Conversely, the formality of the academy addresses itself towards ends that are framed and established from the beginning; any amount of eccentricity, flamboyance, perversity, is   encouraged, sometimes required, on the way. Practice, the studio, medium, rules and   process hold the artist and the work close to unseen, ungraspable matters of being.

When the dog chases the deer the deer withdraws, running away, the dog is running after. Had the deer stood still the dog would not be running.

The questions – "What if the deer stops?' "What if the dog catches it?' – do not arise. In the field deer and dog running, deer first is deer, dog first is dog, something is fulfilled. The dog is attracted not by "deer' but by the drawing away of the deer. Running in the direction of what runs away is what is most pressing.

2006

1 "an astrology and astronomy of colour'. The expression is Donald Judd's from "Some Aspects   of Colour in General and Red and Black in Particular', reprinted in his Tate catalogue of February 2004.

2 Martin Heidegger, "What Calls for Thinking', from lectures 1951-52. See also Being, Dwelling, Thinking .

3 Christopher Bollas,   Being a Character (London: Routledge, 1993).

4 Donald Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 1991).

1 "an astrology and astronomy of colour'. The expression is Donald Judd's from "Some Aspects   of Colour in General and Red and Black in Particular', reprinted in his Tate catalogue of February 2004.

2 Martin Heidegger, "What Calls for Thinking', from lectures 1951-52. See also Being, Dwelling, Thinking .

3 Christopher Bollas,   Being a Character (London: Routledge, 1993).

4 Donald Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 1991).