On the inciting void

Abstract

The title of this essay requires a double translation in English: it suggests that, in Chillida’s work, the empty instant is a result or consequence of the inciting void (thus, interchanging the noun and the adjective in the original title). Chillida’s sculpture cannot be classified neither as figurative (or mimetic, in general) nor as abstract (such as in the purism of the avant-garde). The philosophy underlying his work doesn’t belong to the Greek world (in which “téchne is much weaker than anánke”, Aeschylus, Prom. v. 511), but neither to the modern world (in which “art is a production... by free will, under which reason lies”; Kant, Critique of pure reason, § 43). Before this distinction an originary, primordial action may be found: the action of the hand offering places, received by a world conceived as intertwinning of measures. This latent double title (inciting is the present participle of the verb “to incite”: void is the result of the action of emptying, not understood as casting, but as hollowing out). Thus, Chillida’s work is literally liminary: it opens the world while being in the world, as if it was the stone’s or iron’s skin. To allow the void to be seen in actu exercito and at every inciting instant means to let the things be as places of a historical world: our fathers’ world.