Blank 1864 - 1941

Editor: Here we have "Blank", a drawing by Niels Larsen Stevns, created sometime between 1864 and 1941. It… well, it’s a drawing of blank pages in an old book. It seems so simple. What am I missing? What can you tell me about this drawing? Curator: Consider the material conditions. We're looking at paper, an everyday material but one with a history tied to labor, to industrialization, to the dissemination of ideas. This "blankness" becomes a critical gesture. It's not *nothing*; it is *unused*. What work was *meant* to happen here, and didn't? Editor: I guess I hadn’t considered it as a choice, but a missing… anything. So, the value is in *not* having content? What does that say about how we define “art” or, even, value? Curator: Precisely. How does the labour required to create a blank page relate to the labour invested into creating other kinds of drawings? How might the production of blank pages serve social or political purposes, just as pages filled with drawings might? Editor: So it challenges this division between "high art" and just, well, production? Like it makes me wonder about all the drawings that never made it into art, existing only to serve other functions or not at all? Curator: Yes, this emphasis on material challenges the viewer. Where is the art here? What kind of skill is presented by blankness? Can mass-produced paper exist outside the world of economics, of industry, of production and consumption? Editor: That’s really thought-provoking. I hadn’t even thought about the actual materiality of the blank pages themselves having some inherent social or political weight, which affects what qualifies as “art”. Curator: It’s easy to be distracted by content. This makes us question how art is constructed. Hopefully, we’ve considered some alternate lenses today.