Blankness as a Signifier

Abstract

Leaving aside a question to which I'll return, that of the blank stare, it seems blankness first appeared as the ground for a signification that it facilitated but that antedated it. According to Meyer Schapiro the smooth white ground common to most pictorialisms was quite a late development.' Blankness, then, was a response to the pictographic rather than a precondition for it. Cave painters did without or felt no need for an uninterrupted field, but one later became necessary-the ground acquired the properties of a clear sky-in order that the image could operate unimpeded by any other presence. Schapiro makes the point that at first this field is filled with rows of figures, and then it turns into a rectilinear space with figures in it, which he tantalizingly analogizes to the walled city. So, in his model, blankness first comes into view as a space in which the pictograph narrative no longer has to compete with a ground cluttered with detail and accident, and then it becomes associated with what one might call a pictorialism of the finite space, where the smooth white ground is coupled with a limit, with a dimension and thus a proportion, and, in consequence, with an overt connection between composition and orientation. The space of the image now has a figural relationship to its viewer; blankness has invisibly changed into a kind of space, a metaphor of some sort (an account of the development of the space of the signifier that makes it be a passage from