Syntactic expletives are words that perform a syntactic role but contribute nothing to meaning. Linguists such as Noam Chomsky regard syntax as a branch of biology and thus purport the concept of syntax as a derivative study of linguistic knowledge embodied within the human mind – whist others such as Gerald Gazdar veer towards a more Platonistic view, since they regard syntax to be the study of an abstract formal system. Yet others including Joseph Greenberg regard grammar as something more akin to a bi-product of phonetics, formed by geographical and cultural influences. No matter your opinion there is essentially a vacuum in language, a space or void that the mind more often than not feels tempted to fill with a detritus of vocabulary, "it is raining", a common saying, but what is "it"? "It" in this example is a syntactic expletive, a nonsensical aberration of grammar given little regard by each and everyone of us in our day-to-day lives. Yet we use them everyday all the same.
Madrid based artist Josechu Dávila‘s work, in my personal opinion, has ventured into a similar area with a range of sometimes controversial visual art, with his collection of, at times, near debilitatingly thought provoking pieces. Deploying a wide spectrum of media including paintings and installations including video and sound works, Dávila focuses on two themes, subtraction and cancellation, and achieves these objectives in a variety of novel interpretative methods including the censorship of a live rock performance, the removal of one minute and thirt seven seconds of an archive radio transmission and the destruction of a neglected 17th painting discovered gathering dust at the back of a local antiques store.
For "Annulment of an XVII century Painting" Dávila uses chloro-rubber paint which is used to paint markings and lines of many municpal roads and motorways across the world. The "performance" was witnessed by a mix of art curators, including a restorer, a head conservation expert, a museum director and invited members of the public at a local art museum,
As Dávila states himself, each piece can be considered as an attack, i.e one piece of art destroying another. His act of painting the canvas of a previous art work which had laid dormant and neglected for at least 20 years in the back of the aforementioned antiques shop had ironically found new purpose, a new ideological iconography of purpose through its own destruction or deletion. It was once again being witnessed and considered by the minds of the local artistic community after centuries of irrelevance both to the art intelligensia and also society at large.
The idea of defacement, subtraction, deletion, the destruction of one work of art by another is extremely pertinent to the world of graffiti. Not only is each stencil piece or spray art found in the streets of most major cities around the world obliterated by other artists and eventually local municipal council directives, but the canvas itself, more often than not is a piece of "public property" and thus all creative acts are treated as public defacement of the structures in question. The ephemeral nature of graffiti and of art as a whole has a direct correlation with our present society, bombarded by a continuous stream of imagery, information, fact and conjecture. Initially each overlaying the previous before eventually obliterating almost all trace of previous input, creating a real-time documentation of 21st Century life as we see it from moment to moment.
Wasting Time and Space of Exhibition by Josechu Dávila
The art of our day, as with all components of our shared history, will eventually be confined to a collective archive of data, data that can be proven incorrect or irrelevant through the course of time and the accumulation of further enquiry and collection of yet more data. Surmising an aggregation of "the past" to form yet more combinations of knowledge-based connectivity via both a the construct of a linear temporal model and the fractal forms of research and communicative methodologies.
Subtraction of Punk-rock concert content by Josechu Dávila
Each subtraction of previous art works in Dávila’s pieces is based upon the mathematical model of Phi or as artists will refer to it – The Golden Section or Divine Proportion. Its roots may date as far back as the ancient Egyptians in the design of the Great Pyramid, The Ancient Greeks recognized it as "dividing a line in the extreme and mean ratio" and can be witnessed in the architecture of The Parthenon. The artists of The Renaissance referred to it as the Divine Proportion – "The Last Supper" by Leonardo da Vinci incorporates these proportions and it has been used for the beauty and balance in the design of many great art works since. The golden section is a line segment sectioned into two according to the Golden Ratio which can be calculated as follows:-
and as a quadratic equation as
What is essentially the mathematical yet skeletal form of perfection of balance and harmony and design has been utilised by Josechu Dávila for the purposes of censorship, removing previous works of art and acts of creativity and replacing them with the beautifully proportioned dimensions of "nothing". The perfection of space overriding the detritus of form and the verbiage of didactic debate.
View an interview with Dávila below:-
