VACANT

An event has just ended a spontaneous exuberant moving celebration. The hall is crowded, the stadium is full Roars of applause from the audience. An ancient gesture heretic primal at times vulgar revolutionary because it breaks the notion of a secret association revealing an affective connection the sharing of an idea. An embrace addressed to those who have crossed a threshold to offer us a part of themselves. A sign of support and gratitude measurable despite the distance between performer and crowd. But the clapping never ends, it goes on for too long. It becomes hypnotic, dissonant, gradually absurd. The promise of individual transformation and collective catharsis—potentially contained within that ritual—appears to be broken or jammed. What happens when an expressive effort—driven by love or by ego—reaches its climax? When the spotlight goes out—on a performance or on the lies of a leader—the endorphin rush ends, and after a moment of ecstatic unity we suddenly return to normal? Which act of imagination will be able to change us, taking root in our lives beyond the fleeting duration of that applause? Beyond that event? Vacant is an intervention both intimate and public, a composition that invites us to reflect on the experience of an end and of the void, and to question individual agency by engaging the symbolic and inherently iconoclastic power of applause. "Vacant" is made with the contributions of more than 350 artists, curators, philosophers, architects, historians, choreographers, and activists who, from 1954 to 2013, shared their research trajectory—through lectures and gatherings—with thousands of resident artists at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine, USA.