What absence is made of

Val and I were in Washington, D.C. for a week. He attended a training course in the city and I was on vacation mode, fresh from boot camp. I was so happy because this trip made one of my wishes true: I got to visit the Smithsonian! 

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At the Hirsshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, I was confronted with this question: What is absence made of? This is a question that the curator/s tried to answer through a select set of art installations collected by the museum. On occasions like these, I miss my museum-hopping friends (Man, Ate Mary, Ate Bing, and Krishna) because I normally pick their brains on how they see the artwork (like when we were at the Pintô Art Gallery).

Anyway, there were some pieces that I think fully illustrated what absence is. Unfortunately, I did not note down the attributions. But mainly, these pieces are about missing something or someone. The giant lower leg, for instance, can be seen as missing the rest of the human's body. But it can also mean that on the other side of the blank wall, a statue of a man is there with a missing lower leg (actually, there's no other side of the wall). And so absence here is, for me, made up of missing body parts.

Another installation showed an empty classroom with worn down desks and lectern. The perceived long-term absence of people (students and teachers) can have a haunting effect. Why are they absent? Did many of them die because of an epidemic or a natural calamity? Are they so afraid to go to class because of violence on the streets? 

I have learned to associate this style of artwork (including the stark white lights) with the Holocaust; hence seeing this piece sent chills down my spine as I thought: Are the students and teachers here victims of genocide and racial persecution?

In a similar fashion, the absence of human figures in this installation is obvious (I think that this is Abbottabad by Huang Yong Ping). The way I see it is that it's supposed to represent the aftermath of the raid done by the U.S. forces on Osama bin Laden's compound that led to his death in 2011. After all that violence, plants have started growing and taking over the compound. Absence of humans, in this case, allows nature to take back its own. It reminded me of the view I saw across the Yamuna River from the Taj Mahal: the jungle slowly but surely swallowing man-made structures.

Absence, therefore, is subjective. From an artist's perspective, absence is far from nothing. It is definitely not a vacuum. There is always something that takes the place of what has gone missing. But before that succession comes into full swing, the sight can be eerie, haunting, and beautiful.