Aesthetic Strategies of the Intermediate Space. Ma and its Suggestions

From the end of the nineteenth century western science and western arts have overturned the ancient conceptions of linear and objective time and space, and in particular in the avant-garde of the twentieth century the idea of an intermediate space, of a suspension of time and of a fundamental dimension of the interval has been introduced. It can be surprising to find that the East, and in particular Japan, have anticipated these intuitions centuries before and that are revealed in the Japanese term ma, “between”. Through the genesis of such a pictographic sinogram, we begin to recognize, in its ideographic configuration, a true fusion of spacial and temporal values. Inextricably space and time, its network of semantic and figurative references is connected to the category of transition, a constitutive dimension of space in Japan. The intermediate space is the space-interval where the void plays a crucial role. This is the sensible consideration of the “nothingness” (mu), understood as emptiness, which is the philosophic cornerstone of Zen, the Buddhist current that since the thirteenth century has exerted a more and more decisive influence of all Japanese arts, not only figurative, including those that, not by chance, we call martial “arts”. Some examples of contemporary western art seem to be inspired to this character of Zen. This lecture aims at comparing two ways of understanding the intermediate space between different models of civilizations.