Absolute Nothingness: The Kyoto School and Sound Art Practice

Abstract

This paper explores how the concept of Absolute Nothingness as developed in the thought of three key Kyoto School thinkers Nishida Kitarō, Tanabe Hajime and Nishitani Keiji has influenced the practice of sound art. The paper examines the influence of these three philosophers on D.T. Suzuki and John Cage, the Mono-ha movement, and the Fluxus movement before examining how these influences have shaped sound art practice.

Full text

157Invisible Places 7– 9 APRIL 2017 SÃO MIGUEL ISLAND, AZORES, PORTUGAL
Absolute Nothingness –
The Kyoto School and Sound Art Practice
STEPHEN RODDY
roddyst@tcd.ie
CONNECT Centre for Future Neworks and Communications,
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
ABSTRACT: This paper explores how the concept of Absolute Nothingness as developed in
the thought of three key Kyoto School thinkers Nishida Kitarō, Tanabe Hajime and Nishitani
Keiji has inuenced the practice of sound art. The paper examines the inuence of these
three philosophers on D.T. Suzuki and John Cage, the Mono-ha movement, and the Fluxus
movement before examining how these inuences have shaped sound art practice.
KEYWORDS: Kyoto, School, Absolute, Nothingness, Sound, Art, Nishida, Tanabe, Nishitani.

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1. Introduction
The Kyoto School was a group of comparative philosophers and theologians working at the
University of Kyoto between 1913 and 1963. Guided and inspired by the pioneering works of
Kitarō Nishida the Kyoto School were renowned for their integration of Eastern with West-
ern thought. They developed radically novel interpretations of place, body and experience
informed by what Western commentators, most notably James Heisig (2001) has described as
a meontology. Meonotology lies in stark contrast to the Western concept of ontology. Where
ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, meontology is the philosophical
study of the nature of non-being or nothingness. Absolute nothingness does not merely
refer to the absence of some ‘thing’, but refers to a supposed ‘place’ or eld of potential
within which things and no-things co-specify and dene one another. This paper presents
an overview of the ideas of key Kyoto school thinkers before exploring how these ideas came
to inuence and manifest themselves in sound art practices. The paper considers these links
through John Cage and D.T. Suzuki, the Mono-ha movement, and the Fluxus movement.
The rst three sections of his paper discuss the works of Nishda Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime and
Nishitani Keiji and they are highly indebted to Heisig (2001), Yusa (2002), Franck (2004)
and Davis et al. (2011) who provide useful insight and render the often dicult work of the
Kyoto School intelligible.
2. Nishida Kitarō
The founding member of the Kyoto school was Kitarō Nishida (1870–1845). He is often cited
as the most important Japanese philosopher of the 20th century. In fact he is considered the
rst Japanese philosopher to engage with the Western philosophical tradition (Davis et al.
2011). Nishida was born in 1870 and lived through the Meiji Restoration, a period of time
in which Japanese society transitioned from the feudalist han system of governance to the
modern system of prefectures that exists today. For the two and a half centuries directly
prior to the Meiji Restoration Japan had isolated itself from the outside world. During this
time it began to embrace the world and to rethink its internal political and cultural systems
to incorporate some of the global developments that had taken place during Japan’s isolation.
Nishida would contribute to this expansion and reinvention of Japanese culture, bridging the
gap between East and West by rethinking Japanese thought in terms of the Western philo-
sophical tradition. Having dropped out of high school, Nishida gained entrance to Tokyo’s
Imperial University obtaining a philosophy degree in 1894. He soon took a teaching post at
a middle school and under the advice of his close lifelong friend D. T. Suzuki he also took up
the Zen Buddhist practice of Zazen or sitting meditation. The down to earth nature of the
practice provided a counter-foil for his lofty academic ambitions. He was a keen practitioner

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who immersed himself deeply in Zen until the year 1905 when he completely abandoned his
practice. Three years later he became assistant lecturer of Philosophy at Kyoto University
and the released his rst book An Inquiry into the Good in 1911 at 40 years of age.
Nishida was interested in reconciling the intuitive, nonreective consciousness that
he had experienced through Zen, with the logical and rational, reective consciousness
of the Western philosophical tradition. As such An Inquiry into the Good aimed to establish
consciousness as an absolute unifying principle for reality through the transcendence of
the subject-object dichotomy (Heisig 2001,30–41). This interest in transcending the sub-
ject-object dichotomy would stay with him throughout his career. In developing his ideas
Nishida adopted William James’ concept of Pure Experience as “the original ux of life before
reection has categorised it” (James 1904). While James viewed Pure Experience as the foun-
dation of the conscious individual Nishida viewed it as ‘the fundamental mode of true reality”
extending it to provide a unifying theoretical foundation for all of reality. Nishida viewed
this reality as a dynamic unity of pluralistic but interdependent processes evolving within
and as the activity of conscious experience. He viewed self-awareness as that aspect of this
unity which is capable of mirroring the whole. According to Nishida an individual does not
“have” experiences rather experience itself “has” the individual. As such the world mirrors
itself in each of its contents and the unfolding of this mirroring within ourselves is what we
think of as self-awareness. He believed that the mistaken apprehension of reality through
a subject-object model gives rise to the sense of a separate self that thinks itself the owner
of experience. Simple everyday direct experience was synonymous with Pure Experience in
Nishida’s philosophy and was the domain in which subject and object are unied and self
does not exist. Nishida had hoped to establish pure experience as the absolute ground of
reality but as his thought developed he built upon his ideas about pure experience to develop
his concept of absolute nothingness.
In 1926’s From That Which Acts to That Which Sees, he argued that consciousness itself must
unfold in some still other more basic eld. This eld would provide the necessary means for
the existence of that consciousness and so the ultimate ground of reality. Nishida concep-
tualised this eld as an absolute nothingness. As Heisig (2001) observes Nishida’s absolute
nothingness is “nothingness” insofar as it is not of the world of being and so cannot be or
pass away and it is an “absolute” because it cannot be dened in relationship to anything
in the relativistic world of being “so that its only opposition to the world of being is that of
an absolute to a relative.“ (Heisig 2001, 62). As such absolute nothingness cannot become
the subject of conscious experience or an object of experience. It functions through self-ne-
gation in that it nullies any denition applied to it while at the same time providing the
means by which any such denition might be applied. It is the absolute nothing by which all
of the somethings of being are rendered relative. This sidesteps the essentialism inherent in
the subject-object model by preventing nothingness from being positively characterized or

160
armed. Being a groundless ground it provides an epistemic and ontological source that
is an alternative to foundationalist descriptions of reality which posit some bottom ground
level upon which reality is founded. Nishida’s concept of an absolute nothingness then was
not some empty void beyond the world but acted as a creative and dynamic principle at work
within the world. It is encountered as the pure experience of the concrete realities of ones
immediate location. Absolute nothingness developed Nishida’s earlier ideas on Pure Experi-
ence by providing the necessary means for the existence of consciousness. Pure Experience
and absolute nothingness become two sides of the same coin in Nishida’s philosophy (Odin
1996, 80–81). Nishida developed his “Logic of Basho” or place around the idea of absolute
nothingness. He conceptualised absolute nothingness as the ultimate basho (place) or eter-
nal now in which consciousness is located and consciousness itself in which self and world
unfold as the interplay of relative being and relative nothingness which results in the mutually
interdependent existence of the peoples, things and process of that world.
3. Tanabe Haijime
Tanabe Hajime was another leading member of the Kyoto School. Born in 1885 he was 15
years younger than Nishida. In 1930 having been appointed by Nishida to a role at Tokyo
University, Tanabe published an essay, Looking Up to Professor Nishida’s Teaching, which was
highly critical of Nishida opening a rift between the two that would never close (Heisig 2001).
Tanabe rejected Nishida’s pure experience as a starting point for his own thought and argued
that Nishida’s basho (place) of absolute nothingness had religious undertones. He also argued
that Nishida’s attempts to render absolute nothingness as a basho (place) had essentialised
it as an extant object, presenting absolute nothingness in terms of a metaphysical ontol-
ogy rather than a meontology, arming negation rather than negating negation. For the
starting point of his philosophy Tanabe drew from the Buddhist concepts of śūnyatā and
dependent origination and Hegel’s idea that the individual is always dened in relationship
to other individuals to develop his concepts of pure relationship and absolute mediation. For
Tanabe individuals are relative and can be both self and other depending upon how they are
encountered. Furthermore all of reality is relative and interrelated. The individual contents
of reality, objects, people, social institutions, can only exist and make sense in terms of their
relationships to other “things”. This he describes as “self-in-other” and for Tanabe nothing
can exist beyond these mutual co-dening interrelationships. He reformulated absolute
nothingness in terms of absolute mediation which for him is the animating principle which
mediates the web of interrelations from which reality is composed. Absolute mediation is
the observation that “one” cannot be posited with the mediation of an “other” and that
armation is impossible without the mediation of negation. Tanabe’s further assertion
is that nothing can relate directly to another thing but that all relationships are mediated

161
by further relationships and this mediation is absolute in that it permeates all aspects and
elements of reality. Tanabe also criticized Nishida’s basho (place) of absolute nothingness
as being too abstract and failing to relate to the concrete realities of the everyday world. He
developed his logic of the specic as an alternative which aimed to account for the histori-
cal and sociocultural dimensions of reality. The logic of the specic provided an ontological
description of absolute nothingness as the mediating force of specicity and specity as the
socio-cultural substratum of historical peoples. Tanabe’s work grew increasingly religious
over time invoking absolute nothingness as a religious dimension of life that could provide
some form of salvation from the shortcomings of logic and reason as a means of describing
the non-rational. In Philosophy as Metanoetics Tanabe turns to Shinran or Pure Land Bud-
dhism to argue for absolute transformation through radical self-negation and submission
to Other-Power a Pure Land concept which he equates with absolute nothingness.
4. Nishitani Keiji
Nishitani Keiji was born in 1900. In 1914 when he was preparing to enter High School his
father died of Tuberculosis. Nishitani himself protracted the same illness and it was during
this period of struggle that he rst came into contact with Zen through the writings of D.T.
Suzuki. Nishitani would later comment that his youth was a period absolutely without hope
that lay in the grips of nihility and despair (Heisig 2001,191). After his fathers death Nishitani
lived alone with his mother and his own battle with Tuberculosis took a toll on him both
physically and mentally (for more see Heisig 2001). During high school Nishitani immersed
himself in philosophy and is said to have carried a copy of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathus-
tra like a bible while also engaging with the works of Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Emerson, Carlyle,
and Strindberg. After graduation he worked as a high school teacher and adjunct lecturer
while publishing in a number of journals. At this time and his work focused on Bergson,
Nietzsche Schelling, Kant and the European Mystics, Meister Eckhart in particular. In 1932
he took up a position at Kyoto University. Having had an interest in the Zen state of mind
since youth he began focused Zen practice with Yamazaki Taikõ in 1937. At rst Nishitani
used Zen as a counterfoil against which to balance the intellectual pursuits of his academic
life. Over time Nishitani’s engagement with Zen came to be one of the dening features of
his philosophy. The other dening feature of his work was his engagement with Nihilism
which was no doubt inspired by the struggles of his youth. Nishitani once commented that
for him the choice to pursue a life dedicated to philosophy was a choice between life and
death (Heisig 2001, 191). In similar fashion to Tanabe before him, Nishitani spent two years
studying under Heidegger at Freiburg. During this time Heidegger had started also to engage
with the question of Nihilism and while Nishitani learned much from Heidegger’s phenom-
enology Heidegger in turn spent much time learning about Zen from Nishitani.

162
Nishitani’s thought united his interests in Nihilism, Existentialism and Phenomenology.
He recognised a tension between the two extremes of Essentialism and Nihilism and a viscous
cycle of reactionary swinging between these two poles in the thought and behavior of the
average person. Essentialism is the denial of the relative nature of self and world through
the belief that all existent things have some essential substance or set of attributes that are
inherent to them and dene their identity and meaning. This implies an extreme armation
or reication of the subjective ego and objective contents of the world. Nihilism, in this sense,
is also a denial of the relative nature of self and world in the belief that self and world are
devoid of any true nature, identity, meaning or ultimately existence. This implies an extreme
negation of the subjective ego and objective contents of the world. Nishitani aimed to dissolve
the tension between Essentialism and Nihilism through Nishida’s absolute nothingness. For
Nishitani the nothingness of the Nihilistic worldview is merely relative and can be overcome
through absolute nothingness. This required a disciplined process of “self-emptying”. To
achieve this one must rst accept the reality of the nihilistic world-view by embracing the
little personal doubts encountered in everyday life fostering a larger realization of nihility
in which a “Great Doubt” consumes all certitude about reality. Through a further embrace
of doubt the certitude of nihilism itself is dissolved and nihilism is “trans-descended” to
reach the eld of absolute nothingness or śūnyatā which, according to Nishitani, envelops
and pervades all aspects of reality as their most basic identity. This absolute nothingness or
śūnyatā is a space in which the relative world of being is allowed to manifest in its natural
“suchness” or immediacy free of the errors of nihilism and essentialism which are relativized
against the backdrop of absolute nothingness. Nishitani used the language of Mahayana
Buddhism to elucidate these ideas equating absolute nothingness with śūnyatā which posits
that the lack of inherent existence of self and world is identical with the relative and inter-
connected nature of self and world.
5. Nothingness and Sound Art
The previous sections of this paper have introduced the lives and ideas of three key Kyoto
School thinkers. The remainder of this paper will explore how these ideas have manifested
themselves in, and shaped sound art practice.
6. Cage and Suzuki
John Cage is an important gure in the history and early development of sound art. Licht
(2007) credits Cage with taking some important early steps towards a sonic art by opening
the musical world up to the inclusion of sound as compositional material and the act of lis-
tening as a creative process. La Belle (2006) notes Cage’s engagement with the immediate

163
and proximate nature of sound in his attempts to “see each thing directly as it is”. He argues
that Cage expanded Western art music’s understanding of music reminding it that it was
composed of sounds and laying some of the ground work for a future sound art. However
Licht, LaBelle and Kahn (1997) comment that Cage’s work was still limited by the concepts
of music and composition as the organization of sounds in time and as such provides a
precursor to, rather than an early example of, sound art. Whatever the case Cage’s work has
played an important role in shaping sound art.
Cage is infamous for importing concepts from eastern thought into western art music
and the Zen inspired concepts of chance, indeterminacy, and silence dened much of his
work (Larson 2012). Cage attended lectures on Zen delivered by D.T. Suzuki in the late 1940s
(Cage 1990) and cited Suzuki is as one of his chief Zen instructors (Brooks 2007; Larson 2012).
Suzuki Daisetsu Teitaro, born 1870, was a Japanese philosopher and scholar who is said to
have been monumental in the introduction of Zen to the west during the 20
th
century (Larson
2012). He was Professor of Buddhist Philosophies at Otani University, Kyoto where Nishida
and Nishitani also worked as lectures before joining Kyoto University. He also established
the Eastern Budhist Society and The Eastern Buddhist Journal which Nishitani took over as
chief editor in 1965 a year prior to Suzuki’s death (Heisig 2001). As mentioned previously
Suzuki was a lifelong friend of Nishida and he is widely credited with bringing Zen from
Japan to the West after the Second World War. In reality Suzuki brought an interpretation of
Zen that was deeply inuenced by the work of the Kyoto School thinkers. Sharf (1995) and
Baumann (2000) note that Japanese Zen had been completely reimagined and transformed
in the work of Nishida, Tanabe, Nishitani and Suzuki himself and it was this version of Zen
which Suzuki brought to America and which would prove so inuential in the history of
20th century art. Sharf (1995) also notes that Suzuki’s thought underwent a dramatic shift
on the realease of Nishida’s An Inquiry Into the Good in 1911 as Suzuki adopted Nishida’s
concept of Pure Experience and made it the central principle in his presentation of Zen to
the West. He reorganized his understanding of Zen to position immediate Pure Experience
as the essential core of Zen. Suzuki’s inuence looms heavy over Cage’s work. Bramble
and Bradley (2015) and Pearlman (2012) document how this rethinking of Zen profoundly
inuenced the transformation and development of artistic practices throughout the 50s
and 60s impacting works by Robert Rauscehnberg, Kerouac, Pollock, Feldman, Yves Klein
and Marina Abramovic. By the time Cage had begun to attend Suzuki’s lectures at Berkley,
Nishida, who at this point was deceased, had completed the development of his concept of
Pure Experience into the basho (place) of absolute nothingness. Pure experience and absolute
nothingness became two sides of the same coin in Nishida’s thought. Suzuki’s lectures at
Berkley were deeply inuenced by Nishida’s work. Krummel (2015) documents how Suzuki’s
and Nishida’s ideas were mutually inuential on one another and this is especially typied
by the inuence of Nishida’s logic of contradictory self-identity on Suzuki’s interpretation

164
of the Buddhist concept of soku-hi or “armation through negation”. This concept is seen
reected in Cage’s sustained attempts to remove himself from the compositional process,
as typied in Music for Changes, so that theoretically the music is composed without the
participation, or at least without the direct input, of the composer.
Taking silence to be the sonic equivalent of nothingness, Cage’s ideas on silence have
more in common with Tanabe’s idea of absolute nothingness than Nishida’s. This makes
sense as it has been repeatedly noted that Cage’s thinking on silence was informed by his
experience in an anechoic chamber at Harvard where silence manifested itself for Cage not
as an absence of sound but as the sonorous activity of his own nervous and circulatory sys-
tems. For Cage silence was not an absence of sound or the locus in which sounds unfold but
instead “silence is all of the sound that we do not intend” (Cage, 1961). This echoes again
the logic of self-negation by dening silence in terms of the rejection of the intent of the
agent, intender or composer. Cage rejects the existence of an absolute silence that might
become an object of perception. This is similar to Tanabe’s rst reason for rejecting Nishi-
da’s conceptualisation of absolute nothingness, namely that an absolute nothingness could
not become an object of perception. He argued instead that such nothingness must operate
in the world as a mediating principle, which gives rise to and mediates the inter-related
contents of the world through a process of self-negation. To experience Tanabe’s absolute
nothingness then one would be experiencing the broad spectrum of worldly experience as
mediated by this creative form of nothingness. A second criticism Tanabe made of Nishida’s
absolute nothingness was its tendency to ignore and reduce or eliminate the social, cultural
and historical world, silencing these dimensions in the process of negation. Kahn (1997)
levels a very similar criticism at Cage arguing that his concept of silence silences the social
and political dimensions inherent to sound and sonic practices. In reality Tanabe’s claims
were overstated and Nishida revised and improved his philosophy in light of them (Heisig
2001) nonetheless they are interesting in the context of Cage’s ideas on silence. Cage’s work
was important to the development of sound art and his ideas about silence and nothing-
ness directly inuenced a number of practitioners who would also go on to shape sound
art. However, the most direct manifestation of Kyoto school thinking in art did not come
through Suzuki but instead is seen in the Japanese Mono-ha movement which deserves a
brief discussion here.
7. Mono-ha
Mono-ha, often translated mockingly as the ‘School of Things’, was a loosely aliated
group of post-war Japanese artists who rose to prominence in the early 1970s (Yoshitake
2013). They rejected traditional concepts of representation and production engaging instead
in “non-making” and preferring to reveal the materials, properties and inter-relationships

165
of things as they naturally appear in the world. As such they were concerned with the aes-
thetic dimensionality of natural and man-made ‘things’ and the interrelationships between
those ‘things’ in their unaltered states (Sekine 1986). Their works elevated the signicance
of inter-related things in their own right rather than reducing them to simple materials
that might gain signicance through their incorporation into some larger work. Some of the
works produced by Mono-ha artists have drawn inspiration from the Kyoto school thinkers
and Nishida in particular. Lee Ufan was an important Mono-ha artist and a leading gure
in the movement. He published a two-part essay between 1970 and 1971 Beyond Being and
Nothingness – A Thesis on Sekine Nobuo. The essay discussed a number of works by another
important Mono-ha artist Seikine Nobuo. One of these was Phase-Mother Earth a large out-
door earthwork created in 1968. It was installed at Suma Rikyu Park in Kobe, and consisted of
2.2 × 2.7m cylindrical hole cut into the ground behind which a 2.2 × 2.7m cylinder of the same
earth was placed (see Sekine 1980). In his essay Ufan interpreted Seikine’s works in terms of
Nishida’s absolute nothingness and identity of absolute contradiction. Ufan’s own work was
heavily inuenced by Nishida’s philosophy and his writings about his work make constant
reference to Nishida’s concepts of absolute nothingness and pure experience (Kim2007).
In the early 1960s Yasunao Tone cofounded the seven member free improvisation and
noise ensemble Group Ongaku with fellow composer Takehisa Kosugi. The interests and
aesthetic sensibilities of the group were so similar to those of the Fluxus artists operating
around the same time in New York (Pearlman 2012) that George Maciunas, having been
introduced to their work by Cage, Ono and Ichiyanagi, reached out to invite the group to join
in on the activities of the Fluxus movement in New York. Tone (1970) noted that Lee Ufan’s
theories on art making were very close to those of the Fluxus movement and that the Fluxus
artists were drawing from the same well as their Mono-ha counterparts. This is of interest
when one considers the inuence of Nishida’s pure experience and absolute nothingness on
both Ufan and the Mono-ha movement as a whole. Tone himself went on to create his rst
sound art installation Tape Recorder for the 1962 Yomiuri Indėpendant exhibition at Tokyo’s
Minami gallery. It consisted of a 30–40 minute long loop playing back on tape recorder and
concealed in a cloth bag and intermittently emitting sounds intended to provoke curiosity
and further investigation (Tone 2007). La Belle (2006, 151&153) and Licht (2008) note this
piece as an early instance of a sound installation presented as a production proceeding Max
Neuhaus’ early works which are often cited as the rst sound art installations.
8. Fluxus
Fluxus was an experimental international art movement that emerged during the 1960s and
was comprised of a number of inuential artists, poets, architects, composers and designers
(Doris 1998). Directly inuenced by Cage’s Music Composition classes Fluxus was founded

166
and driven by Lithuanian American artist George Maciunas and counted George Brecht,
Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins and Nam June Paik, amongst its members at dierent times. Cage’s
thought deeply inuenced the Fluxus movement (Larson 2012) and the Fluxus movement
would in turn inuence modern sound art practice (Kahn 1999). The Fluxus movement
was interested in breaking down the division between art and everyday life and a number
of prominent artists from the Fluxus movement were engaged with both Zen thinking and
the philosophy of Kyoto School thinkers. La Bash (2008) notes how Yoko Ono’s Painting to
be Stepped On structured space in terms of Nishida’s concept of space in Eastern art where
the observer is situated inside of the space of the art piece and integrated into it rather
than positioned outside looking into or at the space as he believed to be the case in Western
art. Nishida developed this idea in An Inquiry into the Good (Nishida 1913) while developing
his philosophy of pure experience. La Bash argues that this conceptualisation of space is a
prominent and dening feature of much of Ono’s work. Ono would go on to create her own
sound art installations. Her 1961 piece Voice Piece for Soprano is also notable because, like
Painting to be Stepped On, it embraces Nishida’s concept of space in Eastern Art but introduces
it into a sound art context. This may in part be due to the inuence of Cage who encouraged
Ono to embrace her Japanese heritage in the development of her practice (La Bash, 2008).
Whatever the case Ono has continued to produce pieces of this nature with the most recent
arriving in November 2016 in response to the US presidential elections. Doris (1998) exam-
ines Nishitani’s interpretation of absolute nothingness as śūnyatā and follows the concept
through Suzuki and Cage to Dick Higgins thoughts on mutual interdependence and also to
its manifestation in the Fluxus event score. He argues that the śūnyatā concept as described
by Suzuki, was highly inuential on the thinking of the Fluxus artists. Lushetich (2011)
also examines the challenges to the prevailing notions of art presented in the Happenings
of Kaprow and Watts, the event-score and the Fluxkits of Brecht and Ay-O contextualizing
these in terms of Nishida’s absolute nothingness and the interexpressivity which she argues
that it manifests. Kaprow himself noted that his Happenings were exercises in self-obser-
vation intended to move one closer to “pure experience” and were motivated by his study
of Zen under Suzuki (Kaprow and Kelley 2003; Zepke 2009). For Kaprow the boundaries
between art and everyday life should be blurred so that art might take one closer to this pure
experience, a concept he undoubtedly inherited from Nishida via Suzuki. Lushetich (2012)
further explores how Nishida’s absolute nothingness manifests itself in Nam June Paik’s Zen
for Film, Alison Knowles Identical Lunch and in Vostell’s 1966 event score Yellow Pages or an
Action Page. Finally Lushetich (2014) ties these strands together by examining how prevailing
modes of thinking on the topics of space and time exhibited by the Fluxus movement, along
with the concepts of Happenings, Intermedia, the event score and Fluxkits are indebted to
and best characterized, in terms of Nishida’s absolute nothingness. Lushetich’s work high-
lights how the Fluxus ethos was shaped and determined by Nishida’s absolute nothingness,

167
Derridian blind tactics and the Gramscian production of social life. Driven by the Fluxus
ethos a number of artists moved away from the standard musical engagement with sound
through the composition of sounds in time and towards the organisation of sounds in space
as typied in La Monte Young’s Dream House and Wolf Vostell’s Elektronischer Dé-coll/age
Happening Room, 1968.
9. Sound Art
This paper will now explore how the rethinking of Zen undertaken by the members of the
Kyoto School and introduced into the 1950s American Avant Garde by Suzuki has inuenced
the development of sound art practice. It will focus on a number of key themes in sound
art practices that have been inuenced by Kyoto School thought. These are the focus on
site, place and space over time in sound art, the audience and the art work’s co-specica-
tion of one another, a focus on the everyday, the removal of the artist, and listening as a
creativepractice.
Nishida argued that Western artistic practices of his day had historically been concerned
with time or the unfolding of art pieces in time (theatre, opera, music etc.) and with observa-
tion where the audience members stand outside the piece and peer in (visual arts, sculpture).
He argued that art required a basho (place) of absolute nothingness in which the pure experi-
ence of the art piece unfolds and into which the participant and art piece are integrated and
co-specify one another. He further argues that art arises from historical cultural life and so
is shaped by and tied to it (Nishida 2011). Tanabe argued that art should be engaged with
concrete ordinary life (Heisig 2015). Nishitani argued that absolute nothingness or śūnyatā
was the original mode of being of the objects and processes of the everyday world, as they
exist prior to categorisation or conceptualization. For Nishitani art was a means of revealing
the absolute in everyday. Commenting on the Japanese art of cut owers or Ikebana he noted
that “nitude in itself, in being thoroughly nite, represents the eternity behind it. Time
itself, in being completely temporal, becomes an eternal moment”(Nishitani 1995). Bring-
ing the everyday object to conscious awareness causes it to “oat in emptiness” revealing
its “suchness”; the aesthetic dimensions of its immediate concrete reality. The discipline
of sound art shares these concerns. Sound art embraces spatial presentation and emplace-
ment over temporal organization. It exposes the aesthetic dimensionality of the everyday
and the mundane. It enfolds its participants into the work allowing audience and artwork
to co-specify one another. In doing so it often removes the hand of the artist and embraces
listening as a creative process in this co-specication.
Sound art is a contested term (Kahn 2008; Licht 2009). For the purposes of this paper
the term is used to reference the non-musical sonic art form that emerged to prominence in
the latter half of the 20th century and is primarily practiced through the sound installation.

168
A number of practitioners and commentators have dierentiated sound art from music by
stating that sound art is about the non-performative, site-specic, presentation of sounds
in space and music is the performative organization of sound in time (Licht 2007). The spa-
tially distributed installation of Varèse’s and Xennakis’ work at the Phillip’s Pavilion during
the 1958 Brussels World Expo is often cited as the rst substantial sound art installation
(Licht, 2008). The fascination with the interplay between sound and space has, for better
or worse, dened much of the narrative around sound art (Khan 2008). For example Kotz
(2009) maintains that Neuhaus’ 1977 Times Square piece “crystallize[d] a set of ideas about
sound as a way to dene a space” which drove a body of work that explored the spatial and
perceptual instability of sound in public spaces. Neuhaus treats space and time in a similar
way to that of the Fluxus artists. His concept of the installation bears more resemblance to
a Fluxus event or happening than a traditional musical performance. At the same time, as
Cox (2011) notes Neuhaus’ installation approach also echoes Morton Feldman’s attempts to
liberate duration from clock time in music. Henri Bergson developed the concept of duration
to dierentiate between one’s direct phenomenological experience of time as a dynamic and
malleable phenomenon as opposed to xed clock time (Bergson 1946). However, Nishida
criticized Bergson’s duration for not adequately accounting for the “eternal now” which
Nishida conceptualised as a present moment that realises absolute nothingness and also
contains both past and future simultaneously (Nakatomi 2016). Cage and Feldman were
friends and Feldman, like so many of the 1950s Avant Garde, had adopted Cage’s Zen-in-
spired aesthetics in his own compositions (Boutwell 2012). In fact a number of inuential
early installation artist took their points of references from artists who had been touched by
the Kyoto School’s reimagined Zen. After the works of Cage and the happenings and events of
Fluxus, sound art practices began to move towards a more full engagement with the site in
which works were situated. Works were increasingly expressed both in and as environments
rather than individual objects. Deriving from a lineage extending back to Duchamp’s ready-
mades (a similar link is evident in Kim-Cohen’s (2009) Non-cochlear sound art) and owing
also to the fact that Suzuki had made Nishida’s conception of Pure Experience the essential
core of his Zen, the concrete and the everyday facts of life were increasingly explored in
sound art. La Monte’s aforementioned Dream House, “a building in which continuous sus-
tained tones would be heard in perpetuity” (Licht 2008) represented a step in the direction
of exploring sound in and as an environment. Robert Morris’ Box with the Sound of its Own
Making (1961), a simple wooden box from which emanated a three and half hour recording
of the banal process by which the box was created, was reective of the embrace of the con-
crete, immediate and everyday in sound art. Dennis Oppenheim’s A Sound Enclosed Land Area
(1969) in which he recorded himself walking a pre-mapped route on the streets of Milan and
played it back within the gallery challenges traditional distinctions between the site-specic
piece, the gallery installation and the soundwalk. Janet Cardi and George Bures Miller’s

169
Audio Walks take participants on walks around predetermined routes and introduce an audio
component to proceedings delivered over headphones. The practice of soundwalking, which
is indebted to Westerkamp (1974) and Schaefer (1977), echoes Nishida’s concepts of pure
experience and absolute nothingness with its focus on the unmediated experience of the
immediate sounds in ones environment. It also echoes Tanabe’s belief that art should be
focused on the concrete and immediate realities of everyday life (Heisig 2015). The embrace
of space in sound art has been linked to concept of site specicity and while early sound
art practices were engaged with the conceptual and concrete realities of space, more recent
artists and theorists have begun to focus on the concept of place (see LaBelle 2015). A more
recent installation to engage directly with the question of space in terms of Nishida’s thought
was Presumed Wind Load by Yves Netzhammer & Bernd Schurer. It was installed in 2014 at
the Gray Area, San Francisco for Milieux Sonores: Sound and Imaginary Space curated by
Marcus Maeder. The piece drew upon Nishida’s logic of basho (place) in its juxtaposition of
real and imaginary spaces mediated by sound and spatiality in the context of an installation.
In LaBelle’s (2006) discussion of Neuhaus’ rst sound installation Drive In Music 1967
he notes that Neuhaus is inviting the audience to participate in the creation of the work
because the sounds were received by the individual’s car radio and mixed on the basis of
the driver’s speed, location, and trajectory. There is the sense of a removal of the artist
from the equation here, in order for the piece itself to become realized in this work. This
recalls Cage’s compositional approach and the logic of soku-hi or armation through nega-
tion as interpreted by Nishida and given to Cage through Suzuki. McMullen (2010) argues
that Cage’s attempts to remove himself from his pieces were misguided and did not go
far enough, instead they served to further entrench Cage in the role of composer, gaining
him international notoriety as such. She recommends Pauline Oliveros as exemplary of a
composer who has negated themselves in their work thanks to her “focus on embodiment,
improvisation, and the dismantling of the mind/body dualism”. This echoes the ideas of
the Kyoto School thinkers who each grappled with and developed philosophies to overcome
the subject/object divide. Likewise LaBelle (2006, 5) notes that Cage was still very much in
control of the modes in which he chose to remove himself from his work. Whatever the case
the removal of the artist and the integration of the audience into the creation of sound art
is a recurring theme. This surrendering of control in sound art practices can be achieved by
passing control to a participating public or to a technology. Kubisch’s Electrical Walks pro-
vide the audience members with the means and technology to participate in the generation
and structuring of the piece, as does the practice of sound walking more generally. Like-
wise many of Mary and Bill Buchen’s public installations have an interactive element that
requires public participation. David Rockeby’s Very Nervous System defers control through
his computer vision algorithms and computational sound synthesis techniques to allow the
participants to control and determine the behavior of the installation through their physical

170
gestures. Ximena Alarcon’s (2007) Sounding Underground deferred control to participants in
the creation of an interactive sonic environment from commuters’ memories of the sound-
scape of the London underground. It could also be argued that Alvin Lucier’s I am Sitting in
a Room presents the portrait of a composer slowly losing control over his piece to the room
in which the piece is located as the composer’s voice subsides and the reverberations of the
room begin to dominate the soundscape. In a similar vein Christian Marclay surrenders a
level of control over his piece John Cage from his album More Encores. John Cage was created
by cutting up a selection of Cage records and a gluing a selection of the pieces together to
create a single playable piece thus deferring the agency of the creator to the process and
technology in question.
In Neuhaus’ Time Pieces we see an exploration of what the Kyoto School thinkers describe
as a relative nothingness. Neuhaus’ own thoughts on the pieces seem to be indebted to
Schaefer’s (1977) concept of the sound signal. Neuhaus (2006) notes that these works “form
the sound signal with a silence rather than a sound”. In these works a small sound is
introduced into a space and gradually builds unnoticed for some minutes before abruptly
disappearing. The absence of the sound becomes obvious to the listener, opening up a space
of silence. In this way Neuhaus creates a sonic experience through the removal of sound.
From the point of view of the Kyoto School, the silence is relative in that it is dened by its
opposite, a sound. Yet the space in which this dialogue between sound and silence unfolds
is an absolute silence. In Kyoto School thought, this space might be best dened as aural
consciousness, the space of hearing and listening. Drawing from the perception of Tanabe’s
concept of absolute nothingness, hearing would be a passive process in which absolute
silence mediates the interplay between relative silence and sound. Listening would be the act
of consciously bringing an absolute silence to a sound in order to experience the self-con-
tradictory interplay of sound and relative silence which dene the identity of that sound.
In the culture that surrounds sound art practices, the status of listening is often ele
-
vated to become something of an art form, or at least a creative practice, in itself. This
reects Nishitani’s idea that the process of paying conscious attention is a creative practice
in and of itself. This is probably most true of the aforementioned practice of soundwalking
(Westerkamp 1974), in which listening to one’s environment is an end in itself. For Voege-
lin (2010) listening is creative and a listening practice can allow one to both engage with
the world and to partake in its generation. Oliveros’ (2005) Deep Listening practice aims
to “heighten and expand consciousness of sound in as many dimensions of awareness and
attentional dynamics as humanly possible”. La Belle contrasts Oliveros’ Deep Listening with
the expanded mode of listening encouraged in Neuhaus’ work, which he argues attunes the
listener to a space of possibilities beyond oneself. Bill Fontana (2002) too makes the argu-
ment for listening as extended through recording technologies as a form of composition.
These listening practices tend to move away from the kind of reduced listening introduced

171
by Pierre Schaeer (1966) in favor of a more inclusive, expanded listening. In Listening
Jean-Luc Nancy also argues for a new practice of listening. He critiques Husserl’s phenom-
enology and the mode of reduced listening and its resultant object sonore (sound object) that
Pierre Schaeer developed from his own reading of Husserl’s phenomenological bracketing
(Kane,2012). Nancy argues instead for a mode of listening that Hudson (2014) places closer
to Vogelins generative listening practice. Krummell (2014) notes the similarities between the
thought of Nancy and Nishida with both viewing the world as a relativistic, historical and
social dynamism that has as its source an absolute nothingness. Clarke (2012) also appeals
to Nishida and Nishitani in his description of Nancy’s ontology of sound as a śūnyatā of the
sonorous drawing a further parallel between the thought of Nancy and the Kyoto school.
10. Conclusion
This article has introduced some of the ideas core ideas of the Kyoto School and examined
how those ideas have gone on to inuence sound art practice. It has explored how absolute
nothingness and pure experience were originally developed by Nishida Kitarō and further
rened in the work of Tanabe Hajime and Nishitani Keiji. It also examines how D.T Suzuki
and the Kyoto School redened Zen in terms of these concepts in the early 20th century. It
further traces the spread of these ideas into the Mono-ha movement and through Suzuki to
Cage and later the Fluxus movement before discussing some recent manifestations of this
line of thinking in sound art practice.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. This publication has emanated from research conducted with the
nancial support of Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and is co-funded under the European
Regional Development Fund under Grant Number 13/RC/2077.
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