This is an image of the back cover of the first edition of Six, a large-format art and fashion publication created between 1988 - 1991, by Comme des Garcons. It was an expression and experimentation of the sixth sense of human perception as a means of a transcendence of the five normal senses of human perception. Interesting concept.
This is an image of an artist's illustration of the silhouette of a black hole.
This is an image, by Yong Chuan Tan, featuring a gray celestial body against a deep starry black background. It is often used in online articles regarding black holes, but it is not one.
When a massive star dies, it leaves behind objects from which nothing can escape, and so it becomes a black hole.
Black Hole is the theme of the Comme des Garcons Homme Plus F/W 2026/27 collection. Black suit jackets and coats with cutaway lapels/hems/button stands, making the garments appear split, folded back, left open to reveal internal structures.
Is the political climate of today starting to draw us into a black hole of despair, and does Rei Kawakubo want us to get out of it? I sure do!
The physicist, John Wheeler came up with the term, Black Hole, in 1968, as a way to avoid having to use the cumbersome description "gravitationally completely collapsed object". But, in an earlier inspiration, another physicist, Robert Dicke, had compared the phenomenon to...
Apparently they are not totally black, as a fizz of particles and radiation are emitted.
Take in this cool book, a great collaboration between scientist and artist. The essay musings are by Janna Levin, professor of physics and astronomy at Columbia University. It is her second book on the subject, the first being, 'Black Hole Blues'.
Halloran's artwork took inspiration from the process of cliche verve, a technique popular in the 19th century for making prints by painting on glass and using that painting as a tool in a photographic darkroom.
Halloran's artwork took inspiration from the process of cliche verve, a technique popular in the 19th century for making prints by painting on glass and using that painting as a tool in a photographic darkroom.
And a link, if the video doesn't happen to work.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J-OZqBRxMg&t=461s
"Take solace in your observations, but they will be yours alone. None of your transmission will make it out of the hole to home. All documentation of your demise will follow you into oblivion." (How to Survive a Black Hole, chapter 3.)
The ANREALAGE label, established in 2003 by Kunihiko Morinaga, works with the mantra, "God is in the details". 
Viktor and Rolf's Fall 2001/02, 'Black Hole' collection was inspired by feelings of negativity. As they said, "We were inspired by black holes, which absorb all light and energy. We wanted to transform negative feelings into something positive and creative."
Rei Kawakubo's 3rd Paris Fashion Week collection, Fall 1982/83, was titled, 'Holes', and it featured distressed unfinished black garments. Shock! Horror! (more like "Mon Dieu!") was the French fashion establishment reaction, many of them calling the collection names like, "Apocalyptic" and "Hiroshima Chic".
It was the black dropped stitch sweater created by configuring the knitting machine to produce holes, that did it.
When asked about the sweater, Kawakubo said, "These are tears to some, but to me they're not tears, they're openings that give the fabric another dimension".
RK has also said, "The void (mu) is important" and "I like to work to work with space (mu) and emptiness".
The concepts ma and mu converge in her black 1982 sweater ensemble.
It inspired my black hole sweater ensemble.I wonder what people think when I wear it?
There is a wonderful black hole in this garment from CdG's SS2017 'Invisible Clothes' collection. Space and empitness. Ma and Mu.
Its' amazing AW 2015 collection revolved around the way that a spot of light hits objects in darkness, with pitch black garments illuminated by spots of pure white. The basic concept went through a range of different iterations...white light as a print...prints fading into darkness...circles to create focus on a garment...rounded silhouettes....It gets me thinking 'very cool fabric black holes'.
The painting of the models faces and bodies was to create an optic effect where you only see shadow. Experiencing the total absence of light and colour forced the audience to focus on the form and line of the garments. (It was not appreciated by everyone, that V&R did this)
And, this one, an asymmetric black dress,
becomes a cool asymmetrical black hole dress.
Black holes can serve as powerful metaphors in literature and the arts, as they are so good at representing an unknown existential dread or danger, something mysterious with a sinister edge.
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| An artist's conception of the intermediate-mass black hole that may be hidden in the centre of the globular cluster 47 Tucanae. |
It's a black hole of a whirlpool.
In 1915, Russian avant -garde artist Kazimir Malevich, painted 'Black Square', the first painting of nothing.
"To the Suprematist the visual phenomona of the object world are, in themselves, meaningless, the significant thing is the feeling."
Here is some interesting information about the painting. https://www.rbth.com/arts/2014/01/09/hidden_signs_of_malevichs_black_square_32989.html
Black Square was followed by Black Cross,
and in 1924, with Black Circle.
Malevich died in 1935, and his funeral featured a custom-designed coffin created by Nikolai Suetin. It featured geometric symbols, a black square and a black circle.
In 2003 the artist group, IRWIN presented an exhibition installation devoted to Malevich, 'Corpse of Art'. It consisted of a precise replica of his coffin, with wax figure, lilies and a Black Square.
Israeli painter, Mordecai Ardon's 1961, 'Landscape with Black Sun', delivers a thought provoking visual metaphor for death and loss.
The sun is replaced with a black circle, making something usually alive with tremendous energy, now seem barren and lifeless. Is Ardon expressing an emptiness in life?
This work is housed in The Jewish Museum in NYC.
In 1976 Slovakian conceptual artist, Rudolf Sikora, started a series of works that explored black holes as the ultimate representation of maximum energy concentration. The black hole was his metaphor for resistance to political repression, that of the Communist Government of Czechoslovakia.
Anish Kapoor's 1992 art installation, 'Descent into Limbo' is a fascinating example of a black hole in art.
Basically the installation is a cube-shaped building inside which, a 2.5 metre-deep hole in the floor is coated in a dark pigment to look like a flat bottomless circle.
"The reality there is one of fear. Standing on the edge, somewhere between a hole and a plane, with a diameter and a depth that is more than big enough to completely lose oneself both physically and pyschologically. In limo, in-between. This is not an experience of voiding one's fear into emptiness - it is a conditional experience of fear."
Kapoor said, "I have always been drawn to a notion of fear, towards a sensation of vertigo, of falling, of being pulled inwards. This is a notion of the sublime, which reverses the picture of union with light. It is an inversion, a sort of turning inside-out. A vision of darkness. Fear is a darkness of which the eye is uncertain, towards which the hand turns in hope of contact, and in which only the imagination has the possibility of escape."
In the first installation of this artwork, visitors had to walk for some time to the remote concrete ediface that contained the void, enter the building, and spend some time looking at the void, trying to understand what is in front of them. So, Kapoor was working time as the "fourth dimension", making the void being made up of concrete, black pigment and time.
(And yes, at least one person fell into the hole, not seriously hurt thankfully.)
And the last one I wish to focus on, Croatian artist Igor Grubic's 1998, 'Black Peristyle', one of his most famous works.
He painted a black circle in the middle of the peristyle of Diocletian's Palace in Split, a major tourist attraction in Croatia.
It was an homage to an action that took place 30 years earlier when a group of artists painted the peristyle in red. As in 1968, Grubic's work in 1998 was classified as an act of vandalism.
A video if you want to know more https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7UB-brkxJY
Another person interested in art and black holes is author and historian, Lynn Gamwell. She has put together, 'Conjuring the Void: the Art of Black Holes", a collection of black-hole art with 155 colour illustrations alongside information about the science and history of black holes. I like her comment, "Artists and scientists arrive at similar ideas by different paths. Both benefit from looking at each other's work."
This link will take you into some of the images to be found in the book.
In some of my research for this blog, I was introduced to Martin Amis' 1997 novel, 'Night Train.
The story involves a detective investigating the death of a female astromoner, who was doing research on black holes. A quote from the novel pertaining to that subject, "Hawking understood black holes because he could stare at them. Black holes mean oblivion. Mean death. and Hawking has been staring at death his entire adult life.'
Somewhere along the line looking at information relating to the above quote, I came across a statement written by Blaise Pascal, French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher and Catholic writer, written sometime between 1657 and 1658. It made me think about the last scenes in 2001 A Space Odyssey...I know it's not a black hole, it's the black obelisk, still think it relates.
SLTSLTBsigning off a black hole.
