Horror vacui

In visual art, horror vacui (/ˈhɔːrər ˈvɑːkjuːaɪ/; from Latin "fear of empty space"), also kenophobia, from Greek "fear of the empty"), is the filling of the entire surface of a space or an artwork with detail.

Origins

The term is associated with the Italian art critic and scholar Mario Praz, who used it to describe the suffocating atmosphere and clutter of interior design in the Victorian age. Older, and more artistically esteemed examples can be seen on Migration period art objects like the carpet pages of Insular illuminated manuscripts such as the Book of Kells. This feeling of meticulously filling empty spaces also permeates Arabesque Islamic art from ancient times to the present. Another example comes from ancient Greece during the Geometric Age (1100 - 900 BCE), when horror vacui was considered a stylistic element of all art. The mature work of the French Renaissance engraver Jean Duvet consistently exhibits horror vacui.

Examples

Some examples of horror vacui in art come from, or are influenced by, the mentally unstable and inmates of psychiatric hospitals, such as Richard Dadd in the 19th century, and many modern examples fall under the category of Outsider Art. Horror vacui may have also had an impact, consciously or unconsciously, on graphic design by artists like David Carson or Vaughan Oliver, and in the underground comix movement in the work of S. Clay Wilson, Robert Crumb, Robert Williams, and on later comic artists such as Mark Beyer. The paintings of Williams, Faris Badwan, Emerson Barrett, Joe Coleman and Todd Schorr are further examples of horror vacui in the modern Lowbrow art movement.

Horror vacui (film)

Horror Vacui (German: Horror Vacui - Die Angst vor der Leere ) is a 1984 German film directed by Rosa von Praunheim. Shot in a neo-expressionist style, the film is a satire on cults of any kind. The plot follows Frankie and Hannes, a young gay couple living in Berlin. One is studying art and the other medicine. Their happy life is disrupted when Frankie attends a lecture and quickly becomes involved in a sinister cult operating as a self-help group called “Optimal Optimism”. Madame C, a former Nazi party member, is the leader of Optimal Optimism. When the cult members discovers that Frankie is gay, he is repeatedly raped by both men and women of the group. Hannes must find a way to rescue him.

Notes

References

External links

Horror vacui (physics)

In physics, horror vacui, or plenism, is commonly stated as "Nature abhors a vacuum." It is a postulate attributed to Aristotle, who articulated a belief, later criticized by the atomism of Epicurus and Lucretius, that nature contains no vacuums because the denser surrounding material continuum would immediately fill the rarity of an incipient void. He also argued against the void in a more abstract sense, (as "separable"), for example, that by definition a void, itself, is nothing, and following Plato, nothing cannot rightly be said to exist. Furthermore, in so far as it would be featureless, it could neither be encountered by the senses, nor could its supposition lend additional explanatory power. Hero of Alexandria challenged the theory in the first century CE, but his attempts to create an artificial vacuum failed. The theory was debated in the context of 17th-century fluid mechanics, by Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle, among others, and through the early 18th century by Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz.