I Want Nothing

We should have seen it coming.

We should have known better.

It all could have been averted.

, Whatever ‘it’ was.

The Carnival Glory had crashed into the Carnival Legend. Videos of the crash captured by bystanders were shared widely on social media and had been picked up by a news media eager to cash in on the spectacle whilst simultaneously multiplying the spread. The video showed the nose of the Glory piercing the back of the Legend. In its own perverse way ‘it’ was, in a word, glorious. When you watch with sound on there is a great crashing sound as the Glory rips a hole in the side of the ship. My sound was off in the boarding area. Like most things ‘London’ in the back half of the 2010’s my data connection at Heathrow was patchy, uneven, and ever so perceptibly stretched beyond its actual breaking point. My video was a slow staccato of nauseating nautical penetration. haltingly surreal. , and stuck on a loop.

The Carnival Glory is a Miami-based ship (registered in Panama) that has been carrying passengers since 2003, according to the cruise line. It carries about 1,150 crew members, has a maximum guest capacity of 3,756 and a 110,000 gross registered tonnage. The Carnival Legend is a marginally smaller ship at 88,500 tons. You can’t tell in the videos. It carries about 930 crew members, can accommodate up to 2,610 guests and has been in service for the company since 2002. It is based in Tampa but, as is typical, is registered in Malta according to the cruise line.

Details of the sheer weight of the impact to one side, the picture alone itself was something else. Sensual, perverse, and something else. Symbolically and literally this was an ecstatic moment of pure late-capitalist absurdity. Two ships of comparable size to US aircraft carriers but that don’t really ‘do’ anything except act as sites of consumption - Of oil, of capital, of time, of labor. These were one hundred thousand tonne behemoths plowing into another yet weirdly also a literal collision of a sort of abject emptiness - one duty-free, cash guzzling, buffet gorging, minimum wage paying, captive customer exploiting excess plunging itself into another. Glory puncturing legend. It was a hauntingly satisfying ASMR of absurdly senseless late-capitalist destruction. Naturally, I instinctively took a screenshot and sent it to a freelance 'art assistant' [read painter for hire] in China who would turn it into an oil painting for me. - It hangs in our current show.

, In the room behind the golf course.

Back in 2019, as I sat in a departure lounge (and as my Prime Minister Holidayed in Hawaii as Australia burned) this perverse pantomime of post-capitalist penetration seemed a fitting end to a decade in which we probably thought it all wouldn’t get much worse. We were now on the up and up. Posthumously, of course, we would realise just how wrong we were. In that moment though, - as one Carnival Cruise liner recklessly plowed into the Casino deck of another - this must have felt like a perverse high water mark. Only one month earlier in the midst of his first impeachment hearing Donald Trump, the ultimate lucha libre of late-captialism’s unique lurching brand of sadomasochistic self-harm, had come out with an epithet that was as seemingly self-sabotaging as it seemed paradoxically off brand:

On the White House lawn, in a desultory effort defend what was admittedly a somewhat half-witted attempt to essentially hold (pre-war) Ukraine hostage in an effort to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden, Trump uttered two clauses that seemed so inexorably opposed to every fibre of his public persona and the cultural moment that it inexorably sent the internet into a mild tailspin. Clutching to sharpie scrawled Air Force One stationary like it was Ivanka's waistline Trump yodeled his version of the key point of the call transcript to the gaggle of salivating reporters and right-wing shock jocks:

“I want nothing. I want nothing.”

Then again, again with the benefit of some sort of hallucinatory retrospection, it may well have profoundly foreshadowed things to come. Or. Yes this is the twist of sorts. Perhaps Trump was articulating something more studied, more basic - more core - more essential - more profound to our condition. Maybe this glowering, glowing orange buffoon was somehow grasping that ever illusive atavistic ‘It’ that has been plaguing both this upside down feeling world and to some extent human ‘civilisation’ throughout all time. Perhaps beneath his caricature he was showing a hand he didn’t even know he had. Could it have been that this man, neigh this seer, had a mind, that contrary to popular belief, was capable of running far deeper into all our souls than we ever dare admit? I mean probably not. But the words, like the ships, stick in you somehow - “I want nothing. I want nothing.”

For a long time humanity has gone to great lengths to cultivate spaces for the experiences of apparent nothingness. These are duty-free-zones of semiotic hollowness that are able to set the trite complexities of life to one side - often physically - and leave our minds, bodies and imagination free to settle on the experience of just being. This is not a being in the world but rather a being in our self. Cruise Ships are one such place, apparently Donald Trump’s Oval office may well be another. Back in the fourth and fifth century CE Symeon the Stylite achieved notability by living 37 years on a small platform on top of a pillar near Aleppo.

This set off a sort of craze for ascetic monks (and alike) who seek some sort of affirmation of their innermost beliefs, no matter how outlandish, by living atop a tall structure in a needlessly confined space surrounded by the world they are choosing to prorogue. This is a world that is always below and around them but with they never touch. This is a quasi mediative trend and assuredly individualistic impulse that persists across the world to this day. It is guile masquerading as grace.

Perhaps those cruise ships, and even Trump himself could be seen as the latest manifestations of just that atavistic nihilistic longing to exist in a sort of comforting vacuum. Perhaps this finally explains what painting is all about. After all, what - really - were those cruise ships except for empty vessels for a perpetual recirculation of an existentially empty quasi-nihilistic consumption-as-life ontology?

To look upon the interiors of the 2003 Carnival Glory in all it's glory is peer into a post-post-modern kaleidoscopic hellscape - a post- Robert Venturini (“Less is a bore,” Mr. Venturi wrote.) - floating megalopolis of an overwhelming aesthetic totality but without any of the complications of having any actual substance. The ship is, figuratively and literally, simply mass without weight.

But that is after all the point of the exercise. - Economic analysis indicates around 40% of all Carnival Corporation revenue doesn’t come from the sale of tickets but from onboard spending - of the average $1,475 revenue per passenger for a 7 day Cruise around $560 dollars is from onboard spending. In a sense one does not actually buy a ticket on a cruise but rather they pay for the right to indulge in the continual financing of this perverse a state of self-imposed kaleidoscopic abeyance. Call it a holiday.

As a result of the importance of onboard spending cruise ships are, by design, made to go nowhere in particular whilst maximizing the profits that are only made possible by cruising in ‘nowhere’ zones like international waters and by domiciling and ‘flagging’ the boats in letterbox jurisdictions. The annual report filings show that the major cruise lines all use ‘Flags of convenience’ which mean they are governed by the laws (incl. Labor and corporate laws) of their domicile, rather than their ports of origin, when in International Waters. I would go so far as to wager that a studious analysis of Ship movements via sites like CruiseMapper.com would reveal that the top speeds recorded by any given ship may well be during that sprint into international waters after leaving port. In practice this means Cruise Lines pay an average tax rate of 0.8% against a nominal US corporate rate of 21%.

Meanwhile the standard contract for a crew member like a cleaner requires a mandatory 308 hours per month — for the equivalent of $400-700 per month, or $1.62 to $2.27 per hour. In a curious parallel back on land - what the ACLU regards as the slave labor rates - US prisoner worker schemes can, in some cases, actually pay more per hour than some Cruise employees might earn. On average Prisoner worker schemes only pay 50% less and require significantly less working hours per week. Room and board are normally free for both sets of workers however it is worth noting when considering prospective employers that you may well be less likely to be held hostage, in a legal sense, by the US prison system than a Cruiseline.

Even after all the above manoeuvring, both physical, jurisdictional and ethical the average profit per passenger is still only around 17%. Put all together what this means is that for the unique ability of Cruise Ships, their passengers and crew to be legally, and practically be ‘in’ the world whilst also being apart from it they would be a wholly unprofitable enterprise. Cruiselines are literally a nothing buisness - they pay no tax, pay their employees basically nothing often in order to drive in a circle. The core and, only meaningful, business proposition of Cruise Ships is not to take one anywhere in particular but to leverage this perverse jurisdictional fugue-state to facilitate a vacuum in which one has an experience of, but somehow apart from the world. It is profiting from nothing whilst burning thousands of tonnes of oil in the process - at our collective expense.

Perhaps it was the precisely sheer empty vapidity implicit in this collision of these two bohems that gave it its pathos. As Beckett wrote “Nothing is more real than nothing”. Surely then the experience of one ship designed explicitly to do nothing more than harvest its passengers plowing into another was a sort of compounding of reality. I want nothing. I want nothing.

Beckett was, of course, paraphrasing the Ancient Greek Philosopher Democritus who, today, is primarily remembered for formulating the atomic theory of the universe, but whose other contributions included the stipulating that the knowledge of ‘truth’ is difficult, since the perception through the senses is subjective his maxim - “Of a truth we know nothing, for truth is in a well." This maxim would later appear in the Doctoral Thesis of one Karl Marx. To close the political loop one might forgive for making a connection to the Oxford Languages 2016 word of the year post-truth - “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. According to Demoritus, to know one's truth is to know nothing grounding it. Perhaps this is effervescent lesson of activating our atavistic sense of nothingness is one some have learned better than others.

Back in 2019, whether in an aircraft lounge, on a cruise ship or in the rose garden, what was becoming clear, in retrospect, was that today the line can easily blur between the concept of ‘nothingness’ and ‘emptiness’.

A core tenant of buddhist practice is the cultivation of a sense of ‘emptiness’ - often described as Śūnyatā - the current, 14th, Dalai Lama in his 2005 text, The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality, writes that “According to the theory of emptiness, any belief in an objective reality grounded in the assumption of intrinsic, independent existence is simply untenable. All things and events, whether 'material', mental or even abstract concepts like time, are devoid of objective, independent existence.” Later, during a 2011 speech in Japan he would say that "the essence of emptiness," "is that everything depends on everything else.”

To my simplistic mind few things encapsulate this more elegant form of emptiness ethos better than the Zen Garden. Zen Buddhism was introduced into Japan at the end of the 12th century, and quickly achieved a wide following, particularly among the Samurai class and warlords, who admired its doctrine of self-discipline. The gardens of the early zen temples in Japan resembled Chinese gardens of the time - microcosms of a far grander world beyond resplendent with their own lakes and islands.

However, in Kyoto by the 14th and 15th century as the Renaissance took hold in the West, a new kind of garden began to appear at the important zen temples. These zen gardens were increasingly abstract - they were the elements of nature openly rearticulated in order not to reflect reality but to stimulate meditation. The realization of the 15th century Zen Gardeners was that "nature, if you made it expressive by reducing it to its abstract forms, could transmit the most profound thoughts by its simple presence", Michel Baridon wrote in his seminal treatise of garden history - Les Jardins.

The most famous of all zen gardens in Kyoto is Ryōan-ji, built in the late 15th century where for the first time the zen garden became purely abstract. The garden is a rectangle of 340 square meters. Placed within it are fifteen stones of different sizes. The stones are surrounded by white gravel, which is carefully raked each day by the monks. The only vegetation in the garden is some moss around the stones. The garden is meant to be viewed from a seated position on the veranda of the hōjō, the residence of the abbot of the monastery and perhaps symbolically it is physically impossible to see the garden in its entirety from any given vantage point.

From what little I understand of Buddhism, the concept of emptiness is clearly not the same thing as nothingness. Emptiness is nothing adjacent but far more profound. Emptiness is a state of mind and perception free of presuppositions. It is an embrace of the world rather than the negation or the abeyance of it. Emptiness is very difficult to attain, especially for a judgmental person like myself. Nothingness, on the other hand, is the human experience stripped of its false narratives, the myths we create in order to make sense of the phenomenal world. Nothingness just is. We can very easily buy into that.

Perhaps wanting ‘nothing’ is precisely the yearning we have today. Perhaps at one level we do not actually want to be in or with the world, we do not want to be empty, to be connected, or attuned to the grandeur and irrelevance of the Universe. Perhaps, in our heart of hearts there is this part of us that aspires to nothingness. To be those floating Axiom humans in the final scenes of Wall-e - forever disconnected from the world, and cruising indefinitely frictionlessly suspended away from complexities of earthly life, trading existence and attunement, emptiness, for the simplicities of consumption and simulation for the sake of comforting empty ritual alone.

Perhaps it’s just our nature.

After all -

, And I will do anything and everything to get it.

Our current exhibition - I want nothing - is now open.
, Tee-times cost 1 euro.

- JL