Art without moving your lips

[Art's] voice owes its power to the fact that it arises from a pregnant solitude [silence].
(Malraux).

“… silence encloses all things, including speech, or language, or discourse, or any form of expression.
Art is thus essentially a grammar or rhetoric of silence…”
(Caranfa in reference to Saint Augustine).


In art any distinction between language, philosophy and art is blurred, for all three are manifestations of the invisible in the visible, of the unknowable in the knowable and of silence in discourse.
(Merleau-Ponty)

Silence silences what we think we know, it teaches us to listen – in an integral way.
It promotes an encounter with the “other’ or oneself as another (Ricoeur).

“what we know is more than we can tell and we can tell nothing without relying on our awareness of things we might not be able to tell (Polanyi)


Knowing is ultimately unknowing … and discourse is the voices of silence.

The voices of art are the voices of silence – or the silenced, or the unspeakable, or the unspoken.
Art is silence coming into being or articulation – things said without breaking the silence.
(Merleau-Ponty)


This post references liberally from:
Voices of Silence in Pedagogy: Art, Writing and Self-Encounter.
Angelo Caranfa.

Aesthetics of Silence (1967)

The exemplary modern artist's choice of silence isn't often carried to this point of final simplification, so that he becomes literally silent. More typically, he continues speaking, but in a manner that his audience can't hear. Most valuable art in our time has been experienced by audiences as a move into silence (or unintelligibility or invisibility or inaudibility); a dismantling of the artist's competence, his responsible sense of vocation — and therefore as an aggression against them.
Modern art's chronic habit of displeasing, provoking, or frustrating its audience can be regarded as a limited, vicarious participation in the ideal of silence which has been elevated as a prime standard of seriousness in the contemporary scene.
But it is also a contradictory form of participation in the ideal of silence. It's contradictory not only because the artist still continues making works of art, but also because the isolation of the work from its audience never lasts. With the passage of time and the intervention of newer, more difficult works, the artist's transgression becomes ingratiating, eventually legitimate. Goethe accused Kleist of having written his plays for an "invisible theatre." But in time the invisible theatre becomes "visible" The ugly and discordant and senseless become "beautiful." The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.
Susan Sontag.
The Aesthetics of Silence. 1967.