We had already seen the blocks-long lines of cars waiting for gasoline in Livingstone, and an even clearer expression of the political turmoil in Zimbabwe was the near emptiness of the elegant and impeccably maintained hotel.
Irwin, the subject of a classic book by Lawrence Weschler, "Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees" (1982), developed in the early sixties from a minor Abstract Expressionist painter into an internationally renowned orchestrator of luminous near-emptiness, as with rooms divided by scrims that impress viewers as both barriers and atmospheres at once.
"Dallas Parking Lot" (2001), for example, a magnificent composition of cool grays and icy blues and warm browns that Struth extracted from the ugly mess of the construction boom in Dallas, shows a rooftop parking lot in early-morning near-emptiness and after-rain freshness, over which pristine glass high-rise buildings hover like benign guardians of the sleeping city's security.
The book's protagonist, also named Michel, is a real sweetheart: a self-loathing bureaucrat living a life of near-perfect emptiness.
Djerzinski and his half brother Bruno Clément split the customary Houellebecq protagonist in two: Michel (that name again!) is the near-autistic container of affective emptiness, while Bruno does duty, after some clumsy auditions, as the porn star.
"In the airplane, 50percentt secure; in the bus, 80percentt," Enrique Galindo, 28, said in Spanish as his cross-country coach pushed through the dark emptiness west of Des Moines near midnight.
On the Strip, near Circus Circus, is the yawning emptiness of the $4.8 billion, 87-acre Echelon project, halted last August along with its 12 to 15 new restaurants, including those of chefs such as David Chang of Momofuku Ko in Manhattan.
The chilling emptiness that couples with the near magical feeling of walking through rooms where modern psychology originated is not just the by-product but the intention of this intimate and thoughtful museum.
For a long time Leith believed he might be able to confront the emptiness that seemed to have developed near the heart of him by thinking (as well as by eating).
In his 1652 painting A View of Delft, now on display in the National Gallery, a musical instrument seller sits musing at his stall near a canal bridge that swoops in a grey emptiness towards the city centre.
Large and incomplete public spaces throughout the Ensanche de Vallecas development near Madrid, shown in 2014, exacerbates the sense of emptiness and abandonment.
