The idea of absence is LGBT art emerged as a type of self-preservation and as an alternative to art movements that valued self-expression in ways LGBT artists were prohibited from partaking in.  Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, for example, created art in a time when the masculine abstract expressionism movement ruled American art.  Their creation of "non-expressive" art, such as Rauchenberg's white paintings and Jasper John's recreation of symbols like the flag were ways in which they could avoid blatant self expression in a time period where homosexuality was illegal. 

Jonathan Katz wrote, "Perhaps Rauschenberg's most famous statement of opposition to Abstract Expressionist pictorial practice is his Erased de Kooning (1953). For this composition, Rauschenberg requested a drawing to erase that he would then exhibit as his own work. De Kooning reportedly picked a complex, well-worked drawing to make the task as difficult as possible. None the less, Rauschenberg succeeded in erasing it and the critics went wild. But it is very much to the point that this bold statement of generational succession and critique should be couched, not in the form of a manifesto or some similar positive statement of identity, but rather in the form of an erasure, an absence. Again, as in the White Paintings, it is as if Rauschenberg's assertion of self could only be presented as the negation of macho Abstract Expressionist identity, not as an alternative to co-equal form." Artists started using art methods that removed the visibility of the artist's hand as a way to be absent from their works. However, as John Cage showed us in 4'33", "There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. "