A Poetry of Transience
by
Joseph McElroy
Somewhere near the beginning of this experience-this exhibition
of largely contemporary art (and on an island I have sometimes visited as a kind
of city refuge from the city)-I find in a glass case an 8-inch-high Buddha ("author
unknown") and find that it is difficult to tear myself away. Almost silver
in the light, this strangely fresh, 16th-century bronze might make of me secretly
a connoisseur-but of what? Its tranquility? Its anchored presentness? Its elephant,
lotus and moon throne?
This was Friday, November 22nd, 2003, and to get here
I had traveled across a chill, bright, windy harbor that I have looked at since
I was old enough to look, to open my eyes, to think. You will say, "to feel."
Yes; but think. To know what I'm feeling; feeling my way. Which often, perhaps
too often, has seemed to be in words. Since my childhood in Brooklyn Heights.
And for many decades in New York City. Leaving (for years at a time) and returning.
By road, river, bridge, rail, air and by this very harbor with its tugs and oil
tankers and container ships, its Statue, and Ellis Island (with that poor, piled,
painful mountain of suitcases in the central hall exhibiting the lives of unknown
would-be immigrants who came here long ago); and fire boats and police boats and
Coast Guard patrol boats that remind me not only that I was a Coast Guard sailor
at the time of that Korean War that is weirdly still with us, but that I am a
resident of lower Manhattan, a few blocks from Ground Zero.
And let me not
leave out of this inventory what I have contemplated from so many distances during
my life if not exactly meditated upon-the Staten Island ferry. It will bring you
out here (connecting with a ten-minute S40 bus ride) to this Snug Harbor, as they
have called the place since 1801, where I find myself walking through rooms that
once housed aged mariners but now exhibitions and cultural activities and, since
September 28th and until February 29th 2004, "The Invisible Thread: Buddhist
Spirit in Contemporary Art." So absorbed in this show of 53 mostly American,
mostly contemporary painters, sculptors, photographers, and installation and video
and occasionally not quite categorizable artists, I must not forget to say that
the gallery is the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, one of several landmark
buildings interesting in their own right on the grounds of the Snug Harbor Cultural
Center in Staten Island.
To this exhibition I bring an outsider's long-time
interests. And I bring questions because I want to understand, because I want
to wake up every day of my life. What is Buddhist, what is American? This is what
I bring and seek to take possession of and be provoked and simplified by. As if
I stand somewhere between the very small Buddha I began with in the south wing-and
the very large American Buddha now confronting me, 25 feet long and reclining
along a fine old wood floor in the great hall of the north wing of this early
19th-century building.
Based on the ancient, 40-some-foot figure of the Buddha
at his death carved out of a rock outcrop in Val Gihara, Sri Lanka, this one is
a brand new, air-filled sculpture of painted cloth. Huge but light, it reminds
me to breathe, because its audible electric fan seems to pump up its giant breathing
presence, so you hear it as almost but not quite a distraction from an imaginary
silence where you stand. Or I, since I'd better speak only for myself, accepting
a moment's peace like a gift from this transcendent blown-up bag of air, this
majestic, shaped balloon, empty and tremendous. The sculptor, Lewis deSota, calls
it "paranirvana (self-portrait)," telling us that the inflated face
is his own at some future moment of buddhahood, dissolving, it occurs to me, that
self that was never more than an aggregate of interactions with others (as the
old texts say, and some recent fiction, even my own, might confirm).
Nearby,
within earshot of the fan, the northwest corner room has been subtly enhanced
by Arlene Schechet's installation, "The Wheel Turns," so that the room
recalls this whole place, from the original ceiling frescoes of anchors and ship's
lines and knots, to all the meanings of the glinting waters of the harbor I can
see through the window. Often more explicitly Buddhist in her sculpture but never
more poignantly grounded than here, Schechet continues the ceiling themes above
us, positioning at waist height ropes cast of palest bluish crystal so they seem
to have been threaded in and out of the four walls, strands at one point broken
and frayed. In the center of the floor where we must turn and turn to read them
(and with our feet, as the artist invites us to do, help erase them) proverbial
words printed in concentric circles speak a poetry of transience-about feeling
which is like a bubble of water, perception a mirage, consciousness a ghost, our
existence "a sphere which is neither Earth, nor water, nor fire, nor air,"
nor infinity of space, neither coming nor going, our destination the end of suffering:
until we look up from this inscribed whirlpool to find in the center of the old
decorated ceiling a captain's wheel to tell us we are somehow on course.
But
if art may focus meditation, can you make a religion out of transience? A Presbyterian
hymn tune slips into my memory. What were the words? They yield for a moment to
T.S. Eliot's in The Wasteland which climactically, and desperately in 1922, invokes
the great spiritual voices including that of the Buddha to give meaning back to
our civilization, though I am remembering in particular the drowned sailor Phlebas
the Phoenician in the next-to-last part, who "Forgot the cry of gulls, and
the deep sea swell / And the profit and loss."
The wheel of birth, death,
life, turns often as I pass along these halls and cross thresholds. An intricately,
brightly woven 18th-century Tibetan mandala hangs on a wall. Occupying an entire
room, "Rose Mandala" (2003) by Chrysanne Stathacos seems casual. She
has sprinkled many-colored petals on a circular mirror and beyond its edge, which
scatter as I tread carefully and become aware of a rush broom in a far corner
and, hung along the wall, bags of sweepings. An effect of everyday work and time
and humble art and impermanence. The artist's comments on her intention and sources
prove both rich and unneeded; the work works by itself.
Christine Lahaie's
motor-driven spindle in "Cam Shaft Padma" turns a double-ended, red-handled
paintbrush which, in some fashion free, very slowly pushes outward, again and
again before it falls back, a glass panel through which light projects luminous
bubbles of shadow on the wall. I am not surprised to learn that the Buddhist word
"padma" may mean a possessive passion, here evidently tempered. Less
hard-edge than in other work of Lahaie's, the technology and some meditative practice
of repetition may touch the viewer's physical rhythm. In her statement the artist
stresses breath, like other makers of mindfulness here. The dissolving of conflict
(hardly unique to Buddhism) evidently accommodates in art-or does it?-the tensions
that make this small-scale mechanical work strong. It builds and releases, turns
back upon itself.
By contrast Max Gimblett's black acrylic circle "No
Trace," seven feet across, projects the suddenness of the swift stroke. A
calligraphic boldness as well as the apparent enso circle symbol of enlightenment
might indicate Japanese Zen, as does the artist's elliptical explanation "all
mind / no mind." Explicitly an enso, Kazuaki Tanahashi's "Forest Within"
circle in green comes with an acknowledgment of the
tradition. Yet "this
is America, anyone should be allowed to draw ensos in her or his own way,"
the artist's statement continues. What he makes of the Lucent Technologies logo
I don't know. Unveiling its enso in 1996 acknowledged by the graphic designers
as derived from ancient Buddhist and Hindu symbolism, the company elsewhere incredibly
claimed that its enso was arrived at independently. Reassociated now with the
phone that Lucent manufactures, to say nothing of baseball cap, coffee mug, sports
bag, delivery truck, and junk mail, it would surely have resembled for the late
(always new) John Cage our ambient noise which is first of all to be listened
to as carefully as trash cans rattling, Haydn's Surprise Symphony, a helicopter
overhead, or my old hymn.
Of all the work offered us in this exhibition, the
least sensuous is the score, or three framed pages anyway, of Cage's early Sixties
instrumental ensemble composition "Atlas Eclipticalis." I read the passage
posted to the left from his autobiographical statement, and like his books A Year
From Monday and Silence, it is fascinating. If Zen is without ritual or sacred
text (the better to act)-which is probably a very non-Zen generalization (if not
a slappable offense)-Cage spent much of his working life generating unforeseen,
indeterminate, direct, and semi-unrepeatable occasions.
Among such other early
and distinguished American discoverers of Buddhism as the photographer Minor White,
represented in this southeast room of the south wing with Cage, Thomas Merton
was better known in the Forties and Fifties as a Trappist poet and the author
of The Seven Storey Mountain than for the effect of his interest in Buddhism,
which was to strengthen the natural bonds between East and West. His drawings,
of the type that appear elsewhere in this issue, make a meditative calligraphy
in touch with things all the more real in the silence of his monastic vocation.
Cage, who was public, called himself "a ground ... in which emptiness could
grow"- in part through, I assume, the silence that can happen not only in
those famous gaps and pauses but if you end a musical piece almost immediately
upon beginning it, incidentally giving the listener a chance to think. If "the
function of objects," as a character of Samuel Beckett's once said, "is
to restore silence," the Cage "objects" are not only his revolutionary
music but wit touched by that "taste of Zen" he calls an "admixture
of humor, intransigence, and detachment."
Approaching him from another
angle (or broadside), the nine tiny video screens housed in wooden bird cages
by the grandfather of New York video Nam June Paik produce a homage to John Cage
with effects theoretically like his but perhaps more pleasurable. Paik runs different
sequences of the same shots equalizing the details randomly as we connect from
street scenes apparently Asian to the face of a child and of a man (Cage himself,
who seems very happy). Paik somehow creates a population without an anecdotal
center, with the voices and all other sounds so naturally, easily, visibly absent
as to yield an unalloyed and relaxed attention. An object for meditation like
so much in "The Invisible Thread," the film also implicitly asks, Why
not trust the viewer with something to one side of entertainment and true to how
we experience our moments in that emptiness that will form itself?
Where is
the boy climbing to in a rare film, "Gabriel" (1976) by the great minimalist
painter Agnes Martin? He doesn't need to know, for the unknown easily contains
his aim. He walks on and on along an upland trail in orchard and pasture foothills
and slowly ascending mountainous terrain. We wait for a similarly steadfast and
unchanging man at the edge of Bill Viola's "Reflecting Pool" for minutes
emerging in stillness. When at last he jumps, the frame freezing him in midair
for a while is eventually followed by his simply vanishing. Into not the water
or exactly the woods, so much as his own concentration in the natural scene which
was a condition of his being here. As in turn the attentive viewer may also find
a place to be absorbed, if not to vanish; or so it seemed to me. In the Hiroshi
Sugimoto video "Accelerated Buddha" (1995) time turns visibly and rivetingly
timeless in quick repeats of apparently the same image or in cuts and substitutions;
and, standing on the threshold of an upstairs room of the north wing, I wonder
if the film is multiplying our experience in order to empty it out into some new
birth. Here is my black hole again, this concept of "emptiness" which
I get and then lose, every day of my life. Sugimoto's staccato texture is irritating,
contagious, and hopeful, oddly. It's the electronics of the screen and a curious
suspense asking, Am I unique? Hardly.
Twice I went through the show, in the
afternoon alone after lunch in a café on the grounds near a quiet garden,
and in the morning with one of the curators, Lilly Wei. She is a distinguished
critic, a regular writer for Art in America, a contributing editor at ARTnews
and Art Asia Pacific, as well as the curator of many shows here and abroad. She
it was who decided the sequence of works in this show-all important because of
the juxtapositions. A quite swift act of intuition when it came to it (she tells
me) after weeks and months of inspired, sometimes precarious preparation. Her
essay for the show, "How Buddhist Is It?" surveys the curious congruence
of freedoms shared by art with Buddhism itself.
As if Buddhism turns out to
be an art of life: for it is life's sake art is for. As Xu Bing's small glass
sculpture, (2003) "Sausage, Bean, Worm, Shit, Zen" glimmeringly metamorphic
and multiple, tells me. Or as Isamu Noguchi seemed to mean in his remark about
art and awakening, which his two bronze "elements" suggest ("Seen
and Unseen," 1962)-like actual stepping stones in a garden of consciousness,
I think, recalling those Japanese Zen gardens he discovered in 1931.
Andrew
Marvell's "The Garden" comes back to me from the 17th century for its
nearly Eastern nirvanic poise close to the time of the terrible Civil Wars in
England; and now some verses follow from "The Coronet," in which Marvell's
speaker, on the thorn of an artist's dilemma, despairs over how to make a matchlessly
crafted poem to his Savior without being guilty of the sin of pride. That is a
side of Christian thinking not unlike the ancient Hebraic prohibition against
any art in competition with God's creation. I watched on television in March of
2001 the dynamiting in Afghanistan layer by layer of the Great Buddha of Bamiyans,
carrying out an Islamic edict against religious representational art. It was shameful,
and ironic, considering modern Buddhism's generally pacific values, neither competitive
nor in fact evangelist if you remember the Dalai Lama's remark, "If the majority
of humanity remains nonbelievers, it doesn't matter. No problem! The problem is
that the majority have lost, or ignore, the deeper human values-compassion, a
sense of responsibility."
The second time through "The Invisible
Thread" I found myself connecting works in many new pairings. This is the
viewer's imagination or luck alive with the surprises of an original and unprecedented
show. The photographer Tri Huu Luu, who escaped from Vietnam and returned to document
Buddhist practice, shows us the back of a monk's head: it is the turning away,
the human close-up, I think it is really the massed single hairs, that I put beside
another work, Hoang Van-Bui's "Unfamiliar Prayers" (2000), a wall of
incense sticks massed densely above, sparsely in the lower area, casting their
triangular double shadows above a bronze mourning bell, recalling a temple in
Hue; somehow recalling for me the self-immolations with which Buddhist monks tried
unsuccessfully to have an impact on the war so many Americans experienced at a
distance.
Who can know the effect of Buddhist studies on Louise Fishman's insight
into the awareness of movement? It hardly mattered to me, in the presence of her
rough and vital action-painting, "Lifting, Moving, Placing," an emblem
that seems in its simple, stepped structure to narrate gradual knowledge. Is there
some Buddhist genre of the Sublime in Pat Steir's sudden, solitary, abruptly abundant
red waterfall, the paint pouring as if gravitationally flung? I looked for a human
figure and didn't find one, though I felt one there. Philip Taafe's "After
Tsuba Colony" belongs, and is, in the same room with Tatfoo Tan's "United
We Stand." The first superimposes disturbingly rendered coils of razor ribbon
upon block prints to evoke themes of the Buddhist ancestral warrior retaliating
symbolically. The second is fierce and perhaps tragic, dynamic in its red strokes
across an area that seemed to me mountainous and animate with gold exploding blossoms
above. We are upstairs at the southeast corner of the north wing and we are ready
for the meditation room furnished with cushions.
But I'm on my way back to
Manhattan. That old hymn comes back to me, "For those in peril on the sea."
I have to make a couple of phone calls. Is the City encroaching upon all these
images I don't want to forget? Richard Gere's photo of people disappearing in
a sandstorm; Dove Bradshaw's heap of ordinary salt, a funnel slowly dripping water
on it; Tom Friedman's "Cup and Straws," an elegant humorous lightness
giving the viewer a luminous lift; Nancy Haynes's visibly changeable glow-in-the-dark
acrylic abstraction of monastery courtyards where debates took place. I have to
make one last stop to see again the four head-high Buddha faces grouped like aspects
around a small central space. Inside it one discovers that the Buddhas are cut
spectacularly from hundreds of New York City phone books. Incredibly the inside
edges of these palpable recyclings never used for their official purpose emerge
like gray stone, a miniature Rushmore containing a cyber-compressed population
of metaphors which Long Bin Chen, one of the artists-in-residence here, offers
as if it were a token of . . . this show, this community of work, surprising,
near, nourishing, to some extent American, touched in its embracing variety by
the Buddhist spirit.
Joseph McElroy is the author of eight novels, most recently
Actress in the House (Overlook Press, 2003). His stories and essays have appeared
in The New Yorker, The Nation, Art International, The New York Times Book Review,
Conjunctions and other magazines.