The Japanese Pavilion at LACMA is hushed and dim. Few people enter it, despite the unquantifiable influence of Japanese art on the west. One is already a seeker when one enters here.
I wish I liked the pavilion better. Architect Bruce Goff was Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired and trained, but what comes of this is a mini-Guggenheim trying very hard, showing it, and controlling the experience of viewing in an almost unpleasant way. I will leave the disappointment here to record how much I loved seeing the exhibit, "Japanese Painting: From the Zen Mind".
It's getting to meet a panel discussion of some great Zen masters, encountered and read by Western artists and writers who turned to the east and were profoundly redirected.
Remember this? "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" I was in high school when I encountered this Zen koan, and surely to most of us it is a cliché, long drained of meaning because usurped by pop-style conceits related to the craze for all things"oriental". The koan was actually written by a Japanese Zen monk, Hakuin Ekaku (1685-1768). The painting at left, by Hakuin, is of a birch rod, which zen trainers used on inattentive sitters at zazen to assist them to attain enlightenment. I am sure it was a great help. It was presented to a student upon "graduation" from monk's training. The painting is speedy, bold, casual, slightly awkward, utterly and effortlessly sprung from long effort at calligraphic accomplishment.
Hakuin struggled for many years to attain enlightenment and finally concluded that whether or not he had done so, he would teach - his dharma was as a boddisatva (Buddhist saint), delaying the attainment to assist others to find it. (His biggest problem, it sounds to me, was to commit the Zen sin of trying too hard - though he became legendary, his satori was much delayed.)
Hanshan (Cold Mountain) was a Chinese hermit/monk/traveler in China during the late 8th-9th century CE.
He and his friend Shi-Te traveled around China joking and fooling around, appearing feckless to many, but living a Zen life. He and Shi-Te are the authors of a body of poetry called Cold Mountain Poems, often the subject of calligraphic scrolls.
Jack Kerouac dedicated "On the Road" to him at Gary Synder's suggestion (Synder among the first translators of Hanshan), and in another book by Kerouac, "Dharma Bums", he and his buddy pal travel around impersonating HanShan and She-Te. No one recognized them until he revealed this in the novel, however. (Thus the prior reference to styling oneself zen, and the seminal buddies-on-the-road narrative genre.)
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| Brice Marden, Cold Mountain
Of interest is Brice Marden's encounter with HanShan's poems and Chinese calligraphy. He worked with the ideas and appearance of calligraphy to make a group of works called "Cold Mountain". Though they had little to do with the subject matter of the poems, they are most certainly Zen in the manner of their becoming.
Fūgai Ekun, another Japanese hermit/monk, made images of Hotei,one of the seven lucky gods of Japan crossing a stream. Hotei carries an empty cloth bag with which he feeds and gifts acquaintances and which is never empty - is he Santa? How could I not find a philosophy that is funny persuasive? Didn't hear the Catholics laughing, but maybe I missed it.
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The next artist, a Buddhist nun, had to move constantly because was hounded by her public and their demands for her work interfered with her ability to make it.
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| Ōtagaki Rengetsu, (1791-1875) "Mountain Crows" |
This is the only photo I was actually able to take because of the gloomy interior of the Pavilion, ostensibly lit as Japanese would light a museum for viewing.
By this time the zen poetry was writing itself.
My steps were planned for me
sloping ramps
branching pathways
in gray fog gloom.
Peer with aged eyes
at treasure
Always new.
"Want to know where the cloud way lies?
It's there, in the center of the void." |
| Torei Enji |
Then I moved from the Pavilion into the crisp and warm early afternoon sunlight to James Turrell's Ganzfeld (Breathing Light). It's a large empty room up the stairs in which only cinematic projected light is all around the 15 permitted shoeless occupants. The light ranges from pale tones to deeply saturated hues, none darkened by complements or shaded with black. If there is a place that is empty yet full, embodying the contradictions of perception, this room is it.
It's a beautiful, unusual experience, easier and cheaper than getting up to see sunrise on Haleakala - you need tickets for that now, too. The changing light is soothing, slow, slowing down the mind and breathing, marveling at the beauty of LED light. Manufactured, artificial, mechanically powered, wasteful of energy. But still, unforgettable.
It's a long way to Chartres, and it was a long time ago. The stained glass survived WWII, and it is so blue, like no other blue attained by man's creative hands.
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| Chartres Cathedral stained glass |
I found I was a very diminished person this time around. The double cataract surgeries I had last year have left me with lots of "floaters", mostly unnoticeable in normal light but which cluttered and glided across my vision cones as I attended to both the Turrell installations.
Maybe we already are.
When John McLaughlin began his life in art, he said that when he looked at Western art, the artists were telling him who they were. With Eastern art, they were asking him who he was. Yet he didn't enter a morass of psychoanalytic examination.
"Barrier: to get through it,
follow the pathless path".
He lived in Japan from 1935-1938, studying the culture,ran a Japanese art gallery in Boston, learned Japanese in Hawai'i and served as a translator in World War II. Self-taught, he was inspired by the monk Sesshū (snow boat) Tōyō (1420-1506), a famous Zen painter fascinated with the concept of the "marvelous void."
He began painting the 1930's and quickly turned to hard-edge geometric minimal abstraction.
He wrote: "With respect to my direct influences I must stress my interest in 15th and 16th century Japanese painters. I have found comfort in some aspects of thought expressed by Malevitch, and I am indebted to Mondrian because his painting strongly indicated that the natural extension of Neo-Plasticism is the totally abstract."[4] (Wikipedia entry)
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| John Mc Laughlin late paintings and a Roy McMakin chair - an invitation to the dance. |
"My purpose is to achieve the totally abstract. I want to communicate only to the extent that the painting will serve to induce or intensify the viewer's natural desire for contemplation without benefit of a guiding principle. I must therefore free the viewer from the demands or special qualities imposed by the particular by omitting the image (object). This I manage by the use of neutral forms." (Wikipedia entry)
Several artists discuss McLaughlin in a video; to me the seem to muddle around, finding few words to help attend to McLaughlin's work. "So close to perfect"...he had a really good journey...a rigorous spiritual practice...paintings are about the figure/ground relationship...more organic than mechanical...(Grotjan examining the non-mechanical quality of the edges, lines, and color planes).
Only Venus and Marsattend this early morning
Clear in the dawn light.
Look away
And they are gone.
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