Foregrounding
Impermanence: Lachlan Warner’s praxis with consumerism [1]
A
discussion of the Blake Prize for Religious Art 2001 winner,
Lachlan Warner’s installation: Vitrine of lightweight (Sunyata)
disposable (Anicca) Buddhas, in a range of festive colours, postures
and mudras.
As
viewed at QUT Art Museum, Gardens Point Brisbane, March 2002.
Gregory
Smith
 |
|
The
artist, Lachlan Warner, poses with his exhibition. |
Figure
1: Two views of the installation:Vitrine of lightweight (Sunyata)
disposable (Anicca) Buddhas, in a range of festive colours, postures
and mudras.
Source:
The Sacred Site ABC Religion Gateway
The
artist’s own explanatory notice adjacent:
I
started this work after completing a series of photograms of
Buddhist figurines, playing with ways of transforming core Buddhist
imagery into a western context: much like the shifts this tradition
continues to go through. I wanted to physically play
with the tenets of the tradition: impermanence, oneness, and
the biggy for artists like me, ‘non-self.’
So,
after moving through the plaster, bronze and cooking foil, I
got into Darrell Lea Easter wrapping. A bridge between
Eastern and Western traditions (and I got to eat a lot of chocolates).
It’s a shop case full of unconsumable consumables.
It’s a play between Thai Wat and Tibetan Gompa aesthetics
as well as the gaudiness that envelopes western traditions, with
the faces and postures that will resonate.
INTRODUCTION
This
discussion will proceed through the usual three layers of art
interpretation: perceptual, iconography and the iconology, [2] in a reflection
on the aesthetic of artist Lachlan Warner, the 2001 Blake Prize
winner, in that installation, “Vitrine of lightweight
(Sunyata) disposable (Anicca) Buddhas, in a range of festive
colours, postures and mudras.” In a meta-discussion,
his work will then be espaliered on various public definitions
to show that it does qualify as ‘religious art.’ Some
original reflections by this beholder follow, arguing that because
the work produces a cognitive and affective ‘shift’
towards a moral stance, this artifact can transform the viewer
and so qualifies as ‘religious art’ in contemporary
Australia.
PERCEPTION
(Viewing the installation)
Fifty-six
figurines are presented, all facing the viewer at the front,
both on and in a familiar glass-topped shop-display case, 188
cm. high, 150 cm. wide, and 62 cm. deep. The figurines are set
on three levels, 31 on top, 11 in the middle shelf and 9 on the
bottom level with the effect being to recreate a crowded lolly
shop display case (vitrine: “a glass display case
for works of art”). Atop a foil-covered 15 cm. plinth, one
rises to 76 cm. high above the case, to break any possible uniform
horizon. All figures are dressed in brightly coloured chocolate
foil wrappings, each in a different colour. A fluorescent
light hidden within the case at the front illuminates most of
the figures to brighter effect. The whole installation
has no backdrop and creates its own sense of space and place.
The whole display is smallish on first view and sized to the
human scale, is not daunting nor filling the exhibition space
available.
The
display would appeal to all ages, being composed of made elements
from everyday life. [3] Figurines
are arranged attractively to suggest plenty and variety, and
to stir an hypothetical buyer’s interest. The figurines
appear in different postures and at different heights, with one
in gold reclining across most of the desktop. Among the apparent
jumble, jut two busts, while four figures are standing, and the
rest are sitting in the traditional lotus position [4] on foil-covered
tufts or mounds. Some are contiguous which suggests plenty, while
others stand gazing serenely into the middle distance. Covered
in foil, their eyes are covered; [5] and
their faces appear compassionate, not judgmental. The figures
are androgenous in their different masses and colours. They do
not all present in static poses; one in particular affects a
skirt in the breeze. The variety, colours and familiar scale
create a distinctive appeal.
The
installation’s title details its variety and expressiveness:
“in a range of festive colours, postures and mudras.“
Mudras are the symbolic gestures of the hands of Buddha images,
external expressions of inner resolve, “picture tools of
identification of deeper meaning.“ [6] Close
inspection reveals the mudras vary: Three large Buddhas on the
top of the vitrine sit with fingers interleaved right palm on
left palm,
[7] and
five more pose similarly within the case. The rest sit with right
arm extended, palm down on the knee, and left arm in lap with
palm uppermost. The reclining Buddha lies with right arm extended,
palm down on hip with fingers extended. The four fingers
of this mudra characteristically suggest the defeat of Mara’s
evil forces. Six appear with long, straight, flattened, ascetic
noses while others present passive faces partially distorted
by the foil wrappings. Stylised Oriental eyebrows are apparent.
Some wear the traditional crown knotted chignon under Tibetan
caps with ear muffs, while others feature the traditional elongated
ears. Nineteen figures on top along the front, all with this
typical “wisdom bump” on their heads, sit like little
stupas. All seated Buddhas sit on tufts of foil-covered ‘ground’,
to suggest realism, earth-bonds and personal balance. These many
and various differences of position, mass, shape and colour entertain
the mind and fascinate the senses in their expressiveness.
No
two colours stand together. Figures appear in gold, green, blue,
patterned red/blue, red, purple, gold, and gold/white wrapping.
On the bottom level, four smaller Buddhas in gold, red, blue
and red, intersperse bigger ones (again from left to right) in
blue, purple, gold, red and green. 31 figurines stand atop the
case inviting the beholder to grasp them, while 25 reside within
the enclosed case, promising plenty more in storage when the
first are consumed. The placement by crowding and apparently
in random colours appeals to catch the eye and invite an instinctively
positive response in the viewer. Among the apparently random
order, the eye presently finds axes of colour: a five pointed
star of gold images frames the exhibit; a three pointed green
axis runs diagonally through to the bottom right, a red vertical
axis parallels the green, and a three point vertical blue axis
balances the red beyond the green. Horizontally, the colours
do not alternate nor appear to be symmetrical, yet the gold,
blue, green, red, gold order of the top row is echoed in the
second, to be broken in the bottom layer as blue, gold, red and
green. Figure 2 displays this arrangement:
|
Top
of cabinet: |
gold |
blue |
green |
red |
gold
|
|
Middle
shelf : |
gold |
blue |
green |
red |
gold |
|
Floor
of cabinet: |
blue |
gold
|
red
|
green |
|
Fig
2: A
diagrammatic representation of colour placements in the display
Finding
patterns in the chaos of nature is a work of science and religion,
just as it is in the art of display and marketing of goods.
The perceptive viewer finds a satisfaction in this discovery
of coherence, in a yin and yang balance.
Vitrine’s
Easter Island serenity harmonises with the QUT gallery’s
quiet. The familiarity of all its elements, the cabinet, the
coloured foils and the Buddha images, [8] makes
this installation hands-on and friendly. Indeed, an electronic
alarm has been installed to prevent viewers touching the figurines,
and it has been rumoured that some figures have been understandably
taken as souvenirs; for strange gaps among the smallest are apparent.
The discussion will later return to these features of perception:
familiarity, appeal and a visual rhetoric of elegiac irony.
ICONOGRAPHY
(Reading the work)
For
the first time, a Blake winning entry is not a painting but an
installation, and in coming down off the wall, this three-dimensional,
mixed media assemblage evokes multi-layered interpretations.
This work is indeed a rich dialogue between materials and message.
Through it, Warner becomes a leading participant in a culture
which sustains several different conversations simultaneously.
First,
“Vitrine of lightweight (Sunyata) disposable (Anicca)
Buddhas, in a range of festive colours, postures and mudras”
is a ‘fun piece’. [9]
It would appeal to the child in all of us. By placing the
viewer in the familiar context of the retailing world as a buyer
of chocolates, it offers the viewer a position of power and invitation.
It seems to tease viewers who engage in ‘retail therapy’
as they would want to buy chocolate-foil wrapped Easter bunnies.
But that the goods should be wrapped Buddhas causes little consternation
in our world of copious consumption. [10]
The familiar shop front setting, the familiar attractive wrapping
and the interesting bulk and variety of supposed chocolate Buddhas
convey pleasure, assurance and the promise of satisfaction.
The installation is first of all familiar as fun.
Secondly,
Warner’s installation stirs the beholder’s curiosity.
Whereas other artifacts are curated, positioned and guarded,
these ephemera delight the eyes and draw viewers to themselves.
These disposable unconsumables appeal, invite and tease
viewers. More will be said later on his ironic playfulness. The
installation is accessible, seemingly simple and familiar. The
clutter, the variety, and the three-dimensional nature of the
installation compose the realism we are used to on our own work
benches and in department stores. [11]
It crafts no artistic disposition of light and shadow to cast
any rugged chiaroscuro (intended interplay of light and
shade to convey mystery or add puzzlement in the act of perception).
The eye wanders freely over various levels; the senses are aroused,
while the mind searches for meanings and significance.
While its nested meanings may yet emerge from further contemplation,
the viewer’s initial search for meaning forms a coalescence
of attraction, emotional interest, and interim understandings.
Thirdly,
the installation sets out to puzzle and challenge. For Warner
juxtaposes the familiar with the unfamiliar, putting commerce
with religion. The two are seldom combined, yet one remembers
that packaging religion does indeed occur. Vitrine could
be viewed as a mandala, an artefact and futurescape of mass production
and consumption. Viewers might even visualise themselves in the
centre of this energized ‘world’ of wrappings, and
feel compassion for the Buddhas trapped therein as customers
can do. Seemingly, nothing in this mandala offers a focus
of rest or opening for meaning. It creates a chromatic sonority [12] in its many layers
of meaning, so that in unpacking them, viewers might directly
appropriate its ontological mandate. The frequencies of the brightly
lit colours produce mantra-like [13] resonances.
The viewer juggles initial meanings while memory and experience
wrestle to reconcile its cross-cultural provocations. The 3D
perspective, the presentation of made objects, and its tempting
tactile invitation to ‘take and eat’ make the installation
more like an everyday commercial reality than “religious
art”.
Fourthly,
the Australian viewer, infused with the prevailing monotheistic
religion, may find this installation challenging upon encountering
one-in-the-many in the various representations of the
Buddha, both little and big, in bust or full figure, standing,
swaying or reclining. The viewer may be confused about the propriety
of this art in a multi-faith world, whether some etiquette has
been breached,
[14] whether
to be quiet in a quasi-religious respect, or to respond to some
kind of Zen paradox operating here, or to be joyful and heartened
in its variety and playfulness. Others may feel disgust
as one does coming upon an accident, or anger when one discovers
a deliberate mistake. The judges [15] noted
its potency to draw out many reactions.
Fifthly,
as a way of plotting a response [16] to
the installation, one beholder might follow the Tibetan tantric
course of the four enlightened stages of skillful, appropriate
action, called the four karmas. [17] These
are strategies employed by the realised yogin when working
with intractable situations. They are based on the “not
accepting, not rejecting” principle, which an open-minded
viewer needs to adopt to appreciate an artwork. The first karma
is “pacifying,” in which one opens to the negativity,
to reverse the habitual tendency to ignore or hide the shadow.
Next in “enriching,” the yogin inspires the unacknowledged
aspects with confidence, celebrating the power of the shadow
rather than discounting it as people typically do. The
third karma is “magnetizing,” where he draws
the negativity in to himself with an actual invitation.
In this way, the shadow is charmed and its power is harnessed.
The last karma is “destroying,” in which he
challenges and threatens negativity with extinction. The writer
has found this course of approach very useful for forming a comprehensive
appreciation of the installation, through welcoming initial,
instinctive and dismissive responses so as to value the many
positives one finds in a sustained engagement with the work.
A balance between emotions and cognition can then be obtained.
Sixthly,
in “Vitrine”, Warner has the moral courage to
challenge society’s priorities in consumer-oriented, globalised
Australia.
[18] The
glitz, hype and impersonal relationships that globalisation begets,
penetrate into the thus-far privileged world of religion. Warner
rebuts with this reductio ad absurdum [19] to show an inevitable outcome
of its unstoppable progress. He plays across Hume’s fact
and value dichotomy where this “is” warns us about
something that “ought not” to be. Warner fuses bodily
appetites and religious yearnings in one outrageous paradox.
Our senses want sweet religion but his chocolate communion is
“unconsumable.” Since in the Buddhist [20] view all of life
is ephemeral, Warner reminds that all we perceive and conceive
can be subject to trade, exchange and merchandising.
Seventhly,
Warner’s construct also challenges our familiar categories,
our traditional frameworks [21] of
‘religious’ values. The viewer arrives to find he is
not at a point de departure or a point of closure either,
but in the middle of an intercultural conversation, between the
mundane and the sacred, between historically different religions
and their world views, between the individual and society, and
between artist and beholder. In these Easter crossovers, Warner
easily engages viewers to be amused, involved and challenged
simultaneously. His installation could be said to “cast
a glow on everything mundane, making sacred and secular not opposites
but inseparable.” [22] It
is also a snapshot of our uncertain journey from chaos to order,
from doubt to faith, and markers one concrete unreasonableness
on the infinite journey to universal reasonableness where all
interconnections are reconciled, as philosopher Charles Sanders
Pierce [23] might have put
it.
In
his explanatory sign, Warner says he aims to “physically
play with the tenets of the tradition . It’s a play
between Thai Wat and Tibetan Gompa aesthetics” Essentially,
the work dramatises an interplay between competing elements,
historical, cultural and metaphysical. In raising aesthetic tensions,
the work holds its intellectual anchors up for review; its process
lies in bouncing seriousness about religion against an apparently
fun-seeking society. The question arises: could this be a tease,
playing a joke on the whole seriousness of the art Establishment,
or the edifice of formal religion and its actors? Is viewing
this Artwerk just a joke, “sending rationality on
holiday”
[24] as
Freud said? The installation exhibits all the seriousness of
play. Like it, play is a temporary sphere of activity,
that is not “ordinary” or “real.” [25] “The consciousness
of play being “only a pretend” does not prevent it
from proceeding with the utmost seriousness, with an absorption,
a devotion that passes into rapture. . . The contrast between
play and seriousness is always fluid.” [26]
Once played, a game assumes fixed form as a cultural phenomenon,
a new-found creation of the mind, a treasure for the future to
be retained by the memory. Its alternation and repetition
are like warp and woof of a fabric. Strangely too, “play
creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into
the confusion of life, it brings a temporary, a limited perfection.” [27] “Vitrine
of Buddhas” acts like play too – it casts a spell
over us, it re-orders our world view, and is seriously demanding.
Warner is no iconoclast or spoilsport either, not breaking all
the rules of art to threaten the enterprise; he is an in-player,
an artist and semiotician with a message to break open. Here
is the artist both as entertainer and as “a servant of deep
vision and subtle sensibility, making sacred and secular not
opposites, but inseparable companions in a world not torn into
spirit and matter, mind and body, or even soul and spirit.”
[28]
Finally,
Warner’s work is a pertinent synectic, a fusing of East
and West, religion and popular culture. He challenges the
myth that “never the twain shall meet.” No one can
accuse him of celebrating the demise of a culture in the incoherence
of its art. This artwork addresses our world today. Where traditional
icons tried “to give us a glimpse of heaven,” [29] Warner has turned
the mirror on ourselves in situ. In multicultural Australia,
he has fused the horizons of two cultures [30] to
highlight the sacred in the mundane.
To
summarise our discussion of its iconography, we observed that
the medium is the message. Warner’s praxis
with consumerism is conveyed in the flimsy, disposable materials
of commerce. The installation is seriously playful, teasing and
ironic when we realise that its disposable unconsumables are
ephemera. Its mantra is that commerce is all about hollow
glitz, and the pleasures of the eyes. The installation’s
nested meanings present a Gestalt, even a mandala for re-mapping
familiar categories from a critical perspective. Its genesis
for being, its ontological mandate, is as “a celebration
of the ability to criticise.” [31] It
could be called an absurd drone or outrageous paradox for making
intercultural crossovers. In reading the work, many various responses
are possible and different people find different ways to view
it, perhaps to ask is the installation a send-up, a bald incongruity
or a treasure of wisdom for the future. We here see artist as
entertainer and critic. In one view, Warner is a semiotician,
who, in presenting one concrete unreasonableness [32] ,
is reminding us of one scandal in the culture’s progress,
and highlights the impermanence of our changeable world. Fusing
horizons in his synectic of East and West, of religion and commerce,
joy and sorrow, Warner holds the mirror up to Australian society
for a timely review.
ICONOLOGY
(Reading the cultural context)
In
our discussion of the installation’s iconology, we shall
proceed by espaliering meanings derived from viewings of “Vitrine
of Buddhas” towards a discussion of moral actions as vectors
to the sacred. In this way, we shall take up what the work offers
the gallery visitors in contemporary Australia, the intended
audience of these ephemera.
First,
Vitrine is a prime example of “staged confrontation,” [33] a drama inherent
in presenting contested ideas. We could reconceptualise a viewer’s
exchange with the work as performance. Erving Goffman defined
“performance as “the activity of a given participant
on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any
of the other participants.” [34] Staged
confrontation involves the public presentation of the working
out of conflicts and competing interests, which is in essence
a demonstration of any exercise of power. The installation is
also a theatre of the powerless which through puns, jokes,
gesture and absurdity opens up a critique of power behind the
dominant ideology, consumerism. Thus this installation
becomes “a typical postmodern double operation . . .both
coercive and enabling.” [35] It
requires, nay coerces, the viewer to take a stand on what it
demonstrates, either abhorring, accepting or celebrating its
paradoxes; and it enables the viewer to find his sociopolitical
location, vis a vis the major issue presented, the marriage
of commerce and religion. These many paradoxes play on after
the gallery doors close.
Second,
does Warner’s work give offence to fellow Buddhists and
fellow Australian Buddhists? We say it does not, because art’s
context is the counter-cultural and cross-cultural dimensions
of life today. Warner here assumes a transcultural life
like a young Thai artist named Kamol. “Acclaimed for
his innovative vision that twins traditional Thai aesthetics
with that of contemporary American art, Kamol was honored in
1997 as Thailand’s National Artist in Visual Arts.” [36] Similarly,
Warner is a transcultural artist whose work speaks to an emergent
transculturally aware Australia. He is one who is acknowledging
and addressing the wider diversity of the world to a still comparatively
insular dominant culture. This melding of art and religion
is inspired by his tolerance of diversity and difference engendered
in Buddhism: “Impelled by his great compassion, the
Buddha decided to survey the world. He says that things
are of different kinds: the lotuses in a pond, some are immersed
underwater, others grow and rest on the surface, and others again
come right out of the water and stand clear.” [37] The work marks
a new stage in Australia’s intercultural relationships.
Third,
this installation also achieves a topical aspiration to universality. [38] In it,
a Buddhist addresses modern society with ancient wisdom:
The
teachings of the Buddhism have never been exclusive to one class
or limited to one geographical area . . . Buddhism is particularly
amenable to expansion because of the universality of the Buddha’s
teaching. His Dharma (Truth) is designed to appeal
to every individual regardless of rank or class, inviting him
or her to follow the path leading to enlightenment and the cessation
of suffering. Being linked to neither a specific place
nor a single society, Buddhism has generally managed to incorporate
the local customs and beliefs.” [39]
For
aesthetically, it presents different pieces in a play on the
one and the many. Warner says, “It’s a play between
Thai Wat and Tibetan Gompa aesthetics.” [40] At a crossroads
of cultures, Warner here plays the Theravada (Thai) tradition
off Mahayana (Tibetan) aesthetics, to play the polyandric diversity
and variety found in the Tibetan monasteries with their many-faced,
mystical and occult Buddhas eternally transmitting Dharma
against the restrained Thai aesthetic [41] with
its more pristine, noble representations such as is found in
the Temple of the Green Jade, Wat Po, in Bangkok. [42] Thus, not only
are cultural crossovers to the non-Buddhist world explored, but
links and differences are explored within the Buddhist tradition
too. This very creative dynamic enlivens the informed viewer’s
delight in discovering the work’s many onion-layered readings.
The artist overturns our expectations that spirituality is esoteric,
by making his expression accessible, robust and rich in multi-layered
meanings that are universally accessible.
Fourth,
Warner’s work could be seen as a subversive aesthetic, riding
the boundaries of respect and political correctness. In
a society growing universal respect for all religions, this apparent
desecration of a sacred artifact, the central symbol of the Buddhist
religion, could invoke a knee-jerk condemnation. But no,
the balance is maintained with serenity and control. Reassured
by its vulnerable simplicity, the viewer finds here no self-justifying
apologia, nor expression of cultural domination, nor any
special personal pleading. The artist acts simply and morally
to foreground the impermanence of life and society. He effectively
challenges the economic hegemony of the Western world, which
dictates that in the consumer world nothing is beyond trade or
exchange. He subverts it to light a fuse in the ethical search
for deeper meaning.
Fifth,
Vitrine explores the issue of non-self. The beholder in
the art gallery could be likened in some slight way to the Buddha
himself who having attained nirvana under the Bodi Tree
stayed there for seven weeks and enjoyed great bliss. The viewer
stands in some awe, and yet upon turning away is drawn back to
grasp at some further scrap of meaning. The installation itself
can be used as a kind of three-dimensional mandala where,
in the release of laughter and insight, duhkha can be
rolled back ever so temporarily. Because there is no clear divide
between cosmology and psychology in Buddhism, mandalas are both
symbolic representations of the Buddhist world and meditational
aids. A mandala is a cosmogram or map of reality. Thus,
our moment of viewing, of absorption (dhyana) in the World
of Sense Form, can yield a glimmer of the World of Pure Form.
If the visit to the art gallery to view this installation can
teach sentient beings to extinguish the fires of hatred, delusion
and greed, then it is karmically profitable. Evoking a
moment of absorption, a transcendence beyond oneself, it prepares
the way for a developed moral response.
Sixth,
this work becomes an agent for enlightenment. Since Buddhism
is basically a religion of renunciation, its psychology rules
out any cosmology. It is possible that one may be instantaneously
struck by an aesthetic pleasure on viewing a natural scene, but
for the Buddhist this can never be more than a fleeting perception.
Not surprisingly, the Pãli canon of Theravada Buddhism,
the earliest collection of Buddhist scriptures available, is
notable for its lack of cosmological lore. For in Buddhist teaching,
existence is conceived of as having the characteristics of suffering
(dukkha), impermanence (anicca), and insubstantiality
(anatta).
[43] As
life’s goal is nirvana, the best thing one can do
is to turn one’s back on the world and escape from it (as
outlined in Buddha’s first sermon outlining the Four Noble
Truths, wherein change, dissolution, suffering and death are
the hallmarks of all things as part of the inexorable process
of samsara (endless circle of births and deaths). In
the Tibetan wheel of life, greed, hatred and delusion are represented
as the three aspects of ignorance, which is the destructive principle
at the root of all forms of existence. Thus for the Buddhist,
the world has no creator, no purpose or meaning. So for Australian
Buddhist
[44] Lachlan
Warner, good karma lies in rolling back ignorance. The Blake
Prize judges recognised this work’s potency for communication,
and I would argue further for its moral role to engender Dharma
(“dutiful observance of cosmic moral laws – in other
words, righteous conduct”). [45] The
work then should not be judged on its excellence of decoupage
technique or likelihood for fame in permanent display, but on
its power to enlighten. We will argue here this is a public criterion
for religious art today.
Now
to summarise our discussion of Vitrine’s iconology,
we noted how Warner speaks to the culture by foregrounding impermanence
in a praxis with consumerism. This is art for a new age,
as he is a transcultural artist. He explores cultural differences
in Buddhism’s aspiration to universality. His persuasiveness
comes in reading this as a theatre of the powerless, or
as a staged confrontation of opposites, where the viewer
can find his spiritual coordinates and parameters when society
has confused its own. This installation is good karma
for offering a moral vector, but conveys an elegiac tone, for
the die of gobalisation has already been cast.
META-DISCUSSION:
Does Vitrine qualify as religious art?
Part
of a discussion of the work’s iconology must situate it
within the wider context of art’s aims and effects, in short,
is it enough for an artwork to be termed ‘religious’
if it shows an artist’s intense interiority? David Freedberg [46] argues that Art
and religion interpenetrate, that “Religious imagination
is present in all areas of life. . . . (and so religious art
occurs when) suppressed images call for those remnants of religious
imagination.” In the past, he says, “aesthetic
responses went forth hand in hand with devotional responses .
. . (to) speak of some kind of religious response or religious
engagement”
[47] For
him, art is religious when it describes the “anagogical
– a spiritual or mystical ascent from our earthbound existence
to a radiance above, (such as) to love.” [48] He
says observing an intensity of brushwork gives the strategies
for engagement, as we viewers “merge representation with
what is represented so it becomes a conflation.” [49] Clearly then,
religious art will evoke responses felt to be religious themes
in their genesis or in their expression.
Need
religious art be inspiring? [50] Curator
and art historian, Rosemary Crumlin, is well aware that historically,
religious art has been received in Australia as “Judaeo-Christian
narrative and figurative” art. [51] "Gradually
the boundaries of the [Blake] Prize shifted away from being exclusively
Christian or sacred, and today artists' inspiration is more likely
to be 'spiritual' in its broadest sense. . . (emphasising) personal
experience as integral aspects of their work." [52] She would rather
define religious art as “a spiritual questioning focused
less on life after death than on a spirit that swells with the
body, the earth and a society.” [53] She
would hope that today religious art has a power “to challenge,
and to raise new questions.”
Crumlin
believes in the capacity of ‘religious art’ to become
“a symbol, a vessel of the Sublime, beyond a restrictive
understanding of belief.” [54] It
could well be new [55] as
“a reconception of meaning without precedent” [56] Essentially then
since art is a communicative tool, religious art today would
convey “some sort of inner life that does not entail commitment
to ritual or permanence or religion.” [57] It
is “visionary work of a religious imagination . . . an inner
sight”
[58] Priest-poet
Andrew Bullen insightfully defines art as experience: “When
art engages with the religious imagination, the viewer is pulled
towards being a participant.” [59] Art
critic Sebastian Smee observes, “The category of religious
art, it seems, must be art that knowingly subordinates itself
to the religious impulse if it is to be meaningful.” [60] Viewing religious
art then, engages one’s memory. Finally, we could expect
a work of religious art to help viewers connect with the singular
Stillpoint of their existence.
Figure
3: espaliers Vitrine on these public criteria.
Fig
3: How Warner’s vitrine satisfies definitions of
religious art.
Clearly
on these fifteen contemporary criteria, Warner’s work rates
with eleven positives and deserves to be called ‘religious
art,’ a label that recognises a significant experience rather
than defines an intended meaning. [63]
The
work would also qualify on most of Matthew Fox’s criteria
for holding that art should be an aid to spirituality:
art
without spirituality is cynical manipulative, commercial, consumer-oriented,
pessimistic, ego centered, competitive, tired, frame-seeking,
elitist, expensive, anthropocentric, self serving. But when art
is allowed to connect with spiritual roots, it is inclusive,
celebrative, joyous, courageous, capable of taking us into grief
and beyond, energizing, open to the cosmos and the community,
playful, justice-oriented, compassionate, honoring of the experience
of art of all times and all cultures, non-sentimental, surprising,
youthful, fresh, spirit-filled, and always in the beginning. [64]
In
foregrounding themes of impermanence and non-self, Warner is
in praxis, critiquing these diverse domains.
Could
‘religious art’ ever lose its way, becoming art for
art’s sake?
[65] We
know that “modern art put a lot of time, effort and rhetoric
into becoming a religion of its own.” [66] Does
this found object, an artifact of modern Australia, merely mirror
that society or culture, or does it in some sense make a moral
assessment of it? To answer, Carroll [67] argues
that three approaches could be taken: autonomism (that art is
independent of the moral sense and has to be free of its strictures),
utopianism (the art and morals are linked to somehow offer some
transcendence for envisioning a better world) and Platonism (a
classic stance that moral assessments are indeed guided by the
artist such as when Shakespeare remarkably crafts us to refrain
our natural desire to condemn the regicide Macbeth). We
here will follow utopianism where artist becomes a moral
arbiter. Effective religious art always reflects society, usually
challenges it and sometimes critiques it. In this model then,
the artistic and the moral are inextricably fused. Art
is a product of a culture and inevitably points to something
in it. This objectifying process of artistic production by its
selection of elements, hybridization of ideas, and symbolic meaning
making necessarily involves a social if not a moral commentary
to evoke a change of attitude in the viewer.
So
this paper holds the view that a cultural artifact to be rated
as ‘religious’ will be transformative and even better,
be redemptive that is, it produces a change in the viewer to
win back a sense of transcendence, for example, towards the Four
Great Truths of Buddhism or towards the forgiveness and compassion
of the Christian Gospels. A Blake Prize for Religious Art then
might be expected to offer transformative even redemptive or
as some might say, salvific perspectives [68] upon
Australian experience and culture. Because this work produces
such a cognitive and affective ‘shift’ towards a moral
stance, this artifact can transform the viewer and so rates as
‘religious art’ in postmodern Australia.
That
patrons need a catalogue to understand a work poses the pertinent
question about identifying the social context for reading a painting.
Michael Warren’s discussion [69] of
Siqoeiros’ El Colgado is enlightening here. To transform
a traditional depiction of the suffering Christ as a suffering
figure, as a victim of torture today in one’s own county
is to generate a very different religious power, not one bathed
in a familiar aesthetic framework, but one speaking of an everyday
horror so as to challenge the beholder. Warren stresses this
moral/ethical response is what defines religious art: “Some
would say the key religious issue at the end of the twentieth
century can be summed up in two questions: Who in the world is
He? And where in the world is He?” The answer may well reveal
itself to be not necessarily within the Christian iconography.
This is how Lachlan Warner’s installation “Vitrine”
qualifies as religious art: it does not function within a familiar
aesthetic framework, it does not represent conventional ‘religious’
imagery but it does have the power to challenge and to raise
new questions. It communicates by humour, challenge and fascination.
It does not purport to engender a commitment to ritual, permanence
or formal religion, for it questions, what indeed is our society
about? Warner’s work is so eminently multi-layered and challenging,
it obviates the need for a catalogue explanation. Clearly,
it is this proletarian, contemporary, revelatory quality that
appealed to the Blake Prize judges.
This
Blake Prize winner snapshots an insight that moral aspirations
and ethical behaviour are the consequences of our choices.
In a crowded arena of choices, in a market-place construct of
society, and with a “take it or leave it” plethora
of religious options available, this work alerts us to the choice
of world views, those ideologies that society and individuals
hold. Seduced by the prevailing consumer society, we can easily
be manipulated into making decisions against our own greater
good. The hollow, disposable and party-wrapped Buddhas alert
us to the fatuous vacuousness of a life defined by glitz and
retailing. Through the irony of hollow Buddhas, beholders
are challenged to reflect on their ethical situation – the
Buddhas are clothed in alien garb like Christ was clothed in
the purple robe of shame (Matt 27:28). Read as symbols,
his Buddhas are victims to the slaughter in the world of choice:
will the viewer buy or seize or behold? Warner’s chocolate-foil
clothed Buddhas demand a reconsideration of ethical realities
in a consumer-oriented world. It is a silent rhetoric of elegiac
irony; it is sad because the dice is thrown; for already the
prevailing paradigms of our society derive from consumerism.
Warner’s
gentle irony demonstrates that there can be no possibility of
a true accommodation in any modernization towards a syncretism
of religious commitment and materialism/consumerism. His synectic
challenges this hybridization of domains, for they patently will
not fuse together. This cloning produces a drone – a toy-like
parody of itself even if it soon becomes kitsch. [70] Janus-like, Warner
affirms that his religious tradition cannot be conjoined to a
commercial future; some choices are simply off-limits.
Topically,
this very issue of religion as a choice thematises the 2002 Easter
editorial from Australia’s national newspaper, [71] which could be
fairly taken as the cynical voice of contemporary Australia backgrounding
his art:
[72] “Religious
belief can often be exclusivist and discriminatory. . .
It might demand an apparent sacrifice of personal freedom or
choice. So religious truth, at best, is a voluntary act, requiring
an assent of an individual’s reason.” [73] Surely such an
affirmation is what ultimately defines us as human. So in all
its low-key assertiveness, Warner’s display of disposability
symbolises that seeking such truth involves a praxis with impermanence,
necessarily involving a sacrifice of will and appetite in voluntarily
accepting the truth about one’s temporality in the material
universe. Warner ignites this one major cognitive and affective
‘shift’ towards a moral stance.
Finally,
in touching upon metaphysics and epistemology, this work has
much to say about finding truth. We as humans can avoid the truth
and refuse to face reality. We want the truth about a product
but do not want the truth about ourselves; we become traducers
of our own truth. Warner’s irony slices through these
layers of deception, historical accretion and self-delusion quite
effectively. He challenges our complacent compartmentalization
of sacred and secular. At this temporal, paradoxical and metaphysical
juncture, the Western beholder must pause in contemplation, striving
to reconcile divergent and competing truth systems within the
one artistic phenomenon. The brutal truth is that Warner
presents a razor edge: in wanting happiness, we are faced with
a chocolate box choice between competing value systems.
In short, religious adherence does demand a radical choice to
achieve the desired transformation, because finding integrations
with the world necessarily compromises and saps the original
religious impulse.
CONCLUSIONS
A
religious aesthetic for today needs to be robust, accessible
and intelligible. An effete aesthetic fails to speak to
experience in a society, fails to articulate a voice in the conversation
that composes a society, or fails to point to or signify transcendent
meanings and values. An effective aesthetic, however, echoes
felt experiences in a culture, and offers solutions that transform
its experienced exigencies. In this way, a religious aesthetic
cannot afford to be rarified, completely unintelligible or a
milksop thing either. It is conceivable then that religious
art can produce ephemera to make points, to entertain, to challenge
and draw attention to social disjunctions, or unjust prevailing
attitudes and structures. It must work at many levels for different
audiences. This paper has argued that this Blake Prize winner
does pursue these agenda.
To
summarise this discussion then, in an effective aesthetic truth,
beauty and goodness will be linked, so that from an appreciation
of the power of its truth comes a power of compassion. Our claim
has been that a suitable religious aesthetic for 21st century
people will more likely be generated over an experience of difference. [74] The conditioned
response that Michelangelo’s David is ‘beautiful’
comes from a cultural agreement about canons of good art, skill,
perspective, and so on. But the David is not extolling
difference; it offers no moral challenge, in short is not transformative
or redemptive – its Truthfulness and Beauty do not necessarily
produce a desire to strive for Goodness nor heed any moral imperative
to serve the needy. It is non-transforming art.
This
paper has argued that in religious art, an aesthetics of style
is not paramount but typically it must express a shift of attitude,
which can begin a metanoia. [75] .
A religious sensibility grows from a theological aesthetic, where
in wonder, or in making so-far unforeseen connections, through
an assimilation of difference, or even in a sustained visual
joke, the beholder is led through a transition in his or her
cognitive and affective state to take up a moral orientation
towards compassion. For this, I believe that “Vitrine
of lightweight (Sunyata) disposable (Anicca) Buddhas, in a range
of festive colours, postures and mudras” qualifies as
excellent religious art. In its infinite lightness of humour,
it entertains, puzzles and challenges the beholder to recognise
economic and religious differences, bridges cultural crossovers,
and elicits a moral stance. In this way, it transforms perceptions,
attitudes and social constructs. On this moral canon, it
can be rated as a most successful example of religious art for
contemporary Australia. #
Appendix
I
Photo
of the installation, QUT Art Museum, Gardens Point, Brisbane
( 17 March 2002, taken by this author with local permission.)
Appendix
II
Photographs
of wrapped chocolate Easter bunnies, supermarket display, Woolworths,
Mt Gravatt, and Darrell Lea Chocolates Ltd Outlet, Slacks Creek,
Holy Thursday, 28th March 2002.
Appendix
III
Representation
of samples of foil from Darrell Lea Chocolates, the same brand
Warner used.
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______________________
Glossary
anatta:
insubstantiality
Anicca: disposable
Dharma
Truth: “dutiful observance of cosmic moral laws – in
other words, righteous conduct”
Dhyana:
absorption
dukkha:
suffering
Karmas:
strategies
employed by the realised yogin when working with intractable
situations; thus, acting karmatically
Mantras:
“phonemes used as for supports for concentration.”
Mahayana:
lit. “great vehicle”; northern schools of Buddhism
that emphasise the compassionate action of enlightened ones
mudras:
symbolic
gestures of the hands of Buddha images; external expressions
of inner resolve, “picture tools of identification of deeper
meaning”
realised
yogin: Tibetan master who has achieved Enlightenment
samsara:
endless
circle of births and deaths
samatha:
the perfectible concentrated and quiescent state of mind
Sunyata: lightweight
Theravada:
(Thai) tradition, lit. “the way of the elders” one
of the eighteen schools of early Buddhism, strongest today in
South East Asia
Thangkas: scroll
paintings; ”religious aid in ritual actions or as a guideline
or help in meditation” (Meulenbeld, p. x.); Tibetan
(monastic) religious art depicting Buddhist scenes, tableaux
and themes with precise iconographic information; hung as lucky
charms in houses at times of death or illness.
Thai
Wat and Tibetan Gompa: monasteries in
different places have different histories, architectural styles
and artistic traditions
Tantric:
some Tibetan Buddhas attain these reserved apparently ‘magical’
powers over nature
Zen
paradox: schools of Mahayana Buddhism that emphasise meditation
as its primary practice.
For
readability, diacritical marks have been omitted here.
Acknowledgement
in part: Thich Nhat Hanh Living Buddha, Living Christ.
(London: Rider, 1995), 199-208.
REFERENCES
[1] The paper’s
title might also be the more interpretative, Invoking Invariance,
as I argue that showing these hollow, disposable ephemera in
this way, Warner is foregrounding a Buddhist teaching on the
impermanence of all things, and for Christian viewers, his art
signs a hidden, more real world of substantial realities that
are invariant, the singular Stillpoint. The artist’s praxis,
or process of encounter and critique, with consumerism is his
warning about its processes and excesses. The artist himself
comments:
Smith:
Is it a fair to describe your piece as a praxis with consumerism?
Warner:
“Exactly . . . there are of course many other potential
interpretations, as with any work, but that is a large part of
the piece Though of course, I can criticise/ question consumerism,
but that is the karma that I work with, am recreated in; I can’t
escape it, or live without it. I have to both demonstrate
against it and celebrate that I can.” Lachlan Warner, personal
email with this author, 1 May 2002.
Foregrounding,
(“lifting up a piece of background to give it value,”)
I argue is here a moral act. It is a term first used by semitocian
Jan Mukarovsky, “The esthetics of language” in The
Prague School Reader of Esthetics, Literary Structures and Style:
Selected and translated from the original Czech, Paul
I. Garvin, ed. (Washington, D.C.: Washington Linguistic Club,
1955), quoted by Garcia-Rivera, The Community of the Beautiful,
(Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1999), 35-37.
[2] Rosemary Crumlin,
“The eyes they bring to see with.” The postmodern
generation, Special edition of The Way. (London: Heythrop
College, 2000), 36.
[3] Like Jasper Johns,
I believe Warner has “the knack of conjoining solemnity
and wit. His art induces us to be like him: entranced by the
elusive but somehow always [bearing] the dependable hum of solitude.”
Art Archive, New York. [On-line] Available: www.artchive.com/artchive/J/johnsbio.html
[2002 April 7].
[4] The canonic prototype
is available [On-line] www.buddhanet.net/images/bdiagram.jpg
[5] Having faces covered
is redolent of Jasper Johns’ “Target with Four Faces”
(1958) where faces were covered with hinged doors, to protect
the spectator from any discomfort.
[6] “The symbolic
gestures of the hands of Buddha images, called mudras, are picture
tools of identification of deeper meaning:” [On-line] Available:
www.buddhanet.net/mudras.htm
[2002 March 13]. Again, “Mudras are a non-verbal mode of
communication and self-expression, consisting of hand gestures
and finger-postures. They are symbolic sign based finger patterns
taking the place, but retaining the efficacy of the spoken word,
and are used to evoke in the mind ideas symbolizing divine powers
or the deities themselves. The composition of a mudra is based
on certain movements of the fingers; in other words, they constitute
a highly stylized form of gestureal communication. It is an external
expression of 'inner resolve', suggesting that such non-verbal
communications are more powerful than the spoken word.”
[On-line] Available: http://www.exoticindiaart.com/mudras.htm
[2002 March 13].
[7] This is the samadhi
mudra, “the normal position assumed by the Buddha when
meditating under the Bodhi tree before his Enlightenment.”
[On-line] Available:
www.e-my.net.my/selangor/bodhivision/Symb5.htm
[2002 April 2].
[8] Images indeed,
for the figurines are hollow, showing that appearances can deceive.
[9] Reviewer, Marcus
O’Donnell: “a delightful and playful piece which has
an obvious fragility and yet a startling, vibrant sense of life.”
[On-line] Available: www.ssonet.com.au/showarticle.asp?ArticleID=1330
[2002 April 3]. I see it as an assemblage for humorous
purposes in the tradition of Joseph Cornell, Julien Levy, Robert
Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns (b. 1930, layers
of reality). Warner’s unconscious antecedents may well
be these New Realists of the USA, in particular Johns and Rauschenberg.
After the excitement of the Dada provocations, they represented
a strain of quietism (170). Rauschenberg is said to make “association
leaps” to explore the “gap between art and life.”
His associate Johns, is notable for his “representational
quality of everyday objects” (502), for his irony in combining
the “things the mind already knows” (151). He explores
“the layers of reality” (160) exposing “a being’s
not being what it was” (157). Hence, Johns is said to be
elegiac, laconic in style and skeptical in timing (149). [Edward
Lucie-Smith Art Today. (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1983),
147-164]. In my view, Warner’s ironic concentration and
repetitions reflect Johns’ work. In particular, “Johns
is not involved with art that mirrors reality, but one that uses
a ‘pictorial’ language to get at the truth of reality
as the artist sees it. . . . The motifs from Tantric art
that appear in Cicada (1979) are the first direct references
to Johns’s long-standing interest in Asian art and philosophy.”
Roberta Bernstein, Jasper Johns (New York: Rizzoli, 1979),
5. Warner himself says of Johns: “Johns to me is an
artist who worked then to some degree as a reactionary realist.
By that I sense that his work at best has a note of irony about
it, at worst an acquiescence with the powers that be. I
hope that the disposable Buddhas are a little more direct and
critical and in your face, so to speak.” Lachlan Warner,
email with this author, 1 May 2002.
[10] See Appendix II
for photographs of the display and stocked shelves in a supermarket
to note the many similarities.
[11] Reviewer Erin
O’Dwyer reports that museum staff say the fragile, hollow
icons arrived “roughly stored in open boxes, with original
photos and instructions from the artist to push them back into
shape as necessary . . . and that if the piece changes as it
tours, then such is the ephemeral nature of the work and of existence
itself.” The Courier Mail 12 March 2002.
[12] Echoing James
McNeill Whistler’s suggestion that colours be treated as
sounds, Warner’s fugue resonates recursively.
[13] Mircea Eliade
“Mantras.” Parabola The magazine of myth and tradition
(Vol. XX No 3, August 1995), 40, defines them as: “phonemes
used as for supports for concentration.”
[14] Warner himself
anticipated this reaction: “Warner expects people will come
to his work with totally different views. He is also prepared
for the possibility of some taking offence at what could be seen
as the parodying of Buddha. “A Buddhist will come to it
with a different view than a Christian,” he says. “Some
might take umbrage. I hope they wouldn’t be insulted by
it, but that’s possible, too.” Kathleen Carmody, “Christian,
Buddhist themes meld in Blake Prize winner.” [On-line]
www.catholicweekly.com.au/01/dec/9/06.html
[2002 April 3].
One
reviewer actually finds it gives offence: “A lack of respect
seems inherent in the work, which chooses superficiality and
expediency over artistry and profundity.” Phil Brown, “Sacred
Aspects: A sense of passion seems to be missing in the Blake
Prize for Religious Art show.” Brisbane News. Issue
390, 09 April 2002, p. 25.
[15] “The judges
were impressed by the multi-layered meaning of the work.
The portrayal of the Buddhas in their various traditional postures,
placed in a vitrine and in the multi-coloured foil of Easter
eggs, unites Western and Eastern spiritual and cultural traditions.
The freshness and vitality of the piece and its spiritual potency
were all essential to the judges’ conclusion.” Judges’
Comments, Blake Prize for Religious Art 2001 brochure,
QUT Cultural Precinct, p. 2.
[16] This process is
not unlike Ignatius Loyola’s Rules for the discernment
of spirits in the Spiritual Exercises, whereby one
can deal with bias and emotion in a dispassionate way.
[17] Simmer-Brown,
J. “Inviting the demon” Parabola, The Magazine of
Myth and Tradition XXII, No 2, summer, 12, 16-17 . Quoted
in Leaman, O. (ed.) Eastern Philosophy: Key readings (London:
Routledge 2000), 189.
[18] A recent advocate
of which is Robert Cooper, United Kingdom Foreign Office: “Today
we live in a world in which the values of the market and the
values of consumerism are at least in the world that you here
in the London School of Economics and I live in, these are the
predominant values. And there is one big attraction of consumerism
for me, and that is that it's one ideology that it's not worth
getting killed for, because it's awfully difficult to consume
after you've been killed.” ABC Radio National, Background
Briefing, Global Morality, produced by Kirsten Garrett, Sunday
31 March 2002 [On-line] Available: www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/docs/bb_020331_morality.doc
[Accessed
5 April 2002].
[19] Falzon’s
book on Faucault and social dialogue addresses the profound sense
of loss in the abandonment of metaphysics in our time in the
face of which he recommends not pessimism or a sense of absurdity
nor an irresponsible celebration of fragmentation but a positive
acceptance of the ‘mundane, transitory, historical world
as the only one there is’ (10). (Wing Han Lamb, A wearable
postmodernism, p. 3) One’s deliberate choice for
hope against pessimism is an ethical choice with political implications.
I argue that Warner is here engaged in this same optimistic social
critique, in that this art-statement becomes a religious one
because it presents the Foucaldian picture of the interplay of
corporeal forces, the ‘agonism of on-going, open-ended combat
of competing positions in social life’ (88) taken to a (previously
unimagined) absurd outcome.
[20] “Buddhism,
in its various forms, realizes the radical insufficiency of
this changeable world; it teaches a way by which men, in
a devout and confident spirit, may be able either to acquire
the state of perfect liberation, or attain, by their own efforts
or through higher help, supreme illumination.” The Second
Vatican Council, Nostra Aetate, Declaration on the Relation
of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, 1965. #2 [On-line]
Available:
www.newadvent.org/docs/ec21na.html
[2002 April 4].
[21] Here I mean Bourdieu’s
term, habitus, “the set of enduring predispositions
by and through which individuals and groups find their sense
of place within a field.” Lindsay Farrell, Culture and
the Sacred (Australian Catholic University monograph, 2002),
2.
[22] Thomas Moore,
“The Soul’s Religion.” Parabola XXI, 2
(1996), 22.
[23] Diané Collinson,
Fifty Major Philosophers. (London: Routledge, 1987), 115.
[24] Noel Carroll,
“On jokes,” in Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical
Essays (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
331. Carroll dismisses Freud’s claim that with the joke
rationality is banished; he argues instead that jokes produce
a transition in the cognitive state of the listener. Warner
surely produces just such a shift in our perceptions about religion
and life today. He uses play, pun and satire to reveal
a great incongruity.
[25] John Huizinga,
“What ‘play’ is.” Parabola Vol.
XXI, No. 4, winter 1996, p. 60.
[26] ibid.
[27] ibid.
[28] Thomas Moore,
“The Soul’s Religion.” Parabola XXI, No
2, p. 22. [On-line] Available: www.parabola.org/magazine/backtocs/backtocs21.html#soul
[2002 April 1].
[29] Henri J. M. Nouwen,
Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with icons (Notre
Dame, Indiana: Ave Maria Press, 1988), 14.
[30] Hans-Georg Gadamer,
Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1988), 272. This
is a most useful concept taken up by many, including Charles
Taylor (The politics of recognition, Philosophical Arguments,
Harvard 1995) to facilitate reconciliations of belief and value
systems as they collide in the modern world. Like de Bono’s
parallel thinking, fusion of horizons strives to
respect the integrity and authenticity of different approaches
in their attempts not to seek domination, compromise or lowest
common denominator union but to create a new, authentic entity
of integrity.
[31] From notes of
a telephone conversation with the artist, 30 April 2002.
[32] My term inverting
Charles Sanders Pierce’s ‘concrete reasonableness,’
a condition marking human progress when human beings have perceived
the laws and all their interconnections within the universe,
in a state of rational harmony with all things. This artefect
dates and signals one cul de sac, a false trail in that
human journey from doubt to belief.
[33] Peggy Phelan,
Unmarked: The politics of performance (London: Routledge,
1993), 36-37, quoted in Bert O. States, “Performance as
metaphor,” Theatre Journal 48, No 1 (March 1996),
9.
[34] Erving Goffman,
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. (New York:
Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1959), 15.
[35] Marvin Carlson,
“Resistant performance.” The Routledge Reader in
Politics and Performance. Lizbeth Goodman and Jane de Gay,
Eds. (London: Routledge, 2000), 63.
[36] I find rich parallels
between Warner and Thai artist Kamol in this introduction to
his work by Collette Chattopadhyay: “Settling in Los Angeles
in the early 1970s, Kamol studied at the Otis Art Institute,
graduating in 1977 with a Master of Fine Arts degree. The beginning
of his transcultural artistic works date to this period when
he first created contemporary multi-media sculptures and installations.
The
works profiled in this exhibit extend those interests, mingling
the artistic discourses of the East and West. Acknowledging the
existential tensions implicit to contemporary society, these
works focus particularly on the nexus between nature and culture.
While Kamol’s works generally underscore a balance between
these two forces, in keeping with Buddhist precepts, his works
inevitably configure the equilibrium as to attenuate the fragile
phenomenon. Constructing subtly balanced compositions, these
works project a presence that bespeaks the physical and metaphysical
complexities of transcultural journeys . . . . Kamol’s images
balance and counterbalance the found objects of civilization
with color fields that allude to nature and space. Building complex
bridges between Thai and American art, these works underscore
the temporal yet timeless qualities of art and life. Ebbing back
and forth between the past and the present, the known and the
undeciphered, the East and the West, Kamol’s works embody
the essence of transcultural existence that has come to characterize
the contemporary world.” [On-line] Available: www.laartcore.org/registryPages/KamolTassananchalee.html
[2002 March 14].
[37] Oliver Rotem,
“Buddhism”. In The Sacred East C. Scott Littleton
(Ed). (London: Duncan Baird, 1996), 66.
[38] Critics have rich
evidence that religion is divisive today. One recent proponent
of this view says: “Religion is only one strand in the way
human beings construct their identity, and frequently a very
divisive one. It actively encourages exclusivity, encouraging
people to think in terms of their difference from the rest of
humanity, rather than what we all have in common. It's because
of that divisive tendency in religions that I think the most
urgent task facing us is to ensure that that framework is based
on secular values. What I advocate is a shift away from the kind
of collective and coercive moral structure associated with religion,
to one that combines modern individualism with a human rights
framework . . ..
I
think it's time we thought about something a little more modest,
but also more promising, which is peaceful coexistence between
different cultures, different ways of life and different civilisations,
and that's not to say that I think of civilisations as fixed
things, monads. All civilisations are open, all civilisations
are conflicted, but they're also different. There are different
forms of thought, different forms of practice in the world, and
people do have different identities.” John Gray, Professor
of European Thought at the London School of Economics. On ABC
Radio National, Background Briefing Global Morality produced
by Kirsten Garrett. Sunday 31 March 2002. [On-line] Available:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/docs/bb_020331_morality.doc [2002
April 5]
[39] Rotem, op.cit.,
56.
[40] Tibetan art is
lavish, archetypal and anonymous: “The Tibetan love of exuberant
decoration resulted in everyday items being produced with
wonderful embellishments. Nearly every item used by Tibetans
was fashioned in this highly decorative way. Ink pots, tinder
pouches, knives, teapots, storage vessels, all were decorated
lavishly in characteristic ways . . .
The
Tibetan artist, like his Indian counterpart, is not free to improvise
on his personal concepts of the appearance of an individual deity
but is required to work within a well-defined structure. In the
Tantric art of Tibetan Buddhism, benign, wrathful, serene or
terrifying deities all illustrate an aspect of the Buddha mind,
or the potential to be found in each of us, so that the artist
projects for us archetypal images from deep within our subconscious,
inviting us to contemplate those aspects of our being
which usually remain hidden . . ..
Tibetan
art is largely anonymous, and this custom of artistic anonymity
is grounded in the Buddhist belief in working toward the elimination
of the individual ego. The Tibetan attitude to a work of art
is that when it is successfully completed it has an existence
of its own and an inherent power to help the viewer come
to spiritual realisation. It ceases to be the property of the
artist when it leaves his studio.” Australian Tibetan Society
(Inc). [On-line] www.buddhanet.net/tibart.htm
[2002 April 8]. My emphases.
[41] On Thai Buddhist
aesthetics. “The Thais are all about black and gold and
deep red and inlaid mother of pearl and colored glass and mirrors
and anything reflective and more gold. The Thais do an amazing
job of using all this color and glass and reflective material
to decorate temples and shrines and thrones and what not.”
From an anonymous travel journal [On-line] Available: www.angelfire.com/la/bneworleans/whereb59.html
[2002 March 14]
[42] Tourist brochure
describing Thailand's most venerated image. [On-line] Available:
www.thaiantiquecar.com/watprakeawword.html
[2002 March 14].
[43] Ian Harris, “Buddhism.”
In Jean Holm & John Bowker (eds.) Attitudes to Nature
(London: Pinter Publishers, 1994), 9.
[44] Biodata supplied
on Radio National, interview with Lyn Gallacher [On-line]
Available: www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/relrpt/stories/s432828.htm#anchor3
[2002 April 2].
[45] Eugene T. Maleska,
A Pleasure in Words (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982),
230.
[46] David Freedberg,
“Beyond belief and the power of the image.” In Rosemary
Crumlin (ed.), Beyond Belief: Modern art and the religious
imagination. (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1998),
12.
[47] Freedberg, Beyond
belief, 13.
[48] ibid.
[49] Freedberg, Beyond
belief, 14, seems to reiterate Duns Scotus’ rational
principle that the intellect and the object together form the
knowledge we gain. Charles Pierce’s esthetics (Basis
for Pragmatism, 1906) is inspired by Scotus’ celebration
of difference – a central theme of Garcia-Rivera’s
analysis towards a “semiotic aesthetics” (Community,
35).
[50] “People seeking
spiritual inspiration in his work will probably be disappointed.
‘It’s about a current debate,’ the artist says.
‘It has a certain political strength to it – that is
for me the main thing. I don’t think this is about inspiration
– this is not that sort of work’.” Report by Kathleen
Carmody, The Catholic Weekly, 1st December 2001. [On-line]
Available: www.catholicweekly.com.au/01/dec/9/06.html
[2002 April 3].
[51] Beyond Belief,
10.
[52] Rosemary Crumlin,
QUT promotion for the exhibition, “O Soul O Spirit O Fire.”
November 2001, “Blake Prize celebrates 50 years.” [On-line]
Available: www.corpcomm.qut.edu.au/2001/nov2001/mrstory8.html
[2002 March 11].
[53] ibid.
[54] Crumlin, Beyond
Belief, 11.
[55] Thus, Crumlin
describes religious art today as expressing ‘scraps of experience’
versus the traditional role of iconic religious art as didactic,
as doors of perception “to edify visiting pilgrims”
as claimed by Christopher Walter, Art and Ritual of the Byzantine
Church (London: Variorum Publications, 1982), 79, whereby
we are “seeing the eternal in the temporal, the lasting
in the passing, the divine in the human” Nouwen, Behold
the Lord, 33.
[56] Crumlin, Beyond
Belief, 128.
[57] ibid.
[58] Crumlin, Beyond
Belief, 42. One might also refer here to Emmanuel Levinas’s
“notions of transcendence as a commitment not to lofty higher
powers but to moral relationships with others.” John A.
Grim, The Journal of Religion 81, 4 (spring 2001), 687.
[59] Andrew Bullen,
Beyond Belief, 78. Coleridge’s Aids to Meditation
is a suggestive term for our purposes here. See Douglas Hedley,
Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: Aids to Meditation and
the Mirror of the Spirit (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
[60] Sebastian Smee,
“When prize art is a matter of faith,” The Sydney
Morning Herald, 17 November 2000.
[61] One of just six
criteria for “What makes a good work of art?” The
Philosophical Magazine Online. [On-line] Available: www.philosophers.co.uk/games/britney1.htm
[62] Paradoxically,
despite efforts to portray God as the dynamic of evolution, psychologically
it seems a topical reconceptualisation would have God as the
fixed point of stability in the flux of life today, so that I
would define any attempt to recover a “field of invariance”
(Bert O. States, Performance as metaphor, Theater Journal
48, no. 1 March 1966, 23), as the religious quest, and thus
any artifact evoking it as religious art. A variation on this
theme occurs in Gascoigne quoting Ben Nicholson: “Painting
and religious experience are the same thing, and what we are
all searching for is the understanding and realization of infinity.”
Laura Gascoigne, God in the gallery. [On-line] Available:
www.thetablet.co.uk/cgi_bin/archinve_db.cgi?tablet-00595
[2002 February 18].
[63] I suggest Warner
would side with Jasper Johns in refraining from making meaning
statements, allowing beholders to make up their own minds: “When
recording an interview with Johns in 1965 1 kept trying to attribute
certain precise intentions and purposes to him and he wouldn't
have it. 'Intention involves such a small fragment of our consciousness
and of our mind and of our life. I think a painting should include
more experience than simply intended statement. I personally
would like to keep the painting in a state of shunning statement,
so that one is left with the fact that one can experience individually
as one pleases; that is, not to focus the attention in one way,
but to leave the situation as a kind of actual thing, so that
the experience of it is variable.” Jasper Johns: interviewed
(New York: Art Archive, 1985.) [On-line] Available: www.artchive.com/artchive/J/johnsbio.html
[2002 April 7]. Similarly, Bernstein writes: “The resulting
lack of certainty as to how the mind attaches meaning to what
the senses perceive is central to Johns’s artistic endeavour.
It is this quality of uncertainty that makes his art so elusive
and specific meanings impossible to pin down.” Roberta Bernstein,
Jasper Johns (New York: Rizzoli International Publications,
1992), 3.
[64] Matthew W. Fox,
“My address at the Art Institute of Chicago.” Creation
Spirituality Network Magazine Vol. 12, number 1 (spring 1996),
46.
[65] Here one could
ask, with Samuel Butler, “What is art, that it should have
a sake?” Barnet, S., Berman, M., and Burto, W. (eds.) Dictionary
of Literary Terms (London: Constable, 1964), 12.
[66] Smee, ibid., “Religious
art: the aesthetic questions it poses are of an entirely different
nature from the religious ones it may illustrate or express.”
[67] Noel Carroll,
“Art, narrative and moral understanding,” Beyond
Aesthetics: Philosophical essays (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press 1999), 270.
[68] Alejandro Garcia-Rivera,
The community of the beautiful: A theological aesthetics,
(Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1999), 123.
[69] Michael Warren,
Beyond Belief, 82.
[70] Kitsch is just
what is out of fashion. Warner’s purpose surely is to highlight
the transitory nature of things in his theme of hollow disposability.
In Buddhism, anything in the ordinary and the mundane can be
an occasion for enlightenment. The reader could refer to a nuanced
defence of kitch in religious art by Richard Viladesau, Theological
aesthetics: God in imagination, beauty and art. (New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 163-4).
[71] The Weekend Australian,
Editorial,
March 30-31, 2002, p. 18. [On-line] Available:
www.theaustralian.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,4042678,00.html
[2002 April 1].
[72] Reviewer Phil
Brown notes that it is “something of a snapshot of where
we’re at with all this religion and spirituality business.”
Brisbane News 03-09 April 2002, p. 25.
[73] “There is
no doubt that Christian moral teaching, even in its Biblical
roots, acknowledges the specific importance of a fundamental
choice.” John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, Encyclical
Regarding Certain Fundamental Questions of the Church's Moral
Teaching, August 6, 1993, 66. [On-line] Available: www.newadvent.org/docs/jp02vs.htm
[4
April 2002]. See also Vatican Council II, ed. A. Flannery,
800, no. 2: “a right . . . a freedom immune from coercion.”
[74] Alejandro Garcia-Rivers,
The Community of the Beautiful, (1999), pp 24, 36, 40,
42, 61, 99, 195. Difference is the rich starting
point for his attempt to build a theological aesthetics for Latin
American sub-cultures, using both the objective and subjective
approaches to construct a theology of Beauty.
[75] The change of
heart or repentance of Christian conversion, e.g., Matt
3:2.
Greg
Smith teaches at Christian Brothers' Gregory Terrace in Brisbane.
He has completed his Master of Religious Education through ACU
McAuley and is now completing his Master of Arts (Theology).
