Titus O.

My friend artist Peter Fagundo described to me this morning a studio visit he had recently with an artist he works with, at the restaurant where he waits tables to pay bills. He said that his initial reaction to the work was to dislike it, though with some time and conversation with the artist he got a place of appreciating where she was coming from, if still not exactly liking the work.

That’s how it goes. And that works well when teaching; it’s the crucial skill, actually. When I used to write criticism, I refused to meet with the artists because I knew that I would lose, not objectivity, but the integrity of that somewhat “pure” immediate gestalt, and subsequent very personal analysis. I didn’t, and don’t, want to appreciate everything that comes round the pike. As an artist, I want to know what it is I’m supposed to be doing, and actually feel great satisfaction when I see something I clearly don’t care about. As I remember Krishanmurti once saying when asked about some silent yogi or levitating lama, “good for them. That’s just something I don’t have to worry about doing myself.” I love that idea. Rather than giving way to envy or agitation, just to think, oh good, I don’t have to make or do that thing.

Pete said that he feels like his aesthetic knife is getting really “honed”; not to kill, but to pare away the unnecessary. I know what he means. I, too, feel like I’m getting ever clearer about what I want to see, and what I don’t. I can appreciate the latter, but feel an increasing devotion to serving the former. Agnes Martin often spoke about human beings having a certain feeling or idea of perfection in their minds, and how artists often attempt to express this idea through their work, of their own sense of perfection in the mind. I take the meaning of this extremely broadly, as I think she was able to do, though her own work had a clear, very personal expression of it.

For whatever reason, I think I’m one of those people who find it especially difficult to know clearly what it is I need to make with much distraction around. Graduate school was really difficult in that respect. It really didn’t help me at all; in fact, it was quite damaging I think. I guess this is why I’m drawn to Agnes Martin, and Zen hermits, Taoist recluses, and desert monks. They shunned the hubbub in order to be able to truly listen within themselves.

Martin called it listening to inspiration. She said that inspiration is sort of always close, but that rational, discursive thought gets in the way; that artists often have that inspiration but that they don’t humble themselves before it (“humility is the most beautiful word,” she said), that they think it has to service their egos, and between the inspiration and the execution, a thousand thoughts enter and debase it. This is exactly how I feel when look at so much work today. I’m using the term “thinking” here not to mean a certain thoughtfulness; but rather, that I think art is by nature a much more intuitive, pre-rational, immediate, visceral kind of experience – even when as quietly reflective as the Ryman’s and Martin’s and early Marden’s I’m enjoying lately.

I’m reflecting on this “inspiration” standard in my own work a lot lately. In the galleries, I see too much thinking often times, and too much superficial influence from unquestioned trends and conventions. My old Korean Zen teacher used to say over and over “too much-e tinking tinking tinking! Only go straight, don’t-know!”

Which reminds me now of the thing I meant to say at the beginning, which is to relate this series of questions. They were how Pete boiled down his critique of that artist he visited. He rattled it off: “I asked her: Why are you doing this? This way? For whom? What do you mean by it? How do you want people to react to it?” I said she probably felt really tired in the day following. Like, those are the questions, aren’t they? And how many artists are really committed to asking them from their toes to their head tops? I’d say, only a percentage, and not a large one.

During my few years stint in a Soto monastery in California a decade back, I stumbled across a book in the library there that came to influence me, and my practice, enormously. Called “Cultivating the Empty Field,” it is the most extensive translation of 12th c. Chinese Zen master Hongzhi’s teachings in English. I can’t overstate how much this book meant to me then. It seemed to clearly and directly explain my real inspiration to practice zen, and my experience sitting on the cushion. This was revelatory especially as I had been practicing for years earlier in a Korean tradtion that emphasized chanting, bowing, and kong-an (or koan) practice. The founder of the school, Seung Sahn, my first Zen teacher, often admitted that he wasn’t fond of sitting, and reached “enlightenment” while chanting.

I wanted to refine my sitting practice, explore and season it, and I was always getting called in to the teacher’s room to have to have these absurd theatrical encounters, giving what I felt were somewhat canned responses, unable to talk about the nuances of what was happening for me in the practice, in simple terms. I was totally passionate and commited, and I “passed” plenty of koans; I just assumed in time (when I got more enlightened?) the ‘system’ would start to feel more natural, less stilted and “Korean.” It never really did; but then I encountered Dogen Zen.

I don’t want to get into the wonders of Dogen here, but one of his immediate predessors and influences was Hongzhi. Here’s a passage:

“Silently dwell in the self, in true suchness abandon conditioning. Open-minded and bright without defilement, simply penetrate and drop off everything. Today is not your first arrival here. Since the ancient home before the empty kalpa, clearly nothing has been obscured. Although you are inherently spirited and splendid, still you must go ahead and enact it. When doing so, immediately display every atom without hiding a speck of dirt. Dry and cool in deep repose, profoundly understand. If your rest is not satisfying and you yearn to go beyond birth and death, there can be no such place. Just burst through and you will discern without thought-dusts, pure without reasons for anxiety. Immediately you can sparkle and respond to the world. Merge together with all things. Everything is just right.”

I just find each line full of liberating insight, and bow a deep bow of gratitude in the direction of 12th c. China. You can have Heiddegger, or Wittgenstein, or Sartre, or the Post-Moderns, or even wacky ol’ Ken Wilber. Throw in Confucius, Rumi, St Francis, Martin Buber, Ramana Maharshi, or even the Dalai Lama. If I had to choose (which thankfully I don’t), I’d just take Hongzhi, and shikantaza (“just sitting”).

Last fall I was looking for a copy of CTEF, and happily discovered that the book’s translator, Taigen Leighton, had recently moved to Chicago. I had been off the Dharma trail for awhile, unable to find a teacher or sangha that felt particularly right for me; though granted I hadn’t been looking all that hard either. I’d kept sitting, but done more yoga and whatnot for a couple years (I needed a fresh take.) Taigen is a Dharma heir, or “Zen Master”, in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki, the legendary transmitter of Dogen Zen to the US. Taigen is also probably the foremost western-born Soto Zen practitioner-scholar in the country (with many renowned Asian born translators, and more traditional “scholars” also making great contributions.)

So I went to sit with Taigen and the group he was leading who met weekly at a Catholic retreat in the heart of Chicago. They soon signed a lease on a new space, and opened their own center early this year (I was happy to design the window signage, for an old store front in Irving Park.) I’m trying to make it up once or twice a week, and though it isn’t really that far, with Chicago traffic or having to take two trains, it still takes me close to an hour to get there. Anyway, what an enormous boon to be able to practice this way in the midst of 21st century American urban existence.

I’ve also started a Zen sitting group at the School of the Art Institute, where I’m teaching, and this is enormously satisfying. This reimmersion in the focused study and practice of Zen is having direct results in my life. I can see it (I want to talk about this more next post). Now, I just need to find some income through summer, until fall semester starts…

I saw Richard Tuttle talk the other night, along with his wife, poet Mei Mei Berssenbrugge. Wow.

He really has become one of a handful of constant touchstones in my thinking about art today, from a couple of shows I saw in NYC 15 years ago to his retrospective in Dallas in 2006. This night, he read a series of short poetic “essays” that he wrote for a series of catalogs on color. I didn’t get exactly what, where, or for whom these were done. There was an un-synchronized slide show going on behind him with work spanning 1970 to a current show of new work in New York.

He spoke about letting the colors themselves write the essays, and they ranged from the profound to the impenetrable to the humorous (as when he’s conversing with the blue who is writing the essay on blue, “in his head” as it were – a phrase I always find to make very little real sense.)

After, he was asked about beauty and morality, and I loved that he took the question so seriously that he spluttered for a few seconds before getting started. He then emphatically said that he felt that art was really about the opposite of beauty, in that it is a way to digest and become aware of the phenomenal world without being destroyed by beauty. “I mean,” he said, “if I could see the actual beauty of this podium right here I would be annihilated by it.”

Jeder Engel is Schrecklich, said Rilke. Indeed.

That one statement really deftly flipped an entire aesthetic convention on its head, and reminded me of similar verbal maneuvers by Dogen, or any other number of Zen-type folks.

I had to go up and shake his hand after, pay homage. I was happy to find his handshake strong, dry, and warm, and his demeanor so friendly, attentive and convivial. I so liked him, and Mei Mei, with whom I briefly discussed Leslie Silko (her friend, and a favorite writer of mine) and her home in Abiquiu, a mile or two from where we stayed over Christmas.

My friend, artist Peter Fagundo, and I walked to the train pleasantly high and seemingly extra attuned and sensitive to self and surroundings, making drunken thugs and winos on the train platform extra-disconcerting, but accepted as grist for our attention’s mill.

We then went over to my place for a studio visit. I’ve been making some really difficult sculptures the last year. It began with a 3-D Design class in Arlington last spring. I worked along side the students, as I very much like to do, and made something with wire and melted plastic that quite intrigued me. I wonder if I have spent the year since going down a blind alley, while polluting the atmosphere with the noxious gases given off by heat gunned shopping bags and painting tarps. I’ve made a body of what I’d consider some tough, freaky doo-dads that are the most fun I’ve ever had in production, but with results that perpetually leave me aching with intimations of a missing element, or perhaps a wholly misguided approach. I’m at one of those agonizing if perceptibly fruitful impasses.

The crux of my dilemma has been this re-emphasis for me on trying to make a functioning, cohesive aesthetic object, but using a completely unconventional approach and material. I began with wire armatures, but wanted to have less control over the forms. This led me to airplane cable, that I began to zip-tie into looping, Marden-esque aerial forms hanging in space. Some stayed just like this, while others accrued plastic skins, as pictured here. These are just a couple hanging around in the living room until I can get them documented, and then hopefully out of sight/out of mind for a bit.

I know quite clearly what I do not want to see: production or process as cheeky gimmick, cheesy crap re-contextualized as wink-nudge formal maneuver, hipster anything. I’ve really wanted to avoid directly referencing ANYTHING in the world, and am both intrigued and frustrated by the wealth of associations the biomorphic forms I’ve been using conjure, for me anyway.

I have wanted to be in discussion with certain things – moderns, mainly, like DeKooning, Pollock, Leger, Andre Masson, Picasso, analytical and synthetic cubism, etc. Also, there’s an obvious relationship to John Chamberlain, and I think often about Tomas Kiesewetter, the contemporary German sculptor who I think simply kicks total ass.

And cartoon explosions.

So, I’m a bit caught at the moment, wondering whether to proceed, or step away from this approach for awhile. Pete and I have this open-ended project starting in a house in Evanston. That’s soon to become a real platform for a wide-ranging inquiry into art practice, and I’m sure some solutions will present themselves,  in the midst of new dilemmas.