Titus O.

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.