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.

I was really into a number of bands from Australia when I was in high school in the mid 80′s, and even later into college. There was no particular reason I was into bands from Oz, save they seemed disproportionately skilled at crafting really catchy New Wave tunes. And, I became obsessed with (Midnight Oil singer) Peter Garrett’s bald head – I spent an entire printmaking class in high school using it as subject, which seems really weird in retrospect. Was I anticipating shaving my own for a few years, as I did during years of Zen training?

Maybe it began with “Unguarded Moment”, the Church’s first minor blink on American radar, no doubt due to MTV. The only record of theirs I really got into was “Heyday” a couple years later – 1985? I had it on tape; it was good to drive around to, but not timelessly great. After that, I didn’t care about them at all. Kinda pretentious, aren’t they?

I saw Icehouse’s “Hey Little Girl” on MTV, and I loved that song. But they may have really hit their peak earlier, still calling themselves Flowers, with “We Can Get Together,” a near perfect nugget of New Wave pop gold. The video sums up an entire (brief) era of design and fashion. Like most other half-way decent “new wave/college” bands of the time, they turned quickly into power ballad shlock meisters. But discovering that one song on youtube blew me away.

Later, Midnight Oil was a fixation, as mentioned, before they turned into national protest anthem writers. When I first heard Power & the Passion, something pivotal shifted in my psyche.

I suppose it’s worth mentioning that INXS was never more than a band I didn’t change the radio/TV when they came on.

Later, early in college, there was one great record from Hunters & Collectors – Human Frailty. With the wonders of youtube, the loss of thousands of abandoned LPs years ago becomes slightly less painful.

About the same time, that first Crowded House record was much loved – the bass player is the brother of the singer in H&C. And speaking of brothers, there was Neil and Tim Finn of Split Enz, another fave, who are actually from New Zealand I think; Neil formed Crowded House in Melbourne, home of H&C too. I met them all later when I lived there, sharing a house as I did with artist musicians who all lived on the dole, smoked too much weed and embodied the classic bohemian existence. God, it was a good life.

I ended up in Melbourne my junior year in college, when it came down to deciding where to study “abroad”. My main options in art school were Italy, New York, or Australia, and to me it was a no-brainer. I wanted to go as far away from Reagan America as I could get – even though culturally, Europe would have been stranger. The president of KCAI had become pals with his counterpart at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, and they concocted a literal student exchange. I was the guinea pig.

They sent some shockingly handsome, charismatic con artist kid who in his one semester stole $5000 of tools, wrecked a girl’s corvette, slept with a number of guy’s girlfriends, and even got my girlfriend’s English roommate pregnant (like him, she also turned out to be kind of a slut, so the paternity was probably murky). By the time I returned 12 months later, he was legendarily loathed. When I got to Melbourne, after a few weeks the head of the department I was in admitted that they felt bad because I was such a committed student and nice guy. They had sent who they did simply to get rid of him. It seemed typically Australian to me at the time – practical, irreverent, humorous, and a bit lazy. I saw the 80′s come to a close somewhere in the desert outback. I had an absolutely fabulous time in my year down under, but couldn’t wait to get home in the end. People said I looked different, at best only like the old Titus’ cousin, complete with mild Aussie accent. I can’t believe its been almost 20 years since I was there.

I thought the Oscars were weirdly timely and enjoyable last night. Subdued, respectful, intimate, but still totally global. That is our moment: hovering quietly, expectantly in disaster, hoping for a smooth landing crafted by our national Sully Sullenberger, Barack Obama.

The sets in that opening song and dance number oddly mimicked the trash aesthetic that’s so dominated art the last couple years, but I liked them nonetheless. They were well considered. The anticipated song montage was less painful than I expected – though the second number with Beyonce almost ruined the whole show. Those brown tights were a very bad idea – not at all bootylicious.

I liked that there were only a couple steps up to the stage, with the presenters standing at a modest podium a few feet from the seats.

The backdrops throughout the night were dark, understated, and downright beautiful – deco-noir-futuristic, straight out of Blade Runner. The multiple screen arrays almost looked like they’d been designed by Terry Gilliam – the steam punk aesthetic is really working its way through the culture. Most women’s dresses looked crafted to match the sets; generally somewhat tastefully Ingres-esque, a mixture of the diaphanous and the heavily formed, all slightly deconstructed.

I heard that it was the cheapest production in years. If so, I hope they keep spending less money.

The narcissism factor seemed especially in check – no memorable run-on thank you lists, no crying jags, no starlets I especially wanted to see yanked off the stage with a hook.

Then again, there were no real enjoyably cringe worthy moments, or people you could really love to hate.

But who needed such melodrama with Philippe Petit balancing the Oscar on his chin, and allowing us to bask in his irrepressibly joyous aura?

(I was just looking for this old interview and realized it never made it from Glasstire to my site. So for sake of archiving…)

I recently sat down with Michael Auping, chief curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, to discuss (among other things) Declaring Space, his revelatory exhibition of four artists who attempted to modernize our very conception of space itself. Featuring Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, this exhibition marks the first time these artists have been brought together in this way, and they’ve perhaps never looked better.

Titus O’Brien: Congratulations on a wonderful show. The Modern continues to be one of my favorite museums in the country. I have noticed since I’ve been in the area the last three years that the Modern seems to have a certain focus on sort of grand, almost heroic late modern masters; like Philip Guston, Anselm Kiefer, Sean Scully, and now the four artists in Declaring Space.

Michael Auping: Maybe that’s a reflection of my age, knowing at this point that I can’t do everything. When I was a young curator I thought I could do everything. I would do two shows a year. Now I do a show every three years. I tend to look at art harder now. I’m not as easily seduced by the next new thing. I take my time to engage more classic statements.

This and following images are installation views
of Declaring Space.

I also think that this show has a little something to do with the current context right now. The artists in this show were incredibly ambitious and boldly romantic. It’s harder to find that kind of art now. Maybe that’s for the better, maybe it’s for the worse, I don’t know. Some say it’s because of 9/11: people retrench, artists retreat a little bit—become more conservative. But this show has been on my mind since I was at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, where they have one of the great collections of international abstraction from the 1950s. I’ve always wanted to do this show. To my mind, it represents a very intense moment in the metaphysics of abstraction. It could be thought of as the high renaissance of abstraction. Maybe we need to be reminded of a moment like that now.

TO: It does seem very timely. In the past couple decades, the “head-y,” postmodern climate found these guys really sort of unfashionable. Their pronouncements and stated goals were so profoundly metaphysical, transpersonal, mystical even – seriously no-no territory for a long time.

But as you say, 9-11 has acted as some sort of watershed. We’ve seen a kind of burgeoning romanticism and longing for authenticity. It seems, though, almost like a pastiche, with all the mushrooms, fairies, deer, skulls, needlepoint, etc. It doesn’t feel very confident. Can you say more about what you think makes this show timely in this environment?

MA: It’s timely only in the sense that artists right now seem so caught up in their own minutiae, and in their own little products which can be sold at the growing number of art fairs to new collectors who seem to create an overwhelming demand in the market. That’s fine to a point, but artists also need time to think and reflect. Their role in society is not to produce product but to act as visual philosophers who ask big questions. Rothko, Newman, Fontana, and Klein are of a generation of artists that thought larger. I think they are good models for younger artists to look at today.

TO: I have to say that as I get older these works do start to look different. Their gravity (thinking especially of Rothko and Newman) is attractive. With that softly lit, chapel-like gallery, I’ve never seen so many Rothkos displayed so well. The bodies of the other artists’ work look great too, and create a fascinating dialog with each other. I wanted to ask you how intimately involved you are in the installation process.

MA: Probably more intimately involved than our installers would like (laughs). I work very hard on the installation of art. It tells more about the meaning behind the artist’s intentions than any essay or wall label. It’s a very practical thing. You simply have to make the effort to get to know the artist and their work – what it calls for, what it needs to exist on its own terms. I read a lot of letters by Rothko, for example, and I think he understood by the end that shining a lot of light on his paintings was the worst way to experience them.

TO: Yeah, I’d actually almost forgotten that a Rothko could work, they’re normally lit and hung so badly.

MA: Our initial thought is that to see more color we need to shine more light on something, and that’s not true. If an artist uses color properly, the color will to a certain extent burn under its own fuel. You don’t need to add a lot more gasoline to the fire. This is especially so with Rothko. I took all the lights down and looked at the art. With our minimal skylights, it wasn’t dark, but more like twilight. I aimed one light in the center of each picture. That’s not much considering how large some of these paintings are. Rothko was trying to create a situation where the color was vibrating in the room. So, by not lighting all the walls up it allows the edges of the paintings to blend with the space, and if you allow that to happen, the paintings and the space become one thing. Also, he was one of the first to allow paint to spill over on the edge of his canvas so if you look at the side you’ll see paint on the side. To my mind, that was an indication of his engagement with the wall.

TO: In terms of the lighting, I’m reminded of that Caravaggio in Kansas City which, if you’re sneaky, you can flip the lights off and see it much more as it was meant to be.

MA: Yes. Frescoes in many Italian churches were not lit by anything other than ambient light, sometimes a candle or two. The artists knew that was the way they would be seen, and they painted the light into the painting accordingly. With abstraction it’s also important how these paintings are lit and installed.

TO: Looking at work of this period (the 1950s), you notice there is this shift from the depicted romanticism of say, Caspar David Friedrich or the American landscape tradition to the works of these artists, where the viewer now becomes the figure in the landscape.

MA: Yes. Somehow that romantic impulse was inherited by abstraction, and the mystery of what Rothko called “an unknown space.” And that unknown space remains a mystery after all this time. I was saying to someone the other night, its incredible that abstraction is almost 100 years old. When something is 100 years old it’s an antique. In some ways these paintings exist as modernist relics of an ancient religion. I really think that the middle fifties constitutes the high point of abstraction. Yet we still haven’t solved the mystery of that space.

TO: You compare this to our moment, where there is a toying with romanticism, but its almost embarrassed, or ironic. It’s a return to that earlier depiction or representation of it. There is a lot of overt referencing to it, to Friederich for instance; it’s all over the place.

MA: Well, it may not be the moment to be romantic. This may be a good time to remember a time when you could be. Anyway, great moments in art often occur around wartime situations; who knows what will occur.

Also, it’s not as if there is nothing left of this romantic transcendentalism. Rothko, Newman, Fontana, and Klein did leave a legacy that we can see today. Newman’s zips were magnificently transformed into Walter de Maria’s stainless steel poles which electrify his monumental Lightning Field. Can you imagine a Jim Turrell being created without the knowledge of Rothko or Yves Klein?

TO: The large Klein IKB monochrome on the wall starts to float just like a Turrell when you stand in front of it. I was noting recently that Olafur Eliasson seems like a natural heir to Donald Judd and that group.

MA: Yes. He is also in debt to the generation before Judd, whether he knows it or not. I assume he does.

TO: I like how the show ends with Klein, the youngest artist of the four, obviously pointing the way to the revolutions in art in the sixties and seventies. Op art, conceptual art, happenings, Fluxus, etc.

MA: You might say, pun intended, Klein makes the biggest leap of all four. In this show, he is the most radical.

TO: Do you find that there is any particular distinction between these artists culturally, with two Americans and two Europeans?

MA: Certainly this exhibition begs a question like that. Bringing this group of artists together is somewhat controversial because we think of European and American art as being very separate structures. It’s also viewed as a competitive situation. Of course, the typical historical take is that the US triumphed after the war and the European contribution was just a footnote. There is no question that abstract expressionism or the New York School, as it is also known, had an incredible international impact. But in terms of this idea of opening and expanding the space of abstraction, the Europeans were very much engaged as well. They made important contributions, Fontana and Klein in particular.

TO: The palettes of Newman and Rothko are more sober, saturnine – morose even. Klein and Fontana seem more whimsical in a way.

MA: Maybe not whimsical. Lighter maybe, with those starburst sorts of colors…and in terms of color, Klein’s love affair with blue is very French. It’s kind of tongue-in-cheek, there’s evidence of a sense of humor for a Frenchman to invent his own blue.

TO: Humor seems to be a part of Klein, in particular, and even in Fontana to some extent, where its nowhere near in Rothko or Newman.

MA: The Americans were “painters,” and in many ways more conservative. They engaged the tradition and tools of painting, probably because they didn’t have a long tradition of their own. They were single-handedly, and soberly, creating a new American painting in the context of this grand spatial democracy. The Europeans were more skeptical and advanced conceptually, and in terms of their awareness of art history. Fontana, for example, was very conscious of the fact that Italians invented perspective in painting. That absolutely changed the nature of space in painting. By slicing through the surfaces of his canvases, he also created another dimension for painting.

Fontana was also intensely aware of space exploration in the 1950s. He felt that painting should be an intrinsic part of expanding our consciousness about space—how it is defined and perceived. Klein was also very futuristic in his approach. He believed that space was the ultimate medium and that in a perfect world gravity would not exist. People would float around the planet, completely unburdened by their past. His famous leap off a second-story ledge in Paris was a leap into a future, mystical concept of space.

TO: There is a curious dichotomy between the Ron Mueck show that just closed, after setting all kinds of attendance records for the Modern, and this one.

MA: The attendance has actually been quite good for Declaring Space, considering the fact that it is a fairly philosophical exhibition. This show won’t travel to any other museums—it’s too expensive to insure—so people are coming here from out of town. The coupling of two shows like these really highlights the fact that today’s contemporary museum is addressing many different communities. The Ron Mueck show had a “wow” factor that very few shows can match. People—many of whom have never been to a museum before—came to witness Ron’s technical skills. I can’t tell you how many times I was asked, “How did he make those figures look so real?” Dazzling us with technical skill—and Ron is one of the best—is a form of entertainment, and many younger artists today understand that entertainment is a valid aspect of the art experience. Declaring Space is more esoteric and a little more difficult to deal with. It doesn’t provide a specific skill or image to hold on to. It creates a space that forces you back on yourself. That has always been an important aspect of art. One is like going to the movies. The other is like going to church.

TO: Do you think the general public really understands the issues brought up by Declaring Space? How much does that matter to you?

MA: I don’t really think about the public when I’m planning a show. What is “the public”? There are communities with varying degrees of interest and education…I think mostly about artists when I’m putting a show together—what they will think. They are smarter than the public about art. They know how to understand subtle narratives. I’d like to think our job is to be smart rather than appeal to the lowest common denominator.

TO: Do you think about the kind of institution you’re wanting to create—like what kind of niche or brand the Modern has as opposed to other institutions around the country or world?

MA: I’m conscious of what they do, but I think it’s important for museums to be unique, and not try to be MoMA, or the Walker, even if it means doing things that are not “hip” or of the moment. You have to do things you think are unique. I think our exhibition program is unique, for better and worse. You can’t be unique and make everybody happy.

TO: You can’t talk about art today without money coming up. What are your observations about money and art today?

MA: We’re in a gluttonous time in the world. I think people should be nervous. I know I am. I was just in China, and I did dozens of studio visits. It’s like America in the twenties, in terms of trying to develop the concept of an avant-garde. In the twenties and thirties, Americans knew about the radical developments taking place in Europe, but we didn’t yet know how to find our own radical nature. We copied Picasso and Matisse. In China, all the artists are looking to the West, and doing quite good impressions of Nauman or Kiefer or Warhol; but it’s just a sort of mannerism. As was true in America, it is a country with a lot of money and a lot of contemporary art; unfortunately, not much of it is very good.

In the world in general there is simply more money, and certainly more artists than there have ever been. But it’s like a garden. If you give it lots and lots of water many things will grow, and among them, quite a few weeds. What we have here is a garden out of control. There needs to be more emphasis on quality, not quantity. The museum, like the critic, must be discriminating.

TO: What are you working on next?

MA: I’m not sure yet. I’m just enjoying this one for now. I’m a little nervous, anticipating the next idea. But I don’t need to know for another few months. The next show won’t be for another two years.