Return to The Third Mind: American
Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989
January 30 - April 19, 2009
Object Labels for the Exhibition
This exhibition traces how Asian art, literature, and philosophy were transmitted and transformed within American cultural and intellectual currents, influencing the articulation of new visual and conceptual languages. It explores how American art evolved through a process of appropriation and integration of Asian sources that developed from the 1860s through the 1980s, when globalization came to eclipse earlier, more deliberate modes of cultural transmission and reception. While Europe has long been recognized as the font of mainstream American art movements, the exhibition explores an alternative lineage of creative culture that is aligned with America's Pacific vista-Asia. Vanguard artists consistently looked toward "the East" to forge an independent artistic identity that would define the modern age-and the modern mind-through a new understanding of existence, nature, and consciousness. They drew ideas from Eastern religions, primarily Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism, as well as classical Asian art forms and performance traditions. Opening with the late nineteenth-century Aesthetic movement and the ideas promulgated in transcendentalist circles, The Third Mind illuminates the Asian influences shaping such major movements as abstract art, Conceptual art, Minimalism, and the neo-avant-garde as they unfolded in New York and on the West Coast. It also presents select developments in modern poetry, music, and dance theater. The Third Mind refers to a "cut-ups" work by Beat writers William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, whose cult of spontaneity in art and life drew inspiration from Asian attitudes. This manuscript composed of random texts and images evokes the eclectic yet purposeful method by which American artists often appropriated material from Asia to create new forms, structures, and meanings in their work. Misreadings, mediations, denials, and imaginary projections emerge as important iterations of this creative process. Some artists identified with non-Western art and thought precisely to subvert and critique what they saw as the spiritually bankrupt capitalist West. Others culled alternative, East-West identities from transcendentalism, Theosophy, Carl Jung's formulations of the collective unconscious, and New Age movements preaching the perennial vitality of Asia's spiritual psychology in a global age. Still others simply extracted and freely enlisted what served their particular artistic impulses. Grounded in documentary evidence of the artists' encounters with Asia, this exhibition shows how artists working in America adapted Eastern ideas and art forms to create not only new styles of art, but more importantly, a new theoretical definition of the contemplative experience and self-transformative role of art itself.
Section 1
Aestheticism and Japan: The Cult of the Orient
In 1853 and 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry opened trade with Japan, ending its 250-year policy of seclusion from the West. Previously, Americans' exposure to East Asian cultures had been limited, although some rarified Bostonian circles were already attentive to Hinduism and Buddhism. Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau had looked to these religions to inform their reflections on unifying the self with cosmic nature. But Perry's "unlocking" of what was known as the Orient was a momentous event for a younger generation of Americans. The subsequent involvement with East Asia was propelled by multiple desires, from the United States' political and economic drive to assert its hegemony over the Pacific region to individuals' personal quests for alternate spiritual beliefs. In the American imagination the East became a mystical place to interpret at will-the very antithesis to the West's faith in reason, science, and progress. American artists and intellectuals discovered East Asia through myriad channels. Texts were the primary means; however, the export of ceramics, screen paintings, lacquer, and woodblock prints was an avenue for the spread of East Asian aesthetics to an American public avid to collect exotic decorative arts for the home. International fairs and exhibitions, such as the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, included Japanese and Chinese pavilions. Individual figures also loom large in this narrative. Harvard-educated scholar Ernest Fenollosa, who lived and taught in Japan, became a pivotal writer and curator who formed major Asian art collections in the United States. Artist John La Farge traveled to Japan and published and lectured on Japanese art and culture, influencing many in his milieu in Boston and New York. James McNeill Whistler deployed East Asian strategies in his work and was key in fostering interest in Asian art among his peers. Thus, a network of artists, many associated with the Aesthetic movement-an eclectic, art-for-art's-sake artistic and decorative style that borrowed from a range of cultures and periods and emphasized the beautification of all aspects of life-turned to Asia and particularly Japan. Asian art collector Charles Lang Freer championed a group of these artists, among them Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Abbott Handerson Thayer, and Whistler. American artists living in Paris, such as Mary Cassatt and John Twachtman, also rethought Japanese aesthetics in their work. For them, Japanese art became a rich source to mine and reconfigure for their own artistic ends.
This section is organized by Vivien Greene, curator of 19th- and early-20th- century art.
John La Farge
(1835-1910)
Of the American artists who were significant purveyors of Asian aesthetics, Boston-born La Farge-unlike expatriates James McNeill Whistler and Mary Cassatt-spent his career in the United States and actually traveled to Japan. Married to the grandniece of Commodore Matthew Perry, who opened Japan to the West in 185354, La Farge began collecting Japanese decorative and religious arts in 1856. Almost contemporaneously, he began painting flower still lifes, progressing to watercolors of water lilies, a common Japanese landscape theme, which evokes the sacred Buddhist emblem of the lotus. In 1886 La Farge traveled to Japan with historian Henry Adams. There they were introduced to Orientalist scholar, collector, and connoisseur of Asian art Ernest Fenollosa, who toured with La Farge and Adams to view collections of Japanese art, especially at Buddhist temples. Throughout the trip, La Farge painted watercolors of the sights he encountered. This trip exercised enormous influence on La Farge, and upon returning to New York, he looked to Mt. Fuji-the volcanic mountain in central Japan and a ubiquitous image in Japanese art-as a source for the mystical landscape surrounding Christ in his mural for the Church of the Ascension (1888). He mused in his diaries: "Murmurs of Buddhistic conversation remain in my mind. . . . For I had proposed to make my studies serve for the picture of the 'Ascension'; to use the clouds and the wilderness for my background; and to be, at least for moments, in some relation to what I have to represent; that is to say, in an atmosphere not inimical, as ours is, to what we call the miraculous. Here, at least, I am not forced to consider external nature as separate and opposed."
John La Farge (1835-1910)
The Last Waterlilies
1862
Oil on wood
Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine, The Lunder Collection
John La Farge (1835-1910)
Small Study of Waterlilies
ca. 1879
Watercolor and bodycolor on Japanese paper
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, Gift of Bancel La Farge
John La Farge (1835-1910)
Portrait of our Landlord, the Buddhist Priest Zenshin San, at the Door of the Clergy House, Iyemitsu Temple, Nikko
1886
Watercolor and gouache over graphite on wove paper
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Willard G. Clark
John La Farge (1835-1910)
Water-Fall of Urami-No-Taki
ca. 1886
Watercolor on paper
Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Stuart P. Feld
John La Farge (1835-1910)
The Great Statue of Amida Buddha at Kamakura, Known as the Daibutsu, from the Priest's Garden
1887
Watercolor and gouache on wove paper
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of the family of Maria L. Hoyt, 1966
John La Farge (1835-1910)
The Great Statue of Amida Buddha at Kamakura
ca. 1887
Watercolor over graphite on wove paper
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd
Mary Cassatt
(1844-1926)
Cassatt, a Paris-based Impressionist, was a key proponent of Japanese art in the West. Deeply impressed by an exhibition of Japanese prints in 1890, she was inspired to create a series of ten color drypoint etchings and aquatints (189091). These works illustrate how she adopted formal aspects of the Japanese prints, from off-center compositions and flat planes to an emphasis on pattern. Her sensitive manipulation of these conventions and themes transformed the quintessentially Japanese into something entirely her own.
Her contagious excitement can be felt in a note to painter Berthe Morisot: "Seriously, You must not miss that. You who want to make color prints, you couldn't dream of anything more beautiful. I dream of it and don't think of anything else but color on copper." Cassatt's primary inspiration was Kitagawa Utamaro; she owned several of his works in her personal collection of ukiyo-e prints. She adapted motifs from Utamaro's work, such as Midnight: Mother and Sleepy Child (1790). Cassatt also responded to ukiyo-e images because they addressed quotidian events of women's lives such as ablutions, dressing, taking tea, and caring for children. This subject matter, converted into the diurnal activities of a Parisian woman, predominated her work. Cassatt's transposition from East to West also occurred on a technical level. She employed the medium of drypoint and scratched her images into copper plates rather than using the traditional Japanese woodblock. The comparison of an earlier stage of a print to a final one, as with The Lamp (ca. 1891), shows her progression from the more naturalistic "drawn" image to its transformation into something much more Japanese in its reductive forms and planar space. Rather than simply emulating ukiyo-e prints, Cassatt translated these through a Western lens to achieve distinctive modernist images.
Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)
In the Omnibus (The Tramway)
1890-91
Drypoint and aquatint on cream laid paper
Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, North Carolina, Gift of Therese Thorn McLane in honor of Samuel Hudson Hughes and Zelina Comegys Brunschwig
Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)
Afternoon Tea Party (The Visit)
1890-91
Drypoint and aquatint on cream laid paper
S.P. Avery Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)
The Letter
189091
Drypoint and aquatint on cream laid paper
S.P. Avery Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)
The Lamp
1890-91
Drypoint, soft-ground etching, and aquatint on cream laid paper
Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, North Carolina, Gift of Therese Thorn McLane in honor of Samuel Hudson Hughes and Zelina Comegys Brunschwig
Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)
The Lamp
ca. 1891
Drypoint and soft-ground etching on cream wove paper
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Rosenwald Collection
Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)
The Coiffure
ca. 1891
Drypoint and soft-ground etching on cream laid paper
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Rosenwald Collection
Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)
The Fitting
1890-91
Drypoint, soft-ground etching, and aquatint on cream laid paper
S.P. Avery Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and
Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)
Woman Bathing (The Toilette)
1890-91
Drypoint and aquatint on cream laid paper
S.P. Avery Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)
Mother's Kiss (The Kiss)
1890-91
Drypoint and aquatint on cream laid paper
S.P. Avery Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)
Maternal Caress
ca. 1891
Drypoint and soft-ground etching on cream wove paper
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Gift of Miss Elisabeth Achelis
This work by Cassatt was based on Utamaro's print of a mother caressing her child.
Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806)
Midnight: Mother and Sleepy Child, from the series Customs of Women in the Twelve Hours
Japan, Edo period, 1790
Polychrome woodblock print, 36.5 x 24.4 cm
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1922
Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)
The Bath (The Tub)
1890-91
Drypoint, soft-ground etching, and aquatint on cream laid paper
Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, North Carolina, Gift of Therese Thorn McLane in honor of Samuel Hudson Hughes and Zelina Comegys Brunschwig
James McNeill Whistler
(1834-1903)
Whistler, a London-based American expatriate, was perhaps the greatest advocate of Japanese art of his time, although he never traveled to Japan. During his career, Whistler transitioned from including Asian decorative objects in his paintings to fully embracing Japanese allover design principles for interiors he created, such as The Peacock Room (187677), which his patron, the Asian-art collector and Aesthetic-movement supporter Charles Lang Freer, preserved (now in the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). The dates of Whistler's first contact with Asian decorative and fine arts objects and Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints are uncertain, but he had begun collecting Asian art by the early 1860s. Whistler soon after used East Asian motifs in his work, such as the Western woman clad in an embroidered robe, seated before a Japanese folding screen and holding a Chinese porcelain vase in Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks (1864). These amalgams of Asian accoutrements project an aura of exoticism, rather than a fully developed comprehension of Asian ideas or pictorial characteristics. As Whistler's engagement with Japanese art developed, he abandoned Orientalist pastiches in favor of a sophisticated adaptation of Japanese compositional devices, apparent in his Nocturnes of the 1870s.
James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903)
Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks
1864
Oil on canvas
Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection, 1917
James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903)
Arrangement in Gray: Portrait of the Painter
ca. 1872
Oil on canvas
Detroit Institute of Arts, Bequest of Henry Glover Stevens in memory of Ellen P. Stevens and Mary M. Stevens
James McNeill Whistler
(1834-1903)
Nocturne: Blue and Gold-Old Battersea Bridge
ca. 187275
Oil on canvas
Tate, London, Presented by the Art Fund, 1905
This asymmetrical London river scene captures the ephemeral nature of the
Thames's muted light, mist, and water, demonstrating the artist's use of shallow space and tonal subtlety with sources in Edo-period Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, in this case Hiroshige's archetypal Bamboo Yards, Ky_bashi Bridge.
Utagawa (And_) Hiroshige (1797-1858)
Bamboo Yards, Ky_bashi Bridge, from the series One Hundred Famous
Views of Edo
Japan, Edo period, 1857
Polychrome woodblock print, approximately 35.7 x 24.1 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, William Sturgis Bigelow Collection
James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903)
Nocturne
1875-80
Oil on canvas
Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection, 1917
Whistler's more fugitive later Nocturne illustrates his evolving interest in the philosophy of nature embodied in Chinese and Japanese monochromatic ink painting. This thinly painted image renders human and landscape forms nearly immaterial, evoking the "spirit-matter" or qi associated with East Asian aesthetics, which he may have known. With these paintings, Whistler strove to depict nature as dynamic and formless rather than monumental and physical, suggesting something numinous and wondrous beyond external form.
Augustus Vincent Tack (1870-1949)
The Voice of Many Waters
ca. 1923-24
Oil on canvas mounted on wallboard
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., Acquired 1924
New York painter Tack studied Arthur Wesley Dow's method of abstracting rhythmic forms from landscape and nature. Inspired by a 1920 trip to the Rocky Mountains, he composed a slice of that terrain in a scroll-like format that recalls Dow's Grand Canyon photographs as well as the Chinese monumental landscape paintings Tack collected and could access in East Coast collections. The title of this painting is taken from a verse in the book of Revelation (14:2), "The Voice of God is like the sound of many waters." This painting reflects upon the transcendental power of the American West, which artists likened to the majestic and mysterious vistas conjured in East Asian landscape traditions. Through his rhythmic mosaic of colors, packed closely around a middle tonal range, Tack leads the viewer's eye upward over a rocky foreground to a waterfall along the right side of the painting and into the clouds on the opposite side. Tack's meditation on the unity of matter and spirit appealed to collector Duncan Phillips, who lauded his paintings in Ernest Fenollosian terms as a "blending of Eastern and Western art" and an advancement of "the La Farge tradition in American painting."
Charles Caryl Coleman (1840-1928)
Still Life with Plum Blossoms in an Oriental Vase
1887
Oil on canvas
Private collection, Courtesy Berry-Hill Galleries, New York
Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849-1921)
Still Life
ca. 1886
Oil on canvas
Indianapolis Museum of Art, Gift of the Gamboliers
Augustus Saint-Gaudens
(1848-1907)
Adams Memorial
1886-91; cast 1968
Plaster cast (original bronze figure in granite setting designed by Stanford
White, Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D.C.), Saint-Gaudens National Historic
Site, Cornish, New Hampshire
Kano Motonobu (1476-1559)
White-robed Bodhisattva of Compassion
Japan, Muromachi period, first half of the 16th century
Hanging scroll; ink, color, and gold on silk, 157.2 x 76.4 cm Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Fenollosa-Weld Collection
Thomas Wilmer Dewing (1851-1938)
The Recitation
1891
Oil on canvas
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit Museum of Art Purchase, Picture Fund
Dewing was a central figure of the Aesthetic movement and among the artists championed by Asian-art collector Charles Lang Freer. Although Dewing collected Japanese prints, it was largely due to his contact with Freer, whom he met in 1890, that Japanese art became a visual repertory for his pictorial investigations, eventually leading him to paint folding screens. The Recitation, representative of the allusive pictures of women Dewing produced during the 1890s, personifies sound, portraying one woman rehearsing while the other listens. This atmospheric, quasiabstracted scene of female figures blending into a vaporous green locale is at once the embodiment of Emersonian ideas and contiguous Asian sensibilities, both in its dematerialization of the figures in the landscape and its interpretation of humanity harmoniously at one with nature. Dewing acknowledged the oblique influences of Japanese aesthetics on these works, writing that a painting of his looked "astonishingly like an Utamaro."
John Henry Twachtman (1853-1902)
Arques-la-Bataille
1885
Oil on canvas
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Morris K. Jesup Fund, 1968
Section 2
Landscapes of the Mind: New Conceptions of Nature
For modernists throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Asian art offered an expressive aesthetics of transparency, weightlessness, dematerialization, and rhythmic form. The Japanese print and treatises on Japanese art predominated before World War I; examples of Chinese painting and volumes of Chinese philosophy, which became more accessible in the 1920s, figured more as sources of inspiration in the interwar period. Spiritual discourses that synthesized Eastern and Western metaphysics of nature and being generated new ideals of art as a reflection of cosmic reality. Artists, writers, critics, psychologists, mystics, and patrons all promoted psychical research and universal spiritualism, drawing on the writings of the American transcendentalists and Theosophists as well as Henri Bergson, William James, Vasily Kandinsky, Swami Vivekananda, and others. As testimony to this new vision of nature as a unified whole with the self, artists offered the mind-landscape. The artist collectives in this section conceived of nature, and landscape in particular, as a reflection of consciousness: Eschewing traditional Western schemes of landscape as monumental and eternal, they took from the East the notion of landscape as ephemeral form and infinite process. Through the influential teachings of Arthur Wesley Dow, an American artist who created a method of compositional harmony based on Asian aesthetics, they appropriated techniques such as ink brushwork and compositional devices like multiple viewpoints from Chinese landscape painting to achieve a dynamism that suggested something numinous and wondrous beyond external form. This development culminates with the Northwest school of painters that coalesced in 1930s Seattle around artist Mark Tobey. Unlike New York, which faces Europe, the West Coast's proximity to the Pacific and its higher number of Asian immigrants, including artists, aligned its cultural identity more organically with East Asia. The Northwest artists shared an interest in Asia as an urgent source of alternative values conceived as a salve for what artist Morris Graves called the "Western world's highly technicised, rational-mindedness."
Arthur Wesley Dow
(1857-1922)
Dow was the most influential interpreter of Japanese pictorial traditions for early-twentieth-century American modernists. In the 1880s, while studying in France, he became acquainted with japonisme. In 1891, on his return to Boston, he met Asian-art scholar and curator Ernest Fenollosa, who later hired him as assistant curator of Japanese art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which housed the largest collection of Asian art in America at that time. Dow defined line, color, and n_tan (a Japanese term for the massing of light and dark) as the three principal compositional elements in visual art. A teacher at Pratt Institute; Art Students League; and Teachers College, Columbia University, Dow perfected this theory in his book Composition (1899), which became the most widely read American art manual during the first half of the twentieth century. Composition featured analyses and illustrations of works by such Japanese masters as Sessh_ T_y_, Kan_ Tan'y_, Ogata Kenzan VI, and Katsushika Hokusai, and offered exercises and instructions for the use of "Japanese materials and brush practice." He documented his only trip to Asia (190304)where he studied woodblock printing in Japan and tie-dying in Indiain photography, the medium he experimented with during his summers in Ipswich, Massachusetts, when the seasoned photographers Gertrude Käsebier and Alvin Langdon Coburn were his students. Dow's emphasis on linear rhythms and balanced spacing demonstrates Fenollosa's evolutionary theory that American culture would be led toward a more "perfect type of spiritual living" through employing "structures of harmony." A collector of Japanese woodblock prints and avid promoter of new conceptions of nature based on a synthesis of Eastern and Western art forms, Dow devoted himself as an artist to landscape imagery in oil painting, color woodblock prints, and photography.
Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922)
Ostrich Tree Point near Pacific Grove
1912
Gelatin silver print
Collection of Edgar O. Smith
Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922)
Dunes and Trees, Ipswich
ca. 1902
Gum bichromate print
Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, Partial Gift of George and Barbara Wright and partial purchase as the gift of R. Crosby Kemper
through the R. Crosby Kemper Foundation
Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922)
Grand Canyon, Winter
1912
Gelatin silver print
Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, Partial
Gift of George and Barbara Wright and partial purchase as the gift of R. Crosby Kemper through the R. Crosby Kemper Foundation
Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922)
August Moon
ca. 1905
Polychrome woodblock print
Collection of Edgar O. Smith
Utagawa (And_) Hiroshige (1797-1858)
Goten Hill at Shinagawa from the series One Hundred Famous Views
of Edo
Edo period, 1856
Polychrome woodblock print
Merlin C. Dailey and Associates, Victor, New York (Ex-collection Arthur Wesley Dow)
Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922)
Rain in May
ca. 1907
Polychrome woodblock print
Collection of Edgar O. Smith
Dow was the first to popularize Japanese color woodcut techniques in America. He had studied this process for four years in the early 1890s. Using pine blocks and later maple boards, Dow worked on all three stages of the woodcut process: designing the image, carving the blocks by hand, and carefully printing them by registering blocks of multiple shape and color onto the paper surface. He also used the grain of the wood and the texture of the paper as integral elements of the finished work, emphasizing the humble craft quality of the woodcut as art. Drawing inspiration from Japanese art, including prints in his own collection, he explored the rhythmic spacing of landscape motifs to decoratively enliven his surfaces and suffused color variations to convey the atmospherics of the season, weather, and time of day. Like Rain in May, these works cultivate a flatness which Dow believed was the "artistic truth" of painting and the pictorial arts.
Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922)
The Destroyer
ca. 191113
Oil on canvas
Spanierman Gallery, New York
Dow's first trip to the Grand Canyon in the winter of 1911-12 stimulated a shift in his
painting style from intimate views to sweeping vistas and from muted to saturated colors.
For Dow, as for other American artists, the Grand Canyon and the natural wonders of the
American West epitomized the transcendental power of landscape as cosmic form. Drawing upon his own theories of line and n_tan harmony derived from Japanese aesthetics, Dow wrote of this landscape series: "I hoped to give
the sense of vastness-the immense scale of everything there. In line not unlike the classic subject of the Zen painters of China and Japan."
Utagawa (And_) Hiroshige (1797-1858)
Azuma Shrine and the Entwined Camphor from the series One
Hundred Famous Views of Edo Edo period, 1856
Polychrome woodblock print
Merlin C. Dailey and Associates, Victor, New York (Ex-collection Arthur Wesley Dow)
This woodcut by Hiroshige was in the collection of Arthur Wesley Dow. Hiroshige was revered among European and American artists for his bold, asymmetrical compositions and pictorial flatness, rendering his images into pure
abstract forms and colors on the picture plane. Dow used examples of Hiroshige's devices in his popular manual, Composition (1899),
and applied his lessons of skewed, flattened perspective, crisp outlines, and simple
compositional elements to his prints, paintings, and photographs.
Georgia O'Keeffe
(1887-1986)
O'Keeffe studied with Arthur Wesley Dow at Columbia University's Teachers College twice before moving to New York in 1918 to paint under the guidance of Alfred Stieglitz, who later became her husband. O'Keeffe's evolving notions of the spiritual potential of abstract art were shaped by Dow as well as by her studies of Vasily Kandinsky's concept of painting as a process of musical composition, in which abstract form and color express inner feelings and visionary space. O'Keeffe called the abstractions made during her time on the Texas plains her "songs" and continued to compose them using this musical process through 1919. These and other watercolor landscape images from 191617 are among the most innovative paintings of her career. They reflect her incorporation of Dow's schematized landscape of color blocks, his notion of graded tones, and his lessons in the soft, fluid, and linear brushwork of Japanese calligraphy. O'Keeffe traveled to Asia twice, in 1959 and 1960. During the later decades of her life in Abiquiu, New Mexico, she incorporated into her solitary routine Asian modes of dress, diet, and communion with nature. Her art stands as an encounter with Asian art and philosophy that was uniquely transformational for its early-twentieth-century moment.
Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986)
Abstraction
1917
Watercolor on paper
Collection of Gerald and Kathleen Peters, Courtesy Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe
Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986)
Sunrise and Little Clouds No. II
1916
Watercolor on paper
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, Gift of The Burnett Foundation
Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986)
On the Old Santa Fe Road
193031
Oil on canvas
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, Gift of The Burnett Foundation
Stanton Macdonald-Wright
(1890-1973)
Morgan Russell
(1886-1953)
Shifting planes of color, conceived as synaesthetic evocations of energies and emotions, unseen but felt, were central to the Synchromists Macdonald-Wright and Russell, who introduced this movement of dematerialized Cubism in Berlin in 1913. Three critical texts for artists pursuing the synthesis between visual art and music were Arthur Wesley Dow's Composition (1899), in which he declares that music is "in a sense the key to the other fine arts, since its essence is pure beauty; that space art may be called 'visual music'"; Thought-Forms (1905) by Theosophists Anne Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater, in which they examine the significance of color for transmitting an interplay between the body and mind; and Vasily Kandinsky's On the Spiritual in Art (1912) and The Blue Rider Almanac (1912). All of these texts drew from Asian spiritual and aesthetic treatises to form their conception of visual art as an essentially experiential, time-based, and psycho-physiological phenomenon. In his transparencies (ca. 19131923) for the cinematic color-light machines of his own design of the 1920s, Russell explored a plastic "expression of the eternal and the immutable-that which underlies the universal flowing of things as they appear." In classical Chinese philosophy, he found support for his theories, quoting a Chinese master's words that "spirit is rendered in the rhythm of things." In California in the late 1920s, Macdonald-Wright also developed the concept of flow, melding his forms with a larger formlessness of the world. For him, this mystery emanated from the Chinese concept of qi (cosmic spirit or energy), a "vitalizing element" which he found in the brushwork of the Southern Song painters. Such brushwork, he stated, became "something beyond itself-not a series of lines, per se, but a harmonization, an unstatic balance of opposing abstract forces." Landscapes constructed according to these Chinese precepts, he believed, engendered a sense of the imminent but hidden, feelings of stillness, and mental repose.
Morgan Russell (1886-1953)
Study in Transparency
ca. 1913-23
Oil on tissue paper mounted on wood
Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey, The Morgan Russell Archives and Collection, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Henry M. Reed
Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890-1973)
Dragon Trail
1930
Oil on canvas
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, 1981
Marsden Hartley
(1877-1943)
Hartley's early landscape paintings reveal the inspiration of American transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, as well as a mystical reverence for nature. In 1909, Hartley's first solo show was organized by Alfred Stieglitz at his New York gallery, 291. Stieglitz introduced Hartley to the work of European avant-garde artists, motivating his 1912 trip to Europe to further his artistic development. In Paris, Hartley became friends with German artists who introduced him to the work of Vasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc; Kandinsky's On the Spiritual in Art (1912) influenced Hartley to incorporate musical structures and Buddhist references into his painting. Hartley moved to Berlin in 1913, and his paintings from his two years there integrate European modernism with Native American iconography, military symbols, and Buddhist, Egyptian, and Christian motifs. Musical Theme (Oriental Symphony) (191213) emulates Kandinsky's theory of the ability of color, shape, and form to create harmonies that elevate consciousness. It also adheres to the hieratic structure of the icon-a sealing of form into a static, timeless order-such as that found in the flattened, pyramidal structure of the religious folk paintings illustrated in Kandinsky and Marc's influential almanac The Blue Rider (1912). Hartley's "cosmic cubism" assembled the collaged forms of musical notations and Asian symbols personal to him, such as the abhaya mudr_ sign in the center of Musical Theme, and one of his own Buddha sculptures encased in upper right corner.
Marsden Hartley (1877-1943)
Musical Theme (Oriental Symphony)
191213
Oil on canvas
The Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts,
Gift of Mr. Samuel Lustgarten, Sherman Oak, California
Alfred Stieglitz
(1864-1946)
Stieglitz was New York's impresario of modernism, gathering around him in the 1910s a group of artists engaged in discourses on art, nature, and non-Western notions of mystical experience. These artists moved toward the pure color and abstract form advocated by Russian painter Vasily Kandinsky, whose influential essay, On the Spiritual in Art (1912) was first published in English in Stieglitz's journal Camera Work in 1912. Kandinsky's search for the inner essence of nature was informed by his reading of Theosophy, a latenineteenth-century synthesis of spiritualism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, with some enhanced occultism from the Egyptian cult of the dead. He believed that the pulsating colors he used in his work vibrated with spiritual essences and cosmic laws, normally hidden from the eye. These ideas of nature as a psychic field of energy became central to Stieglitz and his circle, which included Georgia O'Keeffe and the Photo-Secession pictorialist Edward Steichen. While Stieglitz used Arthur Wesley Dow's japoniste pillar print schemes in his early photographs of New York, his cloud images of the 1920s incorporate an amorphousness that play off O'Keeffe's experiments in abstraction. These tiny photographs, which he called Equivalents (192627), express Stieglitz's belief in art as a projection of subjective experience onto the world-the unconscious externalizing itself in its self-mirroring embrace of the world. At the same time, their abstracted forms reflect an Asian sensibility of flow and metamorphosis, arousing insight into the ephemeral experience of life, which Stieglitz likened to a Chinese play with "no beginning-no end-no plot."
Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946)
Equivalent (Cloud Study)
1926
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949
Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946)
Equivalent (Cloud Study)
1926
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949
Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946)
Equivalent (Grasses)
1927
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1928
Yun Gee
(1906-1963)
In fall 1953, Life magazine declared Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson the "Mystic Painters of the Northwest," unified in their "mystical feeling toward life and the universe, their awareness of the overwhelming forces of nature and the influence of the Orient." Yet these were American painters emulating the aesthetics of Asia. Artists of Asian descent living in the United States, such as Chinese-born painter Gee and Japanese-born artists Paul Horiuchi and Yasuo Kuniyoshi, were subject to prejudice that was common at the time against persons from Asia. The fear that the United States would be swallowed up by massive Asian immigration was dubbed the "Yellow Peril," a derogatory phrase that appeared in dimestore novels such as The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) by Sax Rohmer and in Jack London's essay about the Russo-Japanese War titled "The Yellow Peril," published in 1909. Gee's career was an example of the Chinese immigrant artists' struggle to assimilate the modern European aesthetic and elevate their work above this stereotype.
Born in China, Gee immigrated in 1921 at age fifteen to San Francisco where he joined his father, the owner of a small grocery store. He studied painting and drawing with Otis Oldfield at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute). He used the European modernist style of Orphism, a derivation of Cubism, to describe subjects of contemporary life that conjured his particular identity, such as his San Francisco Chinatown (1927).
Yun Gee (1906-1963)
San Francisco Chinatown
1927
Oil on paperboard
The Oakland Museum of California, Gift of Mrs. Frederick G. Novy Jr.
Morris Graves
(1910-2001)
A self-trained artist, Graves first encountered Asia in 1928-31, when as a seaman he made three trans-Pacific trips, stopping in Japan, China, Hong Kong, and the Philippines where he acquired Asian art objects and visited temples and gardens. In 1932, Graves settled in Seattle, where the Seattle Art Museum, with its extensive Asian art collection amassed by Richard E. Fuller, was about to open. Fuller also supported local contemporary artists by hosting annual exhibitions, in which Graves regularly participated along with Guy Anderson and Kenneth Callahan, forming the foundation of the group of painters that became known as the Northwest School of Visionary Artists. Graves wrote of his focus on Asian aesthetics: "Aided by the Seattle Art Museum's great Oriental collection, and by association with American-Japanese, Chinese, and Hindus; by a trip to Japan in 1930; and by the increasing bulk of published information treating Oriental Art, I have turned to the art of Asia for the beginning knowledge of what nature means, toward the beginning realization of how and why nature too is subjective." Although notorious for his Dadaist performances, Graves was also a reclusive painter who studiously cultivated the air of an Asian mystic. By the mid-1930s, he began attending a Buddhist temple in a local Asian American community of Seattle. Graves said, "Zen stresses the meditative, stilling the surface of the mind and letting the inner surface bloom." He explored this idea in the Inner Eye series of nature paintings, which won him national acclaim when exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1942. As World War II erupted, Graves's worldview was at odds with the political realities of the day. Arrested for refusing to participate in military training, he was released after one year in March 1943. Shortly after, Graves produced Time of Change (1943), which features the image of a phoenix, a Buddhist emblem for rising from the ashes of destruction. The painting demonstrates his aspiration "to paint of how form manifests its subtlest quality named 'Idea.'"
Morris Graves (1910-2001)
Lotus
1945
Tempera on paper
Seattle Art Museum, Promised gift of the Marshall and Helen Hatch Collection, in honor of the 75th Anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum
Morris Graves (1910-2001)
Time of Change
1943
Tempera on paper
Collection of John Jordan and Laura Welland
Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882-1966)
The Three Brothers Yosemite, 1911
1911
Platinum print
George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, New York, Gift of Alvin Langdon Coburn
Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882-1966)
Regent's Canal, London
1904
Photogravure print
George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, New York, Gift of Alvin Langdon Coburn
Coburn studied at Arthur Wesley Dow's Ipswich Summer School of Art in 1903, and that year gained membership to two elite photographic societies: the Linked Ring in
London and the Photo-Secession group in New York. Like other pictorialists, James McNeill Whistler exerted a strong influence on Coburn for his creative synthesis of traditional East Asian and modern European aesthetics. In Regent's Canal, London, Coburn emulates the exact compositional format of Whistler's Nocturne: Blue and Gold-Old Battersea Bridge (ca. 187275, on view in this gallery), which in turn was indebted to Utagawa (And_) Hiroshige and East Asian ink painting.
Gertrude Käsebier (1852-1934)
The Red Man
1902
Gum bichromate print
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.
Käsebier, Arthur Wesley Dow's most outstanding student at the Pratt Institute, emerged as a star of the Photo-Secessionists when Alfred Stieglitz devoted the first issue of Camera Work (January 1903) to her photographs. Featured in that issue alongside her images of mothers and children, The Red Man represented Käsebier's "ideal Indian," a figure reminiscent of those she had known in her childhood in Colorado. The Orientalist presentation of her subject as a mysterious being peering out from an encircling protective blanket coupled the early modern style of primitivism with the fantasy of the East as a land and people out-of-time and in communion with nature-the very antithesis of the West's rationalism, scientism, and progress.
Edward Steichen (1879-1973)
The PoolEvening
1902
Photogravure
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Barbara Ivins, 1962
Edward Steichen (1879-1973)
The Pond-Moonrise
1904
Platinum print toned with applied color
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933
Although Steichen did not formally study with Arthur Wesley Dow, his early photographs employ Dow's lessons in rhythmic spacing and his conceptual approach to nature as psychic space. Steichen, who collaborated with Alfred Stieglitz in the Photo-Secession group, combined a blue tint with the subtle grays of the platinum process to create a mood that can only be felt rather than narrated in words. The device of mirroring the sky and trees in the water below presses the viewer into intimacy with a world where it is no longer possible to distinguish between the floating sensation of reverie and the palpable objectivity of nature. Dow's idea of the Japanese synthesis of form and emotion similarly serves Steichen in his image of the world as inseparable from the artist's psyche-world and self are joined on the reflective surface of the photograph.
Arthur Dove (1880-1946)
Tree Trunks
1934
Oil on canvas
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., Acquired 1934
Arthur Dove (1880-1946)
Rain or Snow
1943
Oil and wax emulsion on canvas
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., Acquired 1943
Kenneth Callahan (1905-1986)
The Storm
1962
Oil on paper mounted on canvas
Seattle Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Roland Smith
Paul Horiuchi (1906-1999)
December #2
1959
Gouache and paper collage on canvas
Seattle Art Museum, Northwest Annual Purchase Fund
Mark Tobey (1890-1976)
Fog in the Market
1943
Tempera on paper, mounted on board
Collection of Dr. Alvin E. Friedman-Kien and Ryo Toyonaga
Deeply affected by the destruction of World War I, Tobey gravitated toward universalist thinking and an egalitarian worldview. In 1923, Teng Baiye, among the first Chinese artists to study in the West, introduced Tobey to Chinese brushwork, which challenged his Western perceptions about painting. Following one lesson, Tobey exclaimed, "I came out and I saw a tree and the tree was no longer a solid." According to this perception of nature, form is dematerialized and composed of everchanging currents of cosmic energy (qi). Seattle had a large and vibrant Asian population. The blend of classes, ethnicities, and races in the urban environment supplied Tobey with a wealth of subject matter with which to infuse life into his brushstroke. For a period his principal subject was the Pike Place Market. Tobey captured the frenzied character of the market scene, enveloped in a fog of gauzelike tempera washes, by allowing no part of the composition to come to rest. Viewed from an elevated vantage point, the figures below are delineated in his "white writing" style-what Tobey called the "calligraphic impulse," characterized by schematized compositions of white line against a dark background.
Arthur Dove (1880-1946)
Fog Horns
1929
Oil on canvas
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Anonymous Gift
Influenced by Vasily Kandinsky in the 1910s, Dove aimed to translate sound into painted abstractions and portray the experience of nature as mystical and often synaesthetic. Dove read Ernest Fenollosa's Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art (1912) soon after publication, inspiring a sense of affinity between Chinese and modern art in the mutual aim to penetrate "the spirit of the thing." In the 1920s Dove furthered his understanding of how inner essence was bound to outer reality by immersing himself in the Bhagavad Gita, the writings of Laozi, and a variety of Hindu texts, as well as the contemporary philosophies of cosmic consciousness by Henri Bergson and Maurice Bucke. In Fog Horns, Dove visualizes the inner vibrations of nature-the fourth dimension-in the reverberating, rhythmic lines of force, floating a few outwardly moving concentric rings across a watery horizon, to echo the low-toned resonances of the horns as they would linger over space and time.
Section 3
Ezra Pound, Modern Poetry, and Dance Theater
By 1900, the sway of the so-called mystic East had positioned Asian art and thought as embodiments of a superior metaphysical system. An ever-expanding library of classical Asian texts shaped this attitude in America. Henry David Thoreau's admiration for the Bhagavad Gita, the best-known part of the Indian epic the Maha - bha - rata, typifies the regard artists and intellectuals felt for the sacred texts of the East: "The reader is nowhere raised and sustained in a higher, purer, rarer region of thought than in the Bhagavad Gita." Ezra Pound's seminal translations of classical Chinese poetry and Japanese No plays, based on the Orientalist scholar Ernest Fenollosa's notes, transformed his poetic style and influenced other Anglo-American modernists including T. S. Eliot. Although he had no knowledge of Chinese and Japanese languages, Pound rewrote Fenollosa's drafts of poems by the revered Tang-dynasty poet Li Bai (701-762) to forge a modern poetics using concrete images, free verse, and bold linguistic rhythms. This project set the course for his life-long appropriation of Chinese and Japanese literature as the basis for his creative method and style, and the publication of Cathay in 1915 established Pound as the chief innovator of Chinese poetry in English. Pound's work on Japanese No theater also influenced the development of modern poetic theater. No is a form of traditional Japanese theater that combines poetry, dance, chant, pantomime, and recitation. Excited by Fenollosa's drafts, Pound reworked them to capture what he felt was the overarching "unity of image" essential to No plays. W. B. Yeats, looking at these texts with Pound in 1913, was inspired in 1916 to compose his first play, At the Hawk's Well. Yeats rejected the naturalism and realism then prominent in Anglo-American theater in favor of what he described as "a new form of drama, distinguished, indirect, and symbolic, and having no need of mob or press to pay its way." Through Japanese performer Ito - Michio, who starred in Yeats's production of At the Hawk's Well, sculptor Isamu Noguchi met dancer and choreographer Martha Graham. Frontier (1935) was their first of many collaborations that drew on No principles and aesthetics. The empty space of the stage, inviting the spectator to move beyond any specific place or time, allowed Noguchi and Graham to create abstract and symbolic realms. This use of reductive images positioned n deep space to allude to mythic or supranatural phenomena would become a hallmark of modern dance theater.
Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904)
Gleanings in Buddha-Fields
1898
The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Writer and translator Hearn lived in Japan from 1890 until his death in 1904. His colorful tales of Japanese culture, customs, and folk traditions helped create the image in the American popular imagination of Japan as a land out-of-time.
Yoné Noguchi (1875-1947)
Seen & Unseen: Or, Monologues of a Homeless Snail
San Francisco, G. Burgess & P. Garnett, 1897
General Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Noguchi (Isamu Noguchi's father) was among the first Japanese-born poets to write modern verse in English, transposing Japanese poetics into a new literary form. Active in both America and England, Noguchi was a member of the Anglo-American Orientalist circle that included artist Alvin Langdon Coburn and poets Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats. In 1911, Pound wrote to Noguchi that "surely if the east & the west are ever to understand each other that understanding must come slowly & come through the arts."
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
"Payadhvan, I have heard the key" from The Waste Land
October 1922
Typescript manuscript, ink on double foolscap used by Ezra Pound
The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
This is the final manuscript page of Eliot's modern literary masterpiece. The poem explores humanity's cultural and spiritual crisis and the soul's search for regeneration. Part V, displayed here, contains "What the Thunder Said," based on the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (5.1), among the oldest of the Upanishads. Modern poets considered these Hindu scriptures, which are the core teaching of Vedanta, to be one of the greatest expressions of metaphysical poetry ever composed. Eliot incorporates Sanskrit words in the line "Datta, dayadhvam, damyata" (Give, sympathize, control) and closes with the formal ending to an Upanishad, "Shantih shantih shantih," which means "The Peace which passeth understanding." This manuscript draft is annotated by Pound and may have been typed by him or on his typewriter.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)
Gitanjali (Songs Offerings)
Introduction by W. B. Yeats
London, Printed at the Chiswick
Press for the India Society, 1912
The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Bengali poet Tagore was revered among the international literary vanguard as the voice of India's spiritual heritage. With an effusive introduction by W. B. Yeats, this compilation of poems, whose title refers to devotional offerings of song in Hindu tradition, was among Tagore's most influential works. In 1913, he became the first non-Western writer to win the Nobel Prize in literature.
Martha Graham (1894-1991)
Frontier
1935
Choreography by Martha Graham, sets by Isamu Noguchi, music by Louis Herst Black-and-white documentary film, transferred to DVD, 10 minutes, 41 seconds
Martha Graham Archives, New York
Sadakichi Hartmann (1867-1944)
Japanese Rhythms: Tanka, Haikai, and Dodoitsu Forms
1926
Rare Book Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Long before Ezra Pound and the Imagists began incorporating Japanese techniques into
their modern verse, German Japanese poet and critic Hartmann was shaping the influence of Japanese poetry in contemporary English literature. As early as 1898, Hartmann was the first to write translations of Japanese poetic forms of haiku and tanka. This book features his translations as well as critical studies of their method and techniques, which he links to vers libre (free verse). Hartmann, who was born in Japan and raised in the United States, also wrote about the influence of Japan on Western art, anticipating Fenollosa's investigations into this rich topic.
Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908) and Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
'Noh'; or, Accomplishment: A Study of the Classical Stage of Japan
New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1917
Asian and Middle Eastern Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Pound edited Fenollosa's drafts of a number of translations of medieval Japanese No plays, or sections of them. Fenollosa had studied these texts with Umewaka Minoru (18291909) and his family, one of the most distinguished dynasties of No performers in Meiji Japan. Pound, moved and excited by these drafts, first edited and published Fenollosa's writings about No in the Quarterly Review (1914). He then edited fifteen of the plays themselves, added the essays by Fenollosa, and published 'Noh'; or, Accomplishment: A Study of the Classical Stage of Japan. Pound had no knowledge of classical Japanese, and his highly innovative translations often move the text into realms of language and emotion that suggest more of his own quintessential concerns than anything in the Japanese tradition. These No texts provided Pound with material for passages in his epic poem Cantos, which occupied him for the following fifty years.
Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908)
The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: An ars poetica
With foreword and notes by Ezra Pound
New York, Arrow Editions, 1936
Asian and Middle Eastern Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Ezra Pound discovered this manuscript on the poetics of the Chinese ideogram in Fenollosa's papers and revised it for publication in 1920. In his introduction, Pound writes that in this essay, "we have . . . not a bare philological discussion, but the fundamentals of all aesthetics." Pound rejected what he insisted was the narrow view of academic linguistics and language pedagogy, convinced that only artists have the insight and intuition to grasp the profundity of Asian cultures. Fenollosa declares: "This twentieth century not only turns a new page in the book of the world, but opens another and a startling chapter. Vistas of strange futures unfold for man, of worldembracing cultures half-weaned from Europe."
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
Cathay: Translations by Ezra Pound, for the Most Part from the Chinese of
Rihaku, from the Notes of the Late Ernest Fenollosa, and the Decipherings of the Professors Mori and Ariga
London, E. Mathews, 1915
Asian and Middle Eastern Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Orientalist scholar Ernest Fenollosa learned classical Chinese poetry while living in Japan from 1878 to 1890. Fenollosa was particularly interested in the writings of the eighth-century poet Li Bai (also known as Li Po, whom Fenollosa referred to as "Rihaku" in his manuscript, using the Japanese pronunciation of the written characters), one of the most esteemed figures in classical Chinese poetry. Li Bai's free-spirited poems, with their Taoist overtones, his compassion for the common people, and keen visual transparency were of great appeal to Fenollosa. Pound's adaptation of Fenollosa's translations stimulated his promulgation of Imagism, a movement in modern Anglo- American poetry that derived its style of clarity, terse precision, and use of musical phrasing in place of traditional rhyme or meter from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry.
Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882-1966)
Michio It_ wearing hawk costume from W. B. Yeats's play At the Hawk's Well
ca. 1916, printed later
Gelatin silver print
George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, New York, Gift of Alvin Langdon Coburn
Japanese performer Michio It_ (18921961) played a significant role in introducing American audiences to Asian theater and dance. It_ arrived in Paris in 1911, soon drifting to Berlin, where he first became aware of Eurythmics, a type of performance that combines dance, music, and drama. With the advent of war in 1914, It_ moved to England, where he obtained the support of Ottoline Morrell, a great patron of the arts, and Ezra Pound. His dances dazzled audiences in the West for what one observer described as a mastery of "the power of suggesting space, atmosphere, and distance by swift, forcible strokes, the economy and simplicity [used] to obtain emotional effect; the satisfying dignity and formality; the buoyancy, lyricism, feeling of joy and freedom; and the tenderness betokening brotherhood." Through Pound, It_ appeared in the highly successful first performance of At the Hawk's Well, Yeats's English-language No play, held in the living room of another wealthy patron, Lady Cunard, in 1915. This event, which T. S. Eliot attended, was a sensation among the literary and dance communities of England.
Yoné Noguchi (1875-1947)
The Pilgrimage
Vol. 1, 1909
The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882-1966)
Michio It_ wearing Edmund Dulac fox mask
ca. 1915
Gelatin silver print
George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, New York, Gift of Alvin Langdon Coburn
Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882-1966)
Michio It_ in kimono, large mask on wall
ca. 1916, printed later
Gelatin silver print
George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, New York, Gift of Alvin Langdon Coburn
Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988)
Michio It_
192526
Bronze
The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York
Hengtangtuishi (1711-1778)
The Jade Mountain: A Chinese Anthology, Being Three Hundred Poems of the T'ang Dynasty, 618906
Translated by Witter Bynner from the texts of Kiang Kang-hu
New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1931
Asian and Middle Eastern Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
American poet Bynner traveled to East Asia in 1917, when he sought out Lafcadio Hearn in Japan, and went again in 1920, when he was taken by "the wonder" of China. At Berkeley in
1919, Bynner met Kang-hu (1883-1946), a writer and social activist who had left China in 1913 when the Chinese Socialist Party, of which he was a prominent member, had been outlawed. Their translation of a well-known anthology of classical Chinese poetry from the Tang Dynasty, first published as The Jade Mountain in 1929, became one of the most popular compilations in the history of modern literature, influencing generations of American poets. Bynner reflected on the Tang masters that "against the burdens and buffets of life, these poets had found an inner peace and a good will towards men."
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
Certain Noble Plays of Japan: From the Manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa
Chosen and finished by Ezra Pound, with an introduction by William Butler Yeats Churchtown, Dundrum, Ireland, The Cuala Press, 1916
Rare Book Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904)
Passages from Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan and Out of the East: Reveries and Studies in New Japan
ca. 1900
Manuscript notebook
The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Witter Bynner (1881-1968)
The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu: An American Version
1944
The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Section 4
Abstract Art, Calligraphy, and Metaphysics
By 1950, with interest in Asian culture circulating throughout the American art world, the connection between East Asian calligraphy and abstract painting became a threshold for experimentation. Artists ranging from Robert Motherwell to David Smith to Mark
Tobey extolled the calligraphic arts of black brushwork on white ground as the epitome of a pure and spontaneous expressive gesture. Calligraphy is the ancient practice of writing ideographs, the basis for all East Asian written languages. Along with its allied
art of monochromatic ink painting, it is performed with a soft-tipped brush and ink on paper or silk, often on the floor, and is composed of fluid brushstrokes designed to convey a harmonious and rhythmic inner structure. By 1955, the calligraphic brushstroke had become a definitive pictorial element of Abstract Expressionist painting as well as in sculpture. Denying its literary function, artists saw the abstract potential of the calligraphic brushstroke as "a symbolic reference which involves not only its shape, but the spirit-lyrical, violent, or tentative, in which it was executed," according to critic William C. Seitz. Asian principles also appealed to artists in their ongoing quests to give metaphysical meaning to abstract form. Popular writings on Zen Buddhism and its ethics of direct action stimulated the ideal of the artist as a conduit for a cosmic energy beyond the material realm. For Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki, who taught at Columbia University in the 1950s, sumi-e, or ink paintings, expressed the spontaneous rhythm of life. On the West Coast, Lee Mullican and Gordon Onslow-Ford forged a visual philosophy based on a trancelike summoning of primal consciousness defined in Asian mystical terms. Drawing from Zen rhetoric, abstract art aspired to be a direct record of the artist's inner vision and a prompt to transport the viewer into an altered state of mind.
Mark Tobey
(1890-1976)
Tobey's formal studies of Chinese calligraphy, his pursuit of classical Asian art and spiritual traditions, and his dedication to a range of non-Western perspectives secured his influence as a philosopher and sage among vanguard artists ranging from Morris Graves to John Cage. "To rediscover the past is to move forward," he wrote. Seeking to express the vitality and interrelatedness of natural forces through the calligraphic line, Tobey was the first American since James McNeill Whistler to win a grand prize at the Venice Biennale. In the 1930s, Tobey taught art and philosophy at the experimental Darlington
Hall in Devon, England, where he met writers Arthur Waley and Aldous Huxley and potter Bernard Leach, all of whom were leading modern theorists of an East-West synthesis in world culture. His faith in universalism and fierce anti-materialism led him to convert to the Bahá'í World Faith, a religion with origins in nineteenth-century Persia that emphasized what Tobey called "universal citizenship." In 1934, Tobey traveled to Shanghai to study calligraphy and to Japan, where he lived at the Zen monastery Tenry_ji in Kyoto, practicing meditation and ink painting. He was impressed by the Japanese awareness of the vastness of nature perceived in the "smallest detail." After his first experimental ink studies, Tobey inverted the black-on-white format of East Asian calligraphy into a light-on-dark draftsmanship known as "white writing." Universal Field (1949), one of Tobey's most masterfull realizations of this distinctive style of abstraction, manifests the artist's unique line-writing, what he called "structures of light." His allover composition of gestural brushmarksanticipating Jackson Pollocksuggests a field of energy. Often described in terms of music, his rhythmic paintings unfold in time as a structure of shifting phrases. Tobey was by no means narrowly focused on East Asian art or culture. His Bahá'í creed fostered an Islamic dimension to his interests, while also pointing to a spiritual basis for universalist ideology: "I do not work by intellectual deductions. My work is a kind of self-contained contemplation."
Mark Tobey (1890-1976)
Crystallizations
1944
Tempera on board
Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Mabel Ashley Kizer Fund, Gift of Melitta and Rex Vaughan, and Modern and Contemporary Acquisitions Fund
Tobey's friend John Cage originally owned this painting. They met in Seattle in the 1930s while members of a community of vanguard artists, Jungians, and Theosophists who gathered around the experimental Cornish School of Art. Through his friendship with Tobey, a committed seeker of non-Western spirituality, Cage found an artist "who had a great effect on my way of seeing. . . . He had an extraordinary sense of the presence of things." In the early 1940s, emerging on the street after seeing Tobey's show of "white paintings" at the Willard Gallery, New York, Cage awakened in a flash of insight to his immediate environment. In a haikulike mesostic for "Mark," he described what was now his own approach to art and life:
Mark Tobey (1890-1976)
Untitled
1944
Tempera on paper
Collection of Dr. Alvin E. Friedman-Kien and Ryo Toyonaga
Mark Tobey (1890-1976)
Universal Field
1949
Tempera and pastel on cardboard
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Mark Tobey (1890-1976)
Space Ritual XIX
1957
Ink on Japanese paper
Collection of Miani Johnson, Willard Gallery, New York
Franz Kline
(1910-1962)
Celebrated for his bold, sweeping brushstrokes in white and black enamel, Kline was one of America's leading Abstract Expressionists. In 1950, Kline's paintings were introduced, through Isamu Noguchi, to the Bokujinkai (Association of People of Ink), a progressive artists group in Japan that promoted the inherent abstract and universal qualities of East Asian calligraphy. The group's journal Bokubi (Beauty of Ink) soon devoted two issues to Kline, along with the Art Informel painters in Paris who also worked in an abstract calligraphic style. Kline corresponded with the group's leader Shiry_ Morita, and painter and theorist Hasegawa Sabur_, who became a close friend. Kline and Hasegawa participated in the March 1954 panel discussion at the Museum of Modern Art "Abstract Art around the World Today," which focused on abstract painting and its connections to Zen and calligraphy. During this period, Kline experimented with the techniques of calligraphic ink paintings on paper.
In the mid-1950s, Kline began rejecting associations with East Asian calligraphy. Regarding this denial of Asian components of American art, critic Clement Greenberg wrote, "not one of the original 'abstract expressionists' least of all Klinehas felt more than a cursory interest in Oriental art. The sources of their art lie entirely in the West." Conspicuous Asian attributes posed an increasing threat to the national rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism and receded from the mainstream discourse.
Franz Kline (1910-1962)
Untitled
ca. 1952
Ink on telephone book paper
Private collection, Courtesy McKee Gallery, New York
Franz Kline (1910-1962)
Untitled
1957
Oil and ink on paper
Private collection, New York
Franz Kline (1910-1962)
Mahoning
1956
Oil and paper collage on canvas
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Purchase, with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art
Franz Kline (1910-1962)
Painting No. 7
1952
Oil on canvas
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 54.1403
Painting No. 7 was illustrated in the May 1952 issue of Bokubi, the Japanese journal of avant-garde calligraphy coedited by Hasegawa Sabur_ and Shiry_ Morita.
The issue features many of Kline's black-and-white paintings from this period.
Cover of Bokubi magazine, no. 12
(May 1952), featuring Franz Kline's Painting No. 3 (1952)
1952
Courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Library, New York
David Smith
(19061965)
East Asian calligraphy appealed to abstract sculptors as well as painters in the early postwar period. Smith realized the radical potential of the "spatial calligraph" to dissolve the mass and volume of traditional Western sculpture by forging cursive strokes of welded steel as a kind of writing in space. He was inspired by the relationship between brush-driven ink and welded steel: "As my material already possesses strength akin to the Japanese power-stroke intent, I take delight in using steel as a fluid." In order to "return to symbol origin before these purities were befouled by the words," Smith investigated cuneiform, Sumero-Akkadian, and Polynesian writing, as well as East Asian calligraphic script. Smith read The Spirit of the Brush, a compendium of writings by Chinese painters from the fourth through tenth centuries, during the period when his works on paper took a calligraphic turn. According to The Spirit of the Brush, "there are four aspects to brush-work: muscles, flesh, bones, and spirit. . . . If the muscles are dead, there is no flesh; those strokes that are too effeminate have no bones." Smith's brushstrokes express such metaphors of embodiment and reveal his fascination with how fluid line creates form in space.
David Smith (1906-1965)
__ 11/23/51 (Old Snow)
1951
Ink on paper
The Estate of David Smith, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York
David Smith (1906-1965)
__ 51/12/16 (New Snow)
1951
Ink on paper
The Estate of David Smith, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York
David Smith (1906-1965)
Lunar Arcs on One Leg
195660
Painted steel
The Estate of David Smith, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York
David Smith (1906-1965)
Untitled
1953
Egg ink and ink on paper
The Estate of David Smith, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York
David Smith (19061965)
David Smith (1906-1965)
O Drawing
1957
Bronze
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Roger Davidson, Harris
Davidson, Matthew Davidson, in honor of Mrs. Harry Davidson
David Smith (1906-1965)
Untitled
1957
Egg ink on paper
The Estate of David Smith, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York
David Smith (19061965)
Gordon Onslow-Ford
(1912-2003)
An abstract painter, Onslow-Ford studied at the Royal Naval Colleges in Dartmouth and Greenwich, England, and spent 193639 in Paris, where he met Roberto Matta, who inspired him to make automatic drawings and join the Surrealist movement. In 1947, Onslow-Ford moved to California, and, in 1949, he and artist Jean Varda acquired the ferryboat Vallejo, which became their studio and a meeting place in Sausalito, California, for such artists and writers as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Lee Mullican, Wolfgang Paalen, and Alan Watts. At the newly established American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, Onslow-Ford studied Ved_nta metaphysics with Haridas Chaudhuri and Zen Buddhism with Watts, leading Onslow-Ford to the epiphany that the line, circle, and dot were the root of all art. In 1951, Onslow-Ford, Mullican, and Paalen collaborated on the exhibition Dynaton (Greek, "the possible") for the San Francisco Museum of Art, which led to Onslow-Ford's subsequent "quest of the inner-worlds."
Gordon Onslow-Ford (1912-2003)
Round See
1961
Parle's paint on canvas
Lucid Art Foundation, Inverness, California
Brice Marden
(b. 1938)
In 1984, Marden attended the Japan House Gallery exhibition Masters of Japanese Calligraphy, Eighth-Nineteenth Century, sparking his interest in the brush techniques and the philosophy of East Asian literati. The Minimalist painter broke from his celebrated monochrome style to explore the visual principles of classical East Asian calligraphy and landscape painting. In his Cold Mountain series, named for the eighth-century Chinese poet-recluse Hanshan (literally, "cold mountain"), Marden structured his compositions as faux calligraphy in couplet form, moving from right to left. "I use the form of calligraphy, then it disappears, but it's always there, in some way." But beyond this borrowing, obviously resonant with abstraction and Minimalism, he was drawn to the pure psychic charge of calligraphic brushwork and the
spatial principles of its relation to the empty ground. In the album of ink paintings on view here, Cold Mountain Studies 135 (1988-90), Marden explores classical principles of calligraphy such as the tensions between its graphic flatness and surface depth, the vertical grid and its dynamic decomposition, and the abstract form of the ideograph and the expressive spirit of the artist. In his related oil paintings from the 1980s, Marden adopts the structure of Chinese landscape paintings, allowing the viewer to travel through the layered vista of mountains, rivers, and hermitages following a rhythmic composition of fluid brush lines and subtle tonal variations. Marden aspired toward making artwork "a meditative object." He said, "I find that interesting about the Chinese . . . [their] paintings and drawings evolved in a kind of inspired state." He complements his avid study of East Asian visual and literary arts with study trips to Japan, China, and India, and by collecting Chinese art.
Brice Marden (b. 1938)
4 (Bone)
198788
Oil on linen
Collection of Helen Harrington Marden
Brice Marden (b. 1938)
Cold Mountain Studies 1-35
198890
Ink on paper
Collection of the artist
Jackson Pollock
(1912-1956)
Pollock's interest in non-Western modes of creativity and psychology began with his studies at the Los Angeles Manual Arts High School with Frederick Schwankovsky, who introduced him to Theosophy and took him to meetings to hear the Hindu spiritual leader Jiddu Krishnamurti. In 1930, Pollock moved to New York where he met John Graham, the Russian-born painter who was interested in universal spirituality and primitivism, and he began Jungian psychotherapy. These encounters inspired Pollock's reading of Asian texts. His library included such classical books as the Bhavavad Gita, Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel, The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu by Witter Bynner, several journals of the Gutai art group, as well as numerous Jungian-inspired publications on mythology. After 1938, Pollock's work became semiabstract, influenced by his exploration of the unconscious as a source of creativity as well as his interests in Navajo sand painting, Surrealist automatism, and the art of Joan Miró, José Clemente Orozco, and Pablo Picasso. From 1947 to 1952, Pollock developed his signature process of pouring or dripping paint onto canvas in stages, allowing him to record the force and scope of his physical gesture in enamel or aluminum paint. Pollock's blackand- white gestural abstractions from 1950 were seen as resembling "oriental hieroglyphics," and Pollock himself noted, "I paint on the floor and this isn't unusual-the Orientals did that." Moreover, Pollock's turn to unconventional commercial paints to obtain a thin liquid consistency for his pouring technique steered him away from the thick viscous material of Western oil paint to something more akin to water-based Japanese sumi ink. The six panels that make up Untitled [Red Painting 1-7] (ca. 1950) are distinguished from Pollock's monochromatic works for their red color and their serial composition that underscores the allusion to writing. Pollock stated: "There is no accident, just as there is no beginning and no end."
Jackson Pollock (1912-1956)
Untitled [Red Painting 17]
ca. 1950
Oil on canvas, in six parts, and enamel on canvas
Private collection
Isamu Noguchi
(1904-1988)
In 1950, Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi traveled to Japan "in search of the spirit of the East." The son of prominent Japanese poet Yoné Noguchi and American writer and teacher Leonie Gilmour, Noguchi saw himself as the fated heir to a dual cultural heritage. Immersing himself in the study of Japanese art, Noguchi sought to absorb certain structures of primitive and traditional Japanese culture into his evolving notion of modern form. He pursued three areas of research: philosophy and aesthetics, classic forms, and traditional materials. In 1966, he set up a studio compound in Mure, a village on Shikoku Island in Japan, where he lived part of each year and produced his celebrated abstract sculptures in granite and basalt. "I sometimes think that my particular advantage, whatever it is, has been this factor of disturbance and conflict, that I live between two worlds and that I am constantly having conflicts of East and West, past and present." Noguchi was part of the pervasive influence of Asian sources on postwar
American art. As art critic Dore Ashton noted in 1954, "It seems that our artists, satiated with European traditions, look toward a fresh impetus, a new 'way'. . . . The East is permanently with us now, and our artists are aware of it." Noguchi's interpretations of Asian cultural theory and artistic practices his fierce commitment to forge a "new way"enhanced the meaning and value of abstraction at a time when it was considered the most progressive form of modern art. Beyond his traditional use of natural materials such as stone, ceramic, and wood, methods such as calligraphy, and concepts such as
the void, all of which were intrinsic to Japanese art, Noguchi aspired, like the haiku poet Bash_, to create works of "surplus meaning," which expanded in the viewer's mind.
Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988)
The Cry
1959
Balsa wood on steel base
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 66.1812
Noguchi used balsa wood to carve forms that were then cast in bronze. The original carving of The Cry, on view here, was cast in bronze in 1962. Noguchi stated that he preferred working in wood because of its lightness and natural patina but was forced to make the bronzes for commercial success. The Cry is related to a series of bronze sculptures on the theme of mortality whose vertical forms were inspired by calligraphy. "The basis of calligraphy is balance," he wrote. "In sculpture, however extreme, there is always a countervailing thrust, an actual weight. The vitality of a sculpture thus comes from a mimic of the original stroke, a tension, and not merely from its appearance."
Philip Guston
(1913-1980)
At the Los Angeles Manual Arts High School, Guston met Jackson Pollock and studied under Frederick Schwankovsky, who taught Asian philosophy, Theosophy, and the mystic writings of P. D. Ouspensky and Jiddu Krishnamurti. In 1948, at the American Academy in Rome, he befriended John Cage who later introduced him to composer Morton Feldman. Guston occasionally referred to sound and music in describing the effects of a painting, stating in 1952, "Look at any inspired painting. It's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation." In the 1950s in New York, Guston attended D. T. Suzuki's classes on Zen at Colombia University and frequented the Eighth Street Club where Cage gave lectures. During this period, he began creating abstract ink-on-paper drawings influenced by his"desire for direct expression." In these works, which he made with a twopronged bamboo quill, and in his related oil paintings, Guston amassed strokes of varying densities and touch, impressing Robert Irwin with the effect of their "psychic build-up . . . a pure energy-build-up." Guston's interest in East Asian aesthetics and philosophy, together with his readings on existentialism, inspired an attitude toward art making that favored direct and precise action over artistic will, desire, or cognitive thought. "To will a new form is unacceptable, because will builds distortion," he wrote. These strategies "must be removed to clear the way for something else- a condition which . . . resists analysisand probably this is as it should be."
Philip Guston (1913-1980)
Drawing No. 4
1950
Ink on Japanese paper
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 64.1702
Philip Guston (1913-1980)
Drawing No. 14
1953
Ink on paper
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 64.1703
Philip Guston (1913-1980)
Painting, Number 5
1952
Oil on canvas
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. Lawrence Sophian, 1990
Robert Motherwell
(1915-1991)
A passion for process was central to Motherwell's abstract paintings, drawings, prints, and collage. In this, he was influenced by American pragmatist John Dewey, whose Art as Experience (1932) eschews figuration in favor of the sheer expressive power of forms and colors interacting. Dewey studied philosophy in China and Japan, and based his notion of art as an experiential rather than descriptive act in part on these studies. In the 1950s, Motherwell attended lectures on Zen Buddhism at the Eighth Street Club in New York. During this period, he synthesized his notion of psychic automatism-of the hand "taking off by itself"-with a method of spontaneous brushstrokes influenced by East Asian calligraphy and Japanese Zen painting as well as an emphasis on paper and ink. He said, "You learn of Japanese calligraphy to let your hand take over; then you begin to watch the hand as though it is not yours. . . . When the viscosity is right, it is close to (as the Orientals are always trying to express) mindlessness, or to pure essences, with nothing between your beingness and the external world. As though your beingness were transmitted without intervention." The Lyric Suite (1962) is a series of some six hundred gestural abstractions made with common American inks on what was then known as "Japanese rice paper." Motherwell recalls that he "worked perhaps forty at a session,
without conscious preconceptions, and with no revision-that was the rule of the game." He was also interested in "the Oriental conception of the absolute void: you start with empty space, and . . . the subject is that which animates the great space."
Robert Motherwell (1915-1991)
Lyric Suite
1965
Ink on Japanese paper
Dedalus Foundation, New York
Hasegawa Sabur_ (1906-1957)
Supreme Goodness is Like Water
1954
Ink on paper
Estate of Hasegawa Sabur_, San Francisco
A pioneer of abstract painting in Japan who was trained in classical Japanese art history, Hasegawa became associated with the Abstraction-Création group after he moved to Paris in 1929. During World War II, he described the "anguish between the Orient and the Occident" as deeply troubling to his artistic vision. Seeking to reconcile this split, Hasegawa abandoned oil painting in the postwar years and experimented with a synthesis of modernist abstraction and traditional East Asian calligraphy. He was instantly intrigued by the black-and-white paintings of Franz Kline, which his friend Isamu Noguchi showed him during his visit to Japan in 1950. Hasegawa published an article on Kline in Bokubi, the journal of avantgarde calligraphy that he coedited with Shiry_ Morita, and he began to correspond with Kline, who welcomed his friendship. In 1954, Hasegawa was invited by the American Abstract Artists association to New York, where he gave lectures on Zen and contemporary Japanese art at such venues as the Eighth Street Club and the Museum of Modern Art. He returned to the United States in 1956, to teach at the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, where he remained influential until his untimely death the following year.
Max Gimblett (b. 1935)
Lion
1985
Acrylic polymer and metallic pigments on canvas
Collection of Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Max Gimblett
Through his intensive study of Jungian psychology in the 1970s, New Zealand immigrant artist Gimblett delved into Asian spiritual traditions and art-making practices. Gimblett's gestural abstract paintings extend directly from his formal studies and practice of Zen calligraphy, and he conceives of his brushwork-often using kitchen mops dipped in acrylic polymer on canvas laid on the floor- as a spontaneous, improvisational act, "ruthless and merciless . . . [expressing] absolutely fierce self-knowledge." The reflective surface and quatrefoil-shaped canvas of Lion exemplifies what the artist calls "transcendental painting." A practitioner of Rinzai Zen, Gimblett likens the calligraphic process of his painting to the ecstatic state of "knowing nothing." Proceeding from "the ocean, the unconscious-these are things that are not knowable," Gimblett believes that artists should avoid getting caught up in self-identity or the identity of the work. Rather, they should take "direction from the autonomous object, from the work itself.
Never touch it or proceed to project a thought into it, or an emotion, but instead, try to understand how to serve it."
Natvar Bhavsar (b. 1934)
Delwara
1982
Acrylic and pigment on canvas
Courtesy the artist and Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York
Indian-born Bhavsar moved to New York in 1962. Deeply rooted in India's intellectual, linguistic, and artistic heritage, Bhavsar found himself equally drawn to the innovations of Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Jules Olitski, among others who were experimenting with Color Field painting. Bhavsar's intuitive approach to color, inspired by his cultural underpinnings, found fruition in this corollary abstraction. His surfaces are painstakingly built up through numerous layers of pure, dry pigments applied with graded sieves rather than paintbrushes. The artist's approach to applying color is a deeply meditative process, akin to experiencing a state of contemplative ecstasy. The title of this painting alludes to the famous twelfth-century Jain temple in Rajasthan.
Charmion von Wiegand (1896-1983)
The Ascent to Mt. Meru
1962
Gouache on paper
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, Ruth Abrams in memory of Gerald Scofield 82.2931
Influenced by Piet Mondrian, whose writings she translated into English, von Wiegand championed a visionary narrative of universality in modern abstract art informed by what she called "the Oriental tradition." For von Wiegand, modern artists "liberated" Western tradition from man's domination of nature and brought "Western art . . . close to the metaphysical speculations of Oriental thought: Vedantism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism." In her view, Abstract Expressionism was "one further step in the disintegration of the Western tradition" by virtue of its integration of Asian sources.
In the mid-1940s, von Wiegand became immersed in Theosophy as well as Tibetan
Buddhist philosophy and art; in the late 1940s, iconic Buddhist geometric forms such as vertical stupas and diagrammatic mandalas emerged in her painting. The Ascent to Mt.
Meru alludes to the sacred mountain in the center of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology. Von Wiegand draws upon this common motif and use of primary colors in mandalic cosmograms to create her distinctive geometric abstractions.
Sam Francis (1923-1994)
Red and Black
1954
Oil on canvas
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 56.1442
Born in California, Francis became interested in Japanese art and contemporary culture after he moved to Paris in 1950 and participated in Tachisme, a French style of action painting associated with Art Informel. His friendships with Michel Tapié, the French Art Informel critic who forged connections with Japan's avant-garde
Gutai group, and the Paris-based Japanese painter Toshimitsu Imai, aligned his work with the East-West currents in international abstract painting. Red and Black reveals Francis's early experimentation with the color black as a transparent source of light, and with the use of large void spaces and drip technique derived from his understanding of haboku, a Zen painting technique known as "splashed ink." Inspired by these early encounters, Francis spent two months in Japan in 1957 where he met the industrialist and art collector Idemitsu Sazo. Idemitsu, whose museum held the largest collection of zenga by the eighteenth-century monk-painter Sengai Gibon, became his patron. Francis returned to Japan several times throughout his career, and more than any other postwar American painter, became integrated into Tokyo's contemporary art establishment.
Okada Kenz_ (1902-1982)
Decision
1956
Oil on canvas
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, Susan Morse Hilles 81.2791
The East-West dimension of Abstract Expressionism occasionally resided in the work of Asian American artists who could scarcely extricate themselves from the intercultural transactions that stimulated the wave of Asian interest among American artists. Okada was perhaps the most successful of Japanese artists who immigrated to New York in his generation. After arriving in 1950, he developed a distinctive style of muted abstraction that proved appealing to Abstract Expressionist circles, including dealer Betty Parsons who showed his work. Okada used the Japanese philosophical term y_gen to describe his unique confluence of Japanese sensibilities and contemporary abstract painting. This term, suggesting mystery and depth, is the core aesthetic and spiritual principle of No theater as expounded by the fifteenthcentury theorist Zeami Motokiyo in his treatise F_shi Kaden (The Transmission of the Flower of Acting Style). Evoking a landscape of thoughtforms, Decision is a masterwork of Okada's unique style.
Mark di Suvero (b. 1933)
Hankchampion
1960
Wood and chains
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Scull
Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986)
Sky Above the Flat White Cloud II
1960/64
Oil on canvas
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, Gift of the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation
Lee Mullican (1919-1998)
Evening Raga
1962
Oil on canvas
Estate of Lee Mullican, Courtesy Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles
Section 5
Buddhism and the Neo-Avant-Garde
The exploration of Asian thought among the postwar neo-avantgarde was linked to a broad intellectual and cultural movement that sought alternatives to modern Western rationalism and utilitarianism. Reacting against the heroics of Abstract Expressionism and the commercialism of high modernism, artists associated with neo-Dada,
Fluxus, Happenings, the Beats, and Bay Area Conceptual art along with experimental film in California championed anarcho-cultural sensibilities. They drew from Dada, Western phenomenology and existentialism as well as notions of minimalism, indeterminacy, and everyday realism extracted from Buddhist thought. Loss of faith in high modernism and progressive rationalism spurred a subversive and philosophical interest in non-Western cultures-especially of China and Japan-to the extent that the 1963 Fluxus Manifesto summoned the vanguard to "Purge the World of 'Europanism' [sic]!" These artists challenged the staid idealism of bourgeois Western culture and its corollary angst of subjective alienation. But the so-called anti-art movements were far from negative. They affirmed everyday life and its natural, often humorous, relation to art. Emerging from the tragedy of World War II, they renounced the abstractions of high art for the poetry of quotidian existence. The romantic image of the Zen practitioner as outside and free of society also had a special appeal to artists who resisted Eisenhower America's conformist and corporatist values. Buddhist thought, especially Zen, appealed to neo-avant-garde artists through its radical empiricism and embrace of spontaneous, unmediated experience. In the 1950s, composer John Cage emerged as the most influential artist and thinker to promote Zen as a creative method. He adapted its concepts of the self and reality as nothing but an infinite, ever-changing void. Such descriptions gave rise to popular conceptions of Zen as a lineage of mystic madness characterized by the childlike wonder of an empty mind. It inspired Jack Kerouac's spontaneous prose, Cage's silent music, George Maciunas's anti-art, and Tom Marioni's situation art-all of which rejected formal modernism in favor of the sheer immediacy and authenticity of everyday life. In this formulation, art is a catalyst for direct insight into nature, consciousness, and being. Art, Cage remarked, is "not self expression but self alteration."
John Cage
(1912-1992)
Cage's Asian-inspired philosophy had sweeping impact on the development of the American neo-avant-garde. During the 1950s and '60s, his writings, musical compositions, and constellation of friendships with visual artists, poets, performers, and musicians created a new set of conditions for art making. The term "Cage Zen" became synonymous with art conceived and communicated for the quasi-spiritual purpose of focusing consciousness upon direct, unmediated experience, allowing the accidental contents of sensory perception to become art itself -- in his words, "to stop all the thinking that separates music from living." Influenced by Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy's writings and by D. T. Suzuki, whose legendary classes he attended at Columbia University in the early 1950s, Cage's insights into Asian aesthetics became the foundation of his credo on art as an open field of experiential immediacy. "Since the forties and through my study with D. T. Suzuki of the philosophy of Zen Buddhism," he wrote, "I've thought of music as a means of changing the mind . . . an activity of sounds in which the artist found a way to let sounds be themselves."
Cage had no interest in formal Zen practice or its history as an organized religion in modern Japan; his use and interpretation of Zen were strategic and creative. He was impressed by the mode of direct experience contained in zazen, the formal meditative practice of still, focused mindfulness that informs traditional Zen art. He was also fascinated by the doctrine of dharma transmission, whereby enlightenment passes through direct experience between the minds of master and student. Cage's Zen-inspired experiential methods established mental, transformative interactiona dynamic relationship between the creator and recipient/vieweras a key principle in such neo avant-garde art movements as neo-Dada, Fluxus, and Happenings. Art, Cage remarked, is "not self expression but self alteration."
John Cage (1912-1992)
Eninka #22
1986
Twenty-second in a series of fifty smoked paper monotypes with branding on gampi paper chine collé on Farnsworth paper
Printed by Marcia Bartholme at Crown
Point Press, Published by Crown Point Press, San Francisco
Collection of Dr. Alvin E. Friedman-Kien and Ryo Toyonaga
John Cage (1912-1992)
From the portfolio Seven Day Diary (Not Knowing)
1978
Printed on Rives Heavyweight Buff paper
Published by Crown Point Press, San Francisco
Seven sheets, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Crown Point Press Archive, Gift of Kathan Brown
Trial Proof A for Day One
Etching and drypoint
Trial Proof A for Day Two
Etching, drypoint, and soft-ground etching
Trial Proof A for Day Three
Etching, drypoint, soft-ground etching, and sugar-lift aquatint
Trial Proof A for Day Four
Etching, drypoint, soft-ground etching, sugar-lift aquatint, and photo etching
Trial Proof A for Day Five
Etching, drypoint, soft-ground etching, sugar-lift aquatint, and photo etching
Trial Proof A for Day Six
Color etching, drypoint, soft-ground etching, sugar-lift aquatint, and photo etching
Trial Proof A for Day Seven
Color etching, drypoint, soft-ground etching, sugar-lift aquatint, and photo etching
John Cage (1912-1992)
Water Music
1952
India ink on paper, colophon
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Purchase, with funds from an anonymous donor
John Cage (1912-1992)
New River Watercolors, Series I, #3
1988
Watercolor on parchment
The John Cage Trust, Red Hook, New York
John Cage (1912-1992)
New River Watercolors, Series I, #5
1988
Watercolor on parchment paper
Collection of Ray Kass
John Cage (1912-1992)
Wild Edible Drawing No. 6
1990
Handmade paper of mulberry, burdock, hibiscus stems, barley, hijiki, and clover
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Sarah Ann and Werner H. Kramarsky,
1999
John Cage (1912-1992)
Where R = Ryoanji (R)/78/83
1983
Pencils on handmade Japanese paper
The John Cage Trust, Red Hook, New York
John Cage (1912-1992)
Where R = Ryoanji 3R/38/84
1984
Pencil on handmade Japanese paper
The John Cage Trust, Red Hook, New York
John Cage (1912-1992)
Where R = Ryoanji (2R)/96/87
1987
Pencil on handmade Japanese paper
The John Cage Trust, Red Hook, New York
John Cage (1912-1992)
Where R = Ryoanji R/172/88
1988
Pencil on handmade Japanese paper
The John Cage Trust, Red Hook, New York
John Cage (1912-1992)
Where R = Ryoanji R/23/90
(Paris Opera Curtain)
1990
Pencil on handmade Japanese paper
The John Cage Trust, Red Hook, New York
John Cage (1912-1992)
Where R = Ryoanji (R5)
1991
Pencil on handmade Japanese paper
The John Cage Trust, Red Hook, New York
John Cage (1912-1992)
Where R = Ryoanji (3R/17)
1992
Pencil on handmade Japanese paper
The John Cage Trust, Red Hook, New York
John Cage (1912-1992)
Haiku
1952
Printed music score
The Poetry Collection of the University
Libraries, State University of New York at Buffalo
Robert Rauschenberg
(1925-2008)
Gold Standard (1964) represents a unique convergence of Rauschenberg's methodology, the influence of John Cage's interpretation of Zen, and the contemporary Japanese avant-garde, in whose history this event reigns mythic. Rauschenberg made this work when he was traveling through Asia with Cage and Merce Cunningham during the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's world tour. Cage was the company's founding musical director, and Rauschenberg was the artistic advisor. Rauschenberg's Combines, which
grew from his process-based collage and assemblage works, incorporate everyday materials in "random order" to form what Cage described as "a poetry of infinite possibilities." Rauschenberg created Gold Standard as a live demonstration on the stage of Tokyo's vanguard S_getsu Art Center. He assembled the Combine on a gold-papered folding screen in front of a packed auditorium from junk he had collected in the streets of Tokyo: a road barrier, a page from the local Japan Times, Coca-Cola bottles, an electric lamp, and an RCA Victor Dog. Rauschenberg's nonverbal, four-hour performance was billed as an "open interview" with Japan's leading neo-Dada art critic Yoshiaki T_no. Instead of answering the audience's questions, however, he glued them onto the screen and turned a TV on.
Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008)
Gold Standard
1964
Oil, paper, printed reproductions, clock, cardboard box, metal, fabric, wood, string, shoe, and Coca-Cola bottles on folding Japanese screen, with electric light, rope, and ceramic dog on bicycle seat, and wiremesh base Glenstone Foundation, Potomac, Maryland
Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008)
Automobile Tire Print
1953
Housepaint on twenty sheets of paper, mounted on fabric
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Purchased through a gift of Phyllis Wattis
When John Cage first met Rauschenberg, he described him as "'natural' Zen." Both were experimenting with allowing the random constellations and material of everyday life to demarcate fields of perceptual experience as art. Their collaboration Automobile Tire Print was a manifesto about just that: Cage drove his Model A Ford, with black paint applied to a back tire, over a long strip of paper that Rauschenberg placed on the street outside the artist's studio in New York. The car tire's abstract, linear imprint created what Walter Hopps calls a "quotidian icon."
Nam June Paik
(1932-2006)
Recognized internationally as the first video artist, Paik fled Korea during the Korean War in 1950, settling first in Japan and then Germany to study avantgarde music with Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, and David Tudor. In the early 1960s, he emerged as an innovative force in the new-media movements developing in Tokyo, Germany, and New York. Paik was at the forefront of Fluxus, neo-Dada, and Happenings. By 1962, when Paik performed Zen for Head at the first Fluxus festival of new music in Wiesbaden, Germany, the value shifts from intention to nonintention, object to process, and stasis to duration reflected the broader application of what Paik called the "old Zen-
Cage thesis: 'It is beautiful, not because it changes beautifully, but-simply- because it changes.'" Zen for Film (1964) is a live projection of an empty film leader. Taking the Zen cliché of silence and emptiness to its logical and literal extreme in the medium of film, Paik's projection of pure lightinterrupted by the noisy projector and dust particles on the projected screen -- emerges as anything but pristine. Paik's embrace of actual, constant process expressed through technology is his response to Cage's interpretation of Zen. Later, when asked if he were a Buddhist, Paik replied: "No, I'm an artist. . . . Because I am a friend of John Cage, people tend to see me as a Zen monk. . . . I'm not a follower of Zen but I react to Zen the same way as I react to Johann Sebastian Bach."
Nam June Paik (1932-2006)
Cage in Cage in Cage
1994
Antique metal cage with video, Homage to John Cage (1973, re-edited 1976), feather, metal wire for hanging, Casio LCD color TV-7700
The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection, Detroit
In 1973, Paik created a video homage to his long-time friend and mentor, John Cage.
The video, inserted here in Paik's punning sculpture, features Cage performing his historic score 4' 33" on a street corner. Cage composed the work at Black Mountain College in 1952. It consists of three movements of silence lasting four minutes and thirty-three seconds, during which the audience experiences the random sounds of the environment as music. He explained his concept as the nature of void in Asian metaphysics, by which silence and emptiness are not the opposites of sound and form, as in Western thought, but rather contain in themselves the complete presence of duration and change. By eliminating the artist's ego in the act and performance of composition, Cage's art abandons fixed form and becomes an indeterminate or "purposeless" process. Paik was among the most important multimedia artists who absorbed the radical implications of Cage's new method that, in Cage's words, "sees things directly as they are: impermanently involved in an infinite play of interpenetrations."
Nam June Paik (1932-2006)
Zen for Head (1962; Paik's interpretation of La Monte Young's Composition 1960 #10 [to Bob Morris])
Performed at Fluxus International Festspiele Neuster Musik, Städtlisches Museum Wiesbaden, August 9, 1962
Documentary photograph
Photo credit: picture alliance/dpa
Zen for Head was Paik's enactment of La Monte Young's 1960 performance score, "Draw a straight line and follow it." Paik dipped his head, hands, and necktie in a bowl of ink and tomato juice, and using his body as a brush, dragged himself along the entire length of a thirteen-foot-long sheet of paper. Paik's allusion to Zen in his title and emulation of expressionist Zen calligraphy to create a Dadaist hand scroll inverted all that Cage Zen had come to represent. This irreverent and inelegant antic upended the virtues of contemplative experience with the wild force of unmediated action.
Nam June Paik (1932-2006)
Zen for Film
1964/2009
16mm film projector, empty leader
Courtesy The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit, and the Estate of Nam June Paik
[Exhibition copy]
Nam June Paik (1932-2006)
Zen for Film
1964/65
Film canister containing 16mm film with approximately 20 minutes of film leader
The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit
Yoko Ono
(b. 1933)
Ono's work arises from the Dadaist debates on art and life championed in New York during the 1950s by John Cage and Marcel Duchamp that aimed to break down the boundaries between high art and everyday life. Ono expanded upon this sensibility to embrace the mind as a player in the act and experience of art. Her instructions for music, paintings, events, objects, and film-many compiled in her 1964 anthology Grapefruit-established the primacy of concept, language, and participation that was central to Fluxus and Conceptual art. Born in Japan and raised there and in the United States, Ono was a key transmitter of a certain metaphysical intelligence and poetic beauty identified with Asian culture. The most significant series of Ono's early work is Instructions for paintings (1962), which was exhibited in Tokyo in 1962. Dismissing the convention of art as an "original" expression by the hand of the artist, she had her instructions copied in fine Japanese script on ordinary sheets of paper that she taped to the gallery walls. Overthrowing the traditional primacy of illusion and object, Instructions for Paintings invites the active participation of the viewer to complete the artwork as a mental process. Her thoughts- communicated through instructions-are meant to be shared, and Ono's hope was for her thoughts to be developed through interpretation by others. Ono mined influences from Cage, existentialism, and Zen to empower others through imaginative activity. She stated, "Instruction painting makes it possible to explore the invisible, the world beyond the existing concept of time and space."
Yoko Ono (b. 1933)
Instructions for Paintings
1962
Twenty-two works, additional works lost, ink on paper, handwritten in Japanese by
Ichiyanagi Toshi
The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection, Detroit
Yoko Ono (b. 1933)
"Works of Yoko Ono," S_getsu Contemporary Series 15
S_getsu Art Center, Tokyo, May 24,
1962
Offset on paper
Collection of the artist
Yoko Ono (b. 1933)
Grapefruit
Tokyo, Wunternaum Press, 1964
Book
Collection of Kevin Concannon and Margo Crutchfield
Yoko Ono (b. 1933)
"To the Wesleyan People"
January 23, 1966
Typescript
Collection of the artist
Allen Ginsberg
(1926-1997)
The Beat literary movement gained national attention in 1955 when Ginsberg read "Howl" at a poetry reading in San Francisco's Six Gallery. His descriptions of his "generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked . . . listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox" were so sensational that Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights publication of "Howl" was banned for obscenity. Influenced by Jack Kerouac, whom he called the "new Buddha of American prose," Ginsberg believed in the Beats' destiny to revolutionize prosody with "unworried wild poetry, full of perception." A fellow reader of Mah_y_na sutras and classical Zen poetry, he desired to give contemporary poetic form to what he called undifferentiated consciousness and the concretion of personal experience. Ginsberg's apocalyptic incantations, deliberately blaspheming American values, were couched in a rhetoric of mysticism that envisioned Asia as politically innocent and spiritually superior to the bleak United States. Writing to Kerouac from Paris in 1957, he commented, "Now the bitter American reality encounters the Oriental century to come." Ginsberg went on an extended trip to India and Japan in 196263. In 1970, he became a follower of Chögyam Trungpa, a Chinese-Tibetan teacher of Tibetan Buddhism who was gaining popularity in America for his Wild Wisdom teachings and founded in 1974 the Naropa Institute, the first accredited Buddhist college in the West, in Boulder, Colorado. Ginsberg cofounded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poets with Anne Waldman at Naropa in 1974 and devoted several months each year to teaching by Trungpa's side. Ginsberg developed a profound interest in yogic breathing (or pr_n_yama), mantra chanting, and the physiological effect of spoken
words. He sought a new poetic measure that corresponded more closely to the body's breath than to iambics structured on the repetition of certain rhythms or sounds. He dedicated Mind Breaths (1978) to Trungpa, whose calligraphy of the sacred Sanskrit syllable Om appears on the facing page of Ginsberg's title poem. Ginsberg also documented his life with the Beats through photographs, several of which are on view here.
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
Above Dasasumedh Ghat (Ten-Horse Ghat) our house roof, Ganges riverside
temple tops, Peter with my camera.
1960s
Gelatin silver print with ink inscription by Allen Ginsberg
Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography
Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
Gary Snyder, Peter Orlovsky, and Allen Ginsberg on a visit to Lama Anagarika
Govinda in India
1962
Gelatin silver print with ink inscription by Allen Ginsberg
Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography
Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
Philip Whalen, Sensei
1984
Gelatin silver print with ink inscription by Allen Ginsberg
Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
S.F., 1955
1955
Gelatin silver print with ink inscription by Allen Ginsberg
Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
Anne Waldman and William Burroughs, Naropa visit summer 1983, Mexican restaurant Boulder Colorado
1983
Gelatin silver print with ink inscription by Allen Ginsberg
Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
Jack Kerouac, R.R. brakeman's manual a pocket, 206 E. 7th St. fire escape,
N.Y.C.
1953
Gelatin silver print with ink inscription by Allen Ginsberg
Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography
Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
Sea of Japan
1963
Gelatin silver print with ink inscription by Allen Ginsberg
Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, Courtesy The Allen Ginsberg Trust,
New York
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
Howl, and Other Poems
1956
Printed pamphlet
The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Allen Ginsberg (19261997)
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
Howl, and Other Poems
San Francisco, City Lights Pocket Bookshop Book, 1969
The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
Mind Breaths: Poems 19721977
San Francisco, City Lights Books
1978
Private collection, New York
Jack Kerouac
(1922-1969)
The Beat writers Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs shocked the literary establishment with their sensational works, such as Kerouac's On the Road (195157), Ginsberg's epic poem "Howl" (1956), and Burroughs's Junkie and Queer (both 1953). The Beats, who came of political awareness in the aftermath of World War II, coalesced around their discontent with American values of corporate and social conformism.
Kerouac's The Dharma Bums (1958) stakes out a different territory of altered consciousness influenced by his studies of Buddhist texts, which he began in 1953. Kerouac's interpretation of Buddhist emptiness, mpermanence, and the Tao (or flow) of perpetual process legitimized his formulation of what he described as "spontaneous prose" as an unmediated act of inspired "Zen lunacy." For him Buddhist states of self-transcendent consciousness and principles of direct apprehension of truth are transfigured as a writing style that communicates the flow of reality "'without consciousness' in semi-trance."
A French-Canadian Catholic, Kerouac never abandoned his faith in a personal God. When asked what the Beat generation was seeking, he answered, "I want God to show me His face." His drawings circa 195658 depict visions of the Buddha, Bodhidharma, and God as living incarnations of wisdom, compassion, and piety. Unlike John Cage, whose encounter with Buddhism was largely filtered through D. T. Suzuki and other popular commentators, Kerouac delved into the foundational scriptures of Mah_y_na Buddhism compiled in A Buddhist Bible, edited by the well-known scholar Dwight
Goddard. Kerouac complemented his self-guided studies of Buddhist sutras with meditation. In The Dharma Bums he describes his midnight meditations, sitting cross-legged under the stars while reciting to himself the opening lines of the Prajn_p_ramit_-s_tra: "I am emptiness, I am not different from emptiness, neither is emptiness different from me; indeed, emptiness is me." By 1959, Kerouac's conversion from Beat to Buddhist beatitude was complete. The Beats' literary style and lifestyle were one and the same, shifting creativity from an act of conscious construction to an act of living consciously.
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)
Dharma Bums 'Greek' reject
November? 1957 (from verso)
Typescript scroll
The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums (1958) is a re-creation of his experiences with poets Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder in and around Berkeley, California, in 1955. Kerouac describes his discovery of the Dharma, or cosmic law of existence in which Buddhists take refuge, as "the manifestation of the universal essence of mind revealing itself to itself, as before and before, as now and now again, as after and long after indeed. As already." It was through Snyder that Kerouac became a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the Cascades in summer 1956. This experience forms the central narrative event of The Dharma Bums. In this earlier version of the manuscript (before he changed Snyder's name to "Ryder"), Kerouac recounts his Buddhist epiphany wherein he finds through solitary meditation in nature a greater force of transcendence than he had ever found in the sensational highway joy rides recorded in On the Road (1957). Drawing his spontaneous prose from William Carlos Williams's modernist poetics, jazz improvisation, his alcohol and drug-induced highs, and Zen-type meditation,
Kerouac established a new mode of subjectivity that defined the Beat literary movement.
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)
Bodhidharma Hoiko
ca. 1956
Pencil on paper
The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)
God
1956
Oil and pencil on paper
The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)
Face of the Buddha
1958?
Pencil on paper
The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Dwight Goddard (1861-1939)
A Buddhist Bible
2nd edition, revised and enlarged, Thetford, Vermont, D. Goddard, 1938
The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
This book belonged to Jack Kerouac. Compiled by Buddhist scholar Goddard, its selection of foundational Buddhist texts provided direct sources for Kerouac's three books influenced by Buddhism: the novel The Dharma Bums; the treatise Some of the Dharma; and Wake Up, a compilation of Buddhist sayings, a life of the Buddha retold by Kerouac, and his summary of the Surangama S_tra. Kerouac filled eleven "Dharma notebooks" with transcriptions and analyses of these sources, and wrote proselytizing letters to Allen Ginsberg outlining his "Chinese position," claiming to have arrived at the center of things where "nothingness resides and does absolutely nothing."
Tom Marioni
(b. 1937)
By the early 1960s, San Francisco was generating what the popular Zen advocate Alan Watts called "a huge tide of spiritual energy in the form of poetry, music, philosophy, painting, religion, communications techniques in radio, television, and cinema, dancing, theater and general life-style." As a center of American counterculture, San Francisco appropriated Asian philosophy and cultures as a critique of Western rational thought and materialism. The post-Beat atmosphere gave rise to artistic experiments with spontaneous action grounded in the sublimities of everyday life. The presence of such poets as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Kenneth Rexroth, and Philip Whalen, all of whom were learned in Buddhism and Asian literary traditions, inspired an artistic culture attuned to the metaphysics of acute natural observation. Art communities were also receptive to John Cage's teachings on chance operations and composition as process. By the late 1960s, Asian rhetoric infused the performative, environmental, and ephemeral art of Marioni, Terry Fox, David Ireland, Paul Kos, and Jim Melchert, among other Bay Area Conceptual artists. Remote from the New York art market, the Bay Area artists used humor to further subvert their perceived long shot at commercial success. From 1970 to 1984, Marioni founded and directed the Museum of Conceptual Art, San Francisco, the first alternative art space in the United States. Marioni's first "social" work expressed the notion of art as an open field of mental and sensory awareness, contained in the situations of everyday life. The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art was initiated at the Oakland Museum in 1970 when Marioni convened a beer-drinking party
in the exhibition space and left the litter of the event in place. He continued to host weekly beer gatherings for the arts community through most of the 1970s; his credo was to "make art that's as close to real life as [he could get] without its being real life." In An Aid to Communication (1979) the shelves of empty beer bottles comprise a record of the deconditioning effects of free alcohol on these quotidian, conversational events.
Tom Marioni (b. 1937)
An Aid to Communication
1979
Wood shelves and 216 Anchor Steam beer bottles
Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California, Museum purchase with funds from the prior gift of Ben C. Deane
Tom Marioni (b. 1937)
Out-of-Body Free-Hand Circles
2009
Graphite on prepared wall
Courtesy the artist, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, and Margarete Roeder Gallery,
New York
Bruce Conner
(1933-2008)
Conner arrived in San Francisco in 1957 and quickly assimilated into the Beat community. His travels to Mexico with Timothy Leary and experimentation with psychedelic drugs inspired his iconic experimental film chronicling their mushroom hunts, Looking for Mushrooms (195967). Pursuing what he called "a new Vision," Conner explored Christian, Tantric, Gnostic, and Native American traditions and regularly tuned in to Alan Watts's weekly radio show on Zen Buddhism.
Conner investigated the light and nature of dematerialized form: "In my films, collages, and other works, I was bringing back references to discoveries within that realm of the spirit." Mandala (1966), whose title refers to the geometric cosmograms used as visualization aids in Tantric Buddhism, is composed of tiny, felt-tip marks whose accumulation creates an optical field of quietly pulsating energy. Conner organized these marks in circular images whose "universal form," he said, implies infinity. The use of light and dark as well as positive and negative ground also defines his series of Angel photograms from the mid-1970s. Conner placed his body to create a life-size photographic negative thereby revealing himself as sheer light, an image of ephemeral being. Conner's ideas, a major influence on Bay Area Conceptual art of the 1970s, are linked to a syncretic, contemporary spiritualism that revolves around imagery of evanescent experience.
Bruce Conner (1933-2008) and Michael McClure (b. 1932)
Cards
1st edition 1966; 2nd edition 197071
Offset lithographs on paper, fabric-covered box
Collection of Kristine Stiles
Bruce Conner (1933-2008)
Mandala
1966
Watercolor and felt-tip pen on paper, mounted as hanging scroll
Collection of Joseph and Lannis Raffael
Bruce Conner (1933-2008)
Sound of Two Hand Angel
1974
Gelatin silver print photogram
Collection of Tim Savinar and Patricia Unterman
Allan Kaprow (1927-2006)
Raining. Happening to be enacted by any number of people and the weather. Times and places needn't be joined. The rain may be watched. (For Olga and Billy Kluver)
1965
Letter to Olga Adorno and Billy Kluver, February 1965, pen on paper; cardboard box with instruction label, typescript on paper glued to box; score in 6 parts, each watercolor on cardboard
Collection of Jon and Joanne Hendricks
Allan Kaprow's theory of a new avant-garde called for the end of formalist Western art. He proposed a radical set of "form-principles" that would render "the line between art and life . . . as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible." Drawing on an eclectic inventory of Dadaist, Cagean, and Zen ideas, he promoted Happenings as a new art form based on "change," "chance," "accidents," and a notion of time that was "variable and discontinuous."
Peter Kirby and Jeff Kelley
Allan Kaprow Talking on "Trading Dirt"
1988
Color DVD, converted from documentary video, with sound, 15 minutes
Collection of Peter Kirby
Allan Kaprow (1927-2006)
Trading Dirt
1983-85
Documentary photograph (Bucket Half Full from Trading Dirt)
Courtesy Allan Kaprow Estate and Hauser & Wirth, Zurich and London
Photo by Robert Cook
By the early 1980s, Allan Kaprow had abandoned Happenings in favor of more intimate pieces that he called "activities." Trading Dirt incorporates the added dimension of storytelling into his art-as-life events. In a series of transactions with individuals in his
San Diego community, including one at the Zen Center where he regularly attended seated meditation sessions, Kaprow exchanged one bucket of dug-up dirt for another. People assigned special meaning to the dirt from a pet's grave, a favorite garden, and "heavy-duty Buddhist dirt" from the foundation of the center itself. When one of his fellow Zen practitioners commented that this act was "stupid," Kaprow retorted with a laugh, "I suppose you think sitting on a cushion day in and out is smart." The mental spin that turns nonsense to insight and the commonplace to the transcendental defines Kaprow's use and interpretation of Zen as a creative method.
Shigeko Kubota (b. 1937)
Duchampiana: Video Chess
196875
Video sculpture: plywood, glass, Plexiglas, TV, DVD player, cable, fan, DVD
Collection of the artist
Kubota was a member of the Tokyo multimedia avant-garde before arriving in New York to join Fluxus activities in 1964. Along with her husband Nam June Paik, she is best known for her video sculptures. Duchampiana electronically reassembles visual and audio documentation of a historic 1968 match between John Cage and Marcel Duchamp at the Reunion concert in Toronto. Both masters exerted transformational influence among the neo-avant-garde, and both were revered for breaking down the barriers between art and everyday life. Kubota designed this work as an interactive chess board, completing it after Duchamp's death: "TV is always somewhere between dream and reality. When you and your chess partner play Video Chess, you are accompanied by the videotape of the two great masters playing from the other side of this world."
Shigeko Kubota (b. 1937)
Marcel Duchamp and John Cage playing Duchampiana: Video Chess at the Reunion concert in Toronto
1968
Documentary photograph
Collection of the artist
Alison Knowles (b. 1933)
The Identical Lunch (2nd edition)
1973/92
Six silkscreens on canvas
Collection of the artist
A founding member of Fluxus, Knowles cultivated the Japanese attitude that everything is worthy of attention, "finding in daily rituals the stuff of art." This event score prescribes for herself and other Fluxus artists to eat the same lunch, at the same time, in the same place, for an indeterminate period: a tuna fish sandwich on wheat toast with lettuce and butter, no mayo, and a large glass of buttermilk or a cup of soup. She described The Identical Lunch as her "noonday meditation."
Dove Bradshaw (b. 1949)
20
1971
Glass and acetone
Collection of the artist
A pioneer in the use of indeterminacy in creating sculpture, painting, performance, and film, Bradshaw describes her method as the "chance positioning of work, the use of materials particularly susceptible to weather and indoor atmosphere, the gradual erosion of water, and the use of inherently unstable substances such as acetone, mercury, and sulfur." In 1971, her friend and physicist Lawrence Domash, who worked with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on the relationship between consciousness and macroscopic quantum phenomena and who suggested to her a connection between quantum physics and Eastern thought, inspired her to take up Transcendental Meditation. 20, in the shape of an hour glass, actually measures space, thus fusing time and space in a single visual object.
Paul Kos (b. 1942)
Sound of Ice Melting
1970
Two twenty-five-pound blocks of ice, eight boom microphone stands, eight microphones, mixer, amplifier, two large speakers, and cables
Collection of the artist
Like many artists in the Bay Area, Kos was influenced by the tide of Buddhist culture endemic to the social geography of northern California. By the 1970s, these affinities became coupled with a politics of antimaterialism, a wholesale critique of American corporate liberalism, mass commodity culture, and military aggression in the Pacific and Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Kos, a key figure in the Bay Area Conceptual art scene of the 1970s, used commonplace objects in their barest condition to "find the visceral quality of materials, find their edges." Kos's installation Sound of Ice Melting was featured in the opening show of sound art at the artist-run Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco in 1970. It presents eight microphones amplifying the silence of two twenty-five-pound blocks of ice melting in real time. The electronic hissing and din of environmental noise drown out the conceptual "silence." Kos's studies of Japanese haiku invigorated his approach to art as an event whose meaning expands in the viewer's mind. To contemplate the sound of ice melting is to directly apprehend transience and contingency.
David Ireland (b. 1930)
Broom Collection with Boom
1978-88
Brooms, wire, copper, concrete, and C-clamp
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Ireland's creative philosophy acknowledges the inherent perfection of things "as they are." The artist appropriated Zen's cultivated amateurism and poverty of materials to "strip away the ranking system" and "uncover" the natural conditions of art that "occur in the process of life itself." This attitude culminated in his project to turn his Victorian house at 500 Capp Street in San Francisco into a site of aesthetic practice. Broom Collection with Boom is made from old brooms found scattered throughout the house. Ireland considers these works assembled from the humblest materials "like a prayer or . . . a religious object that in itself doesn't contain your salvation or your enlightenment; it only reminds you of your obligation to the philosophy . . . of trying to see what is . . . as a Zen master would have it."
William S. Burroughs (19141997) and Brion Gysin (1916-1986)
Untitled ("Rub Out the Word") from The Third Mind
ca. 1965
Blue-line manuscript board with original mixed-media artwork, typescript, and ink on paper
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Purchased with funds provided by the Hiro Yamagata Foundation
These two sheets are from The Third Mind by Beat writers Burroughs and Gysin. This manuscript is composed of random texts, images, and calligraphic scribbles that the authors recombined to create a conceptual and visual collagelike narrative that, they concluded, became something more than the sum of its two creators. Their "cut-ups" offered a new method for creating literary content.
William S. Burroughs (1914-1997)
and Brion Gysin (19161986)
Untitled ("Permutations") from The Third Mind
ca. 1965
Gelatin silver prints, ink, and letterpress on paper
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Purchased with funds provided by the Hiro Yamagata Foundation
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919)
Vajra Lotus
1957
Oil on canvas
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of the artist
Poet Ferlinghetti was a core member of the San Francisco Renaissance, a movement whose members Michael McClure, Kenneth Rexroth, and Philip Whalen, are often grouped with the Beats. In 1953, Ferlinghetti cofounded City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, which became an important venue for transmitting Asian culture to the American literary vanguard. In 1955, he established City Lights Press, which published seminal works by the Beats including Allen Ginsberg's Howl. Integrating calligraphic gesture into his paintings, Ferlinghetti's Vajra Lotus refers to the vajra, a ritual implement in Tantric Buddhism whose form symbolizes the "sphere of actual reality," and the lotus, the sacred emblem of Buddhism, representing the purity of mind that can stem from the filth of the mundane world.
Arakawa (b. 1936) and Madeline Gins (b. 1941)
The Mechanism of Meaning
196371/1996
Three canvases from the series of eighty-four canvases:
Canvas no. 6 from Subdivision 3 (Presentation of Ambiguous Zones)
Acrylic, oil, and pencil on canvas
Canvas no. 1 from Subdivision 5 (Degrees of Meaning)
Acrylic, colored pencil, and playing cards on canvas
Canvas no. 2 from Subdivision 5 (Degrees of Meaning)
Acrylic on canvas
Collection of the artists
Arakawa and Gins linked the Conceptual art programs of John Cage and Marcel Duchamp through the use of visual and verbal paradox to probe the question of the very nature of the mind that contemplates art. By exposing the conceptual space between the viewer and the creator, their work opens up perceptual meaning to multiplicity, destabilization, and nonsense. The Mechanism of Meaning, incorporating diagrams, drawings, stenciled words, and various collage elements, offers a series of interactive exercises. The work proposes how meaning is constructed not by abstract knowledge systems but rather by an individual's active engagement with the world. The Mechanism of Meaning, which was first published as a book of the same title in 1971, has continued to occupy artists in a variety of media, including architecture.
Andy Warhol (1928-1987)
Sleep (excerpt)
1963
16mm black-and-white film transferred to DVD, silent, 5 hours, 21 minutes (excerpt
50 minutes) at 16 frames per second
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
Warhol's first long-duration film, Sleep, stars the young Beat poet and Tantric Buddhist practitioner John Giorno, who saw in Warhol's embrace of emptiness a natural affinity to Buddhism. Ostensibly, the film documents Giorno in real time, as a single shot, lying naked and asleep for nearly six hours. In fact, the film is comprised of twenty-two separate close-ups of Giorno's body that Warhol printed and then spliced together into multiple, variously repeated sequences. Warhol's use of repetition-the reenactment or replay of a single unit of sound and image-was linked to experiments by John Cage and La Monte Young that explored how durational repetition can induce awareness of subtle and minute variations in a structure of apparent sameness.
Sleep compels an altered state of consciousness in the viewer through an intense and prolonged repetition of sameness-literally, the contemplation of a man breathing. Warhol explained, "If I'm going to sit and watch the same thing I saw the night before, I don't want it to be essentially the same-I want it to be exactly the same. Because the more you look at the exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel."
Alison Knowles (b. 1933)
The Giant Bean Turner
1995
Flax pulp with azuki beans
Courtesy the Emily Harvey Foundation, New York
Artist to perform on-site throughout the museum:
January 30, February 10, February 17, February 24,
March 6, March 13, March 20, and March 27 at 2 p.m.
An Anthology
New York, La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low, 1st edition 1963
Book, offset on glossy red paper covers, offset on multicolored papers with inserts, envelopes, and fold-outs. Edited by La Monte Young.
Designed by George Maciunas
The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit
Timothy Leary (1920-1996)
The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead
Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert
New York, University Books, ca. 1964
Asian and Middle Eastern Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Leary's equation of the consciousness-expanding effects of hallucinogens with Hindu and Tantric yogic states of meditation was key to his theory of a new psychology of mind, which attracted the Beats, especially Allen Ginsberg. For the Beats, drugs were another way to decondition themselves from normalcy, complacency, and quietism. Ginsberg describes his first LSD experience as seeing "a vision of that part of my consciousness which seemed to be permanent and transcendent and identical with the origin of the universe-a sort of identity common to everything-but a clear and coherent sight of it. Rather beautiful visual images also, of Hindutype Gods dancing on themselves."
These ideas culminated in the publication of The Psychedelic Experience, which uses the Bardo Th_dol, the classic Tibetan Buddhist text of death and transmigration, "to teach the person to direct and control awareness in such a way as to reach
that level of understanding variously called liberation, illumination, or enlightenment."
An Anthology
New York, La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low, 1st edition 1963
Book, offset on glossy red paper covers, offset on multicolored papers with inserts, envelopes, and fold-outs. Edited by La Monte Young.
Designed by George Maciunas
The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit
"Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik"
September 1-23, 1962
Hörsaal des Städtischen Museums, Wiesbaden
Mailer for the event (with image of Düsseldorf concert on the back)
Designed by George Maciunas
Offset on card stock
The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit
William Anastasi (b. 1933)
Issue
1966/2009
Score: Draw two vertical lines 4 1/2 inches apart from floor to ceiling on a plaster wall. With chisel and hammer chip the surface away within the lines to a one-quarter inch depth. Pile the debris at the base of the removal in a mound as wide as the strip extending onto the floor at a right angle from the removal.
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Fluxus Collective
Fluxus 1
1965
Fluxus edition, assembled by George Maciunas
Mixed media in wooden box
The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit
Fluxus Collective
Fluxkit
1964/65
Fluxus edition, assembled by George Maciunas
Mixed media (vinyl attaché case), printed matter
The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit
George Brecht (1926-2008)
WORD EVENT
1961/63
Offset on card stock
The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit
George Brecht (1926-2008)
Water Yam
1963
Fluxus edition with collaged cover by George Brecht, cards
The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit
La Monte Young (b. 1935)
L Y 1961 (Compositions 1961)
1963
Offset on stiff blue paper covers and offset on glossy paper, stapled
Fluxus Edition (FLUXUS h)
The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit
Dick Higgins (1938-1998)
A Thousand Symphonies. Performance relic of Danger Music #12, Symphony #860 in Three Movements [1) meistro 2) largo 3) presto finale]
1967/97
Musical sheets, bullet holes, and spray paint
Estate of Dick Higgins
William T. Wiley (b. 1937)
Boo Dada Bar B Q
1982
Wood, steel, brass, lead, nylon, stainless steel, and paint
Collection of the artist, Courtesy Charles Cowles Gallery, New York
Harry Smith (1923-1991)
Film Number 11: Mirror Animations
ca. 1957
16mm color film transferred to DVD, with sound, 3 minutes, 35 seconds
Sound track "Misterioso" by Thelonious Monk
Anthology Film Archives, New York
Smith, an ethnomusicologist, experimental filmmaker, artist, and mystic, developed an interest in Asian spirituality from his parents who were Theosophists. His focus on non-
Western spirituality and abstract art attracted Hilla Rebay, director of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (now Guggenheim Museum), who, in 1950, invited him to New
York. Smith recorded the poetry and music of Beat writers Gregory Corso and Allen
Ginsberg, who helped secure a teaching position for him at Naropa Institute, where he became "shaman in residence." Smith's animated films use overt magical symbolism and drug-induced hallucinatory visions; of Film Number 11 he commented that it was an "exposition of Buddhism." The film's sequences of dissolving images open with snow crystals falling through the frame, which then become an abstract molecular cluster, a Cabalistic tree of life, a skeleton, and a receding theater in an infinite field of depth. An Indian dancer emerges, disappears, and reemerges, floating away on a cerebrum in a final frame.
Jasper Johns (b. 1930)
Dancers on a Plane
198081
Oil and acrylic on canvas with painted bronze frame
Tate, London, Purchased 1981
Chakrasamvara and Vajravarahi Embracing
Tibet; central Tibet, Sakya monastic order, late 14thearly 15th century
Opaque watercolors on cotton cloth, 121.9 x 106.7 cm
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Stella Kramrisch Collection, 1994
Johns was first exposed to Asia in 1952, when he was stationed in Japan for six months during the Korean War. In 1964 he returned to Japan at the invitation of his friend and dealer Kuzuo Shimizu to spend several months working in a Tokyo studio. Johns's meditation on the tragic themes of love, transience, and death culminated in his homage to Merce Cunningham, Dancers on a Plane. Johns, who from 1967 to 1978 succeeded Robert Rauschenberg as artistic advisor to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, was a close friend of John Cage and Cunningham. Dancers on a Plane demonstrates Johns's signature crosshatch style, a complex and kinetic organization of chalky, diagonal brushstrokes in a system of repetition whose shifting, darting inner structure charts his concept of dance. For him, dance is an x-ray in movement, space, and time, illuminating the dual poles of human existence: sexuality and death. This painting is part of a series loosely based on a Tantric Buddhist painting depicting the deity Chakrasamvara in mystic union with his female consort, an iconographic representation of the actuality of enlightenment through the ecstatic union of compassion and wisdom. In this richly symbolic and pulsating manifestation where both the male and female embody the Buddha, each is adorned with garlands of skulls: the dance of life coexists with death. Chakrasamvara is an aspect of the Hindu deity Shiva taking the form of Nataraja, the cosmic dancer and force of all creation and destruction. Johns's homage, disguised in this reinvented system of Tantric imagery, suggests Cunningham as an avatar of Shiva as well.
Section 6
Art of Perceptual Experience: Pure Abstraction and Ecstatic Minimalism
Asian philosophies and art forms extolling the self-transformative powers of extreme contemplation, long durational focus, and ecstatic consciousness informed certain abstract and Minimalist artistic developments from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s.
Reinhardt's profound admiration for Asian aesthetics and monastic mysticism shaped his notion of art as a perceptual experience that could change the viewer's consciousness through concentrated contemplation. The reductive forms and monochromatic compositions of Reinhardt and his younger contemporaries Tadaaki Kuwayama, Agnes Martin, John McLaughlin, Anne Truitt, and Richard Tuttle made slowed-down, durational time-that of looking at an art object-a medium of existential awareness.
Reinhardt described his abstract art as "a logical development of personal art history and the historic traditions of Eastern and Western pure painting." A related notion of sculpture as an interactive process was central to Carl Andre, Walter De Maria, and Dan Flavin, as well as to the West Coast Light and Space artists Robert Irwin and James Turrell. Irwin, rejecting the Minimalist label, calls this work "the art of perceptual experience." Drawing on Asian aesthetics and metaphysics, these artists used reduction, repetition, and negation to make art that was purely experiential.
Ad Reinhardt
(1913-1967)
Reinhardt was deeply learned in Asian art and philosophy. He received a masters degree in Asian art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; taught Asian art throughout his long teaching career; and took extended study trips to Asia and the Middle East. His notebooks, a direct extension of his studio practice, are filled with transcriptions from Hindu and Buddhist texts, quotations on Asian aesthetics, and excerpts from the Tao Te Ching. His research reads like instructions to his creative thought process: "Advance toward the formless, what is without contour / Encounter nothingness." Applying ideas derived from his studies, he approached his mature geometric abstractions as objects of specific, ritualized attention that produced a concentrated state of awareness in the viewer. He described how, in this suspended state of mind, the boundaries of self are dissolved in a timeless sense of unity with the object of contemplation. From 1961 until his death in 1967, Reinhardt exclusively painted black square canvases measuring five by five feet, each with subtle attenuations of dark tones and a vaguely discernible cross structure trisecting the powderydry, matte surface into nine symmetrical squares. This series culminated Reinhardt's rigorous method based on the repetitive, prescribed craft he associated with ritualized and diagrammatic object-making in Asian and
Islamic cultures. In language that echoes his reverent descriptions of Buddhist sculpture, Tantric mandalas, and Chinese landscape paintings, Reinhardt declared his black paintings to be "a pure, abstract, non-objective, timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless, disinterested painting-an object that is . . . ideal, transcendent." For his 1966 retrospective at the Jewish Museum, he wrote that the black paintings are "a logical development of personal art history and the historic traditions of Eastern and Western pure painting."
Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967)
Small Painting for T. M. (Thomas Merton)
1957
Oil on canvas
The Abbey of Gethsemani, Trappist, Kentucky
Reinhardt created this painting for Thomas Merton's hermitage at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. Merton was among the most influential writers and thinkers of postwar America. This poet, civil-rights and antiwar activist, and erudite interpreter of
Buddhism and Taoism was a best-selling author on topics ranging from mysticism to the politics of nonviolence. Merton and Reinhardt met as Columbia University students in the mid-1930s and remained close after Merton entered the Trappist community in 1941. Their correspondence on Christian, Islamic, and Buddhist philosophy reveals how deliberate each was, through their respective pursuits of abstract painting and monastic mysticism, in theorizing what Reinhardt called the "contemplative act-continuous, absorbed, attention." Merton wrote to Reinhardt thanking him for this work: "It is a most recollected small painting. It thinks that the only one thing is necessary & this is time, but this one thing is by no means apparent to one who will not take the trouble to look."
Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967)
Abstract Painting, Blue
1952
Oil on canvas
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Gift of Beacon Bay Enterprises
Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967)
Abstract Painting
196066
Oil on canvas
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, By exchange 93.4239
Robert Irwin
(b. 1928)
In Southern California, Irwin explored the use of reductive forms to produce what he called "the art of perceptual experience." His early interest in how phenomena are perceived and altered by consciousness developed through his studies of modern European phenomenology and Eastern metaphysics. In 1957, he became involved with Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, whose members Ed Moses and Kenneth Price were engaged with Asian aesthetics. During the 1960s, his work evolved through a sequence of what he called "aesthetic inquiries" to conceptualize and realize art as a perceptual experience induced by acute, concentrated, and slowed-down viewing. As Irwin wrote, "While there is no one transcending 'art,' there is one infinite subject: the subject of art is aesthetic perception." By the early 1970s, Irwin had abandoned the discrete object entirely and focused instead on modifying and augmenting spaces, using scrim to heighten visual experience. The idea of art as an experience of being sensually absorbed in the object one is looking at inspired his early "dot paintings." These slightly convex canvas forms, applied with small dots in opposing colors arranged with greater density at the center, operate spatially and perceptually as a vibrating field of energy capable of exerting quasi-hypnotic power over the viewer. Irwin next pursued the possibility of an edgeless painting with a series of silver-white disks whose material form, when attached to the wall and lit, dissolves in the interplay of its own shadows. In these light and space works, Irwin suggests that absorption in the sheer beauty of the encounter induces an awareness of "the living process, that deceptively simple fact of our presence in the world."
Robert Irwin (b. 1928)
Untitled
196466
Oil on canvas
Collection of Arne and Milly Glimcher
Robert Irwin (b. 1928)
Untitled
1969
Acrylic lacquer on formed acrylic plastic
Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Museum purchase
Sengai Gibon (1750-1837)
Circle, Triangle, and Square
Edo period, early 19th century
Hanging scroll; ink on paper
Idemitsu Museum of Arts, Tokyo
This ink painting by Japanese monk Sengai is the most famous image of Zen art in America as it was frequently illustrated in English-language books on Zen Buddhism.
Influential author on Zen and Japanese culture D. T. Suzuki declared it "a picture of the universe." Suzuki wrote, "The circle represents the infinite, and the infinite is at the basis of all beings. But the infinite in itself is formless." The triangle symbolizes the beginning of all forms that human intellect and senses make tangible. The square is the triangle doubled; according to Suzuki, this "doubling process goes on infinitely and we have the multitudinosity of things, which the Chinese philosopher calls 'the ten thousand things,' that is, the universe."
In Japan, Sengai was revered as an ink painter and calligrapher of Zen themes, whose works embody the experience of his own enlightenment gained through meditation practice and study. Seeing connections between Sengai and modern abstract art, Tokyo industrialist Idemitsu Sazo (18851981) amassed a large collection of works by Sengai and American abstract painter Sam Francis, whom he befriended. Sengai's expressive brushwork, basic empty forms, and implications of the metaphysical caught the imagination of American artists.
Walter De Maria's sculptural installation
Triangle, Circle, Square (1972) on view in this exhibition alludes to Sengai's iconic work, illustrating how artists appropriated and transformed Asian imagery and ideas to
serve their own creative vision.
Walter De Maria (b. 1935)
Triangle, Circle, Square
1972
Brushed stainless steel
The Menil Collection, Houston
Sengai Gibon (1750-1837)
Circle, Triangle, and Square
Japan, Edo period, early 19th century
Hanging scroll; ink on paper, 28.4 x 48.1 cm
Idemitsu Museum of Arts, Tokyo
De Maria grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area where his exposure to Asian culture and ideas came easily. Moving to New York in 1960, he was active in post-Cage experiments in music, Fluxus, and proto-Conceptual and Minimal art. From the mid-1960s, De Maria's work became increasingly engaged with Taoist cosmology. Arithmetic progressions of single, repeating forms implying continuous expansion and protracted stillness define his well-known Broken Kilometer (1979) and 360° I-Ching/64 (1981) sculptures. De Maria's reference to a mandalic cosmogram can be seen in Triangle, Circle, Square, which quotes the famous Buddhist cosmogram by the eighteenth-century Japanese Zen monkartist Sengai.
Zarina (b. 1937)
Untitled
1977
Laminated paper, pierced with sewing needle
Collection of the artist
The "pin drawings" of Indian-born artist Zarina rely on a grid and are obsessively reworked with numerous individual needle marks. In differing the frequency and intensity of marks in a meditative process, the artist creates surfaces that range from the rhythmically mathematical-alluding to the Islamic concept of multiplicity in the divine-to the visceral and feminine, as ritual traces on the body. These sophisticated, often chaotic patterns are ultimately held together by an underlying minimalist structure.
Zarina (b. 1937)
Untitled
1977
Laminated paper, pierced with sewing needle
Collection of the artist
Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948)
Caribbean Sea, Jamaica
1980/2004
Gelatin silver print
Collection of the artist
Since 1980, Sugimoto has produced a series of black-and-white photographs of seascapes. Focusing on the horizon line between sea and sky, he centers his composition within a precise proportion of the frame. Sugimoto's pristine view of infinite expanses of nature fuses with a contemplation of the infinite expanses of time, as the captured image unfurls in the viewer's mind toward a pure, abstract, and continuous eternity. His art brings the radical simplicity of Minimalist forms to the photography of real space.
Japanese-born Sugimoto has maintained a studio in New York since 1974. A highly literate connoisseur of Japanese art, he regards his collection of mostly Buddhist and Shinto religious art as his "mentor." He writes, "Living with pieces of ancient and medieval art, I have come to feel that I might borrow upon some small increment of their beauty, so as to transplant that power into my own works."
Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948)
Time's Arrow
1987
Gelatin silver print (Seascape, 1980) and gilded bronze (Buddhist reliquary fragment, Kamakura period, 13th century)
Collection of the artist
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
(1951-1982)
Pause Still
Performed at 80 Langton Street, San Francisco
1979
University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation
San Francisco performance artist Cha, who moved from South Korea to the United States in 1963, explored the immigrant's loss of identity through her attention to kinship and examination of language in exile and alienation. In her performance
Pause Still, Cha and her sister pantomime the familiar domestic activities of their mother, appearing behind a scrim as shadowy profiles conveying the anonymity and spare beauty of traditional, daily labors. Cha's description of estrangement exposes the dissociated states that attend the trauma of displacement and that record the reality of belonging nowhere-in Cha's case, neither to the East nor to the
West. In her performances and videos she pictured these fractured psychological and locational states, presenting a vision of the mental effect on the Korean diaspora.
Black-and-white photograph (performance still)
80 Langton Street June 1978May 1979
Exhibition catalogue
80 Langton St., March 1979, A Month Of Performances
Exhibition poster printed on glossy paper
Postcards printed on cardstock
Black-and-white contact sheet with 25 images
Black-and-white contact sheet with 25 images (exhibition copy, 1979/2001)
Audiocassette stereo sound transferred to CD, 5 minutes
Dan Flavin (1933-1996)
icon IV (the pure land) (to David John Flavin 19331962)
1962, reconstructed 1969
White formica with daylight fluorescent light
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Dan Flavin
Untitled (Full Scale Diagram for icon IV)
1962
White grease pencil and pencil on brown paper joined across center mounted as hanging scroll, 165.7 x 166 cm
Dan Flavin Art Institute, Bridgehampton, New York, Courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York
Flavin served in the United States Air Force in Korea from 1953 to 1957. His earliest electric light works were part of a series of monochromatic boxlike forms titled icons. Flavin created icon IV (the pure land) (to David John Flavin 19331962) as a tribute to his deceased twin brother. He paired it with a calligraphic diagram of the work mounted as a hanging scroll to emphasize its stature as a special icon of contemplation. The title refers to the Paradise of Amit_bha Buddha, the blissful realm of rebirth according to the J_d_, or Pure Land, sect of Buddhism. Flavin was interested in fluorescent tubes for their visual and conceptual ambiguity, which he believed created a "buoyant and insistent gaseous image which, through brilliance, somewhat betray[s] its physical presence into approximate invisibility."
Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929)
Untitled
ca. 1962
Cardboard egg cartons, cotton batting, oil, and ink stitched to linen, mounted on canvas
Private collection, Courtesy Robert Miller Gallery, New York
Kusama arrived in the United States in 1957 and rapidly gained critical attention in the New York art world for her Infinity Nets series of large, monochromatic paintings with overall surfaces composed of repetitive impasto brush marks. These paintings derived from Kusama's psychologically driven obsession with infinity as a perpetually expanding, all-engulfing physical force. In her egg-carton reliefs she constructed the serial grid surface from cardboard egg cartons and then sewed skeins of upholstery stuffing onto the relief, deranging the Minimalist grid with her recurring attention to repetition, aggregation, and accumulation.
Anne Truitt (1921-2004)
Platte
1962
Acrylic on wood
Collection of Patricia Lewy Gidwitz
Truitt, who lived in Japan in the mid-1960s, developed large-scale geometric sculpture whose wood surfaces are hand-painted with subtle variations of color. Her forms, titles, and chromatic bands evoke nature and allude to places she has known, like this green-hued columnar work named after the river Platte. Inspired by Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman, she described her work as "color in three dimensions, color set free, to a point where . . . the support should dissolve into pure color."
John McLaughlin (1898-1976)
#7
1966
Oil on canvas
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alan C. Lerner
A Japanese sensibility of nature as immanence informs McLaughlin's geometric abstract paintings. The artist lived in Japan in the1930s, served as a Marine Corps language officer in Asia during World War II, and was a dealer in East Asian antiquities. Settling in Southern California, he became a self-taught painter at age forty-eight. He conceived of his reductive compositions of vertical and horizontal bands of color as "totally abstract" paintings that would "enable the spectator to contemplate nature beyond the limitations of an image or symbolism."
Carl Andre (b. 1935)
Zinc Ribbon
1969
Zinc, one continuous strip
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Panza Collection 91.3672
By the time he made Zinc Ribbon, Andre had developed his concept of "sculpture as place" and wrote, "A place is an area within an environment which has been altered in such a way as to make the general environment more conspicuous." This approach reflected his interest in Zen gardens designed for Buddhist monastic contemplation as "ancient exemplars of field sculpture" and experiences that induce "an ecstatic change of state." Andre later noted how "[he] found in Kyoto this kind of calm, fierce calm, a kind of fierce attention, a fierce equilibrium." Increasingly, Andre described his Minimalism as a process of emptying art to arrive at a "blankness," a nothingness full of conceptual potential.
Richard Tuttle (b. 1941)
Paper Octagonal 1-5
1970/2009
Paper and starch paste
Collection of the artist, Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York
Tuttle, studying in Japan in the 1960s, submerged himself in the daily, ephemeral epiphanies of Japanese culture. There, he discovered a poetics of immanence that satisfied his wish to "escape from the West" and, as an artist, "get something that is not yet culture into culture." His Paper Octagonal series consists of white octagonal forms cut from large, thin sheets of paper fifty-four inches in diameter. He pastes these nearly invisible forms onto walls subverting monumentality with sheer light and an extreme humility of means. They are less constructed paintings than bare traces of a touch so immaterial and humble as to feel dissolved in the space they inhabit. Tuttle found in Japanese Zen's philosophical discourse of self-negation an ethics of expansiveness and freedom: "If I can free humble material from itself, perhaps I can free myself from myself." This installation is in honor of the memory of Robert Rauschenberg.
Richard Tuttle (b. 1941)
3rd Rope Piece
1974
Rope and nails
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection, Gift of Dorothy and Herbert Vogel, Trustees
Agnes Martin (19122004)
White Stone
1965
Oil and graphite on linen
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, Mr. Robert Elkon 69.1911
From the early 1960s, living alone in the expansive desert landscape of New Mexico,
Martin developed her signature paintings of light graphite lines hand-drawn over pale oil washes on textured, unprimed linen surfaces. While she shares reductiveness, repetition, geometry, and an allover, unitary composition with her Minimalist contemporaries, Martin's intentionally imperfect, slightly off-center, and weightless execution of those compositional practices compels a divergent reading that emphasizes, in her words, a "sublime performance" and "aesthetic of quiet disruption." Like Ad Reinhardt, Martin's extensive writings cite specific Taoist and Buddhist texts as sources of her humanist philosophy of pure abstraction. She viewed her grids as planes of incorporeal expansiveness, suggesting "the line doesn't have to describe anything. It focuses you, beyond it and beyond yourself."
Agnes Martin (1912-2004)
Little Sister
1962
Oil, ink, and brass nails on canvas and wood
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, Estate of Geraldine Spreckels Fuller
2000.40
Jordan Belson (b. 1926)
Samadhi
1967
16mm color film, with sound, 6 minutes
Sound by Jordan Belson
Center for Visual Music, Los Angeles
From 1957 to 1959, Belson was Visual Director for the Vortex Concerts, a series of electronic music concerts accompanied by visual projections at San Francisco's Morrison Planetarium. His Vortex work inspired his abandoning of traditional animation methods to work with manipulated projected light. He counts yoga, Eastern philosophies and mysticism, astronomy, Romantic classical music, alchemy, the work of Carl Jung, nonobjective art, and mandalas, as influential to art. Samadhi is a gradual metamorphosis of emerging and receding circles that evoke planetary globes and the pupil of an eye. While Belson's images in this film are derived in part from live photography, they are documentary "visions of [his] inner eye" that correlate with his experiences of advanced yogic meditation. The sound track of percussive breath suggests the gradual transportation of the viewer's consciousness toward the sam_dhi state-the union of the mind and its object of contemplation. Belson wrote, "I was very pleased when I finally saw how concentrated, how intense Samadhi is, because I knew I had achieved the real substance of what I was trying to depict. Natural forces have that intensity: not dreamy but hard, ferocious."
James Whitney (1921-1982)
YANTRA
1957
16mm color film, transferred to Blu-ray DVD, with sound, 8 minutes
Score by Henk Badings
Estate of John and James Whitney, Los Angeles
James Turrell (b. 1943)
Sojourn
2006
Wood, glass volume, and computerized LED setting
Collection of the artist, Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York
Turrell, a master of perceptual psychology, uses common light to shape space, inverting emptiness into substantial form. Since the 1960s, he has devised spaces, both indoor and out, that place viewers in a realm of pure experience. These spaces operate as zones of sensual awareness, triggering a rupture with familiarity and arousing sensations of immanence. Aside from his Quaker faith and extensive readings in science, phenomenology, and philosophy, Turrell appropriated Eastern metaphysics to explore the interpenetration of time, body, and mind in specific and creative ways. But Turrell distances himself from any religious labels, opting for a concept of art as ecstatic revelation: "I believe in the need and thought of spiritual sensibilities or dimensions beyond us. But it is vital to me to take them away from a vocabulary of religion. . . . This arena of thought has been a concern of art as long as it has existed."
Tadaaki Kuwayama (b. 1932)
Untitled
1962
Acrylic on Japanese paper mounted on board
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift of the artist and purchased with funds contributed by the International Director's Council and Executive Committee Members: Tiqui Atencio Demirdjian, Christina Baker, Janna Bullock, Rita Rovelli Caltagirone, Dimitris Daskalopoulos, Harry David, Caryl Englander, Shirley Fiterman, Laurence Graff, Nicki Harris, Dakis Joannou, Rachel Lehmann, Linda Macklowe, Peter Norton, Katharina Otto-Bernstein, Tonino Perna, Inga Rubenstein,
Simonetta Seragnoli, Cathie Shriro, Ginny Williams, and Elliot Wolk, and Sustaining Members: Linda Fischbach, Beatrice Habermann, and Cargill and Donna MacMillan 2008.49
La Monte Young's 1957-58 compositions based on long sustained tones set in a unique harmonic language are recognized as the beginnings of musical Minimalism. Analysis of the static harmonies of the sho in classical Japanese gagaku; the slow, unmetered alap sections over the harmonics of the tambura drone tunings; and the concept of svara, the entire dimension of pitch and its effect on the listener, found in North Indian raga, all reinforced Young's concern for an expanded unfolding of time and later inspired his organically evolving improvisational techniques and radical tunings in the system called just intonation. In 1962, Young formed a group later called The Theatre of Eternal Music whose members included Terry Riley and Marian Zazeela. In 1970 they became disciples of the master Hindustani raga vocalist Pandit Pran Nath and served him through his death in 1996 and on into the present. Pran Nath taught, "Sound is God: Nada Brahma." The concept of a work that was eternal led Young and Zazeela to evolve Dream House, a continuous electronic sound environment in luminous fields of colored light. Zazeela's work uses intense light focused through dichroic filters projected onto sculptural forms to produce color subtraction that alternatively dissolves and substantiates the contours and shadows, all harmonically integrated with Young's environment of periodic composite sound waveforms to create total immersion in the media. The Dream House is an omni-sensory sound and light environment that can transform the listener's psychic state into what Young calls "the drone-state-of-mind."
La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, and The Just Alap Raga Ensemble perform
Young's Raga Sundara in Dream House, Saturdays, March 14 and 21, 9 p.m.
Jung Hee Choi performs RICE, a site-specific multichannel video and sound installation, in Dream House, Saturday, March 28, 9 p.m.
For more information, visit www.guggenheim.org.
La Monte Young (b. 1935) and Marian Zazeela (b. 1940)
Dream House
1962-present
Sound and light environment: "a time installation measured by a setting of continuous
frequencies in sound and light."
Marian Zazeela, Imagic Light II, 1993-2009
Aluminum mobiles, fresnel lamps, dichroic colored glass filters, and electronic dimmers
Marian Zazeela, Open Rectangle II from Still Light, 2002
Low relief wall-mounted, white-painted wood construction, fresnel lamps, dichroic glass filters, and electronic dimmers
Marian Zazeela, Dream House Variation IV, 1989-2009
Neon mounted on wood
La Monte Young, The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry in Prime Time When Centered above and below The Lowest Term Primes in The Range 288 to 224 with The Addition of 279 and 261 in Which The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped above and Including 288 Consists of The Powers of 2 Multiplied by The Primes within The Ranges of 144 to 128, 72 to 64 and 36 to 32 Which Are Symmetrical to Those Primes in Lowest Terms in The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped below and Including 224 within The Ranges 126 to 112, 63 to 56 and 31.5 to 28 with The Addition of 119, 199193
Custom Rayna interval synthesizer-generated sine waves, pre-amplifiers, amplifiers, loudspeakers, and custom subwoofers
Jung Hee Choi (b. 1969)
RICE
1999present
Site-specific multi-channel video sound performance and installation with audio,
"Composition in the style of La Monte Young's 1960 sustained friction sounds" in a setting of Marian Zazeela, Imagic Light II; computers, video projectors, stainless steel cooking pot, wooden paddle, microphone, mixer, amplifiers, and loudspeakers Jung Hee Choi to perform on-site on Annex Level 4: March 28 at 9 p.m.
Courtesy MELA Foundation, New York
La Monte Young (b. 1935) and Marian Zazeela (b. 1940)
Dream House
1962-present
Sound and light environment: "a time installation measured by a setting of continuous frequencies in sound and light"; Marian Zazeela, The Magenta Lights, aluminum mobiles, fresnel lamps, colored glass filters, electronic dimmers; La Monte Young, The Magic Chord from The Well-Tuned Piano, custom sine wave oscillators, amplifiers, loudspeakers
Courtesy The MELA Foundation, New York
Section 7
Experiential Performance Art: The Aesthetics of Time
The final exhibition section presents performance, video, and installation art of the 1970s through 1989. This period reflects the growing popularity of Asian devotional traditions in American culture and the expansion of meditation centers, many founded by exiled Tibetan or Vietnamese teachers and Indian gurus. In addition to the growing library of books and museum exhibitions on Asian art and thought, these offered an antidote for the disaffected counterculture generation who identified in Asia "a more extended class of sentient beings and thus an expanded moral community," in the words of philosopher J. Baird Callicott. Laurie Anderson reflected on the downtown New York art scene of the
1970s: "Buddhism in many forms was in the air. Spirituality was stylish. Artists wore white. There were a lot of drugs. Activism had been a life and death matter because it was fueled by the draft. There was a sense of purpose." Buddhist monastic traditions and advanced yoga teach an acute and detached awareness that registers what is happening in the mind and body, separating one's mental and emotional reactions from the events themselves as they occur. Experiencing this mental stance of pure, still attention is central to all Asian philosophies and spiritual practices. Where earlier generations of American artists drew from these traditions as individual philosophy, without joining spiritual communities, several of the artists in this section are advanced practitioners of an Asian contemplative discipline and meditation technique, have spent extended periods of time in one or more Asian countries, or served in the Vietnam War. As part of their practice, they explore endurance and extreme duration to become aware of the self and the substance of time. Their innovations-on stage, in the streets, or at their downtown lofts-shaped new time-based forms of art that combine performance, video, music, and photography to encapsulate the experience of viewer and performer in the bare immediacy of "exactly now."
Live performances by Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk, and Robert Wilson will be presented in the rotunda and the Peter B. Lewis Theater as an integral part of this section. For more information, visit www.guggenheim.org.
Ann Hamilton
(b. 1956)
The Guggenheim Museum invited Hamilton to respond to The Third Mind exhibition with a site-specific installation. Her work, human carriage (2009), combines her deep interest in language, architecture, materiality, and the body. The core component consists of a set of guillotined books representing the vast bibliography that serves as the intellectual foundation for the exhibition. American artists used translations of Asian literature and philosophy as one of their main sources for understanding the East. Hamilton investigates the processes of circulation, transmission, interpretation, appropriation, and misunderstanding of these texts through this "materialization of reading," in which cross sections of multiple books run as veins through newly made strata. Her insight offers a key to seeing the art presented in The Third Mind. It does not illustrate its textual sources; it embodies them and engages the paradox that while "reading might forever change you it leaves no material trace." The installation, created for the Frank Lloyd Wrightdesigned rotunda, responds to the body of the building and its scale. A pulley system carrying book weights operates along the vertical height of the museum's rotunda and serves as a visual and structural counterbalance to the spiraling, downward movement of the aluminum tubing that carries a slight bell carriage. The carriage itself consists of a pair of Tibetan temple cymbals veiled in white silk. Descending several times a day, the cymbals respond to the building's intimate idiosyncrasies and sound throughout the hollow interior of the rotunda, drawing attention to the resonance. "Like cultural influence, it is at any particular moment both everywhere and nowhere," Hamilton reflects. A shadow ellipse on the rotunda floor veils the place where the sound of the bell carriage and the silence of the book weights are exchanged in the cyclical rise and descent of the pulley. All of this is choreographed by a "reader" at the top of the ramps, who, through patient, repetitive acts, sets this metaphoric, process-oriented project into play.
Ann Hamilton (b. 1956)
human carriage
2009
Installation composed of cloth, wire, bells, books, string, pipe, pulleys, pages, cable, gravity, air, and sound
Courtesy the artist
James Lee Byars
(1932-1997)
Byars's art and life reflect a sustained, creative engagement with Asian aesthetics and spiritual philosophy. He was introduced to Japan by artist Morris Graves, and from 1957 to 1967 he lived in Kyoto, the center of traditional Japanese arts and culture, seeking out the study and practice of Zen meditation, Shint_ ritual, and classical No dance theater. Byars drew eclectically from No's slow, stylized movement and medieval dramas of the supernatural realm to forge a contemporary performance art that was highly abstract, poetic, and ceremonial. A self-styled Eastern mystic who dressed in all-black or all-gold costumes, Byars indentified with Asia's concept of death as a mental state of eternal perfection and self-transcendence, which influenced the material, spectacular quality, and themes of his performances, sculptures, and installations. Like Byars, all the artists in The Third Mind were born before 1960. For them, travel was part escape, part enlightenment, and grounded in an Orientalist tradition that sought self-betterment through the selective appropriation of ideas, practices, relationships, and artifacts that represented a superior alternative to Europe and America. After 1990, artists traveled less for personal research and more as participants in the biennials and other international shows that have proliferated around the globe over the last two decades. This development has paralleled globalization and the consequent shift in how knowledge is transmitted. While earlier generations idealized knowledge and art, contemporary generations value information, culture, and critique. This shift is key to understanding a specific trajectory of American art and thought that this exhibition reveals.
James Lee Byars (1932-1997)
The Death of James Lee Byars
1982/94
Gold leaf, crystals, and Plexiglas
Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels, Courtesy Marie-Puck Broodthaers, Brussels
[Exhibition copy]
Byars's work explores the phenomenon of presence. He plays between the immediate living moment and an evocation of death as a realm of the eternal. This installation was created as the site for a performance by Byars based on earlier works exploring the artist's own "departure" from the real world. It presents a gold-leafed room where Byars enacted his own "death" through the symbols of a glass sarcophagus and five crystals left there as a bodily trace. The performance instructions read: "Quietly lie down and quietly get up." This shimmering space invites contemplation of an otherworldly state of being-not just transcendent death, but the East whose grace it conjures.
James Lee Byars (1932-1997)
The Performable Square
1963
Japanese handmade white flax paper
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of the artist, 1966
Byars made this work for a performance at the National Art Museum of Kyoto, when he was living in Japan. It is comprised of several large sheets of Japanese flax paper connected to each other by paper hinges and folded and stacked into a square. This work was conceived as an event, whereby Byars would carefully unfold the sheets in a series of stylized, ceremonial, and repeated actions.
James Lee Byars (1932-1997)
Untitled Object
196264
Crayon on Japanese paper, joined and folded
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of the artist, 1965
Byars studied papermaking and ink painting while living in Japan. He incorporated these arts into Processional (1964), an event he performed at the Zen monastery Sh_kokuji in
Kyoto. He slowly unfolded an accordian-style book some 200 feet long, on which he had brushed a single line in ink, along the open verandah of the temple's main hall.
James Lee Byars (1932-1997)
Processional
1964
Performed at the temple Sh_kokuji, Kyoto, 1964, documentary photograph
Photo by Lothar Schnepf
Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, New York
Adrian Piper
(b. 1948)
A Conceptual artist, activist, and philosophy professor, Piper began her lifelong study of Vedic thought, metaphysics, and meditation techniques by reading the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and Swami Vishnudevananda's Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga (1960). She advanced in her yoga practice to become a svanistha in 1971 and a brahmacharin in 1985. In addition to teaching metaethics and Kant, she has taught the Upanishads, Ved_nta ethics and epistemology, Sankhya, and the philosophy of yoga. For Piper, these Indian traditions "became very useful in describing levels of reality and
how, when objects are stripped of their formal and aesthetic qualities, as well as their conventional meanings, deep meaning becomes manifest; it is then possible to access something universal that underlies all objects, subjects, and locations." Piper's artist's book Here and Now (1968) is a portfolio of sixty-four loose sheets, each containing a grid of eight by eight squares. Piper typed a description of the precise location of each square within the squares sequentially in the grid of each sheet, immersing the viewer in the concrete location of the grid as an event for concentrated attention. In a related soundwork, Seriation #2 (1968), Piper repeats the word "now" in a measured tone, in increasing intervals from one minute to one second, emphasizing immediacy. Also in 1968 she made Hypothesis Situation #4, taking a sequence of photographs of the window through which she looked while sitting in meditation, then placing the photographs on a
graph to indicate "spatiotemporal markers of the location of an indefinitely expanding awareness" and attend to her "perceptions of personal and psychical environment."
Adrian Piper (b. 1948)
Here and Now
1968
Cardboard portfolio and typescript sheets
Collection of Alan Cravitz and Shashi Caudill
Adrian Piper (b. 1948)
Seriation #2
1968
Soundwork, 30 minutes
Collection of Adrian Piper Research Archive, Berlin
Adrian Piper (b. 1948)
Hypothesis Situation #4
1968
Graph, photographs, text, and ink on paper in three parts
Collection of Adrian Piper Research Archive, Berlin
Tehching Hsieh
(b. 1950)
Hsieh's Lifeworks are about "unfolding time." Hsieh entered the United States as an illegal Taiwanese immigrant in 1974, was granted amnesty in 1988, and since then has lived and worked in New York. In the late 1970s, he began a series of One Year Performances. These protracted durations fusing art and life were each defined a specific regimen. In 197879, Hsieh lived in solitary confinement in a wooden cage; in 198081, he lived as an itinerant without entering a building; in 198485, he remained tied by a rope to performance artist Linda Montano without touching one another. Conducted outside of an institutional framework, Hsieh's marathon-like performances straddle the disciplines of Conceptual and body art and testify to his radical belief that the body simply existing in the present is the zone of art: "In my work, time is the material also the content." The Guggenheim's presentation of One Year Performance 19801981 is the first complete viewing of the documentation and performance relics associated with this Lifework in the United States. From April 11, 1980, to April 11, 1981, Hsieh, dressed in a worker's uniform, punched a worker's time clock installed in his downtown studio on the hour, every hour, missing only 133 of 8,760 possible punch-ins. Hsieh invited David Milne, Executive Director of the Foundation for the Community of Artists, a downtown art space at the time, to serve as his witness and confirm the authenticity of these performance acts. Milne's signature can be found on each of the punch cards and witness statements. Hsieh hung a camera from the studio's ceiling and photographed himself after each punch-in. The accompanying film, only 6 minutes and 4 seconds long, presents a delirious compression of time as each hour flashes by in less than one second of footage. He began the year with a shaved head; as the days and months pass, his hair grows, providing physical evidence of the passage of one year's time. Unable to stray too far from his studio or sleep for more than fifty minutes at a time, Hsieh endured extreme isolation, physical deprivation, and mental vacuity akin to the cell life of a prisoner or a monk. Widely read in Eastern and Western philosophical systems, Hsieh's performances embody "free thinking" and the "boundlessness of time" as invisible materials for his art.
Tehching Hsieh (b. 1950)
One Year Performance 19801981
April 11, 1980-April 11, 1981
Installation of documentary photographs and original performance relics, including poster, documents, 366 time cards, 366 24-hour images, 16mm film, time clock, 16mm movie camera, uniform, shoes, and footprints
Collection of the artist
Laurie Anderson (b. 1947)
In the House. In the Fire.
1972-2008
Metal and electronics
Designed with and engineered by Bran Ferren and Clint Hope at Applied Minds, Inc.
Collection of the artist
A pioneer in multimedia performance and electronic music, Anderson encountered Asian metaphysics through the art and counterculture of downtown Manhattan. In 1984, she traveled to Japan on the first of several performance and exhibition tours and became interested in the contemplative philosophy of D_gen, the first patriarch of the S_to school of Zen. She has also studied in Bali, China, and the Tibetan Himalayas. Since 1978, Anderson has practiced Vipassana meditation, which she calls a science of awareness. Her exploration of the intervals of time, the body-mind connection, and sensory communication are derived in part from her experience of Eastern meditation. "I was naturally drawn to Eastern thinking," she remarked, because of its "practice of awareness, to see things as they are, to let them be." Since 1972, the basic material of Anderson's performance work has been spoken stories. In the House is a collection of spoken stories and sounds associated with those stories. Anderson says the work "uses many of the elements that continue to inspire and fascinate me: spinning, alchemy, emptiness."
Kim Jones (b. 1944)
Green Marine Jacket
1983-2005
Acrylic, ink, cloth, and wood
Courtesy the artist and Pierogi, New York
Kim Jones (b. 1944)
Untitled
200207
Graphite and acrylic on oil cloth
Courtesy the artist and Pierogi, New York
Caught between the role of soldier and citizen after returning from duty as a marine in the Vietnam War, Jones began to draw abstract battle scenes obsessively. Using x's and dots for troops, rectangles for tanks and fortresses, lines for tank combat and containment, Jones also used erasure for both movement of troops and their destruction, producing "ghost images" that haunt the drawings. As an index of war's psychosomatic toll, the artist compares his drawings to "a writer keeping a daily diary" of a war that never ends. Jones's battle drawings epitomize art, as "an echo of the other world in the matrix of the temporal existence in which man lives." For this installation, Jones drew connecting lines on the walls between the two works exhibited here.
Alan Sonfist (b. 1946)
Gene Bank of New York
1974
35 black-and-white photographs, 48 relic vessels
Performance and Land art artist Sonfist creates photographic documents of his walks through old growth forests exhibited together with plant and soil specimens that he collects from the sites. Sonfist's approach is to work with nature, as nature. He aims to minimize or even eliminate Western hierarchies that divide humans from the natural ecology, adapting his interpretation of an Asian humanism that is more nature-centric than anthropocentric.
Mark Thompson (b. 1950)
Resting Hand
1976
Color photograph and honey bottle
Collection of the artist
Mark Thompson (b. 1950)
Immersion
197276
16mm color film transferred to DVD, with sound, approximately 50 minutes
Collection of the artist
California artist Mark Thompson worked with a swarm of 40,000 honeybees to produce the film Immersion. Interest in communing with nature through an acute state of stillness and abandon of agitation allowed the bees to entirely consume his torso and head, where the queen bee was caged. His work Resting Hand (1976) contains honey that he harvested in his beekeeping activities. The label on the honey jar shows Thompson's composed hand balancing the whole of his body during the head covering.
Linda Montano (b. 1942)
Mitchell's Death
1979
Black-and-white video transferred to DVD, with sound, 23 minutes
Collection of the artist
In her video Mitchell's Death, performance artist Montano grieves for the death of her former husband, who was tragically shot. She chants, whispers, and prays, drawing on
Hinduism, Buddhism, and Catholicism in a self-healing action. The video presents a closeup of her face inserted with acupuncture needles-a Chinese medical technique of stimulating the flow of beneficial energy in the body. Accompanied by composer Pauline
Oliveros on an Indian scruti box and artist Al Rossi periodically ringing a Japanese temple gong, Montano describes her effort to attend the funeral, her rush to the crematorium, and her final encounter with his corpse. Invoking the classical Tantric Buddhist treatise on death and dying, Bardo Thödol (Tibetan Book of the
Dead), she whispers in Mitchell's ear to remind him that death is only an illusion.
Larry Miller (b. 1944)
Mom-Me
1973
Installation of components from event realized under hypnosis, two panels with family snapshots, photographs by the artist, and video stills with ink and china marker text of the video transcript, mounted on board; life-size portraits, ink on paper; ink drawings on paper; and video documentary, 53 minutes, 23 seconds
Collection of the artist
Post-Fluxus artist Miller created Mom-Me as a performance that involved six sessions with a hypnotherapist. Mom-Me begins with Miller's voiceover explaining: "I wanted to know what it would feel like to become my mother, to lose consciousness of my own identity through hypnosis and to believe for a while that I was Mom." Hypnotized, Miller-as-Mom answered questions about herself and drew a portrait of Mom and of Larry. Inspired by his readings of Asian texts, which stressed the importance of overcoming or transcending the ego through acts of extreme physical and mental endurance, Miller explained, "Mom-Me is about origins and invisible energies . . . part of my philosophical quest."
Bill Viola (b. 1951)
Room for St. John of the Cross
1983
Video/sound installation, black cubicle with window, the illuminated interior containing peat moss on the floor, wooden table, glass with water, metal pitcher with water, color video image on 9.4 cm monitor, one channel mono sound; black-and-white video projection on wall screen; amplified stereo sound
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The El Paso Natural Gas
Company Fund for California Art
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