The End is the Beginning A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy from the University of New South Wales By LINDY LEE College of Fine Art, 2001 1 CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person. nor material which to a substantial extent has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contnbution made to the · research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work. except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged (Signed) ......................~~ :: .............. t........................................ [A_z_ . ABSTRACT The End is the Beginning Questions of loss and impermanence have always been central issues in my work. This thesis examines how beliefs about 'self' in relation to the Void/ death/ impermanence direct visuality in painting. My painting practice develops from a Zen Buddhist standpoint, which is used as the frame of reference for this thesis. For me, the two painters who have served as perpetual touchstones on this issue are Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt. examine how their beliefs and philosophical perspectives are embodied in their work. Further to this, I examine strands of their thinking, which are carried forward into my own. From Rothko, I take his faithfulness to emotional depth and from Reinhardt, meditative consciousness. According to Rothko, death was the only thing to be taken seriously. Rothko found inspiration in Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy. He believed that redemption and transcendence were born in individual struggle to assert self against death, and yet, (like Nietzsche) he nonetheless longed to give into it. Reinhardt incorporated Buddhist and Taoist principles of unity and reductiveness to inform his work. Rothko developed an aesthetic of division and momentary unity embodying this 'tension of opposites'. Reinhardt, in contrast to Rothko, developed an aesthetic in which there is a 'coincidence of opposites'. In Reinhardt's paintings, there is luminosity within the darkness, iridescence within the colourlessness, 'significance' beyond 'meaning'. The writing of131h century Zen philosopher Dagen Kigen is seminal to my work. He wrote that 'self' is not an entity, which asserts itself over the world but is actualized by and changes through myriad encounters with the world. The fact that my paintings are made from uniformly sized smaller components arranged into a grid underscores this philosophy of change. Theoretically, the grid can be pulled apart and reassembled in an unending number of configurations. 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In a piece of pure serendipity, I finished writing this thesis in the week that I was in Melbourne to hang my work for "Three Views of Emptiness"1, an exhibition about Buddhism and contemporary art practice, curated by Linda Michael for Monash University. My work in that exhibition was a summation of my journey towards Zen Buddhism. After hanging the work, the feeling I had was that I was just at the beginning- I could finally start my work as an artist but it had taken twenty years to get to the starting line. My co-conspirators in this exhibition were Peter Tyndall and Tim Johnson. A remarkable degree of friendship had developed between us -not least because Buddhism was a very strong common link. In Linda's car, traveling back to Casey House where we were staying, we swapped stories about conspiracy theories, prophetic dreams and mysterious pieces of synchronicity. I told the story of a seance I participated in with some studio colleagues, Terry Culver and Peter Maloney. During those times, Terry and Peter and I were as thick as thieves since we had spent almost every day of our lives together in the same studio complex for at least 8 years. We had been through 1 Lindy Lee, Three Views of Emptiness, Melbourne: Monash University Gallery, October 9 - November 28, 2001. 3 many phases together and one of these was the seance phase. Almost weekly for about a year we would sit around a table, the three of us holding onto the one pencil, inviting somebody from the 'spirit world' to come and have a chat with us. Invariably the pencil always moved either writing words or drawing pictures. To this day I don't understand what made the pencil move- alii can say is that it worked, none of us was coordinating the movement, especially since we were always bickering over who was going to eat the last biscuit even as the pencil was writing. We were very light-hearted about the whole thing. One night, I invited Ad Reinhardt to join us. I asked him for advice about my work. He very promptly replied, "Use more colour!" We all laughed- after all this was the "Black monk" himself suggesting this and I was in a very 'black' phase. It took a few more years until I took his advice, [actually I'd forgotten about it] but eventually I did. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Ad for his sage words. I would also like to thank Peter Tyndall, Tim Johnson and Linda Michael for being such good sounding boards during that week. It was their encouragement that pushed me over the last hurdle so that I could finish this dissertation. It is also at their insistence that I have included this story. Others I would like to thank are my husband Robert Scott-Mitchell, not only for living with me during this entire process but also for scanning 4 and printing the images in these pages, and then proof-reading. My mother-in-law Clare Scott-Mitchell deserves thanks for wading through the earlier drafts. Jean Brick, Paul Maloney, Subhana Barzaghi-Roshi2, David Bubna-Litic, Susan Murphy-Roshi were the Zen friends who helped me. One of the great privileges in doing the research or this thesis was that it gave me the opportunity to interview Robert Aitken-Roshi, Daido Loori and Kazuaki Tanahashi. Robert Aitken-Roshi, Daido Loori are regarded as two of the 'founding fathers' of Zen Buddhism in the West and Kazuaki Tanahashi is one of the foremost translators of Dogen. I would like to thank them for their time and generosity in answering the sometimes niggling questions I had for them. I would like to acknowledge that it was with the assistance of two research grants from the University of New South Wales that I was able travel to the United States to conduct these interviews. My thanks also go to my brother Walter Lee, who in a surprising but welcome burst of fraternal love, donated the airfare for me to travel to Paris to see the Rothko retrospective. Dr Dick Ouan needs to be thanked as well. Dick commissioned a painting and gave me an advance so that I 2 Roshitranslates from the Japanese as "Venerable Master" and is a term used for a Zen Master. 5 would have accommodation money when I arrived in Paris. Gratitude goes to my supervisor Dr. David McNeill for supporting me through this interminable process. I would also like to thank Dr. Graham Forsyth and Eric Riddler for helping me tidy up the final bits for submission. Lastly, I would like to thank Dr Benjamin Genocchio for being my sounding board. It was through conversations with him that I realized how significant "The Harp of Burma" was as a touchstone in the development of my practice. 6 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1: Kon Ichikawa (director), The Burmese Harp, 1956, Nikkatsu Corporation. Stills from home video release, Public Media Home Vision & Janus Films. Figure 2: Hans Namuth, 'Mark Rothko in his Long Island studio, Summer 1964', photograph. Jeffrey Weiss, Mark Rothko, Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1998, p 268. Figure 3: Mark Rothko, No. 21 [Untitled], 1947, oil on canvas, 99.7 x 97.8 em. Private Collection. Jeffrey Weiss, Mark Rothko, Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1998, p 79. Figure 4: Rock Garden, Ryoan-ji Zen Temple, Kyoto, Japan. Photographs by Michael Clarke, hunkabutt.com Figure 5: Raphael Urbinas, School of Athens, 1509-1510, fresco, 770 em (base dimensions). Vatican Collection. Pier Luigi de Vecchi. Raffaello Ia Pittura, 1981, Florence: Giunti Martello, p 160. Figure 6: Mark Rothko, No. 46 [Black, Ochre, Red over Red], 1957, oil on canvas, 252.1 x 207 em. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA. Jeffrey Weiss, Mark Rothko, Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1998, p 159. Figure 7: Mark Rothko, Underground Fantasy [Subway], c.1940, oil on canvas, 87.3 x 118.2 em. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Jeffrey Weiss, Mark Rothko, Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1998, p 35. 7 Figure 8: Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1941 - 1942, oil and graphite on linen, 61 x 81 em. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Jeffrey Weiss, Mark Rothko, Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1998, p 37. Figure 9: Mark Rothko, No. 1 [No. 18, 1948], 1948- 1949, oil on canvas, 171.8 x 142.6 em. Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York State. Jeffrey Weiss, Mark Rothko, Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1998, p 85. Figure 10: Mark Rothko, The Ochre [Ochre and Rend on Red], 1954, oil on canvas, 235.3 x 161.9 em. Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.