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. Jeffrey Weiss, Mark Rothko, Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1998,p149.

Figure 11: Mark Rothko, No.10, 1958, oil on canvas, 239.4 x 175.9 em. Private Collection. Jeffrey Weiss, Mark Rothko, Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1998, p 165.

Figure 12: Mark Rothko, No.2 [Black on Purple], 1964, mixed media on canvas, 266.7 x 203.2 em. Private Collection. Jeffrey Weiss, Mark Rothko, Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1998, p 207.

Figure 13: Mark Rothko, Untitled [Seagram Mural], 1958, mixed media on canvas, 266.1 x 252.4 em. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Jeffrey Weiss, Mark Rothko, Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1998, p 170.

Figure 14: Mark Rothko, Untitled [Seagram Mural], 1959, mixed media on canvas, 265.4 x 288.3 em. National Gallery of Art,

8 Washington D.C. Jeffrey Weiss, Mark Rothko, W~shington: National Gallery of Art, 1998, p 171.

Figure 15: Mark Rothko, Untitled [Black on Gray], 1969 -1970, acrylic on canvas, 203.8 x 175.6 em. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY. Jeffrey Weiss, Mark Rothko, Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1998, p 239.

Figure 16: Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1969, acrylic on paper on canvas, 137.2 x 107.3 em. Private Collection. Jeffrey Weiss, Mark Rothko, Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1998, p 231.

Figure 17: John Loengard, 'A "black" painting being executed by Ad Reinhardt', 1966, photograph. Ad Reinhardt, Ad Reinhardt, New York: Rizzoli, Museum of Modern Art, New York and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1991, p 10.

Figure 18: Grechen Lambert,' Installation shot of Ad Reinhardt's black paintings on exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New York', 1966, photograph. Barbara Rose, Art as art: the selected writings of Ad Reinhardt, 1975, Berkeley: University of California Press, p 42.

Figure 19: Ad Reinhardt, 'Dark', undated handwritten notes. Reinhardt Archives of American Art, Washington D.C. Barbara Rose,

Art as art: the selected writings of Ad Reinhardt, 1975, Berkeley: University of California Press, p 89.

Figure 20: Ad Reinhardt, Reinhardt's World in Colour Slides as a Non-Happening, colour transparencies, 1956- 1958. Goodrun

9 Inboden and Thomas Kellein, Ad Reinhardt, 1985, Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie, p 69.

Figure 21: Lindy Lee, All Spirit in the End Becomes Bodily Visible,

1990, oil, wax on canvas, 180 x 160 em.

Figure 22: Lindy Lee, Honour the Black(detail) 1990, photocopy and oil on paper, 42 x 210 em. Benjamin Genocchio and Melissa Chiu, Lindy Lee, 2001, Sydney: Art & Australia, p 35.

Figure 23: Lindy Lee, Utmost Causation 1989, photocopy and polymer paint on paper, 210 x 150 em.

Figure 24: Lindy Lee in Studio, Wigram Rd., Glebe, Sydney, 2000.

Figure 25: Lindy Lee, No Up, No Down, I am the 10,000 Things, 1995, installation, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Benjamin Genocchio and Melissa Chiu, Lindy Lee, 2001, Sydney: Art & Australia, p 40.

Figure 26: Lindy Lee, Home Departure 1999, oil, wax, polymer paint on board. 150 x 164 em.

Figure 27: Lindy Lee, Blood Vertical1999, oil, wax, polymer paint on board. 210 x 30 em.

1 0 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements 3

List of Illustrations 7

Table of Contents 11

Introduction 12

Chapter1 The Great Doubt 21

Chapter 2 Art From the Chasm- the Work of Mark Rothko 53

Chapter 3 Art of the Empty Field- the Work of Ad Reinhardt 109

Chapter 4 The Dark of Absolute Freedom- the Work of Lindy Lee 156

Conclusion 222

Bibliography 226

Appendix 1 Documentation from the exhibition The Dark of Absolute Freedom is under separate cover

1 1 INTRODUCTION

Making art is a largely intuitive activity and most artists learn to develop very strong instincts about what is 'right' for them. At times, it has been useful to write about ideas and processes that have engaged me. Without exception, the writing is retrospective. The reasons that generate creative processes are often so subterranean and labyrinthine that the complexities do not have a proper chance to emerge if spoken about too early. However there does come a point where it is invaluable to articulate more consciously the threads being worked with. Writing this thesis is the opportunity for me to unravel in detail the many layers that have gone into the development of my painting practice as well as providing the ground for future work. What I find remarkable is the perspective that time gives- in hindsight there has always been a clear trajectory, even though in the thick of things the path has seemed very obscure and muddy. This thesis, entitled "The

Dark of Absolute Freedom", has two components- an exhibition which took place at the Roslyn Oxley Gallery in August 1999 [see Appendix1] and this written dissertation.

Ever since I can remember, I have been troubled by the sense that at the heart of everything, there is loss- death of a kind is always present. Finding some kind of meaning in the face of this has been a

1 2 personal priority. Linda Michael wrote of my early paintings that 'the

tone of these works is melancholic, mourning a loss of identity that

never was- could never be- that of the artist'.3 No doubt this can be

attributed to the feelings of displacement, firstly internalized from my

parents experience as immigrants and my own experience of never

-·quite belonging. Whatever the reasons, temperamentally I grew up

predisposed towards questions of an existential nature. As Zen

philosopher Keiji Nishitani writes; 'when we have become a question

unto ourselves the religious quest awakens within us'.4 Loss and

redemption were key issues in my early work. Over the past decade, in

studying and practicing Zen Buddhism, this sense of loss, has

expanded into a philosophy of impermanence. This thesis plots the transition and development from the more melancholy experience of

loss to an understanding that impermanence is an essential aspect of who we are.

In Chapter One, "The Great Doubt" I begin with "The Harp of Burma", a Japanese film I saw in the late 1970s when I was a student in

London. Although, as a film, it is now more dated and less compelling than when I first saw it, it nonetheless remains very potent in my

memory. In retrospect, the film encapsulated all the major themes I

3 Linda Michael, "Three Views of Emptiness", 2001, Melbourne: Monash University Museum of Art, p 16. 4 Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 1982, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983 edition, p 3. 1 3 would work with later when I returned to Australia. I remember that images from the film would come into my mind with some force whenever I was at some critical point in my work. Thei~lm's main character was Mizushima, a soldier whose wartime experiences made him confront the reality that suffering and death are central to human experience. He undergoes a major transformation away from his pre­ war and secular life to one that is religious and spiritual. His path, at first inadvertently Buddhist becomes Buddhist through choice.

In Zen Buddhism, the 'great doubt' is an essential crisis about the nature of one's own existence. Finding meaning and authenticity comes only in the wake of that doubt. Chapter One elaborates on the central principle of Zen, which is that Absolute Reality is the void, that is, the individual and universal reality of all things is that nothing is fixed- everything changes and everything therefore is empty of permanent self. Emptiness, or Sunyata, however, should never be seen as a negation of form, which is simply another kind of nihilism.

Form and Emptiness are not in opposition. In Buddhism, Form is

Emptiness and Emptiness is Form. Form or tathata is integral to the operations of Emptiness, each form is in actuality the manifestation of

Emptiness. Inter-dependent co-origination and causation are discussed as central to how Form and Emptiness are related.

14 Meditation is the method used in Zen to experience directly one's own

'voidness', which is essentially one's own 'beingness'. 'Being', as discussed throughout the thesis, is antithetical to conceptual thinking.

'Being' can only be experienced directly, without the mediations of language and so silence and stillness are cultivated through meditation. Painting also has the potential to elicit silence and being and thus its kinship to spirituality is introduced in this chapter.

My interest in American painters Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt reflect my major preoccupation of what 'self' is in relation to death or the void. Both artists had an extraordinary ability to embody in their work, their varying philosophical standpoints in relation to this question of

'self' and the void. A major portion of this thesis examines their work in this light.

One of the questions for me is whether it is possible to be a religious painter in this day and age. To me, these two artists were, in the broadest sense, religious painters despite the fact that neither had embraced any formal religion. They both acknowledged that birth and death were the fundamental realities of existence and from my perspective, any question that arises from these two events, is a religious question. The moment an individual begins to investigate purpose and meaning, the realm of "spirit" opens out. I am not

1 5 invoking a metaphysical "otherworld" but rather an understanding

that what constitutes what we are, is much greater than what can be

discerned through intellect alone.

If you believe, as I do, that death/the void/ impermanence/ the abyss

remains a burning issue to comes to term with, then attitudes to it can

be seen as a central organizing principle in aesthetics. In the cases of

Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt, their differing temperaments and preoccupations produced different types of abstractions but both were focused on questions of voidness.

Chapter Two, "Art From the Chasm", concerns the work of Mark

Rothko. Death and transcendence were Rothko's major themes. For

Rothko, a key problem was how to be a religious painter when many of the devices and paraphernalia of religion had been largely exiled or at least rendered irrelevant to modern American society. Early in his career, Rothko tried using Ancient Greek myth to express 'something real and existing in ourselves'5, but later rejected this and any use of figuration because the figure was too compromised and overburdened with historical connotation to provide the direct, emotional

5 Michael Compton [et all, Mark Rothko, 1987, 2"d edition New York: Stewart, and Chang, 1996, p 80.Tabori and Chang, 1996, p 80.Chang, 1 6 experiences which he wanted to provoke.

During his student years, Rothko had read Friedrich Nietzsche's Birth

of Tragedy- a book, which furnished him with the philosophical

underpinnings for his work. Rothko wanted to elevate painting to the

equivalence of music. Nietzsche had held that music, alone of all the

arts, could allow humankind to glimpse directly the horror of the void.

For both Rothko and Nietzsche, the encounter with suffering and the

will to transcend such suffering validated human existence. Rothko

developed a painterly language, which embraced his standpoint. His

canvases are extraordinary expressions of glorious yearning for unity

as well as expressions of sombre brooding and alienation. For Rothko,

the pull of oppositions fuelled his work.

Chapter three concerns the work of Ad Reinhardt. Reinhardt openly

eschewed religion. Nonetheless in his writings and the way in which

his work operates, there is a 'mystic's backbone'. In his chapter

entitled JJ Art of the Empty Field", I use a Zen Buddhist perspective to frame my examination of Reinhardt's work. Reinhardt did not seek anything so exalted as transcendence but rather sought the condition of absolute presence. In his endless lists of negatives about what painting should not be and in the work itself, particularly his 'black' paintings, he foiled any attempt to create 'meaning'. For Reinhardt any

1 7 attempt at finding 'meaning' in art robbed art of its greatest meaning

which is the direct engagement with the absolute 'now'. Viewing

Reinhardt's work is an exercise in meditation. In both formal

meditation and 'seeing' his 'black' paintings, the process only works if

expectations of what is happening are let go of. Being in the absolute

present is not possible if 'ideas' of what is occurring intervene. Pure

experience is lost in the mediations of the thinking process. Rothko

viewed 'death' as a condition to be confronted but it belonged firmly as

something 'over there', in opposition to life. Reinhardt's view was

closer to the Buddhist understanding that birth and death are

actualized in every moment of existence.

Chapter Four, "The Dark of Absolute Freedom" is concerned with my

own work. This phrase is taken from Reinhardt's notes. Although it is

unclear as to where Reinhardt first gleaned this phrase, I have

interpreted this as being Taoist in origin and resonating very strongly with the Zen Buddhist principle of 'only don't know'.6 Among the

many perplexing questions I have about existence is the question about what and who "I" am. Rothko's belief was that whatever self is, it is separate from the void. Self has a discrete existence quite apart from what he understood as the abyss. Life, for Rothko, was at the opposite end of the spectrum to death and so his paintings enact this

6 Seung Sahn, Only Don't Know, 1985, Rhode Island: Primary Point Press. 1 8 sense of division. Reinhardt had a deep understanding of unity with

voidness or emptiness. His aesthetic asserts a process of continuous

emptying. The audience is required to fully engage in the flow of birth

and death in each moment presented. In my work, birth and death are

presented as the precise nature of who "I" am. Self at no time has any

kind of permanent identity but nonetheless self has existence. The Zen

philosopher who has most profoundly influenced me is the thirteenth

century Zen monk, Dogen Eihei. He wrote very specifically on the

nature of what self is. For Dogen, any productive investigation of who

you are begins with letting go of any notion of what one might 'think'

one is. He wrote that 'to study the self is to forget the self; to forget the

self is be verified by the myriad of dharmas ... '7 What constitutes who

we are is not what we 'think' but the result of direct engagement with

the world. In fact, what we are, is our relationship- the indivisible

connection of 'self' with the world.

Issues concerning identity erupt with some regularity, at this point in

history and I am concerned with these questions as much as any of my

7 Dagen Eihei, 'Genjo Koan", Moon in a Dewdrop, San Francisco: Element Books, 1985, Kazuaki Tanahashi [translator and editor]. p 70. 1 9 contemporaries. However, for me, the term 'identity' carries with it a

notion of stasis and circumscription which belies the actual nature of

'self'. I prefer the term 'selfhood' which encompasses the possibility that 'self' is a constantly changing aggregation of elements relying on context and conditions to come into being. The aesthetic I have developed enacts this. My paintings are assembled from component parts made into grids, which are not necessarily fixed and can easily be pulled apart and put together again to make an entirely different work of art.

20 Chapter 1

THE GREAT DOUBT

Harp of Burma

Japanese filmmaker Kon Ichikawa directed Harp of Burma in 1956

[figure 7]. The sentiments in the film are fervently anti-war. The main character, Sergeant Mizushima, is stationed in Burma with the rest of his troop. During his tour of duty he learns to speak some

Burmese and play the Burmese Harp. The film is set at the end of

World War II, in the weeks following Japanese surrender to the Allies.

Mizushima is ordered to make one last mission. His mission is to rescue an enclave of Japanese soldiers still fighting in the hills, half a day's distance from the base camp. They have refused to surrender­ not believing the war is over, his mission is to persuade them to return. The soldiers refuse and the Allies make one final assault, which

Mizushima barely survives. A Buddhist monk nurses Mizushima back to life and although grateful for the monk's ministrations, Mizushima steals his robes and begins his journey to rejoin his own troop, which has been transferred to a camp some two hundred miles south. As he travels, he discovers fields and streams littered with war corpses. He is consumed by grief and is so traumatized that he starts burying the bodies as a way to alleviate some of his anguish. Although technically free to return to Japan with his comrades he finds he can't- his monk's

2 1 Figure 1: Kon Ichikawa (director), The Burmese Harp, 1956, Nikkatsu Corporation.

22 disguise has permeated him so thoroughly that he can't relinquish his

Buddhist robes. He bids farewell to his comrades and stays on in

Burma and continues his self-appointed task of burying the dead.

The war displaces Mizushima's usual or ordinary aspirations and his

life becomes saturated with questions of suffering, loss and

redemption. Death is so evident and pervasive that everything, it would seem, is loss from the very beginning. He is driven by the need to find salvation. In Harp of Burma, there are two main motifs: the soldier's conversion to a spiritual [Buddhist] life and finding

redemption through burying the dead. At an existential level, everything Mizushima had taken for granted as touchstones of

meaning have become meaningless. A great chasm has opened and

nothingness has emerged as the ground of his being and this awareness has penetrated him to an extraordinary depth. He is forced to confront the nature and value of existence without the support of verities previously established. In the act of burying each individual,

he encounters the heart of human experience- suffering. Each time he buries a body; he reinvests their lives, and his, with significance- firstly by reverent acknowledgment of their existence and secondly by connecting at a most primary level with their anguish. Loss and grief are his close companions -his life becomes a soteriological quest for both himself and the dead. What interests me about the film is

Mizushima's point of transformation from a secular life to a spiritual 23 one. His wartime experiences have led him a critical moment of conversion. Of this moment Zen Buddhist philosopher, Keiji Nishitani writes:

.... when one comes face to face with death and the existence of self­ one's "self-existence"- stands out clearly in relief against the backdrop of nihility. Questions crowd in upon one: Why have I been alive? Where did I come from and where am I going? A void appears here that nothing in the world can fill; a gaping abyss opens up at the very ground on which one stands. In the face of this abyss, not one of all these things that had made up the stuff of life until then is of any use.

In fact, that abyss is always just underfoot.8

Mizushima has become clearly aware of his own impermanence. It is under these conditions that his conversion away from a self- or human-centredness takes place. Instead of experiencing things in terms of their use value, he is faced with a reversal -the question becomes 'Of what value am I?'- does my existence have any purpose at all? In Zen Buddhism, the fundamental question related to this problem is about the nature of what 'I' am. The answer, as Mizushima

8 Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 1982, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983 edition, p 3. Nishitani saw, in Western civilization, an overpowering gravitation towards nihilism resulting from a partial penetration of individual impermanence or voidness. Nishitani was sa leading philosopher of the Kyoto School. His frame of reference was essentially Buddhist and religious. The Kyoto School was founded by Nishida Kitaro [1870- 1945]. Nishida sought to synthesize Japanese [in particular Zen Buddhist] thought with strands of Western Philosophy. His major concerns were the relationship between religion and philosophy and the bridging of East and West. Nishida had many followers at Kyoto University where he taught. The grouping became known as the Kyoto School. Nishitani was one of his most productive disciples along with Abe Masao and Hisamatsu Shin'ichi. It is interesting to note here that Heidegger heavily influenced the Kyoto School. Nishitani had met Heidegger and had presented him with a collection of D.T. Suzuki's essays on Zen Buddhism only to find that Heidegger had already read them and was deeply impressed. D.T. Suzuki was also associated with members of the Kyoto School and his publication The Eastern Buddhist became an indispensable connection between the Kyoto School and the English-speaking world. 24 discovers on those killing fields is nothing he can take hold of. The coming to terms with this nothing has been a prime motivation for a

lot of work, including mine. However it is not enough to accept

nothingness as one's existence and leave it at that- the result would be a destructive nihilism. We need to accept that 'I' exist, but the questions are what is this 'I' and in the context of being nothing and how can any sense of selfhood proceed from nothingness.

Quintessentially, this is the core problem directing my work.

The Great Doubt

In the Zen tradition, doubt is an essential experience on the path of enlightenment. Wu-men, in Chou-chao's Dog, Case 1 of The Gateless

Barrier exhorts his Zen students to 'make your whole body a mass of doubt'.9 The "Great Doubt" is obviously more than idly doubting that

"it will rain tomorrow", it is a fierce and persistent interrogation of the constructions one has put forward in one's life as having reality- crucially oneself. This engagement is not an intellectual or methodological doubt but one that issues from a crisis about one's own self-existence. It is only at this level that one's own nihility can be penetrated. 'Absolute nothingness ... is not possible as a nothingness

9 Robert Aitken, The Gateless Barrier: The Wu-Men kuan (Mumonkan), San Francisco: North Point Press, 1991, p 7. 25 that is thought but only as a nothingness that is lived'.10 For

Mizushima, the markers for his life have been altered dramatically by the deep and shocking recognition of his own nihility. Futility is one option but it is not the one pursued by Mizushima. The "Great Doubt' has awakened and he opens to a religious life. Superficially, it is hardly surprising that the religious life taken up is Buddhist- in Japan

Buddhism took root well over fifteen hundred years ago. What is intriguing for me is the question; "Why take up any formal religion at all?" This is what Mizushima does and what continues to surprise me even now is that, so have I.

The problem Mizushima faces could be regarded as more existential and philosophical than religious. Significantly, the division between philosophy and religion is a Western convention. In Buddhism, birth and death are accepted as cardinal realities and any question, which arises from these two conditions, is a religious question. Zen

Buddhism, as a religious practice, is deeply rooted in human experience. I am deliberately using the term 'religious' and not

'spiritual', which is more a generic and non-specific term whereas the term 'religious' is anchored to a narrative, which contains cultural particularity. Maybe it wasn't one of Mizushima's questions but it is mine- why Buddhism?

10 Nishitani, 1982. p 70. 26 Religion, for the most part, has had justifiably bad press in recent history. Most problems encountered result from wanting religion to do something for us. Nishitani's response to questions regarding the need for religion is to carefully separate any utilitarianism from what he considers religion's real purpose. He wrote:

to say that we need religion, for example, for the sake of social order, or human welfare, or public morals is a mistake ... Religion must not be considered from the viewpoint of utility any more than life should.11

Nishitani describes the question "What is the purpose of religion for us?" as erroneous, since it arises from a utilitarian predisposition that is subject to corruption in its tendency to be self-serving. We are never going to get to any true understanding of the issues as long as our primary motivation is 'what's in it for me.' Any fixed idea of what 'self' is needs to be dismantled. In Zen, the "Great Doubt" is crucial because it shatters the imprisoning ideas about self and leads us back to actuality or 'what is'. Nishitani wrote about the common human tendency to rest only 'in the field of beings at which the nihility that lies beneath the ground of being remains covered up'.12 Real insight is deferred, everyday activity masks direct encounter with our own condition of impermanence, consciousness stays limited to the field of

11 Nishitani, 1982, p 2. 12 Keiji Nishitani, The Eastern/ Buddhist25, no. 1, pp 61 -62. 27 relations between what we interpret as 'self' and 'other'. At this level of penetration we only really exist as representations.13

even the self in its very subjectivity is only represented self­ consciously as self. It is put through a kind of objectivisation so as to be grasped as being.14

As long as we are on 'the field of beings' we can only represent or objectify, not just other things but especially ourselves. Emptiness as itself is not experienced- we live, instead entangled within representations. Relative nihilism results from a view from the standpoint of 'selves' bent on preserving their own objectifications. It is necessary break out of this field of beings' to meet nihility squarely by becoming 'a single Great Doubt". In this doubt, relative nihilism, in which everything has lost its use value to 'me', becomes 'radicalized' to the standpoint of absolute emptiness or Sunyata in which everything has inherent value.

Shoji Birth and Death

"Because a Buddha is in birth and death there is no birth and death."

13 My engagement with notions of originality and the copy, 'fall of the self' and authenticity, in the 1980s and early 1990s, issued directly from my own Postmodern 'crisis' about what constitutes 'self'. [see chapter, "The Dark of Absolute Freedom"] Although Postmodernist theory helped me to contextualize my anxieties it did not provide a philosophy, which was not essentially nihilistic. Postmodernism presented the problem of living in a situation where there is an infinite regress of referents to lose sight of self in, but did not offer any way to break out of the 'field of representations' as Nishitani put it. Postmodernism was part of my trajectory towards Zen Buddhism. 14 Nishitani, 1982, p. 16 28 It is also said, "Because a buddha is not in birth and death, a Buddha is not deluded by birth and death."

These statements are the essence of the words of the two Zen masters, Jiashan and Dingshan. You should certainly not neglect them, because they are the words of those who attained the way15

Simplified, the meaning of this koan is that from the standpoint of beings, there is birth and death but from the standpoint of Sunyata, there is no birth and death, only eternal coming and going. Both are correct, the first position arises from a relative view and the second gives the absolute position. In Zen, it is essential to hold both intimately and in fact both positions are essentially the same standpoint. Holding only to the relative steers us towards nihilism, holding only to the position of absolute emptiness is to be guilty of

'pernicious oneness', an emptiness which eradicates difference.

When Nishitani states that absolute nothingness must be lived, he is talking of a structural shift away from the level of mere thought to that of actual existence. Nishitani proposes that liberation comes from breaking out of the field of beings, which is concerned with constricting ego-representations of the self, to a perspective from the field of Sunyata or Emptiness where the reality of self can be experienced thoroughly.

15 Dogen Eihei, 'Genjo Koan', Moon in a Dewdrop, San Francisco: Element Books, 1985, Kazauki Tanahashi (translator & editor). p 74. 29 .... we can make a telos of ourselves as individuals, as man, or as mankind, and evaluate those things in relation to our life and existence. We put ourselves as individuals/man/mankind at the center and weigh significance of everything as the contents of our lives as individuals/man/mankind. But religion upsets the posture from which we think of ourselves as telos and center for all things.16

Zen Buddhism

Zen Buddhism is a form of Mahayana17 Buddhism developed in the

6th and 7th centuries in China a few centuries after Indian Buddhism

[with Bodhidharma] had been thoroughly steeped in China's native

Taoism. The word Zen developed as a transliteration of the Sanskrit term Dhyana, which translates as meditation. In China Dhyana became Ch'an which then evolved into the more familiar term Zen in

Japan. What distinguishes Zen from other forms of Buddhism is the emphasis on "direct pointing to the human heart" [jikishi-ninshin jp.] that is cultivated through meditation. Unlike other types of Buddhism, dependence on sacred texts is stripped away- the veracity of Buddhist teaching is grasped through one's own experience.

The incorporation of Taoist reverence for nature was a major development away from Indian Buddhism. Chinese Buddhism interprets Enlightenment as a return to "naturalness". An enlightened

16 Nishitani, 1982, p 3. 17 Mahayana, translated from the Sanskrit meaning "Great Vehicle", is one of the two major schools of Buddhism- the other being Hinayana or "Small Vehicle." Mahayana Buddhism developed most strongly in Tibet, China Korea and Japan. Hinayana places greater emphasis on individual enlightenment, the follower of Mahayana sees personal enlightenment as stage on the path of liberation of all

30 person does not live through attitude or learned response but has discovered a deep and unified subjectivity in which all divisiveness and contradiction is dissolved. Accordingly, representations of an enlightened person differ between India and China. In the former, the posture is regal but in the latter depiction is often of someone in disarray, happy, delighting in the ordinary- someone who has seen things in their true form realizes there is nothing that exists which is negligible or contemptible.

Hua-yen

One of the high water marks in Buddhism's development in China was

Hua-yen. Its historical mission was to present in the most holistic form, the content of Enlightenment. It did not seek to present a new philosophy but rather a presentation of a grand coalescent and seamless view of different strands of Buddhist thought as they had developed in China. Hua-yen flourished in the Tang Dynasty [618-907

CE.]. This re-assembled Buddhist philosophy became the underpinning of other Buddhist schools including Zen. D.T. Suzuki wrote that Hua-yen became the philosophy of Zen and Zen the practical application of Hua-yen. 1a

18 Daisetz T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture, Princeton University Press, 1993, p 50. 3 1 The Jeweled Net of lndra

The traditional image of Hua-yen cosmology describes reality as the

"Jeweled Net of lndra". The universe is likened to an infinite net- at the intersections where the strands of the net are knotted is a jewel,

which perfectly reflects the light of every other jewel. The jewels represent all phenomena in the universe. This image contains a central principle of Buddhism- interconnectedness and the simultaneity of cause and effect otherwise understood as interdependent co-arising. The light of each jewel is uniquely the property of that jewel but its existence is entirely dependent on the light emanating from all the other jewels. When interconnectedness is emphasized as the primary condition of existence, cause and effect have a different meaning to the usual comprehension of causation, which has a temporal element. Cause and effect is usually interpreted as sequential, that is, if I do 'X' then 'Y' will follow. However, in

Buddhism there is no duration, no linear time in which, as conventionally understood, cause and effect can happen. In the Hua­ yen sense, causation is the relationship between individual parts, which causes the present to occur. ..

32 the emphasis is on the totality of being seen as necessarily composed of individuals which sustain each other in an unimaginably complex network of intercausality and interdependence.19

Subtracting any single component causes an entirely different 'now' to transpire. This being the case, every single thing in the universe holds primary value.

Fa-tsang [the Third Patriarch of Hua-yen]wrote in Hua-yen i-ch'eng chiao i fen-ch'i chang that

If [each part] does not wholly cause the [whole] to be made and only exerts partial power, then each condition would only have partial power. They would consist only of many individual partial powers and would not make up one whole, which is annhilationism ... Also, if [the part] does not wholly create [the whole], then when [part] is removed, the [whole] should remain. However, since the whole is not formed, then you should understand that the [whole] is not formed by the partial power [of a condition] but by its total power.20

In Zen, surrender to vastness doesn't mean annihilation as is implied in theories of the sublime.21 Intimate knowledge comes from actualizing with totality one's individual position in the net. The ancient Chinese term for enlightenment was synonymous with

'intimacy' [Ch. ch'in -ch'ieh; Jp shinetsu].22 In Zen Buddhism, the individual is not overcome or diminished but realizes the intimate

19 Francis H. Cook, Hua-yen Buddhism, The Jewel Net of lndra, University Park: Pennsylvania State university Press, 1977, p 31 20 Cook, 1977, p 12. 21 See Chapter 2, "Art from the Chasm: the Work of Mark Rothko", below. 22 Aitken, 1991, p 14. 33 connection between self and the rest of the world. Robert Aitken-Roshi wrote that the 'eye' is the locus of the universe. He refers to the ancient Master Ch'ang-sha who wrote:

The entire universe is in your eye; the entire universe is your total body: the entire universe is within your own luminance. In the entire universe there is no one who is not your own self.23

Absolute Reality

The term 'reality' calls forth a multitude of meanings. We talk of subjective realities, objective realities, scientific realities, economic realities, metaphysical realities and so on. What all of these terms lack, however accurate, is a sense of totality. None of the above 'realities' could encompass any of the other realities, and in fact they would in some instances contradict each other. In Buddhism, reality encompasses everything and is known as Ultimate or Absolute Reality or the Void. Absolute Reality in Buddhism is not God or any other substantive entity- it is Emptiness or Sunyata. However, when a

Buddhist says that all things are empty or illusory, it is not a denial that the sensory or phenomenal world exists but that any substantial self- identity exists beyond sensory and phenomenal dimensions. It is context, which gives a table its 'table' qualities. In order for something to have a discrete existence, it must be able to stand independently from anything else but everything without exception is

23 Aitken, 1991, p 275. 34 interdependently related to every other thing. For a desk to come into existence as a desk, it needs all the paraphernalia of usage to establish its meaning. In another set of circumstances the desk may well be firewood. Form is a flowing, mutable aggregation relying on the interrelationship of phenomena and confluence of elements for existence. Everything is void because nothing can come into being without the vast web of interconditionality. Not only is everything impermanent, more essentially everything is impermanence.

This means that emptiness, the conditional, dependent nature of things, is wholly present in all things; in terms of impermanence, it means that transience is inherent in all things.24

In reality there is only flux, no discrete selfhood of objects that undergoes transformations like birth, death and decay- there is only change with no permanent centre for that change. The one great

Buddhist truth around which all its various schools revolve is All is

Impermanence.

Sunyata/ Emptiness

In the West, we have inherited a Graeco/Judaic/Christian paradigm, which conceives the Void as something of substance. This is the implicit assumption that governs much of the discourse in the history of Modernism. Monochromes for instance are often referred to as

24 Thomas Cleary, Entry into the Inconceivable: An Introduction to Hua-yen Buddhism, 1983, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1994, p.26 35 'paintings about nothing•.25 Painting 'about' anything is an exercise in representation- from a Zen perspective, Emptiness may be presented or embodied in a work but it can't be represented. Absolute Reality is not a 'thing' that can be grasped and portrayed representationally because Emptiness is a process or an action rather than an object-

Emptiness is a verb rather than a noun and as such can only be experienced.

Abe wrote:

Since emptiness as the pure activity of emptying incessantly empties everything including itself, there is nothing outside this pure activity of emptying26

The great Ch'an Buddhist Master Lin-chi [d. 866] used the term 'True

Man of No Rank' to express the sense that 'true self' abides nowhere, but is the activity of emptying.27 For both Abe and Nishitani, this was a central issue to be worked through non-dualistically: Nishitani wrote about penetrating nihility with nihility while Abe stated if 'the activity of emptying is realized outside of self, it will turn again into something, because its looked at from outside and objectified by self'.28

25 Matthew Collings, 'Nothing Matters', This is Modern Art, London: Channel 4, 1999 (television documentary). 26 Abe Masao, Zen and Comparative Studies, Honolulu; University of Hawaii Press, 1997, p109 27Lin-chi 1-hsuan, The Zen Teachings of Master Lin-chi, Boston: Shambhala, 1993, Burton Watson trans, p 13. 28 Abe, 1997, p 109.

36 In Zen, Nirvana is attained by seeing directly the 'mind's essence', to experience with clarity and immediacy impermanence as our 'true' or

Buddha nature. Terms like Nirvana and Absolute Reality are not references to some metaphysical 'other place' or even a psychological state of mind- Nirvana is here.

It is not that ultimate Reality stands in front of us, but we are standing in the ultimate Reality. The ultimate Reality is not an object to be reached, but the ground which is unobjectifiable. Hence it is without form.29

Conventional Western understanding places birth and death as the bookends of life. The Void is described as something we rise out from at birth and return to after death. In Zen Buddhism, the understanding is that we are never at a remove from the Void. Birth, death and everything in between is an expression of the Void- all events are aspects of Emptiness. In meditation, one is aware of how momentary any kind of selfhood is- there is nothing of substance that can be pointed to as permanent. States of being come and go, thoughts and images rise and fall- birth and death are actualized in every moment.

For Zen Buddhists, Nirvana is a state of liberation or illumination in which one is free from the cycle of birth, death and suffering but this does not mean that birth and death cease but that we experience these

29 Abe, 1997, p 147. 37 states without being divided from them. Attachment, in the Zen sense, is not the same as detachment or lack of involvement. Attachment refers to attitudinal postures, which separate self from the reality of what is occurring. The fact of the matter is that Zen practice is the practice of total involvement and immersion.

Tathata Form or How Appearance Shines

The central principle of "The Great Paramita Heart Sutra" is 'that Form is no other than Emptiness and Emptiness is no other than Form'.30

Form, in essence, is the activation of difference in Emptiness and

Emptiness is the dynamic action of intercausality- phenomena rise and fall- each thing a unique combination of conditions and circumstance living out difference. Form is never negated- it is valued for its uniqueness and absoluteness. Form must fully enact itself for the universe to function. Difference is essential to the workings of

Emptiness. Dogen Kigen [1200- 1253] was a Japanese Zen Buddhist monk and a seminal thinker in the history of Buddhism. He wrote that

Form's transience is in no way an impediment to its absoluteness.

Firewood becomes ash, and it does not become firewood again. Yet, do not suppose that the ash is the future and firewood the past. You should understand that firewood abides in the phenomenal expression of firewood, which fully includes past and future and is independent of

30 The Heart Sutra is one shortest of the forty sutras of the Prajnaparamitasutra and is considered one of the most important sutras in Mahayana Buddhism. 38 interdependence, is that each and every thing must be fully itself for co-dependent origination to occur.

The Great Way of the Buddha -law is: in a grain of dust are all the infinite Buddhas ... all things are the One Mind, the complete body.32

Even a dust mote has inherent value, exactly as it is, since it is also the whole. It is not that the particular is in relationship to the universal- this would imply a dualism that the universal is apart from the particular. In Zen, every particular is already complete and every particular is conceived of within every other particular. The absolute, in Zen Buddhist terms is that all things are true in themselves and thus endowed with Buddha-nature. In meditation, one 'seeks' to see things exactly as they are, not how desire, preconditioning and expectation make them seem. For Zen, every single thing is the "self-expression of ultimacy."33

Hui-neng34 asked his disciple Nan-yueh Huai-juang "What is this that thus comes?" 35 In Zen, words like 'this' or questions like 'What is this?' have a special deployment. They are koans, which imply a question about the essence of Buddha-nature or reality. Hui-neng's

32 Heinrich Dumoulin, Zen Enlightenment: Origins and Meanings, 1976, New York: Weatherill, 1979 edition, John C. Maraldo (translator), p.104. 33 Joan Stambaugh, The Formless Self, Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1999, p 89. 34 Hui-neng [638-713] was the Sixth Patriarch of Ch'an [Zen] Buddhism. 35 Dumoulin, 1976, p 105. 40 'this' [like every 'this'] is Buddha-nature, a concrete manifestation of

Emptiness. Nothing is permanent, things exist from moment to moment, and therefore one can say that in the moment they come to be, they are these things. There is no 'reason' for anything to exist; the reality of beings is simply there in its manifestness. Shakyamuni

Buddha's realization was that II all beings are tathata", that is all things are absolutely true in their 'thusness' or 'such ness'. Dagen advocates the same radical realism- there is no separation between body and mind; no substance lies behind or beyond the phenomenal world.

Phenomenon and essence are the same. Buddha-nature is immutable and ungraspable in that it moves beyond all ideas and distinctions.

Meaning is elusive because it is impossible to completely 'know' a thing in the conceptual sense. Its reality will always exceed any notion of what it is.

Historically and spiritually, the birth of Zen occurred at the moment

Shakyamuni Buddha held up a flower as a sermon he delivered at

Mount Grdrakuta.

Once, in ancient times, when the World-Honoured One was at Mount Grdrakuta, he twirled a flower before his assembled disciples. All were silent. Only Mahakasyapa broke into a smile.

The World-Honoured One said," I have the eye treasury of right Dharma, the subtle mind of nirvana, the true form of no-form, and the flawless gate of the teaching. It is not established on words or

4 1 past and future. Ash abides in the phenomenal expression of ash, which fully includes future and past. Just as firewood does not become firewood again after it is ash, you do not return to birth after death ... Birth is an expression complete in this moment. Death is an expression complete in this moment. They are like winter and spring. You do not call winter the beginning of spring, nor summer the end of spring.31

Firewood is firewood in the absolute present; ash is ash in the absolute present- what Dogen reiterated throughout his writing is that each moment is complete in itself, however fleeting. There is neither transition nor is there a reality which is fixed or static. In Western thinking, the absolute carries a connotation of persistence through time. For instance, the ultimate absolute in Western thinking is God.

Part of God's raison d'etre is that He abides through all time enduring through eternity unlike us. In Dogen, because he refutes any notion of temporal duration the absolute has a completely different meaning.

Each moment, each phenomenon is exactly itself firewood abides in the phenomenal expression of firewood. Firewood is not the past of ash, it is absolutely firewood. Ash is not the future of firewood, it is absolutely ash. The absolute is phenomenal expression unimpeded. It is this one particular which prevents the Doctrine of Emptiness from sliding into nihilism. The obverse to the law of co-dependent origination- that things are empty and come into existence through

31 Dagen, 1985, p 70. 39 phrases. It has a special transmission outside tradition. I now entrust this to Mahakasyapa.36

One of the features which distinguishes Zen from other types of

Buddhism is the emphasis on the transmission of its teaching beyond word and tradition. Although there are very strong traditions and rituals in Zen Buddhism, spiritual insight is not reliant on the accumulation of intellectual knowledge but on direct experience of reality. Meditation and koans are used as a skilful means towards attaining and deepening realization of this 'special transmission•.37 In popular imagination, koans are characterized as nonsensical riddles with a mystical undertone, however, a koan is not so much a riddle as a paradox which intellectual reason can't unravel; it is meant to frustrate usual thinking processes to make the student leap into a different level of comprehension which is intuitive rather than calculative or interpretive. One of the more familiar koans is "What is the sound of single hand?" Logic won't solve this question but nonetheless there is a correct answer. I could say that the answer refers to Emptiness but in the Dokusan room, but if I were to give this explanation, even though conceptually correct, I would not pass.38

The answer has to be presented as embodied, that is, there must be

36 Aitken, 1991, p 46. 37 The Japanese term koan is derived from the Chinese term kung-an, meaning a public legal case. Generally speaking, koans are based on ancient enlightenment stories of the great Zen Masters. 38 Dokusan [jp.] private interview with the Zen Master, usually for koan presentation. 42 complete and indivisible unity between self and answer.

Mahakasyapa's smile embodied his understanding of Shakyamuni's sermon; his smile presented what had been realized.

The answers to koans are usually very simple as they express very fundamental truths. However, the difficulties arising in the journey towards the right answer can seem impenetrable. We are used to being able to explain things, to use our minds interpretively, however, you can't explain a koan, and you can only be it. The "special transmission" concerns 'being'- Mahakasyapa, at the most basic level of understanding, was confirmed by the flower. His senses authenticated his existence.

Tathata is often translated as 'suchness' or 'is-ness'. The foundation for Zen Buddhism, both philosophically and soteriologically, is the possibility of deconstructing the almost automatic tendency to overlay perception with thought constructions, in other word to see 'things-as­ they-are'. The notion of 'things-as-they-are' has also been developed within Western philosophy. Emanuel Kant [1724- 1804] made a distinction between noumena or things-in-themselves and phenomena or things -as -they-are -experienced. However, according to Kant, noumena can never be directly experienced. The implication of making this distinction is that actuality and appearance are quite different, that is, there must be an actuality beyond what appears. The

43 non-duality of Zen practice does not make this distinction, reality is appearance itself- there is no metaphysical conceit that there is any reality "behind" experience. Tathata is appearance of things-as-they­ are without the distorting lens of thoughts 'about' the phenomena in question. In Zen, things-in-themselves can be experienced with the cessation of interpretative thinking in meditation.

The primary koan for Zen students is "What is Mu?" which is derived from the first case in the Wu-men Kuan. [The Gateless Barrier]. The volume is a collection of stories and verses and forms part of the traditional koan curriculum. Wu-men [1183- 1260] was born in Hang­ zhou, which was one of the important centres of Ch'an Buddhism. He was given Mu as his first koan and struggled with it for six years before he had any breakthrough. After energetically renewing his determination, he had a powerful realization. The story goes that after six years he decided not to sleep until he became enlightened.

Whenever he got sleepy, Wu-men would walk to the entrance of the meditation hall and hit his head against a wooden pillar. In 1288, he compiled the Wu-men Kuan including Mu as the first story in the collection. This koan is regarded as basic and in Zen Temples all over

44 the world the first Teisho given at the beginning of Sesshin is often

based on Mu.39

The case states:40

A monk asked Chou-chou, "Has the dog Buddha-nature or not?" Chou-chou said, "Mu."

Wu-men comments:

For the practice of Zen it is imperative that you pass through the barrier set up by the Ancestral Teachers. For subtle realization it is of the utmost importance that you cut off the mind road. If you do not pass the barrier of the ancestors, if you do not cut off the mind road, then you are a ghost clinging to grasses and bushes.41

The lines of the verse do not give many clues about what Mu is but they are the only words given to work with. Zen tradition is very satisfying historically and ritually but only by entering fully the unhistorical'now' can we apprehend the fundamental teaching. The intellectual frustration of the koan contributes to dismantling the 'mind road'. All the usual pathways the discursive mind runs down to find

'solutions' are met with and then abandoned. Reason as the cornerstone of understanding proves inadequate. So Wu-men encourages his students to "cut off the mind road", to pass through

39 Teisho is a presentation offered to an assembly of students by the Roshi [Zen Master] demonstrating his or her insight. It is usually in the form of a talk but is not explanatory in the usual sense. 40 Koan[jp] is taken from the Chinese word kung-an or public notice, originally meant to refer to a legal case constituting a precedent (op cit n. 35): 41 Aitken, 1991, p 7.

45 this gateless barrier of the ancestors, to enter into being ness- into our

own voidness.

When Shakyamuni Buddha twirled the flower in front of the assembly,

he was demonstrating his enlightenment. -After a prolonged period of

meditation, the Buddha looked up at the morning star. and exclaimed

"All things by nature are Buddha, only greed, hatred and delusion keep

us from realizing that fact".42 Tathagata is Sanskrit for "the thus-come"

or "thus-perfected one" and is often used as one of the Buddha's titles

and refers to the unconditioned, essence of the universe.43 The

Buddha realized that all phenomena in and of themselves are perfect

but it is the delusions of ego-projection overlayed on top, which

prevent us from apprehending this. By "cutting off the mind road",

Mahakasyapa saw the flower's such ness; he saw its perfection exactly

as it was and he broke into a smile. In that moment, the complete teaching of the Buddha was transmitted wordlessly. Tradition states that this silent transmission has been passed down uninterrupted from teacher to student throughout all the generations of Zen Buddhism from the time of Shakyamuni.

42 Thomas Cleary, The Flower Ornament Scripture, 1984-1987, Boulder: Shambhala, volume 2, pp 314-317. 43 Shambha/a Dictionary of Buddhism and Zen, 1986, Boston: Shambhala, 1991, Michael H. Kahn (translator), p 220 46 Silence

The cultivation of silence is essential in Zen. Mahakasyapa received

the Buddha's transmission because his openness was an aspect of the

silence in his own being. However, being silent does not mean having

no sound but rather that the tenacious commentary surrounding an

experience or phenomena is stripped right back. The problem is that since language has such a vital role in our lives, we are deceived by its

"magic of terminology"44 Even without meditating; we can gain a sense of how difficult being silent is. For instance, when listening to

music, we assume that we are absorbing the notes without much difficulty, but if we listen with our eyes closed against distraction, it is surprising how the mind intervenes with tangential thoughts clogging up our capacity to hear. Mostly we listen with this kind a notional hearing and mistake it as pure 'hearing'. In pure hearing, there is no separation between the 'hearer' and what is being heard, there is only resonating sound. The same applies to the other senses as well. In meditation, the clarity of one's senses is indicative of how deep the meditation is. After a few days of solid 'sitting' in Sesshin, hearing becomes acute and objects develop a radiant quality because mental chatter has died down and less and less intervenes between self and phenomena.45 After experiencing this kind of clarity, one can gauge the

44 Frederick Franck (editor), The Buddha Eye, 1982, New York: Crossroad, 1991 edition, p 139. 45 Sesshin [jp] meaning to convey the heart-mind, Sesshin is a silent meditation retreat, generally of 7 days' duration. 47 degree to which words or ideas about things become unconscious

surrogates for the actual sense experience of things-in-themselves.

The Zen expression for this is 'mistaking the finger pointing at the

moon for the moon itself.' I remember the first strong samadhi

experience I had during the first few weeks of Zen practice.46 Samhadi

should not be confused with 'concentration', which still carries a form

of dualism in that 'someone' is concentrating on 'something else.' The

chatter in my mind had finally died down and all I was left with was the

pure sound of a workman hammering in the house next to the Zendo.

In that moment 'I' no longer existed. I remember how confronting that

was. I was left with this one question: "If all the constructions,

ambitions, desires I have always put forward as being 'who I am' are

taken away and I still exist, then what is it that exists?"

The Buddha Way

To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is be actualized by the myriad things. 47

At the most basic level, a return to being means we are confirmed by

the world, authenticated by our experience of it. The Genjo Koan

means to "Actualize the Fundamental Point". Dogen, in all his writing,

states that there is no division between world and self. We are

46 Samadhi: a non-dualistic state of consciousness in which the consciousness of the experiencing 'subject' becomes one with the experienced object. 47 Dogen, 1985, p 70. 48 activated by the world. Being in the world is a reciprocal relationship, which needs to be understood as a vital condition of our existence,

otherwise we lopsidedly and dangerously believe that we can make the world in our own image.

To carry your self forward to experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening.48

In Religion and Nothingness Nishitani uses current faith in technology as an example of delusive thinking. Having discovered that nature has laws, we have used them to create useful technologies for our benefit.

Humanity has fallen into error, believing that we can control and transcend nature through machinery. Some consequences have been disastrous- this sovereignty seemed to give us license to pillage the natural world. In thinking we can control nature we believe that we stand outside its laws- but of course we don't. Nishitani saw a number of problems issuing from this belief, firstly that we overlook the fundamental law of nature and of Buddhism that everything, including ourselves, changes. It is only if our sense of being is integrated with an appreciation of impermanence that we can take in the larger dimensions of who we are, if this is omitted, not only is nature compartmentalized and mechanized but so is our own existence. Life becomes a set of shorthand; abbreviated responses

48 Dogen, 1985, p 69. 49 isolated from authentication through our sense experiences. In Zen there is an emphasis on a felt relationship with the world. Nishitani placed great significance on ethics, art and philosophy as a way of steering humanity away from a mechanistic view. From my personal standpoint, returning to being is necessary so that I can be in the world not just cognitively but with the totality of who I am in all my activities, including making art.

The Silence of Painting

Spirituality and painting are not foreign to each other. Over the past few decades there have been a number of important exhibitions and publications exploring their relationship.49 Nonetheless to a certain degree painting as a spiritual activity is greeted with some cynicism.

In The Exile's return, Thomas McEvilley attributes this to paintings' complicity with the Modernist teleology towards a utopian realm of pure spirit.

He writes:

49 For example, Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko, New York: Harper and Row, 1975, Maurice Tuchman, The Spiritual in Art Abstract Painting 1890-1985, Los Angeles County Museum, 1986 and Nick Waterlow & Ross Melnick (curators), Spirit+ Place, Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996 (exhibition). 50 Yet here, in this ritual-pictorial moment [the monochrome], the deepest meanings of Western Modernist art are embedded- its highest spiritual aspirations, its dream of a utopian future. Its madness, its folly.50

McEvilley argues that painting became the measure for how far

[Western] humanity had traveled down the road to a Hegelian realm of

'pure spirit'. The monochrome was meant to lead us from the everyday to the transcendent beyond. When the promised utopia failed to materialize, we became disillusioned and disgruntled with painting, as if it were to blame for the failed ambitions of Modernism.

However, the question of a spiritual dimension in painting still exists.

From my Zen perspective the problem with spiritual Monochrome discourse was the implicit or explicit teleological dimension. For a Zen

Buddhist, there is no place to go but here. There is only what is occurring 'now', even past and present are concepts projected from the present but the present is not fixed. The 'now' is always unfolding, voiding- emptying itself. The difference between heaven and hell depends on where we position ourselves in relation to the void- if we see ourselves as separate from Emptiness by seeking permanence of any kind, then the experience of hell is inevitable since whatever it is

50 Thomas McEvilley, The Exile's Return: Toward a Redefinition of Painting for the Post-Modern Era, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p 9. 5 1 we try to 'fix' as permanent will inevitably be lost.

The two artists who remain seminal in the development of my work are Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt. Both are painters of silence and the void. But their positions were almost entirely opposed. Rothko, like his hero Nietzsche, was a dualist who yearned for the void, and for whom the void was both heaven and hell. Reinhardt, on the other hand, was a hard-nosed mystic for whom unity and Oneness were everything.

I have a belief in painting's capacity to return us to being, which ultimately means, however briefly, giving us back the experience of who we are. Painting has the potential for both direct expression and immediacy of experience and there are innumerable traditions both

Eastern and Western, which demonstrate this. For a painter in the Zen tradition, the aim is never to copy or imitate nature, but to give the object something living in its own right. Silence is an intrinsic attribute in Zen aesthetics and the pared down-ness so characteristic of such work can be attributed to silence having such priority. But no matter how still and silent a work is, it is never lifeless- silence conveys dynamism, the emptiness is full of plenitude and forms are pulsatingly present- Sunyata and Tathata together.

52 For me, the best paintings of any culture have an aspect of silence.

When somebody says that a painting has 'moved' them, I think what

has been caught sight of isa moment in their own being, not like a

mirror reflecting anything so fixed as an image but rather that the work

has opened a space whereby one actually experiences self directly.

53 Chapter Z Y ART OF THE CHASM The Work of Mark Rothko

Observing Rothko viewers is almost as instructive as looking at the paintings themselves. They seem to fall into two categories- the indifferent who walk straight past with only a perfunctory glance and the "believers" who stand before his works and surrender to them, prepared [at least in the privacy of their own internal monologue] to leave everyday considerations at the threshold of his canvases and enter Rothko's "unknown adventure in an unknown space".51 Belief, in Rothko's case, is not concerned with conforming to already established religious paths. He had written;

Pictures must be miracles: the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended. He is an outsider. The picture must be for him, as for anyone experiencing it later, a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need. 52

51 Mark Rothko, writing for Possibilities, 1947, quoted in Michael Compton, (et al), Mark Rothko, 1987. 2nd edition New York: Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 1996, p 84. 52 Ibid. 54 Rothko spent many hours brooding in front of his paintings, trying to catch the infinite and variable complexions contained in his work

[figure 2].53

Rothko wanted to be a great religious painter but he lived in an era when he felt there were no clear cultural or spiritual guidelines. He did not have firm religious beliefs, only an ardent desire to create work that transcended death and suffering. His first wife Edith Sachar had noted that he had a "tremendous capacity for emotional despair."54

Rothko suffered and however grandiose his statements sometimes were, he sincerely believed that it was through suffering one's existence was validated. He had said that "Death was the only serious thing; nothing else can be taken seriously".55 He needed to reconcile his terror of personal dissolution with his longing to give into the Void.

For him, redemption and meaning were born in individual struggle to assert self against death. Diane Waldman characterized Rothko's work as "an act of faith" and "expressions of universal truths".56 Be that as

53 "In the last year of Rothko's life we spent many hours in the crepuscular half­ darkness of the studio on East 69th Street looking at the black on grey pictures with Rothko and Rita Reinhardt, to be followed by dinner, either at a French restaurant or a fish restaurant around the corner. Through those long spells of looking, accompanied by long silences, our opinions were solicited with a deceptive humility. Newly evicted from the paintings, Rothko shared the spectator's puzzlement. What are these about? How did they come to be? Why did I make them? What if anything, do they mean?" Barbara Novak, and Brian O'Doherty, 'Rothko's Dark Paintings: Tragedy and Void', in Jeffrey Weiss (editor), Mark Rothko, Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1998, p 268. 54 Edith Sachar, quoted in Mark Rothko papers, Archives of American Artists. 55 James R. Breslin, Mark Rothko: a Biography, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, p 173. 56 Diane Waldman, Mark Rothko, 1903-1970: a Retrospective, New York: Abrams and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 1978, p 69. 55 Figure 2: Hans Namuth, 'Mark Rothko in his Long Island studio, Summer 1964', photograph.

S6 it may, their poignc:~ncy is effected through the powerful vacillations between faith and faithlessness, trembling fear and soaring exultation, tragedy and ecstasy. Brian O'Doherty referred to Rothko as "fidgeting between the spiritual and the secular, the tragic and the transcendental".57 Rothko, the artist and the man, existed in the great divide between self and just about everything else- most particularly the Void and yet one senses amidst this there is a yearning for spiritual unity and wholeness. Rothko's problem was his perceived threat that in the moment of unity with the original Dionysian ground he sought so passionately we are dismembered, unselved- we die. Oneness of being is identified with the annihilation of self.

Rothko was a great admirer of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, which he read as an undergraduate when he was at Yale University. 58 For both Rothko and Nietzsche, the central focus of human existence was the inevitability of suffering and despair, which consequently give rise to questions about the value of human life. Nietzsche's madman pronounced God's death. 59 This decree did not only mean that the

Christian God had died but also the God of metaphysics- the absolute good, the perfect eternal unmovable mover who had been the ultimate

57 Brian O'Doherty, Art in America, January/February 1973, p 15. 58 Rothko studied at Yale between 1921-23. See Breslin, 1993, pp. 47-54. 59 Freidrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, edited & tr. Walter Kaufmann, Penguin books 1954 [copy] ed.1976 p 95. 57 bestower of value and purpose had died. Nietzsche wrote about the

death of God by saying "The ultimate value is deprived of its value."

Ironically, Rothko the Jew had to forsake the image, not because ancient law declared the face of God too sacred to behold but because

God had died and with Him any potent means of expressing the perplexing questions of life and death. After a prolonged apprenticeship with figuration, Rothko had to retire the image,

'pulverize' it because it could no longer be taken seriously as a spiritual agent. Rothko wrote, "It was with the utmost reluctance that I found the figure could not serve my purposes ... "60 Rothko needed to find a new expressive form, which was direct and unmediated. He abolished the overt referent and narrative - what was left to explore was the direct experience of the human drama being enacted and directly received.

Pessimism of the Strong

Nietzsche had been a follower of Schopenhauer but eventually renounced him. He was attracted to Schopenhauer's view that the main constituent of life was suffering. Schopenhauer regarded radical withdrawal only just short of suicide as the best solution. Nietzsche, however, could not accept the inherent dismissal of existence in

Schopenhauer's pessimism, which he regarded as pessimism of the

60 Mark Rothko, lecture to the Pratt Institute, c. 1958, quoted in Compton, 1987, p 86. 58 'weak'. He preferred the pessimism of Classical Greek culture, which affirmed the value of human existence and recommended living as intensely as possible. Nietzsche considered the difference in outcomes from the two types of pessimism- one was negative retreat and the other positive and proactive. Pessimism of the weak was largely formulated in hedonistic terms based on the sensations of pleasure and pain. Schopenhauer's withdrawal was pain avoidance. He saw all action as futile and abdication of will the only goal worth pursuing.

Nietzsche saw the strong pessimist as an individual who might have the same worldview of suffering as his 'weak' counterpart but embraces life and converts suffering and struggle into an arena whereby the individual experiences strength.

Is there pessimism of strength? An intellectual predilection for what is hard, terrible, evil, problematic in existence, arising from well-being, overflowing health, the abundance of existence?61

For Rothko, the heroic ideal- "the exhilarated tragic experience ... [was] the only source book for art."62 Very early in his thinking, he had prioritized the transcendent possibilities of the heroic. As a children's art teacher, he had observed that with regard to scale, it "definitely involves a space emotion. A child may limit space arbitrarily and thus heroify his objects. Or he may infinitize space, dwarfing the

61 Freid rich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p 3. 62 Compton, 1987, p.82. 59 importance of objects, causing them to merge and become part of the space world".63 Rothko eventually found ways to apply these observations to his own work- the familiar rectangles of finely modulated and shimmering colour in his paintings are bound in a similar method to the figures in the children's drawings he observed.

Their symmetric forms are either tightly confined by narrow borders which visually 'heroify' them or they become fields, which recede or radiate luminous space. He may have 'retired' the image but the forms are nonetheless characters in a drama. As always, Rothko was preoccupied with the human condition, the patches of colour in the multiform paintings and the later rectangles were regarded as personifications [figure 3]. He wrote "I think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures as performers. They have been created from the need of a group of actors who are able to move dramatically without embarrassment and execute gestures without shame" .64

The Ascensional Psyche

Given Rothko's emotional outlook of pessimism, Nietzsche's philosophy of redemption through courage and effort would have resonated very deeply. The aesthetic Rothko worked with developed

63 Breslin, 1993, p 134. 64 Mark Rothko, writing for Possibilities, 1947, quoted in Compton, 1987, p 84. 60 Figure 3: Mark Rothko, No. 21 [Untitled], 1947, oil on canvas, 99.7 x 97.8 em. Private Collection.

61 from notions of transcendence, which were informed by the cultural ground he had inherited, and personal experience. He was a Russian

Jew whose adopted country of America had evolved mostly from

Anglo-European origins. The transcendence he desired hinged on a wish to overcome by 'being over there' -a far point on the horizon to battle towards. That point could be God, Heaven, the Absolute or a vision of self engaged in an heroic struggle toward some ideal.

Rothko's view of himself as an outsider was deeply imprinted on his psyche. His individual history was one of alienation, which became a powerful ingredient in his own personal mythology. As a child he suffered double estrangement- firstly, the anti-Semitism in the Russia of his early childhood. He was haunted by stories of Czarist pogroms, especially one he had heard as a young child in which Cossacks took

Jews from their village to a mass grave and slaughtered them. In some of the accounts he gave later in life, Rothko claims to have in fact witnessed such an event. Secondly, as a young Jewish boy, he was subjected to his father's religious ambitions. While his brothers attended Russian public schools, Rothko's father sent his youngest son to Cheder 65 where he was given over to a 'strict, tedious regime, possibly starting as early as the age of three, of reading instruction, prayer, translation of Hebrew texts and rote memorization of Telmudic

65 Religious school 62 law•.66 Rothko once related to Phillip Guston that "after going a

hundred times to the temple, one day at the age of nine he came home

and announced to his mother he would never set foot into a temple

again but he continued to feel "l~ss for his early sense of Jewish

community".67 The sense of alienation deepened when his family

immigrated to the USA in 1913. He "was never able to forgive his

transplantation to a land where he never felt entirely at home."68

Rothko viewed himself as an outsider. Dore Ashton noted that Rothko

was fond of the words transcend, translate and transplant- all derived from the Latin prefix 'trans' meaning to move over boundaries, cross to the other side, go beyond.69 His experience as an outsider

empowered him and fuelled his work but it also caused a profound

sense of alienation.

One of the pictorial distinctions between the humanist cultures of the

West and Far Eastern Taoist or Buddhist cultures is the point of view.

Perspective as it was developed during the Early Renaissance evolved through notions of fixed identity and separateness, highlighting an

understanding of self as single-centred. The viewpoint developed emanates through a single set of eyes. In landscape paintings of T'ang

66 Breslin, 1993, p 18. 67 Breslin, 1993, p 19. 68 John Fischer, 'Portrait of an Artist as an Angry Man', Harper's Magazine, 241 (July 1970), pp 16 -23. 69 Dare Ashton, About Rothko, New York: Da Capo Press, 1996, p.158 63 Dynasty China [618 ~ 907], the viewpoint is multi centred. There is no

one point on the horizon to look through the painting towards, rather there are a number of 'places' for the eye to rest at, meander through.

The legend at the famous raked stone garden at Ryoan-ji Zen Temple

in Kyoto states that only an 'Enlightened Eye' can see the garden in its entirety. The garden runs adjacent to a narrow verandah and it is therefore physically impossible to step back far enough to gain a view of the whole garden [figure 4]. The 'Enlightened Eye' understands itself as centred everywhere and connected to everything -there is no one viewpoint but many.

Transcendence works as a vertical axis. The heroic aspires to the elevated and ascensional but with little consideration for interdependence and reciprocity. Western spirituality mostly follows the path of transcendence in contrast to a Taoist or Buddhist spirituality that values immanence and the horizontality of interconnectedness. In my view, it is impossible for single point perspective to develop in a culture, which privileges a multi-centred self in its philosophy. The type of perspectival mastery of artists such as Mantegna and Raphael do not have any correspondences in Far

Eastern painting. Renaissance Humanism worked at maintaining a picture of a unitary self and the single point perspective that developed

64 affirmed this view of self. A great example of this is Raphael's School

of Athens [figure 5].

Each image within the code of perspectival art thus offers the spectator the possibility of objectifying himself, the means of perceiving himself, from the outside, as a unitary seeing subject, since each imagEr·makes a deictic declaration: this is how I see [or would see] some real or imagined scene from this particular spot at this particular instant in timeJO

One of the central and underlying considerations in this thesis is how

ideas of self and what that self is in relation to the void are an important organizing principle in the spatial aesthetics of painting.

Rothko, although far removed from High Renaissance pictorial dynamics, still relied to a degree on some of their mechanisms.

Looking at a Rothko, the viewer undergoes contradictory experiences.

In Rothko's paintings, the point of reference is the horizon. He may have eschewed any mention of landscape with regard to his work but what gives it away is the positioning of the viewer. In most of Rothko's mature work, there is at least one horizontal bar, which serves to enhance spatiality. The bar describes both the actual surface of the canvas as well as delineating the field 'in front of' and 'beyond' the painting. The effectivity of the spatial orientation depends on a sense of contained subjectivity- a single viewpoint that looks out. A singular and cohesive self navigates through the spaces towards something infinite, beyond the horizon. However this unitary self collapses as the

70 Brian Rotman, Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero, Hound mills: MacMillan, 1987, p 19. 65 Figure 4: [Photographer unknown], 'Rock Garden, Ryoan-ji Zen Temple, Kyoto, Japan', 1971. · Figure 5: Raphael Urbinas, School of Athens, 1509-1510, fresco, 770 em (base dimensions). Vatican Collection.

67 viewer falls into the physicality and spatiality of the picture. Within the

same painting, one can experience a series of states that oscillate

between extreme self-awareness and dissolution. This self-awareness

can cognitively identify the strong emotional content in the "unknown

spaces", and remarkably in the dissolution, one experiences

emotionally the actuality of absorption into Rothko's sense of the Void.

This is where Rothko is most revolutionary in his approach to space

[figure 6].

Douglas MacAgy wrote one of the first critical essays on Rothko. He differentiated between a [Renaissance] space where "things may exist separately without necessity of interrelationship and the areas between things are defined as absences of contact' and a [Rothko] space where "objects and their environment seem to give way to each other so that dramatic emphasis cannot be fixed in permanent unity.

Identities are elusive and roles enter a shifting relationship."71 The result is the series of miraculous, unexpected revelations. Being present to the best of Rothko's work heightens one's sense of the internal motion and flux of beingness.

Rothko painted canvases larger than human size. He said

I paint very large paintings ... precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself

71 Douglas MacAgy, 'Mark Rothko' Magazine of Art, 42 (January 1949), pp 20-21. 68 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. outside your experience ... However you paint the larger picture, you are

in it. It isn't something you commandJ2 In one sense, the size of his

paintings demands surrender to the authority of scale in the same way that the Void requires surrender in order to appreciate its magnitude with any intimacy. He also remarked "a painter commits himself by the nature of the space he uses"J3

Heidegger, according to Dare Ashton74, conceived that the ultimate function of the visual artist is exploring the question of what space is.

For Heidegger, profane spaces are the privation of sacred spaces.

Ashton continues by referring to Malreaux who talked of paintings not as religious but the opposite of profane. Rothko's 'cause' was the presentation of such space. Conventionally, the sacred is usually split off from the baser reality of everyday self. The sacred serves to elevate and transport us to realms where we actually forget the mundane self. The profane spaces, polluted by the psychological and emotional, are left behind. When Rothko stated that he wanted to present the reality of this world, it was our emotional world he upheld.

What is realized in his paintings is the emotional gravitas of being human. He once suggested to a reporter: "If people want sacred

72 Mark Rothko, writing for Interiors symposium, 1951, quoted in Compton, 1987, p 85. 73 Anonymous, 'Art, Stand up close .. .', Newsweek, 23 January 1961, p 60. 74 Ashton, Dare, About Rothko, New York: Da Capo Press, 1996, p191 70 experiences, they will find them here, if they want profane

experiences, they'll find those too" _75

Signifying Nothing76

Rothko's bearing on the void was complex, as spatial resolutions in his

paintings indicate. The complexity owes something to the

accumulations of cultural interpretations he inherited which he both

repudiated and embraced. Dominant Western attitudes to the void can

be described as avoidance and separation developing from a dualism

that interprets the universe as split from the very beginning. For

instance, the universe visualized through Platonic Idealism

differentiates between the relative World of Appearances - always in

motion and fragmentary, seemingly substantial but in actuality illusory

____and1he_etemaLworJd_of_the_Abso I• Jte_tbatis_understood_as_motion less

and changeless. Not all Western philosophy, of course, can be

characterized as dualistic. In the long history of Western thought are

some exceedingly important examples of approaches to non-duality-

Heraclitus, Benedict Spinoza, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead

and Martin Heidegger to name only a handful. Types of Christian

75 Anonymous, 'Art, Stand up close .. .', Newsweek, 23 January 1961, p 60. 76 Rotman's Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero, 1987, takes its main title from Shakespeare's "Scottish Play": "Life ... is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing". William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, Scene V. Ad Reinhardt, while contemplating on the cultural symbolism of black, also cited this play, Ad Reinhardt, 'Black, Symbol', cited in Barbara Rose (editor). Art-As-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, New York: Viking Press, 1975, p 96. 7 1 mysticism are based on experiences of union with the Divine- Meister

Eckhart, St. Theresa of Avila, Jakob Boheme and William Blake come to mind as representatives of such spiritual non-duality. However, at some point in the dim reaches of ancient history, Western philosophy took the path of duality and we still live in that residue. The 'better' world is always elsewhere and usually unreachable.

One of the subtle but significant outcomes of this split is the distrust generated of our experiences. Since our senses are transitory, we regard their impermanence as an attribute of their unreality­ especially, if in contrast, a counterworld is constructed as eternal, absolute, fixed and therefore motionless. That split creates a diversion; looking 'over there' our own voidness can be dismissed as illusion. Intellectually, the void gets placed outside who we are and objectified. The seamless and intellectually 'unknowable' processes of the Void lose their legitimate position in our lives. The tendency towards objectification and conceptualization gives rise to binaries.

Through dualistic opposition, the Void becomes reified. Fullness opposes Emptiness; being becomes the opposite of non-being. II that which is limitless, without end, infinite, against which is nothing, has no being, the void.77 Questions of existence also become confined by binary conceptualizations. Form is invested with fixed

77 Rotman, 1987, p 62. 72 identity in order to achieve a semblance of authority. Language is the instrument of objective thinking and our experience becomes mediated through it. Binary objectifications become the reality with the result that actual experience is buried. Our own 'nothingness' is repressed and becomes a source of anxiety. The un-nameable can't be named, not because of its ineffability and grounded ness in the experience of being, but because intellectual construction avoids it.

Brian Rotman in Signifying Nothing argues that the Greek reaction to the void is one of psychological denial characterized by unease, fear and horror. He wrote:

For Aristotle, engaged in classifying, ordering, and analyzing the world into its irreducible and final categories, objects, causes and attributes the prospect of an unclassifiable emptiness ... must have presented itself as a dangerous sickness, a God-denying madness that left him with an ineradicable horror vacui.78

The horror of the void became personalized in early Christianity. St.

Augustine, via Zeno and Paramenides formulated the void in this way:

God loves everything and abhors nothing. God, in creating the

Universe, has nullified nothingness. Consequently, being in the Void is to suffer desolation in the ultimate privation of God. Hell is the Void- it is absence and separation from God. Heaven is the fullness of God's presence, being filled with the grace of God. Therefore, the Void is a

78 Rotman, 1987, p 63. 73 thing of horror, destruction, chaos and sin and to be avoided at all costs.

In later centuries, the Romantics addressed the void through various theories of the sublime. In 1757, Edmund Burke published

Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime and

Beautiful. He wrote:

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in any manner analogous to Terror, is the source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotions, which the mind is capable of feelingJ9

And more recently, the Postmodern theorist Jean-Francais Lyotard claims:

Beauty gives positive pleasure but there is another kind of pleasure that is bound to a passion far stronger than satisfaction, and that is suffering and impending death. In suffering the body affects the soul, but the soul can affect the body just as though it were experiencing some externally induced pain, and it can do this solely by means of representations that are consciously linked to painful situations. This entirely spiritual passion, for Burke, is synonymous with terror. Terrors are linked with privations: privation of light; terror of darkness; privation of others; terror of solitude; privation of language; terror of silence; privation of objects; terror of emptiness; privation of life; terror of death.80

79 Andrew Wilton, Turner and the Sublime, 1980, London: British Museum, pp 28-29. 80 Jean-Francais Lyotard, 'The Sublime and the Avant-garde', Artforum (April1984). 74 Rothko's vision was shaped by this intense and dark view of the void with its terrors and privations.B1 One can only speculate the degree to which his overall life experiences of alienation reinforced this standpoint of the void. Both Nietzsche and Rothko privileged the Void

by holding it centre stage in their concerns. Nietzsche recognized its significance and its reality and, to my mind, Rothko was in love with the Void and gravitated to it intuitively but also felt pulled in the opposing direction. He sensed its sublime and formless beauty but feared surrendering to it meant death, not only his physical body, but as importantly, his will. It is his 'will' that enables him in the world, losing it not just kills him- It mutilates and annihilates him. For both

Nietzsche and Rothko, 'will' defines who they are.

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche describes Hamlet's problem not as

"an excess of imagination" or "too much reflection" but that he was confronted with "the truth of existence undiluted and undisguised. "

Nietzsche recognized the facticity of the void and the horror of it.

Understanding kills action; action depends on a veil of illusion- that is what Hamlet teaches us, not the stock interpretation of Hamlet as a John-a-dreams who, from too much reflection, from an excess of possibilities, so to speak, fails to act. Not reflection, not that! _True understanding, insight into the terrible truth, outweighs every motive for action, for Hamlet and Dionysiac man alike.B2

81 For more on Rothko's relationship to the sublime, see Robert Rosenblum's The Abstract Sublime, 1961 and Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko, New York: Harper and Row, 1975. 82 Freid rich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p XIX. 75 The opposing tendencies which Rothko struggled with were portrayed by Nietzsche as Apolline and Dionysiac. Apollo, the Sun God, was also god of form, individuation, revelation and illusion. Dionysus, on the other hand, embodied primal reality without individual or individuated parts- he was the god of flux and chaos. For Nietzsche, the Dionysian view disclosed the truth about human reality- that at the heart of existence was tumultuous chaos. His awful truth was that our entire reality is lived in precarious relationship to meaninglessness. The

Apollonian view offered the illusion of form, enabling the individual to grasp the world and therefore function. The Void still existed but its presence was made more bearable. Rothko attempted to compose an essay of gratitude to Nietzsche:

I found in this fable, the poetic reinforcement for what I inevitably knew was my inevitable course: that the poignancy of art in my life lay in its Dionysian content, and that the nobility, the largeness and exultation are hollow pillars, not to be trusted, unless they have their own core, unless they are filled to the bulging, by the wild.83

Like Nietzsche, Rothko welcomed Apollinian glory but only insofar as it provided the vehicle that could negotiate the Dionysian flux. It was the dialectic between the Apollinian and Dionysian which Rothko used to create his work.

83 Breslin, 1993, p 357. 76 For Nietzsche, music alone allowed us to look on the void and even to delight in the sense of annihilation as we are absorbed by it. Each instance of such annihilation is the foundation of Dionysiac Art, which expresses the omnipotent will behind individuation. Nietzsche rejected the Platonic view that there is a static and unchanging world of higher reality. Creation and destruction are the central dynamics inherent to existence and Nietzsche affirmed this in his preparedness to relive every second of life in Eternal Recurrence. Rothko echoed this sentiment in declaring that he is not interested in portraying any other world but this one- "I adhere to the material reality of the world and substance of things" .84

Nietzsche claims:

Tragedy absorbs the highest musical ecstasies .... Between the universality of its music and the Dionysian receptivity of the listener, tragedy interposes a sublime symbol, myth, creating the illusion that music is merely a supreme means of representation designed to bring to life the visual world of myth. Relying on this noble deception, it can now move its limbs in a dithyrambic dance, and yield heedlessly to an orgiastically feeling of freedom in which, as music, without that deception, it could not dare indulge. The myth shields us from the music, just as it gives the music its supreme freedom. In return music bestows upon the tragic myth a metaphysical significance of urgency and conviction that word and image, without that external assistance, could never hope to attain.85

84 Mark Rothko, 'Personal statement', David Porter Gallery, 1945, quoted in Compton, 1987, p 82. 85 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p 100. 77 Rothko's stated that "I became a painter because I wanted to raise

painting to the level of poignancy of music and poetry"- an ambition

very probably inspired by The Birth of Tragedy. James Breslin noted that Nietzsche regarded music as the "primordial language of feeling ... [which] resonated in Rothko at levels so deep that he was

unable to get some of those into his painting until the 1950s."86

For Nietzsche, music conveyed experiences of elemental power and ecstasy giving us closer contact with reality. A Dionysiac artist is one who is thoroughly united with the "Primal Oness", even in its painful contradiction and reproduces it as music.

That reflection of primal pain in music, free of images and concepts, redeemed by illusion .... The artist has already abandoned his subjectivity in the Dionysiac process: the image now reveals to him his unity with the heart of the world is a dream scene symbolizing the primal contradiction and primal suffering, as well as the primal delight in illusion.87

Rothko wanted his painting to attain the immediacy that Nietzsche said could only be found in music. He asserted this in his famous statement:

I'm not an abstractionist.. .. I'm interested in expressing basic human emotions- tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on ... People who weep

86 Breslin, 1982, p.176 87 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p 29. 78 before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.88

He was one of the greatest abstractionists of the Twentieth century and yet by his own admission that "it was with the utmost reluctance" that he gave away figuration. He spoke often of his work as an "enterprise", meaning its significance exceeded any formal problem solving or even any sense of self-revelation. Rothko saw himself as a contemporary visionary, who on the authority of some inner voice penetrated and divulged the hard truths about the human condition. The tremendous power of his work is generated by the pull of oppositions and ultimately how they overlap; extinguish opposition by becoming momentarily unified.

In 1958, Rothko gave a talk at the Pratt Institute. He said:

I want to mention a marvelous book, Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling I The Sickness Unto Death which deals with the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. Abraham's act was absolutely unique. There are other examples of sacrifice [which seem related]: Brutus, who as a ruler put to death his two sons[because they had broken the law]. Brutus's tragic decision was understandable; the choice between two universals: the State or the Family]. But what Abraham was prepared to do [on God's command, audible only to himself] was beyond understanding. There was no universal that condoned such an act. This is like the role of the artist.89

88 Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists, New York: The Devon-Adair Co., 1957, p93. 89 ed. Marc Glimcher Mark Rothko: into an Unknown World, Clarkson N. Potter, New York, 1991 p 90

79 Rothko was very fond of myth in the way it illuminated human dilemmas. In this story, the central issue is how much of one's inner vision, inner compulsions, religious experience and religious questing can be safely divulged in a world where skepticism rules- where images and symbols have lost their power to grip imagination and where non-belief is the community norm. Rothko himself was an example of his times- his dilemma was the expression of spiritual yeaning when this yearning is largely exiled from one's own culture, and in any case, if one had spiritual revelation, who would believe?

In his early years as a painter, Rothko struggled with mythological and

Surrealist themes that he later abandoned, finding that the reality of

"gods and monsters as intermediaries" were no longer convincing.

The power of representational imagery to enact our dramas had lost its potency. Rothko was convinced he had to "pulverize' the image for the sake of greater clarity. He nonetheless fretted that the lack of figuration would fail to carry purpose. With Adolf Gottlieb, Rothko wrote a rebuttal to criticism that their work was obscure- "There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject matter is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless".90 Admirers of his work sense the content or

90 Adolf Gottlieb and Mark Rothko (with Barnett Newman), letter to the New York Times, 1943, quoted in Compton, 1987, p 78. 80 meaning without necessarily being able to pinpoint the exact subject matter. In a conventional sense, Rothko does not use landscape, portrait and narrative- all of which have meaning arising from representations or mediations. Mediations create distance and perpetually defer the moment of experienced connection. In this instance, what is put at a remove is the unpalatable truth of death.

Greeks had the gods of Olympus to mediate these dramas; Nietzsche claimed that Dionysian truth was experienced through music. Rothko wanted painting also to become a vehicle for truth. It was Rothko's ambition (as with so many other abstract painters) to find a method where communication between painting and viewer could be direct and unmediated.91 Rothko talks of the 'subject matter' of his work but in essence to speak of it as such is too limiting. The power of Rothko's work is the way it slips out of any sedentary meaning. The potentiality and plurality of meaning enacted is elusive and indeterminate but nonetheless palpable.

The Journey Towards Clarity

The progression of a painter's work, as it travels in time, from point to point, will be toward clarity: toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer. As examples of such obstacles, I give [among others] memory, history or geometry, which are swamps of generalization from which one might pull out parodies of ideas [which are ghosts] but

91 For instance Wassily Kandinsky theorized his work through Theosophical principles and in Jackson Pollock, Jungian symbology is used. 8 1 never an idea in itself. To achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood.92

In 1949, when this statement was written, Rothko must have only

recently started to explore the simplified rectangular format for which

he is most known. In the preceding two decades Rothko struggled to find the appropriate form to contain his "tragic idea". Work of the early

1930's employed an awkward mixture of realism of everyday subject

matter suffused with understated melancholy. The "Subway"

paintings have an aura of psychological entombment and the people

portrayed are stark in their alienation. In retrospect, his concerns are

obvious from the beginning. [figure 7]. Throughout his life, figuration was always central- his theme was ever the 'human drama' even in abstraction, the figure was necessarily implied. Irving Sandler suggests that in Rothko's later works, the theatrical aspect gets pared down to effectively cast the viewer as the missing performer93, a theme Peter Schjeldahl enlarged upon by declaring that the viewer

becomes the banished figure in abstraction.94 The kind of emotional

involvement Rothko requires can't be generated without a strong sense of identification from the viewer, his paintings need the

"companionship".

92 Mark Rothko, writing for Tiger's Eye, 1949, quoted in Compton, 1987, p 85. 93 Irving Sandier, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism, New York, Harper and Row, 1970, p183 94 Cited by Anna Chave, Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction, Yale University, 1989, p119 82 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.

94 Cited by Anna Chave, Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction, Yale University, 1989, p119 In the early 1940s, Rothko began to play with possibilities that

Surrealism presented. In part, Rothko's preoccupation with death may have stemmed from the unprecedented destruction that resulted from

World War II that must have caused unbearable anguish. Dore Ashton observed that it "was not, as too many assumed, only an aesthetic despair, but a despair born of events, among which one could include aesthetic events".95 In this situation, Rothko and his contemporaries, like Adolf Gottlieb and Barnet Newman, felt even more profoundly the limitations of representational art, which gave a falsely stable and coherent image of the world. Surrealism offered solace as an effective and innovative means for articulating their preoccupations. During this time, Rothko was driven to find a method to combine his mythological, emotional and historical concerns. Most of his work at this point alluded to Greek myth. In a radio interview with Gottleib in

1943, he said

If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas. They are symbols of man's primitive fears and motivations, no matter in which land or what time .... modern psychology finds them persisting still in our dreams, our vernacular, and our art, for all the changes in the outward conditions of life.96

95 Ashton, 1996, p 73. 96 Adolf Gottleib and Mark Rothko, notes for a radio broadcast, 1943, quoted in Compton, 1987, p 80. 84 Figure 8: Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1941- 1942, oil and graphite on linen, 61 x 81 em. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

RS The Surrealist work was linear and often striated- evoking not only

mythic themes but also a sense of archaeology and the unconscious

[figure 8]. His experimentation achieved uneven results and mixed

critical reception. Diane Waldman extolled the calligraphy of this

period as brilliant" but Peter Schjeldahl wrote that "Rothko at this time

is full of ideas about the use of line: he just can't seem to make the line

do anything".97 Yet Schjeldahl also writes that Rothko was

"incapable of painting other than beautifully".98 In my view, Rothko

was no draughtsman- the energy in his line is clumsy, self-conscious

and lacking assurance but perhaps the most important observation is

that the inherent qualities of drawing are antithetical to his enterprise.

Line delineates and describes.99 Description was not what drove

Rothko- it was dissolution. In his journey towards greater clarity,

Rothko ground the coarser, more literal and obvious outer complexion

of his 'subject matter' to distil the rich essences that were eventually

left for him to work with. His multiform paintings marked the transition in the way his paintings conveyed meaning. The Surrealist works used familiar codes combining mythic reference and narrative to convey meaning much like a sentence strings together words to make a statement. These paintings are schematic with a limited range of

97 Waldman, 1978, p 78 and Peter Schjeldahl, 'Rothko and Belief', Art in America (March/April1979), p 81. 98 Schjeldahl, 1979, p 81. 99 There are of course there are exceptions, notably Agnes Martin and Jackson Pollack whose line, in very different ways, is no longer a line but is transformed into a field. 86 possible meaning. His later and more successful work did not rely on codes but directly involved the viewer in an activity which giving rise to endless inflections of meanings -"A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer" .100 Rothko was determined to make painting not 'about' experience but be experience in itself.

In multiform paintings, Rothko is beginning to develop his language of immediacy. The colours are more elemental, as are the shapes which have greater fluidity giving the impression that they on the verge of morphing into each other [figure 9]. He became enamored with the notion of 'things' as dramatis personae enacting their own dynamism on his canvases.

In 1947, he wrote:

On shapes: They are unique elements in a unique situation, They are organisms with volition and a passion for self-assertion They move with internal freedom, and without need to conform with or violate what is probable in the familiar world. They have no direct association with any particular visible experience, but in them one recognizes the principle and passion of organisms.101

100 Mark Rothko, writing for Tiger's Eye, 1947, quoted in Compton, 1987, p 83. 87 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. The obstacles of history and memory that he would later write about were eliminated and only the 'organisms' themselves were left to

interact in the field Rothko provided on his canvas. However, a further

stage was required for his work and that was the direct implication of the viewer in his drama. The multiforms still had a dimension of

distance- the viewer is still onlooker, witnessing an unfolding tableau

but not drawn into personal involvement.

Elaine de Kooning wrote that Rothko's sudden departure from

Surrealist drawing was a sudden and enlightening experience.

The cleavage from the present and the past for certain artists is as drastic for Saul of Tarsus outside the walls of Damascus when he saw a 'great light' and heard a question .. .' Quo vadis?' This was what happened to Rothko .... He was no longer Saul, he's Paul and he knows where he is going. He didn't make a decision; he had a revelation; he's a convert.102

In the paintings from 1949 onwards the viewer is no longer just a

witness but partakes in the tragedy and ecstasy. Rothko's pictorial

method becomes increasingly more reduced serving to intensify the

clarity and directness of his work. Colour, muddy in the earlier

paintings, becomes his greatest medium. Rothko insisted that he

wasn't a colourist- that term implied for him something that was

superficial and decorative. However, colour conveys more at a single

102 Anna C. Chave, Mark Rothko, Subjects in Abstraction, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989, p 31. 89 glance than any other device available to a painter. Colour projects

mood and symbolic association in a way that is prior to language. Its

richness comes from the wellspring of our existence within the world-

it triggers an infinite variety of associative and secret memory. The

golden yellows that Rothko uses aren't merely colours but active

reminders of streaming sunlight, incandescence, life or whatever and

secret because even if we are not conscious of these associations we

intuit them directly before a single thought has intervened. Whether

Rothko's palette was joyous or sombre, he knew how to work his

colours for optimum emotional effect.

Rothko's Silence We favor the simple expression of the complex thought.103

How is it that Rothko remains for me the painter of painters? I must admit that over the thirty years since I saw my first Rothko, there have

been periods of ambivalence, even periods of downright rejection.

When I was at the initial stage of this thesis, I wanted to compare

Rothko's abstraction with Ad Reinhardt's. In my mind, Rothko would come out the lesser artist but as things progressed, my attitude to his work clearly became more complex. Between Rothko and Reinhardt, there is no lesser or greater- they have both been equally and differently seminal. I see now that my periodic bouts of ambivalence

103 Adolf Gottleib and Mark Rothko (with Barnett Newman), letter to the New York Times, 1943, quoted in Compton, 1987, p 77. 90 and rejection reflected more about my pattern of growth as an artist than anything concerning Rothko. I don't recall the precise moment of first seeing his work in the flesh but nonetheless it was ephiphanous because thereafter I knew what painting was or at least what it was for me. I might add that I had a similar experience with Reinhardt, but discussion of that comes in the next chapter.

During that first encounter with Rothko, something serious was imprinted- that silence existed in painting and that meaning, rather than being diminished, comes into greater fullness in that silence.

Rothko said: "There are artists who want to tell all, but I feel it more shrewd to tell little" .104 Rothko's "instruments", as put forward by

Anna Chave, were Separation and Division, Measure and Darkness and

Light.105 In Separation and Division, Chave was referring to the manner in which the forms in Rothko's work never interpenetrate but remain discrete, thereby carrying a poignant sense of isolation.

Measure meant the distinctions between colour and form, as well as their visual weight, that give rise to the emotional, psychological, aesthetic and symbolic associations. Rothko had once remarked when asked about the colour in his work "No not color, but measure" .106

104 Mark Rothko, lecture to the Pratt Institute, c. 1958, quoted in Compton, 1987, p 87. 105 Chave, 1989, pp 172-184. 106 Chave, 1989, p 177. 9 1 Darkness and Light aptly referred to the Apollinian and Dionysian dualisms and oppositions at play. Rothko's instruments were fundamental, not much to them really. This may be why some are so eager to dismiss his work as 'nice colour' but not much more or why during his lifetime, his critics were disappointed with the lack of change in his work and why, for Rothko, the simple bisected canvas format he eventually settled on was his "heaven and hell".

If, as an artist, silence has priority then there are certain basic things one needs to take account of. Forms and methods have to be simplified to eliminate any possible cause for distraction. The elements themselves must convey the meaning and be genuinely dynamic. The danger is if the reduction is done unintelligently and unresponsively, the result is just boring. Rothko eliminated the figurative, initially because it was an impediment as it no longer carried transcendental connotations but I think ultimately because the direct experience he desired from his work had a greater chance for expression if there was no clutter of overt references to be distracted by. In Rothko's reduced format, nuance is the catalyst for the introspective dialogues between viewer and painting. His forms are so clarified that they become non-static essences of colour, shape, texture, interiority, exteriority, infinity, relativity, contraction, expansion, heavy opacity, vaporous lightness and so on which create

92 for the viewer the intimations of "tragedy, ecstasy, doom". In the transaction between viewer and painting, Rothko's vision becomes personalized and transforms into the viewer's own. The "simple expression of a complex thought" is conveyed only because there is silence. Revelation is the only word that adequately describes the process of viewing.

Rothko's Suffering

As part of my research for this thesis I traveled to Paris in 1999 especially to see the Rothko retrospective mounted by the National

Gallery of Washington. Most of my experience of his work had been limited to either reproductions or, at the most, seeing one or two pieces in various museums. Rothko often referred to his paintings as

'moods'. Seeing an extensive collection of his paintings together is probably the only way to understand his work in this way. One begins to appreciate the reasons he refused to be in group exhibitions during the latter part of his career. As the individual components in each of his paintings work together in either contrast or harmony to produce the work, each of the paintings work together to produce an infinitely intricate and interrelated set of complexions that had been orchestrated over a lifetime. I began this chapter with reference to

Rothko's [and Nietzsche's] view that the heart of existence is suffering, but rather than be defeated by this, it was used as a way to validate

93 iife. What is compelling for me is Rothko's journey and that was what was represented in his retrospective and at this point I need to declare that the following is completely speculative- it is what is reflected back at me about my own attitudes which are folded into the considerations in my own work. My gravitation to Rothko's work is related to his suffering. Maybe the "universal truth" Diane Waldman had acclaimed his work as is this truth that suffering is central to the human condition and this is what genuinely moves people in his work. The first

Buddhist truth is that everyone suffers. There is no such thing as petty suffering and it arises in innumerable ways. We suffer because we lack and therefore feel hollow, inadequate, and incomplete; we suffer because there is loss; we suffer if we hurt others and in turn if we feel violated by others; we suffer when someone we care for is hurt. We can also suffer 'dispassionately', because we 'bear with' the rest of the world in acknowledgment that we're all in it together. Rothko suffered

because he felt alienated but more than that he had a great personal

investment in that alienation. Being the perpetual 'outsider' was what

he identified with most strongly and eventually it became his prison.

Seeing Rothko's oeuvre in the containment of a retrospective, it is hard

not to interpret his life through his paintings and to conclude that the journey he undertook in his lifetime was the embodiment of the tragic

ideal. From the beginning, alienation and division were the core

94 content of his work. In the paintings of the late 1930s, feelings of entombment and isolation are apparent in the dark underground spaces of the subway series and his self-portrait. From 1940 -1946 he worked with Greek mythology and Surrealism. Believing archaic myths to be symbols that expressed the primitive fears and motivations of humankind, he wanted to "redescribe their implications through our own experience".107 The tiering of pictorial space, begun in his earlier work, becomes more visible as a structural element. In his later work the pictorial device of sectionalizing his canvases becomes his standard format until the end of his life. Eventually exhausting the available meaning in his use of symbolic figuration,

Rothko launched into full abstraction. The multiforms, 1947- 1949, are not large paintings and in hindsight they register more as studies for the work to come. These experiments, although extremely engaging, appear as vignettes that tantalize but do not offer the emotional or psychological scope of his later works. However, there is a more direct relationship between the forms in these paintings that the use of images from antiquity were not sympathetic to. For the decade after

1949, he entered 'his glorious Apollinian phase.' Most of the works from this period have a joyous, exuberant quality [figure 10]. The colours range is extensive and saturated- glowing reds, pinks,

107 Adolf Gottleib and Mark Rothko, notes for a radio broadcast, 1943, quoted in Compton, 1987, p 80. 95 mauves, and oranges, offset against more introspective greens, blues and maroons. The late 1950s signaled a more singular dedication to darker colours [figure 11].

As Rothko's work progressed, his acute metaphysical anguish escalated. In the last few years, most of his paintings became darker, bleaker and almost opaque [figure 12]. Curiously, the last few paintings, created in the months before his suicide in 1970, lighten; become softer and more forgiving in their binary format.

Writing about Rothko is very daunting- so much about his life and work has already been trawled over. I can only give my perspective as it pertains to my own 'enterprise'. To me, Rothko was a great sufferer whose life-was lived in the shadow of the void. In one sense he had the courage to pursue and be faithful to his vision, in another sense, the vision held him in its thrall and he was imprisoned by it.

96 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.

97 Figure 11: Mark Rothko, No.10, 1958, oil on canvas, 239.4 x 175.9 em. Private Collection. Figure 12: Mark Rothko, No.2 [Black on Purple], 1964, mixed media on canvas, 266.7 x 203.2 em. Private Collection.

qq He felt himself an exile and invested much power in that. He searched

passionately for a format that could express as clearly and directly as

possible his "tragic idea" and he succeeded brilliantly. Maybe the

format was too successful. In the light of his entire life's work, there

were the occasional critics [with whom I do not agree] who thought he

was 'stuck' and that his work was formulaic. Robert Hughes wrote that

Rothko, far from being Yahweh's official stenographer... was a painter, a maker of visual fictions- better than most, but still prone to repetition and still able to fall victim to his own formulas and reflexive cliches.108

Rothko, himself, voiced concerns about a desire to change his work. In

my view, he couldn't change because the pictorial resolutions were a

perfect fit according to the philosophy he lived his life by. The only

way for change to occur was if all of the beliefs so carefully nurtured

-over 'fTifetimewere swept away by some cataclysmic experience.

Like all great tragic heroes, [and I might add, like the rest of us lesser

beings] Rothko was flawed. In his alienation, it was his will which

directed his survival. His will asserted itself over and against the

World and the Void. His profound sense of separation was invested

with value and the privations he suffered as an individual were the

arena in which he could prove endurance and strength- he was a

108 Robert Hughes, 'Blue Chip sublime', The New York Review of Books, (December 111978), pp 8-16. 100 "pessimist of the strong". But such a powerful investment in ego-will has its price. You can't surrender except to 'fatal destiny' because confrontation lies at the heart of the tragic vision. Walking through

Rothko's exhibition, my experience was a sense of Rothko's confrontation with the Void.109 From the multiforms onwards Rothko employs the 'portal' effect induced by the narrow perimeter of colour around the edges of the canvas and the rectangular forms. At first the confrontation is exhilarated but later it pulsates with sombre brooding.

In the Seagram Murals, particularly, the portals have in their nature a suggestion of Greek colonnades- an entry, by way of a purifying ring of fire, into a sacred place [figures 13 & 14). In other paintings the portals suggest entry into passages of darkness or incandescent light.

The portal factor is evident in all his work until 1969 when it drops away from the frame altogether. The canvas isstillbrsected;--btack on top of grey. The effect is that the viewer has entered Rothko's Void realm. Novak and O'Doherty propose that Barnet Newman's comment of "the hard black chaos which is death, and the grayer, softer chaos that is tragedy" comes closest to the interpretive mark [figure 15).110

109 In the sequence of reproductions of Rothko's work I have tried to present something of the effect of walking through an exhibition. 110 Barbara Novak and Brian O'Doherty, 'Rothko's Dark Paintings: Tragedy and Void', in Jeffrey Weiss (editor), Mark Rothko, Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1998, p 276. 101 Figure 13: Mark Rothko, Untitled [Seagram Mural], 1958, mixed media on canvas, 266.1 x 252.4 em. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

102 Figure 13: Mark Rothko, Untitled [Seagram Mural], 1958, mixed media on canvas, 266.1 x 252.4 em. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

102 Figure 14: Mark Rothko, Untitled [Seagram Mural], 1959, mixed media on canvas, 265.4 x 288.3 em. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

103 Figure 15: Mark Rothko, Untitled [Black on Gray], 1969-1970, acrylic on canvas, 203.8 x 175.6 em. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY.

104 My guess is that in the paintings of the 1950s he reveled in Apollonian

illusion. He had discovered a method of making a unitary image from the two opposing forces that dominated his existence. Creeping towards the end of his life, the power of Apollinian form could not

endure the closer he came to the reality of death. The penultimate

paintings are intriguing. They are a bleak and desolate vision and yet there is something exact about them. In Zen circles, there is an

apocryphal story about a woman who had a profound insight during a

retreat. In her deep meditation, she perceived that "the floor exactly

meets the wall". The rational, everyday mind would laugh this off as a self-evident and absurd observation. To a mind seasoned with some

Zen experience, the laughter is of delight. The insight reveals the true

nature of things- in the interconnectedness of the universe; in this

moment there is not one thing that is not a perfect fit. When the black

meets the grey in these works, their edges meet perfectly. Until this

point, the rectangles in Rothko's work might live in magnetic fields of attraction and repulsion but they never quite meet. Something else

unlikely sprang to mind when I saw these paintings- Peggy Lee's voice singing "Is that all there is my friend, then let's keep dancing .... " In this entirely personal speculation, my impression is that Rothko broke through his self-encapsulating 'will' and discovered that the void is all there is, It seems to me that there are two different ways to go when you discover that "that's all there is". The first, and I suspect this is

105 Rothko's slant, is cast with despair- there is nothing grand at all here, just meaninglessness. In a previous era, God would have bestowed value to existence, for Rothko it was the "tragic idea". For most of his life, it would be his touchstone, but when that failed to sustain him through his depression and serious illness, meaning deserted him.

The second interpretation admits that "this is all there is" but what a

"this", this is. In this view, everything has inherent value because of its relationship with the whole.

There is only a hair's breadth between liberation and damnation.

Rothko's 'will' saved him- it gave him integrity and the drive to power onwards through the adversities of individual alienation and unforgiving foreignness. My own immigrant background empathizes very strongly with that drive but there is something missing in that willfulness which eventually turns things to ashes. Ignorance is one of the cardinal Buddhist defilements. According to Buddhism, suffering occurs because we live ignorantly, perceiving life only from the relativist standpoint of beings- the single-centred view. Rothko's suffering increased tragically because there was little room in his philosophy for the bigger view of interconditionality and interdependence.

106 Rothko wanted to paint portraits of this world that were psychological -

moods running the entire gamut of human emotional experience.

There is nothing mysterious about Zen; its essence is about experiences of unity even with our terrors. Rothko wanted painting to function like music- in our absorption in the medium, the void can be looked upon and we can feel with some safety, its truth. He actually gives us more than this in his work. We experience with immediacy our own voidness and sense of being. One more Zen Buddhist teaching springs to mind.

Hui-neng, the Sixth Patriarch of Ch'an Buddhism wrote:

The boundless emptiness of the sky embraces the ten thousand things of every shape and form- the sun, the moon and stars, mountains and rivers, bushes and trees, bad people and good, good teachings and bad, heavens and hells. All these are included in emptiness.

The emptiness of your original nature is just like this. It too embraces everything. To this aspect the word 'great' applies. All and everything is included in your own original nature.111

Rothko gives back to us our original nature, the primary field layered beneath our everyday minds.

The very last paintings Rothko made were of a very different character to his black and grey works. They are small, peaceful works of radiant

111 Anne Bancroft, Zen: Direct Pointing at Reality, Art and Imagination, 1979, p 15.

107 light. Their colours are pastel hues of beige, pink and apricot contrasted with cooler blues [figure 16]. Who can tell what went on in Rothko's heart and mind during those final months before he killed himself but Novak and O'Doherty offer some Nietzsche as a possible summation: "the luminous afterimage which kind nature provides our eyes with after a look into the abyss".112

When I saw these paintings, they brought to mind a haiku by the much loved Zen monk, lssa:

The world of dew113 Is the world of dew­ And yet. And yet _114

112 Novak and O'Doherty, 1998, p 281. 113 "The world of dew" is the world of impermanence. 114 ed. Robert Hass, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson and lssa, Ecco Press, 1994 108 Figure 16: Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1969, acrylic on paper on canvas, 137.2 x 107.3 em. Private Collection.

109 Chapter 3 ART OF THE EMPTY FIELD The work of Ad Reinhardt

Paintings are the end of the beginning, beginning of the end, the un­ known of the known, known of unknown Threshold 115

Reinhardt, in a sense, directed me towards Zen Buddhism even though

I didn't take up the practice for some two decades after first seeing his work. What I intuited in my first encounter was that some 'truth' had been glimpsed, a sense of something 'ultimate' and 'absolute' that transcended the usual dichotomies we think in. Reinhardt's work opens out being as a limitless ground unimpeded by the logic of language. He is simultaneously evasive and unequivocal. Although reductive, nothing he offers can ever be reduced to singular and static definition but his work is nonetheless absolute. The ideas examined in this chapter are what I consider as correspondences between

Reinhardt and Zen.

Reinhardt, himseif, disclaimed any formal relationship with religion that he regarded as "just another gadget for everyday life".116 Lucy

Lippard had noted that he was more inclined to be a moralist than a religious man but '~mplicit in his writings is the unspoken assumption

115 Ad Reinhardt, '[Art-as-Art]', c. 1966-1967, cited in Barbara Rose (editor). Art-As­ Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, New York: Viking Press, 1975, p 76. 116 Lucy Lippard, Ad Reinhardt, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981, p 176. 110 that all wholly uncompromising conviction is 'religious' ".117 Lippard observed that any interest Reinhardt had in theology and religious tradition was simply an aspect of his voracious appetite for history itself. Reinhardt's meticulous and copious personal journals and teaching notes at the Archives of American Art are fair testimony to the range of his interests. Nonetheless, Lippard also notes that:

Reinhardt's dogmas became increasingly transcendental, increasingly committed to 'one art' and one way; and the paintings, which seemed to be disappearing into darkness, also offered an increasingly hermetic beauty118

Another friend and contemporary of Reinhardt's, Barbara Rose, gives greater weight to Reinhardt's spiritual leanings in her written observations. She wrote: ''Reinhardt appears a prophet of the realization that high art can only endure as spiritual art". 119 Rose speaks of Reinhardt's moralism as issuing from his growing disenchantment with the New York [and Western] art establishment's complicity with the world of commerce and mass communication.

Although initially a willing heir to the hard-edged geometry of Cubism

in the 1940s, Reinhardt had rejected it by the end of that decade. Rose

117 Lippard, 1981, p 176. 118 Lippard, 1981, p 168. 119 Rose, 1975, p xvii.

1 1 1 comments that, unlike his contemporaries who found alternatives in

Surrealism and expressionism, Reinhardt found inspiration in the ... great art of other 'high' civilizations: in the all-over patterning of Islamic art, in the mysterious abstract space of Chinese landscape, and in the ascetic discipline of the Zen academies of painting with their repetition of formulas.120

According to Rose, he ultimately conceived "his final black paintings as a synthesis of the polarities of Eastern and Western art".121

Reinhardt was one of the most significant American cultural figures of the mid- twentieth century. Artists a generation younger- Frank

Stella, Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre and Joseph Kosuth have openly acknowledged their debt to Reinhardt.122 Despite this or as evidence of this, Yves-Ala in Bois, in The Limit of Almost, argues that:

Reinhardt's works were misunderstood more vastly perhaps than the art of anyone else ... that misreadings have by far dominated Reinhardt's criticism, the most vociferous and damaging of all being well-disposed, consisting of sympathetic reappropriations by artists and critics of a younger generation.123

120 Rose, 1975, p xv. 121 Rose, 1975, p xiii. 122 Lynn Zelevansky, Ad Reinhardt and the Younger Artists of the 1960s, undated clipping. 123 Yves-Aiain Bois, 'The Limit of Almost', Ad Reinhardt, New York: Rizzoli, Museum of Modern Art, New York and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1991, p 12. 112 I am about to add to the plethora of Reinhardt 'misreadings'. One thing Bois does concede, however, is that some of these readings have been very productive. The artists listed above were all part of either the Minimalist or Conceptualist vanguard of the 1960s and for varying reasons looked toward Reinhardt as progenitor. One can understand why Bois, as art historian, objects or at least notes that these

'misreadings' cloud proper disclosure of Reinhardt's intentions. As an artist however, I wonder what 'pure intention' might be in relation to the influence one artist might have on another. Without descending to a lax 'anything goes' or ill-informed misrepresentation, it is important to recognize that the act of re-working other artist's ideas is an essential creative tool.124 It is always interesting to see what is appropriated from one artist's work and how it is developed within the oeuvre of another. Bois discusses at length the mitigating historical factors that contributed to Minimalist and Conceptualist 'misreadings' of Reinhardt's work. Curiously, for someone whose work could easily be relegated to the periphery of mainstream art discourse; Reinhardt has more direct heirs than Rothko.

In "The Limit of Almost", Bois is not damning Reinhardt's followers but using Reinhardt's strategy of affirmation through negation. He writes:

124 Refer to Harold Bloom's notion of creative "misrepresentation' in The Anxiety of Influence, New York, 1976. 113 The only way to say what Reinhardt's art is [that is, to make an absolute statement], is to say what it is not. Although my strategy [borrowing from Reinhardt's own] might seem a bit coy, it is the only one possible- it is entirely programmed by the exigencies of Reinhardt's art itself.125

Reinhardt's via negativa results in the disruption of category- words simply can't contain in any concrete or absolute fashion what his work

'does'. In Zen terms, the paintings are incessantly emptying themselves. Viewing the paintings is never an exercise in objectification or qualification but opening to the process or activity within the work itself. Bois notes that even the adjective black, in reference to Reinhardt's work, the term should be in quotation marks as 'black' since they are never quite become completely black.126

Although there are strong correspondences to both Minimalism and

Conceptualism, as Bois indicates, the similarity is mostly morphological. From my standpoint, where these artists were determined to assert positively some definitive and reductive identities for art, Reinhardt negated identities, preferring instead a radical exploration of form, which from a Zen perspective is formless form.

Reinhardt is even more difficult to place within his own generation.

While the expressive nuances in his work are antithetical to

Minimalism, his work was also too cool and concrete for the Abstract

125 Bois, 1991, p 13. 126sois, 1991, p 11. 114 Expressionists. Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt had very different attitudes to life and art. Rothko was chronically insecure and given to grand and visionary statements, whereas Reinhardt was self-assured, confident and given to making statements about art which were designed to deflate pretence and embellishment. Over the decades they knew each other they seemed to endure an uneasy friendship.

Rothko was on more than one occasion the butt of Reinhardt derision.

In a postcard to William Seitz, Reinhardt quipped "whoever mentioned anything about the heroic except Rothko".127 Reinhardt, on the other hand, was sued by Barnett Newman and Rothko for libelous statements he had made. 128

Both were abstract artists but Rothko had started with the figurative and worked reductively to eventually eliminate the figure. Reinhardt prided himself on being one of the few painters of his time who had never resorted to figuration even from the beginning of his practice.

Rothko came to abstraction by way of Surrealism, Reinhardt's abstraction evolved from a Cubist lineage via Mondrian whom he held in particularly high regard. In his essay "[ABSTRACTION VS.

127 Ad Reinhardt, unpublished Artist's file, New York: Museum of Modern Art library. 1281n 1956, Barnett Newman initiated a law suit against Reinhardt on behalf of himself and Mark Rothko. Based on some of Reinhardt's anti-Abstract Expressionist cartoons Newman "alleged libel, malice and injury", charges which Reinhardt denied. The case was dismissed. James R. Breslin, Mark Rothko: a Biography, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, pp 342-343. 115 ILLUSTRATION]", Reinhardt contrasted the differences between

Surrealism and Cubism:

The main current of surrealism is chaos, confusion, individual anguish, terror, horror- in the decay, chaos, aimlessness, discontinuity, unrelated ness, and inexplicablness [of the world], in the accidental, unconscious, amorphous and irrational. In surrealist painting, man is overwhelmed, lost, and unable to dominate his space and time. The world and life itself are a prison-like enigma one moves about in without any understanding, direction or rest. Its relation to the world of war, destruction, insecurity, formlessness is obvious.

The theme of cubism was just the opposite; it stressed the unity, totality, and connectedness of things in its single, one world. In a cubist painting one finds discipline, a consciousness, an order that implies man cannot only control and create his world, but ultimately free himself completely from a brutal, barbaric existence.129

In this essay, Reinhardt isolates the differences between Surrealist and

Cubist aesthetic philosophies with the clarity of Cubism triumphing over the murky underworld of Surrealism. However, despite the differences between the origin and intention of these two schools and between Reinhardt and Rothko themselves, they shared similar ambitions. Reinhardt felt a clear need to separate the pictorial and representational aspects of art away from what he perceived as painting's true potentiality. He wrote: "An abstract painting was not a rearrangement or distortion or re-creation of something else. It was a totally new relationship" .130 Rothko had stated that a painting was not

129 Ad Reinhardt, '[Abstraction vs Illustration]', 1943, cited in Rose, 1975, p 48. 130 ibid.

116 about an experience but an experience in itself, and to that end, removed the figure. They both prioritized silence, being and voidness as essential operations in their work. It was the differences in their standpoints that determined how they proceeded with their explorations. Rothko's starting point was his sense of division, from which he worked towards an expression of momentary unity of his

"opposing tendencies". His oppositions were formed through an emphasis on separateness- Rothko made art positioned in the

'chasm'. Reinhardt started from unity and then proceeded to illuminate the distinctions within that unity- the many in the one. His concern with oppositions was their merger without contradiction and without compromising integrity of form. As Bois points out, in reference to Reinhardt's grid, "As such, it eliminates any notion of a final formal unity: this unity is a given at the beginning, thus there is no struggle to achieve it, it is not a reward" .131 Reinhardt's work is 'art of the empty field.

In Five States of Reinhardt's Timeless Stylistic Art-Historical Cycle,

Reinhardt quoted Nicholas of Cusa:

How needful it is to enter into the darkness and admit the coinci­ dence of opposites to seek the truth where impossibility meets us.132

131 Bois, 1991, p 19. 132 Ad Reinhardt, '[Five stages of Reinhardt's Timeless Stylistic Art-Historical Cycle]', 1965, cited in Rose, 1975, p 10. 11 7 The puzzling 'miracle' of abstraction is how formal visual elements combine together to produce something that is meaningful beyond the decorative. In Rothko's work, it is the tension between component parts, their push and pull, and sense of spatial confrontation all in relation to the viewer, which effects resonance and meaning.

Reinhardt's work hinges on the "coincidence of opposites".

Intellectual categories of opposition collapse leaving the visual elements to express themselves unimpeded. Nietzschean "contrariety and contradiction at the heart of the universe" has no relevance here.

In Reinhardt's universe, seeming opposites exist without confrontation.

For instance, darkness is Reinhardt's perpetual theme. Sight is diminished in the literal sense but inside that we find that the darkness is radiant, expansive and revelatory. In the same way, colour is never given priority, in fact, Reinhardt dismisses colour as messy and uncontrollable and yet his colourlessness is iridescent.

Absolute Meaninglessness

Philosophically, the most important opposition is Reinhardt's disavowal of meaning which results in attaining a more profound meaning. In his endless lists of negatives concerning what art is not,

Reinhardt is not annihilating meaning but getting rid of what he regards as petty, extraneous meanings, which distract away from beingness. The absolute and ultimate in Reinhardt's work exist

11 8 because he evades descriptive or intellectual classification and yet, in

both writing and painting he is absolute, adamant and defiant. The

certainty with which he speaks issues directly from the unequivocal

nature of being, which is not subject to logic- being ness is not a

proposition to be constructed or argued for. It is simply what it is, the

bare and pre-reflexive experience. Once the interpretive dimensions of

language are deployed, meaning and not being becomes the priority.

Reinhardt wrote:

It's been said many times in world- art writing that one can find some of paintings meanings by not only looking at what they do but at what they refuse to do.133 ·

What Reinhardt refuses is teleological meaning, which generates

narrative movement away from actuality. He wrote of the motion of

non-events, meaning events without telos.134 Being is never in stasis

but that is different from the processes of definition contained in

narrative. In the act of defining, we enter the realm of the mediated

and the immediacy of experience is put at a distance. Reinhardt

returns us repeatedly to the primariness of being; his paintings are

"The first paintings which cannot be misunderstood" in that the sort of commitment required takes the viewer beyond conceptualization.135

133 Ad Reinhardt, 'Abstract Art Refuses', 1952, cited in Rose, 1975, p 50. 134 Ad Reinhardt, '[Oneness]', cited in Rose, 1975, p 107. 135 Ad Reinhardt, 'The First Paintings .. .', cited in Rose, 1975, p 111. 119 Any 'idea' we might carry about what the work means is an obstruction to the ultimate significance of the experience. Reinhardt's work is very

Zen-like in this preoccupation. In Zen the focus is on 'what is' rather than what we 'think' about what is happening. Bois corroborates with a similar analysis:

It took him a long time to understand that he would first have to transform his auditor, to alter the phenomenological conditions of the perceptibility of his art in such a way that the beholder. .. would have to renounce completely any usual expectations.136

Reinhardt's stance as the great purist can be understood as a strategy against the erosion of being which is over-ridden by the layers activity created in the search for explanations. This kind of interpretive, evaluative thinking is not only privileged but also misapprehended as being itself. Inductive and deductive thinking functions by constructing narratives allowing us to make sense of the network of relationships we live in, but there is a ground ulterior to the 'I think therefore I am' position- the experiential or the concrete reality of 'what is'. From a

Zen Buddhist point of view, true return to being is the key to liberation.

In Zen practice the aim is not to abandon thought processes altogether and live in a state of dumb thoughtlessness- as human beings we have a natural inclination for thinking. Given the simple fact that there is death, the question of 'why?' is bound to arise. Finding satisfactory

136 Bois, 1991, p 25. 120 explanations for the meaning of existence is a major preoccupation.

The delusion is believing that existence can ever be satisfactorily

spelled out. Explanations wind up doing battle with each other as

antinomies, oppositions or become paradoxical and 'thinking through'

existence results in a 'second degree' engagement with life- we tend

to live in mediations, not in the immediate experience. One of the

problems encountered if the ulterior ground of being is denied is that

we can become trapped between the polarities of opposition- meaning

opposes meaninglessness, being opposes non-being. Of course, as

Ferdinand de Sassure points out individuals are as much formed by

language as language is formed through communication between

individuals.137 However, logic as it proceeds through language is structured to conceive of existence only between binaries, but being exists beyond conceptual oppositions since it is in operation prior to

intellectual constructions. Phenomena conceived of rationally as diametric oppositions can and do exist simultaneously- happiness and contentment coexist with suffering and passion. Including the 'being' aspect in our operations as humans gives a larger perspective.

Reinhardt said "any meaning demeans the esthetic or the art meaning

••• 1 could embrace more meaning than anybody if I wanted to, but what

137 Ferdinand de Sassure, Course in General Linguistics, Glasgow Fontana/Collins 1974 [trans. Wade Baskin] 1 21 would that mean".138 According to Reinhardt, meaning trivializes

meaning in its fullest and truest sense. 'Significance' is more

accurate; [Negation of purpose<- significance]. The will towards

meaning automatically circumscribes an event/phenomena with an

agenda- it is 'meaning' which authenticates existence. We enter the

realm of discourse 'about' the thing; the discourse ends up by being a

substitute for the thing in itself.139 The Zen expression is "mistaking

the finger pointing to the moon for the moon itself". The real

significance of anything cannot be apprehended as it is impeded by

the prioritization of meaning above its own selfhood or, in Zen terms,

its 'suchness' [tathata]

Claude Levi Strauss wrote:

The great religion [Buddhism] of not-knowingness is not based in our capacity to understand. It bears witness, rather, to our natural gifts, raising us to the point at which we discover truth in the guise of the mutual exclusiveness of being and knowing ... The absolute "No" to meaning is the last in a series of stages, which leads from a lesser meaning to a greater meaning.140

The "greater meaning" is about living within the question of our own existence. Truth in being is not teleological- the one thing this kind of truth insists on is bringing us always back to the present. Without the

138 Lippard, 1981, p 130. 139 Ad Reinhardt, '[Art as Art]', c. 1966-1967, cited in Rose, 1975, p 73. 140 Claude Levi-Strauss, cited in Lippard, 1981, p 64. 122 pull of telos, there is no place to go but here. Being 'just here' there are things we begin to notice, for instance, how strong the dynamism of the world constitutes who we are. When the focus or effort to sustain the telos of meaning is emphasized, the pathway is linear, dimensionally more confined and narrow. When the narrative is suspended, the view formed from within 'this' moment is vast in its depth and breadth. Reinhardt never said one positive thing about anything. He understood that any positive assertion about what a thing is negates its being- it is delimited, a boundary is set up between it and the world. The thing in itself is the dynamism of 'it' in the world and the world within it.' Reinhardt's endless lists of 'what painting is

not' liberates it from becoming sedimented into a code- saves its

'being-ness' from invisibility. He wanted his paintings to be "free,

unmanipulated and unmanipulatable, useless, unmarketable, irreducible, unphotographable, unreproducible, inexplicable

icon(s)".141 In a way that resonates with Nishitani's argument against functionalism in religion, Reinhardt is stating that any utilitarian

purpose taints the legitimacy of painting as pure form, that is, a

moment of actuality in the world.

141 Ad Reinhardt, '[The Black Square Paintings]', 1963, cited in Rose, 1975, p 83. 123 Ultimacy

The answers to the 'big' questions concerning life and death can never be 'known'. We spend a lot of time postulating and projecting about what might be but that doesn't necessarily bring us any closer to the biggest mystery of all, which is what we are. Being can't be concretized into static meaning since it always exceeds any notion of what it i~f. In Zen Buddhism, being is accessed through meditation but it isn't confined to time spent on the zafu [meditation cushion], the view from being ness seeps out into the world through "undivided activity".142 Being and doing come together in exactness and clarity in what is occurring. Existence is profoundly mysterious since it is unknowable in the intellectual sense. In Chapter One I described the

Great Doubt of Zen- the doubt where the verities of life are shattered and the abyss underfoot is revealed. The nature of all existence is precarious and impermanent, not just our own but also ideas and intellectual structures. Everything is open to doubt. The news here is that doubt is never resolved- it merely opens and deepens. The further stage is not necessarily the despair of 'nothing to take hold of'

(which was Rothko's) but the 'nothing to take hold of' which is more akin to a mystic's consciousness. The consciousness which relinquishes the intellectual effort to understand and gives over to

142 Dagen Eihei, 'Genjo Koan', Moon in a Dewdrop, San Francisco: Element Books, 1985, Kazauki Tanahashi (translator & editor), p 70. 124 genuinely living within the question of one's own existence.

Reinhardt did not encourage readings of his work as religious or mystical. It is easy to understand why he rejects religion- it is a form of institutional and acculturated narrative. However, denials of his relationship with mysticism are more complex- especially since his private notes are thoroughly permeated with citations from mystical texts both Eastern and Western and experience of his work is often described as a mystical encounter, for example, Paul Tillich described

Reinhardt's work as a non-representational expression of the depths of mystic experience.143

Reinhardt wrote:

Painting that is almost possible, almost does not exist, that is not quite known, not quite seen

To be detached from all forms, not to take hold of anything, not to be determined by any conditions, not to have any affections or hankerings "An ineffable energy, seen invisibly, known unknowably"144

Taken from lmageless Icons, this text exemplifies Reinhardt's abundant written references to Zen Buddhism and Taoism. To be detached from all forms, not to take hold of anything. In this context, form can be interpreted as attachments and notions that become

143 Paul Tillich, cited in Lippard, 1981, p 172. 144 Ad Reinhardt, '[lmageless Icons]' cited in Rose, 1975, p 109.

125 encrusted over being. From a Zen Buddhist perspective, although

being is in fact the embodiment and the enactment of conditions, this

is different from the conditionality of discursive commentary which is subject to desire and debates involving 'should' or 'shouldn't' be- not

to be determined by any conditions, not to have any affections or

hankerings. Being can't be measured or determined intellectually, there is no index outside itself. The paradox is that the movement in

narrative/meaning relies on identities being fixed, that is, any sense of

progression requires signposts, benchmarks, cumulative stages that can be quantified and evaluated. Movement in being can only be discerned when meta-commentary falls away in stillness and silence-

meditation. Being is experienced as an ineffable energy, seen

invisibly, known unknowably. In Zen, ultimate meaning can only be grasped through the openness of 'not-knowing'. Nishitani explains:

The knowing of not-knowing comes only about as the realization [manifestation-siva-apprehension] of such being as it is in itself on the field of sunyata. On all other fields the self is at all times reflective and, as we said before, caught in its own act of grasping itself, and caught in the grasp of things in its attempt to grasp them.145

Several lines earlier in lmage/ess Icons, Reinhardt writes of" The dark

of absolute freedom", a recurrent phrase in his journals.146 It is a

145 Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 1982, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983 edition, p 155. 146 Rose 109 126 Taoist saying which resounds very deeply with the 'only don't know' of

Zen. For Reinhardt, there is being-ness in painting which should

remain free of meaning -it is a silence uncompromised by an

interpretive or representational function. In The Artist in Search of a

Code of Ethics Reinhardt quoted Clive Bell: "every sacrifice made to

representation is something stolen from art".147

"Ultimacy" is a term used occasionally in Zen literature. In the

Sansuikyo [The Mountains-and-water Sutra] Dogen writes: "The realm of ultimacy must also be of a thousand and myriad kinds".148 It conveys more precisely a state of being absolute as different the term

'ultimate' which carries a sense of finality. There is no finality in anything, especially the absolute- Reinhardt's perpetual theme the end

is the beginning is a dimension of this.

Meditation The Black Stone at the Heart of the Universe.

There is an image used sometimes in Zen circles- "The Black Stone at the Heart of the Universe", which evokes the kind of centred ness cultivated through meditation practice.149 The fabled black stone is not

147 Ad Reinhardt, The Artist in search of a Code of Ethics', 1960, cited in Rose, 1975, p 162. 148 Joan Stambaugh, The Formless Self, Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1999, p 90. 149 John Tarrant, 'The black stone at the heart of the Universe', Sesshin Teisho, April 1997, Sydney Zen Centre. 127 literally an object but one's own mobility and gravity of place within the momentum of being. Reinhardt's paintings are 'black stones' which invite a meditative consciousness. The polarities that exist in

his works are so strongly equivalent that their differences are almost

negligible. The result is that the oscillation between poles-

illumination and darkness; colour and non-colour- square against square- is subliminal but powerfully effective evoking Nicholas of

Cusa's coincidence of opposites. The willing viewer is compelled into the absolute present. This undivided unity with the 'now' is also the

'object' of Zen meditation. The striking similarities between

meditation and looking at Reinhardt's paintings goes some way to explain how many descriptions of encounters with his work' often evoke the mystical.

Reinhardt wrote "luminous center in light of which all controversies are understood" .150 In both Reinhardt's work and in zazen [Zen

meditation] the emphasis is on 'what is', not on making comparisons

between 'this' and 'that'. Evaluative thinking results in paradox and controversy- being 'x' it can't be 'y' by definition something exists as it

is because in being what it is, it excludes its opposite. Verses on the

150 Ad Reinhardt, 'End', cited in Rose, 1975, p 114. 128 Faith Mind [ch. HsinHsin Ming] by Sengtsan is often recited as part of cthe Sutra service in Sesshin:151

The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth then hold no opinioii3tfor or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is a disease of the mind. When the deep meaning of things is not understood the mind's essential peace is disturbed to no avai!152

Without the divisions that comparative thinking sets up, opposites can

and do exist in the same field.

One of the most basic Zen meditation techniques is breath-counting-

one counts each exhalation in a cycle from one to ten. The idea is not

particularly to get to the end of the cycle but to notice how thoughts

intervene between you and the breath, which stands as the absolute

present. Even with full concentration this is difficult: the mind

wanders, picks up a thought and runs away with it or starts to make

commentary about the process. Within this, however, there is at times

a fleeting and vivid clarity of undivided presence within 'this' moment.

It is possible to observe the gap between the discursive mind and the

151 Sesshin is the Japanese word for 'retreat' but a more accurate translation is 'to convey or touch the heart-mind'. 152 Sengtsan, Verses on the Faith Mind Hsin Hsin Ming, SZC Sutra Book: 16. 129 actuality of experience or being and how easily the experiential is swamped over by thought. The goal is not the suppression of thought because that would mean a division from a normal process but learning to stay with 'what is' and not pick over whatever the mind brings up. In both meditation and Reinhardt's work, any thinking towards anything is an impediment- the reality of being or the reality of the painting is obscured. You can't think your way into meditation or a Reinhardt painting, you can only be present to it. Reinhardt seems to have understood this profoundly when he wrote:

Path of the razor's edge, balancing, sharpest, thinnest line .... Focus of required one-pointed direction Everywhere, time, the same thing, one exercise .... Ultimate, variations of, confrontations with ultimate ... 153

The razor's edge appears in the instant we 'think' we have an understanding about what has occurred or what Reinhardt might

'mean'. In the split second it takes for a thought to form it is already distant and irrelevant to the experience of the work. Once we veer off onto the 'meaning' path, we are no longer 'with' the painting itself. By making his paintings so elusive, we are left with nothing to connect to except the 'what is occurring'.

153 Ad Reinhardt, 'The First Paintings .. .', cited in Rose, 1975, p 111. 130 By letting go, it all gets done the world is won by those who let it go! But when you try and try the world is beyond winning154

Work of art, power to remain uniquely itself... 155

Any meaning is demeaning156

Reinhardt was unrelenting in demanding total commitment from the viewer. As the decade of 'black' paintings progressed his paintings became more difficult to see. Yve-alain Bois observed that the first

'black' paintings took a few seconds to apprehend but the last ones took as long as half an hour. 157 This was not merely a strategy of resistance aimed at the 'easy' image, it had more to do with cultivating a way of seeing. "No ordinary seeing but absolute seeing in which there is neither seer nor seen" .158 Reinhardt eschewed being called a mystic, but this desire for unity in its bare essence is the mystic's quest and for the open-minded viewer there may be admission to the depths of mystic experience that Tillich referred to.

154 Ad Reinhardt, 'One', cited in Rose, 1975, p 93. 155 Ad Reinhardt, '[Art-as-Art]', c. 1966-1967, cited in Rose, 1975, p 73. 1551bid, p 77. 157 Bois, 1991, p 28. 158 Ad Reinhardt, '[lmageless Icons]', cited in Rose, 1975, p 109. 1 3 1 Reinhardt reiterated his black paintings over and over for the last ten years of his life. A less sympathetic critic might read this as a formulaic and impoverished practice but the potency of his work flows from his comprehension of unity as the ground ulterior to oppositions.

132 Figure 17: John Loengard, 'A "black" painting being executed by Ad Reinhardt', 1966, photograph.

133 Figure 17: John Loengard, 'A "black" painting being executed by Ad Reinhardt', 1966, photograph. Figure 18: Grechen Lambert,' Installation shot of Ad Reinhardt's black paintings on exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New York', 1966, His last works do seem to have a formula. They are a set size, five foot square; divided into a grid three by three; the paint is absolutely mat, non-reflective, non-textured greyed out black with an almost invisible tincture of some other colour but they are not formulaic- they are ritualistic. Rituals maintain prescribed forms and observances. "In illusions, no representations, no associations, no distortions, no paint- caricaturings, no cream pictures, no drippings ... " [figures 17 & 18]

159 Reinhardt's negative lists could also be read as a list of observances in his own painting procedures.

Contemplation without contemplating Freedom through repetition of formula, ritua!160

In Zen, there is a strong ritual element especially during Sesshin when the form of the days is rigorously upheld, each waking moment is fully prescribed and conducted in silence. One learns to regard the sameness of each day, the sameness of one's sitting posture, the sameness of one's method of meditation as one of the most precious aspects of the practice. The form eliminates any possible distraction from the task at hand- to see into our 'essential nature', that is, the nature of our being. Everyday concerns are left at the temple gate, everyday chatter quietens, and silence and stillness percolate through

159 Ad Reinhardt, 'Abstract Art Refuses', 1952, cited in Rose, 1975, p 50. 160 Ad Reinhardt, unpublished Artist's file, New York: Museum of Modern Art library. 135 and through -we are left to initially confront and then enter the mysterious fluidity of whatever we are.

Painting as Meditation

For an artist, the choice of materials and methodology is never arbitrary. No artist of Reinhardt's calibre paints the sam§,

Art world of the 50's and 60s and privately, within his own artistic practice and philosophy he sought non-duality. In Reinhardt's work there is no separation from the void. Emptiness is embodied in

Reinhardt through his process as the painter; embedded within the work itself and demonstrated in its relationship with the viewer. As in

Zen Buddhism, with Reinhardt's work form and emptiness are different sides of the same coin.

If Reinhardt's priority is the assertion of being then his work is not about solving problems. His 'black' paintings are certainly enigmatic, they pose imponderable questions about the nature of being and presence but these questions are not meant to be answered. For

Reinhardt, in the act of painting was meditation. An artist can't create an artwork that is contemplative without a process of making that is equivalently contemplative. Reinhardt could never have produced

136 work that so successfully embodied the silence of being without an intimate experiential appreciation of that silence.

In Zen, meditation is also known as practice. There is no purpose other than attaining with complete unity, the present moment and so practice occurs without gaining ideas, without any expectations­ particularly of enlightenment. Once any notion is formed, there is duality. If there is a relationship of means to an end, there is duality.

The Prajna Paramita Heart Sutra states that "Form is Emptiness and

Emptiness is Form"- they are intrinsic to each other. The Sutra also states that "Form is Form and Emptiness is Emptiness. Be exactly what is, without anything extra and with complete mindfulness.

Dogen speaks of this as the "samahdi of self-fulfilling activity" meaning that one dwells totally within the situation non-dualistically as an absolute action, as an absolute event.

For Reinhardt, painting as meditation is an activity emptied of any notions of self, progress and originality. In some ways, Reinhardt's painting practice is reminiscent of the practice of calligraphy where students copy endlessly the characters of revered calligraphers. The copying of great masters occurs in both Eastern and Western art traditions. In the West, however, the emphasis was the acquisition of technical skill. For the Far Eastern calligraphy student the purpose is

137 not only mastery but of surrender to form. In the same way that

sesshin upholds rigid forms of sitting, eating and chanting in order

eliminate distraction from states of being, the copying in calligraphy

maintains a level of non-ego engagement so directness of being is

recorded with immediacy. Every moment of flux, ebb and flow of tentativeness, confidence or other feeling state is conveyed in the lines

drawn. The brush is held in the hand, through the entire body. It is not

merely the hand, which paints but the totality of body and mind. As

Shunryu Suzuki said, "So to find your own way under some restriction

is the way of practice" .161 Reinhardt's practice was as restrictive as he

could make it. He surrendered to his own form.

Reinhardt wrote "Not ask how did art once arise, rather how does it

arise ever again in each genuine work anew" .162 George Kubler's The

Shape of Time was one of Reinhardt's favourite art theory books.

Kubler believed that the field of art was closed and recurring which

meant that possibilities of art were limited. Rather than find this

crippling, Reinhardt took this as affirmation of his own process. His

statement clearly reveals his preoccupation with the possibility of a

'genuine work'. The coincidence of opposites here is that each of his

'black' paintings delivers to us a fresh, new and genuine moment, over

161 Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, 1970, Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1991 edition, p 41. 162 Ad Reinhardt, '[Art-as-Art]', c. 1966-1967, cited in Rose, 1975, p 75. 138 and over again within his staggeringly austere self-imposed limits.

"Grand sameness" mystery of mysteries, single principle, form,

Silence, "stillness".163 As in Zen ritual, Reinhardt uses the rigid form to clear the decks so that 'pure painting' can be revealed and what that is, like being, is not static. His paintings are evanescent:

Painting that is almost possible, almost does not exist, that is not quite known, not quite seen ... "an ineffable energy, seen invisibly, known unknowably".164

Korean-American Buddhist scholar Hee-jin Kim has played a major role in the translation and dissemination of Dagen's thought in contemporary Western cultures. He comments:

In Dagen's view, the samahdi of self-fulfilling activity in its absolute purity is that very psycho-metaphysical activity, undefiled by and unattached to dualistic categories, events and things, that our perception and intellect creates, ... Confronted with thought and reality, the mind is ever vigilant, deconceptualizing and deontologizing them as circumstances demand, and thereby attaining the state of absolute freedom and purity.165

Much of this could be applied to Reinhardt's project and serves to throw some light on how he conceived of the 'pure idea'. In

Reinhardt's process as an artist and in the work itself, he frees himself from any erroneous assumption of what constitutes the 'new'. No

163 Ad Reinhardt, '[lmageless Icons]', cited in Rose, 1975, p 109. 164 ibid. 165 Hee-Jin Kim, Dagen Kigen: Mystical Realist, 1975. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987 edition, pp 61-62. 139 moment of beingness is ever or can ever be duplicated. Despite the formal resemblance between his black paintings, his work cannot be regarded as serial. As Yves-Ala in Bois observed the period of time required for sight to adjust to the nuances of each painting prevents the sort of narrativisation processes implicit in seriality. Each painting is a complete moment in itself- there is no before or after.

Form

All the senses, all the things sensed­ They interact without interaction. Interacting, they permeate one another, Yet each remains in its own place

Shih-t'ou (700 -790) from "The Coincidence of Opposites"166

Thomas Hess claimed that Reinhardt was not interested in form but pattern.167 From my viewpoint, Reinhardt was only interested in form

-absolute and formless form. In all his work, from his obsessively tight and calligraphic writing style through to the prodigious listings, form was highly articulated [figures 19 & 20]. In actuality, the square formations in Reinhardt's grid may give the impression of dissolving into each other but unlike Rothko, the evanescence in

Reinhardt's work originates not from bleeding of one field into the next

166 Shih-t'ou, "The Coincidnce of Opposites" Foster, Nelson, and Jack Shoemaker (editors), The Roaring Stream, a New Zen Reader, Hopewell: Ecco Press, 1996, p. 42

167 see Thomas Hess, quoted in Lippard, 1981, p 83. 140 but through exactly equivalent forms butting up against each other evoking Mondrian's notion of Equilibrium, through a contrasting and neutralizing opposition.168 Reinhardt creates a dynamic equilibrium.- each square within the grid has equal density and tonality and is sharply delineated. The powerful hypnotic visual effects of the decentred oscillations across the field in Reinhardt's paintings occur because each square is exactly equivalent and therefore each square in relation to all the other squares has its moment of singularity and immersion within the whole. Reinhardt achieves something spectacular in his work- each component part in his paintings has absolute and uncompromised integrity of form and yet they 'flow'.

This is the enigmatic energy at the heart of Reinhardt's work. The question here is what could form be if it has no solidity or fixity? The answer proposed through his 'black' paintings encapsulates the

Buddhist principle of Form is Emptiness and Emptiness is Form. Every single phenomenon 'flows'- nothing has permanence, everything is mutable. Individual form has integrity through its relation to the whole and in this relation; each form needs to be completely itself [however momentary] in order for the operations of the whole to exist. A remarkable state of selfhood is generated through Reinhardt's equivalences.

168 Piet Mondrian, 'Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art' a.k.a. 'Figurative Art and Nonfigurative Art', in Herschel I B. Chipp (editor), Theories of Modern Art, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968, pp 349-362 and Charles Harrison & Paul Wood (editors), Art in Theory 7900-7990, Oxford: Blackwell1992, pp 368-374. 141 Figure 19: Ad Reinhardt, 'Dark', undated handwritten notes. Reinhardt Archives of American Art, Washington D.C.

142 I have described how Reinhardt's methodology can be understood as

meditation but a working process is not always successfully translated

into the same process for the viewer. It is the artist's worst nightmare when creative intention misfires. It is equally a nightmare when the artist feels too much has been revealed and in the bald light of

revelation the depths of one's work are flattened or diminished. The one profound lesson that both Rothko and Reinhardt teach is that clarity of communication never lessens the mystery. It is through their clarity of means that the mystery in their paintings goes on and on. In meditation, penetrating the mind's obscurations of being is very difficult- usually if one's sense of being is fuzzy it is because the chaotic interpolations of one's mind have taken precedence over actual experience. The 'black stone' in meditation is the breath, always bringing the meditator back to present actuality. Painting was a meditative exercise for Reinhardt; it is the same process for the viewer.

His paintings 'fail' without the complete attention of the viewer. Not all viewers have the patience for his work and you do need to have a meditative tendency in the first place to appreciate what is going on.

Like Rothko, whose work lived through the "companionship" of the viewer, Reinhardt's work requires the viewer to participate in an act of co-creation. The painting exists through the transaction between viewer and work but the viewer is not a solid unified subject but

"formless self".

143 Figure 20: Ad Reinhardt, Reinhardt's World in Colour Slides as a Non-Happening, colour transparencies, 1956- 1958. Hisamatsu Shin'ichi was a scholar in the Kyoto School. His most famous work in English translation is Zen and the Fine Arts.169 In it he gives an account of how Zen art does not engage in representation but presents the self-expression of "formless self'. The compelling nature of Zen aesthetics lies in the dissolution of dualities between painter and painting, painting and viewer. Distance between subject and object are overcome.

In the case of Zen painting, then, it is not, as is so often the case with other painting, that a consciousness not free of form [the ordinary self] paints a concrete object; nor is it that the ordinary self-with-form tries objectively to depict what is without form; nor is it that the self­ without-form depicts an object depicts an object-with-form-; nor is it even that the Self-Without -Form objectively paints what is formless. Rather, it is always the Formless Self that is, on each and every occasion, the creative subject expressing itself.... This means, finally, that which paints is that which is painted: that which is painted is that which paints.170

Hisamatsu mentions the "formless self" of painting and painter but by extension, his statement includes the viewer. Reinhardt resonates very strongly with Zen in his statement: "No ordinary seeing but absolute seeing in which there is neither seer nor seen".171 The reality of

Reinhardt's work exists only in the unified activity of neither seer or seen. The painting is actualized within the transactive relationship

169 Hisamatsu Shin'ichi, Zen and the Fine Arts, New York: Kodansha International, 1974. 170 Shin'ichi, 1974, p 19. 111 Rose, p. 109 145 between viewer and work. As Bois noted, "indeed, he reduces the spectator to the sole organ of his or her vision; he dematerializes the

[viewer]".172

Masao Abe had been a devoted student of Hisamatsu's. For sometime, punishing notions of worthlessness had plagued him. This is an account of Abe's moment of realization.

Abe said: " I have tried all kinds of ways, but to be frank, none have been true, I just cannot find any place where I can stand.". "Stand right at that place where there is nowhere to stand", Hisamatsu replied without missing a beat. At that instant, the final vestige of ego-self dropped away, and Masao Abe realized the boundless expanse of his own formless True self. Now there is no longer any devil, nor is there any trace of Buddha.173

Maybe it is not the experience of complete Enlightenment that one has in front of Reinhardt's workbut ifcerfainly glvesagood intimation of what meditation practice is. Years after his experience Abe wrote:

"Wherever you are, total Reality reveals itself for the first time" .174

This passage evokes two responses from me: it brings to mind the totality of what the enlightened eye sees in the Zen garden at Ryoan-ji

Temple and Reinhardt's question: "Not ask how did art once arise,

172 Bois, 1991, p 28. 173 Masao Abe, A Zen Life of Dialogue, Boston: Charles E. Tuttle, 1998, Donald W. Mitchell (editor), p 7. 174 Abe, (1998), p 8. 146 rather how does it arise ever again in each genuine work anew".1751n the stillness and silence of either a Zen garden or Reinhardt's painting the open and willing viewer experiences the boundless content of

being in the world.

Earlier I stated that a return to being was the key to Zen liberation.

Shunryu Suzuki elaborated on the nature of freedom:

When you see something beautiful, you will stay there as long as possible. When you are tired of it, you will go to another place. You may think that is freedom, but it is not freedom, it's being enslaved by your surroundings, that is all. Not free at all! That kind of life is just material and superficial.176

Often what is construed of as freedom is the ability to walk away from a situation if we choose to and to a degree, this ability not to accept constraints imposed from without is very empowering. However, in every moment there are always conditions of some kind, which can be viewed as a restraint or a limitation. Under these circumstances how can freedom be anything other than an ideal? In Zen, since one does

not see self as outside of conditions, freedom is sought through equanimity within what is occurring. Peace is not found by pushing the unpleasant away or by inflating and clinging to the good- it exists

by being with 'what is'. The "middle path" of Buddhism is the 'what is'

175 Ad Reinhardt, '[Art-as-Art]', c. 1966-1967, cited in Rose, 1975, p 75. 176 David Chadwick, Crooked Cucumber: The life and Zen teaching of Shunryu Suzuki, New York, Broadway Books, 1999 (London: Thorsons, 1999 edition), p 294.

147 of the situation at hand without the distortions engendered by

attaching notions of good or bad. The 'what is' does not limit itself to situations but takes into account especially the 'what is happening' in

one's own being. As I have tried to explain, what is at play in

Reinhardt's work is a continuous process of emptying of any notions of self and of what art is in order for the actualization of his work to occur.

In Reinhardt's work the viewer is continuously moving from one equanimous point to the next as the momentum of one's being ness shifts. The feeling is curiously light, fluid and centred as being is anchored in the change and not in any false differentiation or false individuality which absolutises things as separate existences. Perhaps this is what Reinhardt had meant when he wrote that" Art cannot exist without permanent question of being put into question" and when he said in conversation with Lucy Lippard that "Buddhism is an aesthetic, not a religion" .177

In a letter to his lifelong friend, Trappist monk and Zen practitioner,

Thomas Merton, Reinhardt had nominated his favourite religious writers as Coomaraswamy, D.T. Suzuki, Paul Tillich, Jacques Maritain and Martin Buber.178 According to this letter, Buber was the only one who had not, in some way, disappointed him. In I and Thou Buber

177 Ad Reinhardt, 'The First Paintings .. .', cited in Rose, 1975, p 111. 178 Joseph Masheck (editor), 'Five unpublished Letters from Ad Reinhardt to Thomas Merton and Two in Return' Artforum, November 1978. 148 argued against the absurdity of splitting the world into a "ghostly" I and a domain with ready-made meaning. For Suber All actual life is encounter.179 The world is understood through proximal experience and that the sense world is the arena in which one being participates with another. Suber's grasp on aesthetics was formed through his comprehension that the sense world itself arises out of movement from one being to another. He writes that the "relation to the You is unmediated. Nothing conceptual intervenes between I and You, no prior knowledge and no imagination ... "180 The artist is the one who ensures that what is in being does not fall away from the sense world.

Art overcomes the distance between I and Thou, self and other; it is invested in the relation 'between'. Of the engagement with a work of art Suber stated:

The form that confronts me I cannot experience nor describe; I can only actualize it. And yet I see it, radiant in the splendour of confrontation, Not as a thing among the "internal" things not as a figment of the "imagination", but as what is present. Tested for its objectivity, the form is not "there" at all: but what can equal its presence? And it is an actual relation: it acts on me as I act on it.181

In Art-as-Art Reinhardt echoes the relational aspect: "Artist, one who works upon forms and whom form works upon" .182 Reinhardt's forms

179 Martin Buber, I and Thou, 1970. Trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Touchstone, 1996 edition, p 62. 180 Suber, 1970, p 62. 181 Ibid, p 61. 182 Ad Reinhardt, '[Art-as-Art]', c. 1966-1967, cited in Rose, 1975, p 78. 149 are never 'there', there is never even a residue that one can take hold of but once having 'seen' there is no doubt that 'presence' of something has been experienced.

Timelessness the end is the beginning

In the editor's note which introduces Reinhardt's writing on the subject of "Art and Religion", Barbara Rose parallels Reinhardt's 'black' paintings with the abstract imageless icons of Eastern religious traditions. She states:

The black square paintings are thus like the changeless Buddha image Reinhardt studied: static, lifeless, timeless- a form of the Absolute. The search for the timeless and the absolute, begun with Plato and the various modern forms of Neo-Platonic Idealism from Kant to Mondrian, ended for Reinhardt with the abstract, black "mandala".183

For a Buddhist, it is a little puzzling to read of the Absolute as changeless, static and lifeless- after all, the first law of Buddhism is that everything changes. Ineffability as an aspect of the Absolute is caused through ceaseless change. Rose seems to be confusing the

Buddhist Absolute with a Platonic view of the Absolute whose central principle does involve changelessness. However, Rose's statement provides the occasion to delve deeper into a legitimate comparison

183Rose, 1975, p 185. 150 between the sense of time operating in Reinhardt's work and Buddhist

time.

In general, the predominant views of time are that it is either

something like a container in which things happen or that it is a series

of events that progress in linear fashion. Both are views that make time a kind of entity quite independent from phenomenal activity. In

Zen Buddhism, time [like the void] is not considered as separable from self and one's actions. One of the most lucidly articulate Buddhist thinkers about time was Dogen. He was not interested in what

happens 'in' time or 'at' what time something might occur but at what time actually 'is'. Dogen devoted an entire fascicle on an explanation of Buddhist time that he entitled Uji [tr. Time-being]. His perspective was that being is time, thus time is time-being, meaning that it is phenomenological and all the activities within being are time enacted.

An ancient buddha said: For the time-being stand on top of the highest peak. For the time-being proceed along the bottom of the deepest ocean. For the time-being three heads and eight arms. For the time-being an eight- or- sixteen foot body. For the time-being a staff or a whisk. For the time-being a pillar or a lantern. For the time-being the sons of Zhang and Li. For the time-being the earth and sky.184

184 Dogen, 1985, p 76.

1 51 Dogen's images in this verse may seem somewhat obscure but what they allude to are states of being or conditions of existence, for example, "a pillar or lantern", "the sons of Zhang and Li" represent the everyday and the "three heads or eight arms" represents ferocious wrath. For Dogen, time is existential and personal, that is, existence and time are precisely the same.

Dogen asserted that we may theorize about past and future but we can only experience 'now'. Time cannot 'flow' or 'fly' because it can only be actualized in the present moment. Time does not 'passage'- it has no movement of its own except in how it passages through us in our activities. In Buddhism, time is what is occurring 'in the immediate now' [jp.nikon]. Jean Stambaugh, a noted scholar of both Dogen and

Heidegger elucidates "the striking discrepancy" between the Western notion of the eternal present and the Buddhist concept: the Western eternal present belongs exclusively to the life of God.185 Eternity is thus constructed as something transcendent to humankind. She states also that eternity is misconstrued as an endless duration of time.

Dogen, via Stambaugh, says that belief in this kind of eternity is a grave error. What the eternal present and the immediate 'now' have in

185 Joan Stambaugh, Impermanence Is Buddha-nature: Dagen's Understanding of Temporality, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990, p 97. 152 common is wholeness and entirety- /I Nothing can ever be entire or

whole in an endless duration of time" .186 Since, in Zen, there is no

duration but rather a constant unfolding of 'now', terms like carrying

forward, attainment and advancing hold very different connotations to

the usual ones which contain ideas of progress and linearity. In Zen,

all things rest in the limitless field of 'now', this moment. To advance

is not to bring something forward in linear time but to call into sharper

profile particular things that rest in the same field. In advancing or

bringing something forward is to bring all other things forward by

virtue of interrelationship. The field is not flat but vast and multi

dimensional.

The 'timelessness' operating in Reinhardt's 'black' paintings is also

conveyed as individual and phenomenological. Reinhardt wrote:

Work creates its time its own time "gives" content to its time, not "expresses" time.187

Reinhardt was interested in how time is effected as an operation in his work- how his work compels the viewer into a 'timeless' sense of time that does not suffer the relativity of past, present and future.

'Timelessness' is the doing away of the conceptual boundaries of what

186 ibid. 187 Ad Reinhardt, 'Time', cited in Rose, 1975, p 99. 153 time is. However, what Reinhardt demands from his viewer is an

investment of duration as an essential ingredient. In the literal sense,

as Bois observed, it takes many minutes of clock time to apprehend the

minute differences within the grid off a 'black' Reinhardt but in the

Buddhist and phenomenal sense what the viewer enters is their own

time-being. Bois wrote: "The only way to achieve timelessness was to

fold time back on the spectator: what one sees in front of a "black'

Reinhardt is the narrativisation of one's own gaze".188

The Black Mandala "The infinite is a square without angles" Old Chinese189

Mandalas are used as an aid to meditation. The 'goal' of meditation is

unity, but in attaining unity with whatever the object of meditation is

(whether it is a visualization, a symbolic image, koan or simply the

breath) it is never a matter of being divided from the actuality of what

you are. To paraphrase Dogen, the time-being is always precisely who

you are, beyond any 'idea' of what that might be. Of course, the

hardest thing to grasp in meditation is just to 'be'. Dogen developed a special form of meditation called Shikantaza or 'just sitting'.

Reinhardt's paintings are black mandalas which produce a symbiotic,

unified and simultaneous presencing of both viewer and painting.

188 Bois, 1991, p 28. 189 Ad Reinhardt, 'Mandala', cited in Rose, 1975, p 189.

154 Reinhardt was aware that in reality Emptiness is not hollow

nothingness:

No such thing as emptiness or invisibility or silence Own nervous system Own eyes, own learning190

The .. Tragic Idea .. Versus the .. Pure Idea ...

As a painter, what fascinates me is how something as inanimate as

paint on canvas can manifest a belief system. Both Rothko and

Reinhardt were abstract painters, who developed non-

representational forms, embodying their profoundly held core beliefs.

The game they played was much deeper than mere examination of philosophical or intellectual theory- they were both personally invested in questions of what being is in relation to the void. Their stances were oppositional, the primary contrast being the "tragic" idea against the "pure" idea.

For Rothko, it is one's own 'will' or driveness and tenacity that validates 'self'. Reinhardt believed that art should have no other function than be itself in its absolute aesthetic value. He didn't believe in politically motivated art- he thought it fraudulent to propose that

190 Ad Reinhardt, '[Notes on the Black Paintings]'. cited in Rose, 1975, p 104. 155 "by painting Negroes, you could eliminate prejudice."191 He kept his art practice 'pure' but in terms of the social and moral issues he felt were important, Reinhardt was an activist. Both were very independent, courageous and faithful to their own visions and principles.

Personally, like Reinhardt, I don't believe that art can motivate someone politically to change the world. Art must remain useless in the rationalist, utilitarian sense. Meanings, as such, can only ever detract from what art is, that is, an admission into the depths of being.

Reinhardt had considered Buddhism to be an aesthetic, not a religion.

Given how highly Reinhardt valued the aesthetic, Buddhism must have been very favourably viewed by him. What I understand by

Reinhardt's statement is that the ground zero for both Art and

Buddhism is 'being'. In Buddhism, particularly Zen. the practice is always to come back to what is occurring at the most primary phenomenal and sensory level: the aesthetic and not intellectual experience. That primary experience is about fundamental and actual connection with the world. Reinhardt's 'black' paintings are absolute in this sense. They are about nothing. In response to Rothko and

191 Unpublished transcript of interview between Ad Reinhardt and Arlene Jacobowitz, June 14. 1966, Archives of American Art

156 Gottleib's statement that "There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing"192, Reinhardt quipped that "There was no such thing as a good painting about something"193 Reinhardt's nothingness, however, is a stand against painting having any representational function. For Reinhardt, a painting is a set of pure and dynamic relations on canvas enacted palpably in the retina of the viewer.

Rothko's work, in contrast was associative. His compositional devices of colour and bisection, portals and horizon evoke acute emotional being ness. They may have stood on opposite sides of the abyss but they were both intent on giving us the experience of being, first hand and unmediated.

192 Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottleib (and possibly Barnett Newman). 'The Realm of Art: A New Platform and Other Matters: "Globalism" Pops into View', letter, New York Times, 13 June 1943, cited Ashton 79, Compton p78. 193 Ad Reinhardt, '[Documents of Modern Art]', 1960, cited in Rose, 1975, p 166. 157 Chapter 4

THE DARK OF ABSOLUTE FREEDOM The work of Lindy Lee

Notions of 'self' have always been central to my work. Given my

background as a Chinese Australian, this is not surprising- the

formative question in my life has been 'If I'm not precisely this or

that, then what am I?' At the most intimate level it is the question

of who 'I' am, what is it to 'be' and what constitutes 'self', which,

in a nutshell, stems from growing up not fitting in with either of

the cultural classifications (Australian or Chinese) of my

background. Of course I am not unique in this -all of us to

varying degrees have this problem, in that none of us are ever a

precise fit, whatever we are born into. However, this sense of

difference has been a prime motivating factor. My early work

using photocopies of Old Master reproductions was a complex

mix, working through concepts of 'belonging' to a Western art

tradition; loss and redemption and painting as a practice of

silence and embodiment, not just representation. In trying to

understand my current work, it is essential to review the

development of my art practice in the light of questions about selfhood.

158 The Disguise

In Harp of Burma, Mizushima put on the Buddhist robe as a

disguise to ensure a safe return to his troop. It was a matter of

expediency, not belief. However an extraordinary transformation

took place- the robe became Mizushima's key for finding

meaning. The disguise, something used to obscure identity,

became instead an instrument for self-discovery. It became his

'guise' or demeanor in the world, his robes were the outward

clothing symbolic of his struggle and commitment to walk his

path. Guises represent forms of narrative, the robe's narrative is

Buddhist which has a set of beliefs formed from a specific cultural tradition. Each of us live to a certain degree within some kind of

narrative that gives familiarity, direction and perspective to our

lives. Available to us are a confusing number of possible

narratives. The problem I experienced was that no one particular cultural history was even remotely a decent fit. It was more the case that bits and pieces cobbled together in ever changing aggregations felt truer.

Working with images from European Art history was my way of gaining some kind of personal and cultural perspective. El Greco was an important figure during this period [1983 -1990]- he was a mystical Christian with a fierce vision that resulted in paintings

159 of an almost halluCinogenic passion. I envied his belief. By

appropriating El Greco's imagery, I was trying on the strength and

sincerity of his faith- it wasn't Christianity that I was specifically

interested in but belief. In this mix there was also an unconscious

declaration that my work belonged to Western art history and it

does, but after a few years I realized that only an outsider ever

needs to make declarations about 'belonging'. In all of the guises

I was trying on in terms of appropriation I was searching for something I could genuinely adhere to in the sense of finding my own sense of place.

My work of that period was underpainted with either blood red or ultramarine blue. A good example is All Spirit in the End

Becomes Bodily Visible [figure 21]. The source of the image is one of El Greco's crucifixions. The image is scraped back through the black wax to the red underneath. This is a reversal of the usual method of painting that adds layers on top of each other to build up the image. I found it necessary to devise a method of painting in which the image was actually part of the matter it was made from. What the photocopies and painting hold in common is the way the images are embedded in the material -the 'dust' of the photocopy or the waxy paint surface and at the same time,

160 Figure 21: Lindy Lee, A// Spirit in the End Becomes Bodily Visible, 1990, oil, wax on canvas, 180 x 160 em. Figure 22: Lindy Lee, Honour the Black (detail) 1990, photocopy and oil on paper, 42 x 210 em. float as if "a ghostly apparition" suspended above the surface -it is the exploration of how spirit expresses itself through matter, a persistent concern in all of my work [figure 22].194

Burying the Dead

For Mizushima, circumstances drove him to confront death in its

inevitability and universality. Initially overwhelmed, he embarks

on his journey to understand how any life can have meaning in the face of nothingness. In Buddhist terms, this is Form's

relationship to Emptiness. Intuitively he begins to bury the dead.

Each burial is a respectful act in which he honours each individual

life that contained unique detail that will never happen in quite that manner again. In this manner Mizushima offers the dead,

redemption against oblivion.

~------~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~- My photocopies were motivated by similar concerns. They were

usually taken from portraits of people who are now anonymous and most certainly dead. Their portraits are the only residues left

but these images are disembodied from the lived reality of those they depict. None of the substance of their lives can ever be known. It was never important for the viewer to pinpoint the exact historical reference- only a sense of era. The transaction

194 Edward Colless, Korea, 'The Dust of Quintessence', in Victoria Lynn, Soyen Ahn and Miwon Suh (curators), Strangers in Paradise: Contemporary Australian Art to Seoul: Korea Foundation/National Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992, p 50.

163 between viewer and portrait is the meeting and measuring of

one's own existence against the existence of some other who has

long since disappeared.

The Distance Between the Copy and the Original.

Rex Butler wrote a number of essays about my work in the 1980s.

His perspective was literary, drawing from figures such as Pierre

Menard, Kafka and Cervantes.

He wrote:

It would be a mistake to think that ... Lindy Lee starts off with an original and proceeds by degrees to darken it, to make it a debased copy, blackening our hands with its sooty materiality, thick with the silt of rivers, of history, of bodies ploughed back into the ground. Nor would it be simply a matter of saying she begins with a copy and restores it to singularity, uniqueness, the --slgtiature~fiat mterests Llnay-Lee is neiffierffie copy nor tfie original but precisely the distance which lies between195

Of course, I was re-investing the copy with singularity- that was

clearly a strategy of redemption but Butler was very astute in

noting that it was the distance between copy and original that was

of interest to me. Copies are always regarded as 'lacking'

something of the original. From the very first use of appropriated

imagery, it occurred to me to question what it was being

195 Rex Butler, 'In the Shadow of Lindy Lee', On The Beach, number 10, Winter 1986, p 19.

164 compared. It seemed to me that the experience of the copy and the experience of the original were completely different. In viewing the original, there is the immediacy of materiality and content; the hand of the artist located in a specific history and geography; the work in the context the artist's entire oeuvre and whatever legacy has been left behind. In one sense, the status as the original holds centre stage. The viewer's subjective response is held in alignment and directed by this. The copy is at one level the proxy for the original but even as a stand-in, it can never be the site of the same qualities or issues as the original. Through the copy, we can't ever have a first hand experience of all those things the original gives us, but then the original never gives us what the experience of the copy can. The distance or space between the original and the copy gives us a kind of freedom- the space becomes a field for speculation to reconstitute or understand what we mean by 'original'. The experience of the original and the experience of the copy are both authentic experiences but their content is necessarily different.

The personal metaphor is always of central importance. As I reflected earlier, I always felt a bad copy of the dominant narratives in my life and so certain poignancy is attached to the

165 notion of copies. The copy is a metaphor for self as somehow embodying imperfectly the concepts of, in my case, Chinese,

Australian, Eastern, Western or even Cosmopolitan. It is in individual imperfection that self actually exists, between fitting and not fitting is where we encounter the reality of our lives. In the space between the originating social narrative and its social constructions of individuality we live the experience that authenticates who we are.

Butler also wrote:

By photostatting it again, and seeing how it changes -everything that changes from one copy to another would be not simply of the original, nor of the copy: it would be precisely that difference between copies. In a sense, she is looking for precisely what is not reproducible- but she can only do this by means of reproduction.196

One of the more compelling and heart-wrenching visual moments in Harp of Burma is Mizushima discovery of the mountains of dead. It is not just death that has reduced these lives to insignificance; it is also the sight of their massive numbers. Most art students are now familiar with ideas of the 'second degree', image saturation, reception culture, simulacra, however at the time, when I decided to become an artist in the late 1970s, originality was definitely a problem. There was a panicked

196 ibid. 166 frustration when I felt that there was no longer any way to make an original contribution as a painter- everything had been done and every brush mark was already overloaded with references. It seemed the only artistic inheritance was an excess of reproductions that mocked any attempt at originality. I decided to sail into the storm and use the thing that undermined art practice, as I understood it- the copy. In a sense, as Mizushima did with all the bodies he encountered, I lovingly reinvested the reproductions I used with singularity. All the images I used were ones I felt some emotional connection to. The copies were all based on portraiture. When looking at a portrait, we peer into a person's life. There are certain discernible external characteristics

- historical context, age, sex, class -all easily knowable but in the best portraits, say a Rembrandt, something of the sitter's psychology or essence is revealed. Who was this person? How did they think, feel etc.? Ultimately these are questions ab~ut their being- their lived reality, something that can only be experienced from within and impossible to reproduce. Questions about their being ness inevitably lead us to questions about our own.

Each of the photocopy pieces I did [and still do] uses repetition.

The repetition underscores that they are reproductions but

167 paradoxically, each unit is uniquely marked with individual gestures of the photocopier. Butler observed that it would be precisely that difference between copies. In a sense, she is looking for precisely what is not reproducible - but she can only do this by means of reproduction.197 The difference between copies, like the space between original and copy is also metaphorical for the space of existence or being ness. Being ness can't be reproduced- it is at the opposite end of the spectrum to representation that is always at a remove from the phenomenon itself. Being ness in itself is mercurial and ungraspable. Language or representation can never reach being. When language describes what is happening in being, things have already changed. Each of the photocopies represent single moments in the history of the image or the individual. The distance between copies is intimation of what has been lived, what is not reproducible.

I have just examined some of the concepts behind my early work but the whole point of my project is the engagement with being in its ineffability. The work itself needs to be, otherwise the concept is just rhetoric. In my early work, the images in both the paintings and photocopies were barely visible- fugitive. Meaning

197 ibid. 168 and clarity of the image disappears with the minutest light shift or movement in the viewer. One's perspective changes everything.

Nothing of substance to take hold of but the experience is there nonetheless. During this period, I kept remembering Harp of

Burma. Images from the film would appear in my mind, like peepholes into the issues that were only understood in a very subterranean way. It was a reflection of the path I was making for myself- it captured my search for 'self' in the light of nothingness and seeming insignificance.

THE 10,000 THINGS

Rothko and Reinhardt

As I have stated throughout this thesis, what primarily motivates my interest in painting is its potential to elicit beingness, not representations or pictures that might reflect experience but to be experience in itself. For Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt- the two artists who have given most direction to my work as a painter, beingness was the originating drive underlying their investigations in terms of visual language. They were abstractionists whose work testifies to the reality of non-verbal and open apprehension through sensory experience. Beingness is more than 'communicated', it is 'transmitted', rather like the way in which the Buddha held the flower and Mahakashapa

169 smiled. Fundamentally, the language of painting is line, colour,

shape and compositional relationship. Miraculously these

elements can be combined to make pictures that represent and

even mimic the world, however this was not the path followed by

either Rothko or Reinhardt.- Rothko abandoned the figure

because it no longer had any effective spiritual agency and

Reinhardt had never even considered that figuration could be a

viable option. For them, the mediations of representation could

never evoke the primariness or richness of direct experience.

What I have written about them in the preceding chapters

demonstrates how their work was formed by their differing

philosophical standpoints. Their work in a sense could be

understood as oppositional and indeed their standpoints gave rise to serious differences of opinion during their lifetimes. The

content of Rothko's work was human tragedy, and a cherished

hope for transcendence instrumented through the heroic courage

of the individual. At the heart of Rothko's work was a profound sense of division from the world. Reinhardt started from the

position of unity. The grid in Reinhardt's work states unity as his

basic ground whereas Rothko's bisected canvases direct the viewer to experience the ebbing and flowing of separation and union. Rothko explored the full spectrum of human emotional life

170 whereas Reinhardt deplored any suggestion that life could or

should intervene in his notion of art as a 'pure idea'.

What I find, however, is neither is mutually exclusive and what is

fascinating is the fact that both made equally compelling visual

statements which embodied precisely what they wanted to

transmit. As a young artist, this opened up for me the possibility

that painting can convey directly and pre-reflectively. Actually

since those early encounters with their work, I began to rate the

success of paintings, of other artists including myself, according

to how successfully they engage the viewer in this kind of direct

experience. What I have taken from Rothko is the principle of

honouring personal and emotional truth and from Reinhardt, the

cultivation of a meditative consciousness in which unity and the

actualization of one's own emptiness become an essential

ingredient in the work itself.

These two viewpoints combined form the basis for my practice.

Both present 'Formless self' in different ways. Hisamatsu frames the encounter between Zen art and viewer as 'Formless Self' meeting 'Formless Self'. Both viewer and object fall into each other, Hisamatsu wrote that "the nothingness of Zen does not represent space, free of objects, outside of my person, but is

171 rather my own state of nothingness, namely myself that is

'nothing' 11 .198 Reinhardt's black paintings are a perfect exemplification of this process. His work requires an undivided commitment from the viewer. This is not simply that its near invisibility demands more looking but that one needs to divest oneself of oneself, to put aside any attitudes of what the painting

'could' or 'should' be, in other words the viewer has to become empty. Viewing Reinhardt is an act of co-creation, 'seeing' and being 'seen' is unified in the same 'motion of being'.

Hisamatsu writes of II myself that is nothing II but this does imply negation or annihilation of being. Previously I have stated that my formative question relates to the nature of selfhood, motivated by the sense of displacement I've always felt being born into a predominantly White Australian culture. In meditation, I discovered an even more profound configuration of this question- that is, existence goes way beyond the intellectual constructions of self that we normally associate as who we are.

Ultimately this is very liberating but it actually makes the question of who and what 'self' is, even more mysterious. The richness that Rothko 's work reveals is that in being empty one is not being

198 Hisamatsu, quoted in Joan Stambaugh, The Formless Self, Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1999, p 76.

172 nothing in the sense of becoming null and void but that at all times we are precisely something, but that 'something' is never fixed. Reinhardt's black paintings also reveal this but Rothko gives connection to our emotional world.

There is a mistaken belief that meditation is the gateway to some blissful higher state and at times it is, but meditation is not a practice of escape into a realm where the grit and dirt of one's life don't touch you. It is more likely that all of one's shortcomings and 'troubles' explode in your face. Ease and serenity come through facing the stuff of one's existence squarely- it is not about only seeking the 'good' which is why Hui-neng took the time to debunk any notion that the relative world was in any way not central to who we are. "All and everything is included in your original nature" .199 Dagen's shikantaza means sitting perfectly inside yourself. For me, Rothko offers a return to original nature, the primary field layered beneath our everyday calculative minds.

Our original nature is not exclusive of the emotional turmoil of being human. Rothko suffered tragically and it would seem that his deep sense of alienation never left him; Zen emancipation was not his fate. However, his work was a direct, and compelling expression of his 'feeling' life. Rothko, by his own admission,

199 Anne Bancroft, Zen: Direct Pointing at Reality, Art and Imagination, 1979, p 15.

173 never sought a world better than the one he i':lhabited. -the tragedy and ecstasy of this life was his true content, and in turn what his work does for me is legitimate what I feel, give authority to my own experience.

Painting as the practice of The 10,000 Things.

My work bears only the occasional resemblance to either Rothko or Reinhardt's paintings. Reinhardt inspired the darkness of my early work and from Rothko it is the radiance of his colour that stays in my practice. Mostly, however, what I took from my predecessors was the possibility of communicating experience and philosophical/spiritual belief through painting. Painting may have died and been resurrected on innumerable occasions during the past century, but for me it remains the most powerful of practices because it is evocative non-verbally. I am drawn to

Rothko and Reinhardt by equal degree also because the questions they posed about their own existences corresponded to my own, however I do have my own standpoint of the Void to work from.

The Dynamism of Self

When I took up a Zen Buddhist practice several years ago all of the questions I'd been asking in my work became re-focused. In

Zen, one of the most fundamental questions is "What is self?', and

174 my response now to the question 'If I'm not precisely this or that.. .. ', in the light of Zen practice is "I am precisely this and then that and then that and so on". Self is a multiplicity of things internalized and activated by context and conditions. In Zen terms, the actuality of 'self' can't be confined by categories of either I or, Chinese or Anglo or whatever. And yet, unparadoxically, selfhood has a very exact form; the usual mistake made is to believe that this form has permanence. Being is a series of fluid negotiations. It is how the world is enacted in us and how we act in the world. The actuality of experience is not a process of division from the world but a reciprocal relationship­ world and self in a continuous act of co-creation.

Every thinking person is at some time or other involved with the question of who they are. Mostly we are preoccupied with the 'I' in the question "Who am I?" In other words, there is sense of ownership- a 'my' self which splits off from the rest of the world.

Implicit is a rejection of anything other than 'I'. Rejection is understood as necessary by the ego to maintain its sense of uniqueness and individuation. However, in Zen Buddhist terms, the question of "who I am?" is about the reality of 'who' I am which goes beyond the dimensions of the ego. Shin'ichi

Hisamatsu calls this the "Formless Self" which we can only

175 experience from within. In Zen and the Fine ArtsL Hisamatsu writes that Zen art is the presentation of the Formless Self. The priority for any serious Zen student is to awaken to this and live non-dually.200 In Zen, the great abyss is not separate from us. In

Zen, artistic activity is a demonstration of this self. Zen art has nothing to do with realistic representations but is about true 'self- expression'. If there is any depiction of natural phenomena, it is more that the mountains or flowers used are the occasion for the expression of Formless self. Self-expression in Zen is not a solipsistic preoccupation based on any false notion that self is exists as a fixed entity, living in isolation from the rest of the world, it is the world as it is enacted in the person.

In Zen, meditation is the primary tool used to understand what self is. The first thing that one notices is that not for a single second is there anything graspable which can be define as 'self'.

All the constructions, thoughts and sensations we identify as 'self' are actually elusive, but self still exists. One is left with the very perplexing question: 'If the things I repeatedly grasp at as being who I am are not substantial, then what am I?' This is one of the most fundamental of Zen questions and students are left to

200 Hisamatsu, Zen and the Fine Arts, New York: Kodansha International, 1974, p 19. See also Stambaugh, 1999, p 80. 176 ponder this during long hours of meditation. One of the primary koans is: "What is your original face before your parents are born?"201 Like all koans, there is no way that ordinary logic can penetrate the answer. One only comes to the understanding after all the conceptual boundaries habitually imposed on experience are dissolved.

Dogen wrote:

To study the Buddha -way is to study the self; to study the self is to forget the self; to forget the self is to be verified by the myriad of dharmas; and to be verified by the myriad of dharmas is to drop off the body-mind of self as well as the body-mind of the other. There remains no trace of enlightenment, and one lets this traceless enlightenment comes forth forever and ever.202

In this text, Dogen equates the Buddha-way with the self. He asks us to begin by looking for 'self' by starting with what we are right here and now, from the inside. When we study ourselves intimately, what we meet with is the ten thousand things- myriad encounters with the world, encounters which have been internalized. In reality there is no division between inner and

201 Honrai-no-memmolu (Jap., original face), a favourite metaphor in Zen, points to the true nature, or buddha-nature, of human beings and all things. Michael S. Diener (et al.), The Shambhala Dictionary of Buddhism and Zen, 1991, Boston: Shambhala, p 87. 202 Dogen Eihei, 'Genjo Koan', Moon in a Dewdrop, San Francisco: Element Books, 1985, Kazauki Tanahashi (translator & editor), p. 70.

177 outer. Ego 'self' is forgotten and the vast dimensions of

"Formless Self" are experienced. Instead of being a debilitating experience of nihilism, Formless Self in its infinity of forms confirms our activity in the world. The perspective,~shifts from a single [ego] centre to a multi-centred perspective. Self is not a substantial thing, which we can use to stand over or apart form the world - it is the world.

When Dogen was a young Tendai Buddhist monk he encountered a serious obstacle in his spiritual understanding. According to

Tendai doctrine everyone is originally awakened or enlightened.

He encapsulated his problem in this way:

Both exoteric and esoteric Buddhism teach the primal Buddha­ nature and the original self-awakening of all sentient beings. If this is the case, why have the budd has of all ages had to awaken the longing for and seek enlightenment by engaging in ascetic practice. ?203

If all things are by nature Buddha, then why is it necessary to practice? The Tendai Buddhist position must surely mean that we are all Buddha no matter what we do. One problem is that we need to be awakened to our nature, which is seamless, and in each new instant, unique. Our individual Buddha-natures need to

203 Abe Masao, A Study of Dagen, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992, p 19.

178 be transparent to us, in fact we need to be transparent in order for

"the ten thousand things" to be truly lived. We can have no

apprehension of our nature if we are busy dragging what we

'think' we are into every situation we enter. What we encounter

instead is an image of our lives as reflected by our ego, not the

reality. Zen is the constant practice of opening to our own selves.

At the end of the Genjo Koan, Dogen relates a story about a conversation between a monk and a Zen Master.

Zen master Baoche of Mt. Mayu was fanning himself. A monk approached and said, "Master, the nature of the wind is permanent, and there is no place it does not reach. Why, then, do you fan yourself?"

"Although you understand the nature ofthe wind is permanent," Baoche replies "you do not understand that the nature of its reaching everywhere."

"What is the meaning of it reaching everywhere?" asked the monk. The master just kept fanning himself. The monk bowed deeply.204

One of Dagen's many significant contributions to Buddhism is the insight that practice and enlightenment are the same. In my own endeavours, what I am interested in is how the practice of painting is also the practice of enlightenment. A few lines later in this story, Dogen writes,

204 Dogen, 1985, pp 73-74. 179 The actualization of the buddha-dharma, the vital path of its correct transmission is like this. If you say that you do not need to fan yourself because the nature of the wind is permanent and you can have wind without fanning, you will understand neither permanence nor the nature of the wind.205

According to Dogen it is true that all things are endowed with

Buddha-nature but one must realize it in practice otherwise it remains a metaphysical abstraction. As previously mentioned,

Dogen developed a form of zazen [jp. meditation] called

Shikantaza meaning to 'just sit'. Although this form of meditation is attributed to Dogen, the identification of enlightenment and meditation can be traced to China. Hui-neng wrote in the "Platform Sutra" [Ch. T'an ching]:

... Never under any circumstances say mistakenly that meditation and wisdom are different. They are a unity, not two things. Meditation is the substance of wisdom, wisdom itself is the function of meditation. At the very moment when there is wisdom, then meditation exists in wisdom; at the very moment when there is meditation, then wisdom exists in meditation.206

To greatly over-simplify both Hui-neng and Dogen, there is nothing mysterious about Zen enlightenment. In meditation, one

'attains' a state called samahdiwhere there is unity between subject and object. When, in deep samahdi, the temple bell rings,

205 Dagen, 1985, p 74. 206 Hui-neng, cited in Francis H. Cook, Sounds of Valleys and Streams, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989, p 8. 180 there is only the sound- no bell, no listener. When this kind of meditative consciousness is carried over into a nothing to take hold of everyday life, it is an enlightened life. What Dagen terms as 'traceless enlightenment". To 'eat rice and drink tea' become enlightened activities. It seems so simple that to someone who isn't a Zen student it could all seem somewhat facile. 'Just sitting', however, is not just sitting around but a total activity, not something passive, not simply being inert. In the Shobogenzo,

Dagen elucidates the 'activities of the self' as being total exertion

[gujin], total dynamism [zenki] and, activity-unremitting [gyojiJ.207

Total Exertion (gujin)

Whenever we think of how we act in relation to the world, it is usual to regard our activity as 'assertion' of self in and over any situation. Assertion carries with it a notion that we separate from the world, that the world is in a sense passive, waiting for us to motivate it or even create it. Self is not something to be

II asserted" but II exerted". Total exertion is complete engagement not only of the individual but also the total exertion of the situation as well. Self-exertion and the world as it is inhabited in this moment are one and the same thing.

Looked at from the angle of the person who experiences the situation, it means that one identifies one hundred percent with

207 Hee-Jin Kim, Dagen Kigen: Mystical Realist, 7975. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987 edition. 1 8 1 the circumstance. Looked at from the standpoint of the situation itself, the situation is totally manifested or exerted without obstruction or contamination.208

Exertion is more easily understood when referring to human beings but in Dagen's Zen this term is understood as activity involving both sentient and insentient beings.

If you doubt the mountain's walking, you do not yet know your own walking, it is not that you do not walk but you do not know or understand your own walkirig.209

In a situation where I might be walking on a mountain, the mountain exerts through my response to it. If I respond by exerting my openness to it, then the mountain presences, it manifests itself actively to me. But even if I weren't physically there, the mountain still exerts itself. In order for any moment or anything to occur, then every single thing in the universe needs to exert itself actively- be itself totally "without obstruction or contamination". Each situation is a total situation where the entire universe presences. Nothing can occur without the entirety of the world being present.

One of the common demons encountered when undertaking Zen

208 Francis Dojun Cook, How to raise an Ox, Los Angeles: Center Publications, 1978, p 55. 209 Dagen, 1985, p 98.

182 sesshin is effort. In everyday life we strive towards a goal, make efforts to accomplish an end. In sesshin what ene wants to

'accomplish' is to be 'just here', but to 'just sit' requires powerful concentration to be precise in 'just being'. Everyday striving translates into a sincere effort of will, a desire to 'achieve' samahdi. However there is a lot of ego efforting in the 'I will accomplish .... ' It is a subtle entanglement and no amount of 'me' asserting 'my' will in this situation is going to accomplish the desired state. At every turn one finds oneself stumbling over oneself and obscuring one's own way. The right kind of effort needs to be applied. Effort needs to become exertion of the situation, not of individual will standing over a situation.

Everyday life is experienced as an endless series of situations that require negotiation through the instrumentation of the ego.

Erroneously, we come to believe that ego is the sum total of what we are. Only in a circumstance where we push up against ego boundaries and are wasted by our own efforts do we realize exactly who we are. Dagen's philosophy is not transcendental but realizational, the realization of 'who' and 'what' we are in our totality. To this end, total exertion and total dynamism are

183 inextricably linked. In Dogen Kigen, Mystical Realist, Hee-jin

Kim writes that:

Loosely speaking, the former [total exertion] addresses itself primarily to the self, whereas the latter [total dynamism] speaks to the world. Both refer to the undefiled freedom and liberation of the self and the world as the self-expression of Buddha-nature.210

Total Dynamism (zenki)

One can regard exertion as the focused activity of individual self that cannot be separated from the world in its total dynamism

[zenki].

In Zenki, Dagen's major preoccupation is with birth and death.

Dagen uses the terms both in the conventional sense- that they are the two major events in anyone's life calendar, but also in the

Buddhist sense. In each moment of our existence is both birth and death and they in no way hinder each other.

"Emancipation" means that you are emancipated from birth, in death you are emancipated from death. Thus, there is detachment from birth-and-death and penetrating birth-and­ death. Such is the complete practice of the great way. There is letting go of birth-and-death. Such is the thorough practice of the great way.211

210 Hee-jin Kim, Dagen Kigen, Mystical Realist. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1975, 1987 edition, p163. 211 Dagen, 1985, p 84. 184 Emancipation is a key term in Buddhism. One only embarks on

the rigours of Zen training because one seeks freedom, usually

from suffering. Shakyamuni Buddha abandoned his life of

palatial luxury because he needed to know why there is suffering

in the first place. In Zen, liberation is not found in escape but in

faithfulness to being. Penetration, detachment and letting go is

the continuous process. In penetrating a state of mind or a set of

conditions we fully inhabit each moment. Detachment is often

seen by non-Buddhists as a pushing away or separation from but the meaning is more clearly understood in the term 'non­

attachment'. Difficult circumstances, encounters, states of mind

do arise- it is not here that there is illusion; experience is what it

is after all. Illusion is found in the amount of baggage we attach to each situation. Seeing without attachment is to see the thing in

itself without our own projections distorting its 'buddha-nature'.

Detachment is necessary for the true penetration of conditions.

Letting go is also an aspect of detachment. Everything passes away of its own accord, letting go is simply letting be.

Dogen always insists that we abandon customary understanding.

In all three terms- Total exertion [gujin], activity-unremitting

[gyoji], and total dynamism [zenki]- there is an implication of

185 movement.212 The established usage of movement suggests a linear dimension of 'going' somewhere, heading towards in a progression of activities. Within this framework, the activities of birth and death take on meanings of transition, that is, birth is a transition to life, and death, the transition away from life. In

Dogen there is never, ever transition however there is motion.

The central tenet of all Buddhisms is that everything is impermanence, that is, everything is motion. The void is motion.

Sitting still in meditation is discovering the motion in being.

Serenity is cultivated by seeking the still and equanimous point within the motion- which naturally changes every single second.

Penetration, detachment and letting go is ceaseless practice.

Do not think flowing is like wind and rain moving from east to west. The entire world is not unchangeable, it is not immovable. It flows. Flowing is like spring. Spring with all its numerous aspects is called flowing. When spring flows there is nothing outside spring. Study this in detail.213

In all of Dagen's philosophy, he is careful to do away with anthropomocentrism that he would regard as a limited view that places us erroneously outside the totality of existence.

212 Stambaugh, 1999, p 8. 213 Dogen, 1985, p 80. 186 Dagen continues:

In your study of flowing, if you imagine the objective to be outside yourself and that you flow and move through hundreds and thousands of worlds, for hundreds, thousands, and myriads of eons, you have not devotedly studied the buddha way.214

The entire world is not unchangeable, it is not immovable. It flows. Self is not a static, immutable object that flows from east to west, birth to death. Self is the flowing and is entirely inseparable from the total dynamism of the universe. This reality is embodied in Zen art. In traditional Ch'an and Zen painting we see it clearly in the way the elements of landscape are barely discernable -large expanses of emptiness offset by marks that are suggestive of some kind of figuration. It is not that we see static objects but a dynamic and vibrant presencing [figure 23].

Activity-unremitting (gyoji)

Zen Buddhism is essentially atheistic; there is no god who transcends phenomenal existence- because all things are the One

Mind, the complete body. Everything is part of one indivisible existence. As Ruth Fuller Sasaki put it, there is 'only THIS- capital

THIS IS" and every event from microcosmic to cosmological'is

214 ibid. 187 Figure 23: Liang K'ai, Snow Scene, early 1Jih century China, colour on silk, 111 x 50 em. National Museum, Tokyo. but a temporary manifestation of THIS in activity•.215 Activity- unremitting [gyoji] is the unbroken practice of THIS IS and is the

'non-substantial' substructure for everything- it flows through and is everything. However large the THIS IS is, it is clear for

Dagen that we are not caught up in the process passively. Dagen wrote that "because of our activity-unremitting the ring of the

Way is possessed of its power" .216 Our workings are intermeshed within the fabric of activity-unremitting. In an ancient Taoist fable, there is a fisherman so skilled in The Way that he can cast a fine silken thread and catch a fish without breaking the line. He dances the Tao with such complete unity that he can to and fro with the fish until the right moment has arrived to reel it in. There is a misconception that wu-wei or non-interference is about being passive, but passivity also implies a dualism- there is a 'somebody' who gets carried by the flow.

Wu-wei is awareness, immersion and action in the total activity of the present.

A great sage leaves birth and death to mind, body, the way and birth and death. The emergence of this experience does not depend on past or present, but awesome presence of practicing buddha is immediately and fully practiced. As the circle of the

215 Ruth Fuller Sasaki, 'Zen: a method for religious awakening', in Nancy Wilson Ross (editor), The World of Zen, New York: Vintage Press, 1960 p 18. 216 Stambaugh, 1999, p 12. 189 way, the experience of birth and death, body and mind, is practiced right away217

For Dagen, existence cannot depend on notions of past and present, that there can be no sense of 'origin' that denotes a causal event in the past working towards something in its future.

Unlike Hegel's thesis, antithesis and synthesis, Dagen's perspective does not develop from a lower to a higher level. Each step is absolute and inclusive of all other steps. Everything that ever was is right here now, so it cannot 'originate' or depend on

'past' or 'present'. To know this, we are required to be the

'awesome presence of practicing buddha'- total exertion.

Dagen also wrote:

Thus ["all existence"] ... not a being in isolation because it appropriates all; not a being existent without a beginning because "the What presents itself as it is," not a being existing with a beginning because "One's everyday mind is the Way" .218

Humanity is basically 'future- oriented'; the direction of our lives is a striving towards something. Meaning has in a sense a 'future' or at least 'elsewhere' orientation, the emphasis is removed from the 'in and of itself' to an intention beyond. The Zen Buddhist

217 Gyobutsu ligi [Awesome presence of a Practicing Buddha]1241- email to author from Kazuaki Tanahashi. 218 Stambaugh, 1999, p 13. 190 answer to the question 'Why?' is' because it is so.' In the above passage Dogen is stating that there is no such thing as beginning

[or end] because existence simply is as it is. Everything is Tathata.

If one's apprehension of existence develops through ego-form alone, then the Buddhist standpoint of 'things exist because they exist' carries with it the shadow of defeatism and determinism. It is neither- it is a profound liberation. This standpoint in no way is an abdication of responsibility or powerlessness in the face of

'that's simply the way things are and there's nothing I can do about it'. One is left to utterly inhabit and enact one's life.

PAINTING AS PRACTICE OF THE WAY

Dokan "Circle of the Way"

There are a number of references to dokan or 'Circle of the Way' in Dagen's writing. The "Way" is a common term shared by many religions. It usually denotes the path of the 'true' seeker who must devote many arduous years of overcoming obstacles in order arrive at the final destination which is usually

'enlightenment'. For Dogen, however, the "way" is not a metaphor for journeying to the absolute but that each moment of practice encompasses enlightenment. Dokan is the "circle of the way"- the circle of practice and enlightenment are renewed from moment to moment.

1 91 On the great road of the buddha ancestors there is always unsurpassable practice, continuous and sustained. It forms the circle of the way and is never cut off. Between aspiration, practice, enlightenment and nirvana, there is not a moment's gap; continuous practice is the circle of theway.219

There is, of course, a strong Taoist flavour to Dagen's interpretation of the "Way"- given that he spent four years in a

Chinese Zen Monastery this is not surprising. Lao-tzu writes that the Way or tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. To

'name' anything is to circumscribe it conceptually, and to abstract it away from what it is. Any attempt to define the Tao is thus contrary to its own nature. However, having stated that we will push on none-the-less and talk about the Way and it is Heidegger to whom we turn. He had a lot to say about the Way. In a collection of essays entitled "Woodpaths" he wrote:

Wood is an old name for forest. In the wood are paths that mostly wind along until they end quite suddenly in an impenetrable thicket. They are called "woodpaths". Each goes its peculiar way, but in the same forest. Often it seems as though one were identical to another. Yet it only seems so. Woodcutters and foresters are familiar with these paths. They know what it means to be on the "woodpath ". 22o

219 Dogen, quoted in Tanahashi, Kazuaki, 'Introduction', Dogen Eihei, Enlightenment Unfolds: the essential teachings of Zen Master Dagen, Boston, Shambhala, 1999, Kazuaki Tanahashi (editor), p xxviii. 220 Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, New York: Harper and Rowe, 1977, D. H. Krell (editor), p 34. See also Graham Parkes (editor), Heidegger and Asian Thought, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1987, p 80. 192 Woodpaths are very confusing because they appear to lead nowhere and seem useless, but this is if we look at them from an idea that a path is supposed to go somewhere, after all paths are meant to take us from A to B. What excites Heidegger is the very notion that they in fact don't lead anywhere- what they are, is a trace of the woodcutter's activity. For Heidegger, it is the philosophical implication of the woodcutter's 'waying', which he aligns to his notion of 'thinking'. Thinking is thoroughly and essentially questioning a questioning which cannot be stilled or

'solved' by an answer, a questioning that cannot calculate in advance the direction it will be Jed, let alone the direction at which it will arrive. 221

For Heidegger, the way originates with the movement of walking on it. The Way is the movement. Dagen wrote that Because of our activity-unremitting the ring of the Way is possessed of its power. Both Heidegger and Dagen are stating that we are constantly involved in the process of making 'the way'.

221 D. H. Krell, 'Introduction', in Heidegger, 1977. See also Parkes, 1987, p 80.

193 Heidegger wrote:

Thinking itself is a way. We respond to the way only by remaining underway... We must get on the way, that is, must take the steps by which alone the way becomes a way. The way of thinking cannot be traced from somewhere to somewhere like a well-worn rut, nor does it exist as such in any place. Only when we walk on it, and in no other fashion, only, that is, by thoughtful questioning, are we on the move on the way. This movement is what allows the way to come forward?222

In Reinhardt's copious notes he makes many references to

Taoism. One of his favoured Chinese expressions was "The end is the beginning". Another way to put it, in the light of both

Dagen and Heidegger, is that there is no beginning and no end.

Given Dagen's [and Heidegger's] view that actual time can only exist in the absolute now, there is never an initial point of departure and arrival. The actuality is we are always making the

'way'- as long as we exist we are underway, in fact ceaselessly practicing the 'way'. Dagen's total exertion, total dynamism and activity unremitting are the all-encompassing practice of the way, from the individual standpoint of beings to the total workings of the cosmos.

222 Parkes, 1987, p 81, and Martin Heidegger, On the way to language, New York: Harper and Row, 1971, Peter D. Hertz, (translator), p 91.

194 Heidegger writes of the way as a 'reaching', not in the sense of towards a goal that requires a durational notion of existence but that reaching is part of the activity of 'waying'. The thing reached for and the reaching belong together. Without being particularly conscious of it (until I established a Zen practice) painting for me has always been 'practice of the way'. Of course, taking heed of

Dogen and Heidegger, any creative endeavour is practicing the way, however we might understand the process. The reaching and the thing reached for exist within each other. Anything I might reach for, I am reaching for because it already exists in me, as a question in myself that has arisen because the world is inside me. The principle I work with is there is no s.uch thing as superficial attraction- whatever one takes pleasure (or pain) from reveals how profoundly we are connected to the world.

Heidegger gave a lecture series entitled What Calls for Thinking? where he brings "calling" into relation with the way. He wrote:

"In the widest sense, "to call" means to set in motion, to get something underway".223 The practice sustaining my work is to gravitate to whatever "calls" me most insistently. The use of photocopies of European Old Masters, specific colours and more recently the 'splat' are the things that have 'called' me most

223 Martin Heidegger, quoted in Parkes, 1987, p 84, and Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, New York: Harper and Row, 1968, Fred D. Wiek and J, Glenn Gray, (translators), p 117. 195 relentlessly. Each of these components is the locus for a series of questions to emerge. The photocopies were the occasion for questions about loss, redemption and the nature of the copy and original to be confronted. Colour and gesture are the site of more questions. In no sense, however are there 'answers' to these questions, what is revealed is more what lies before me and in me.

The Tao is deeply mysterious, of all the possibilities that are present in any given moment, how is it that 'this' or 'that' is called into being for me? There is a precision in the configuration of self and the world- one that is neither deterministic nor subject to individual will. If one is a follower of the Way, the 'power' one obtains is one of union and liberation through vast perspective.

For Dogen ''the way the self arrays itself is the form of the entire world" .224

And Heidegger, resonating with Dagen's words, wrote:

Yet Tao could be the way that gives all ways, the very source of our power to think what reason, mind, meaning, logos properly mean to say- properly, by their proper nature ... Perhaps the enigmatic power of today's reign of method also, and indeed pre­ eminently, stems from the fact that the methods, notwithstanding their efficiency, are after all merely the run off of a great hidden

224 Dogen, 1985 p. 77 196 stream which moves all things along and makes way for everything. All is way.225

Heidegger certainly was not a Buddhist but we do find that he has a lot of sympathy with Eastern thought. Heidegger writes about thinking in a way that if is not precisely meditation is at least meditative thinking. Thinking, for Heidegger was experiential, not conceptual. In Discourse on Thinking he wrote "Yet releasment toward things and openness for the mystery befall us automatically They are nothing accidental. Both thrive only out of ceaseless heartfelt thinking. "226 Thinking is not of the calculative variety that determines in advance where we are to arrive. The terms he used were Besinnung that is a 'sensing' that includes the entire being, both body and mind. Andenken, which has been translated as 'remembrance' or 'recollection', can also be described as a movement towards something. Interestingly

Heidegger reverses the direction of the 'I' thinking toward something to make it more like being 'called' by something - which I have alluded to as the basis for my own practice. Dagen, never too far away from my thoughts, also presents himself here.

He wrote "to carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience

225 Parkes, 1987, p 84, and Heidegger, 1968, p 92. 226 Joan Stambaugh, 'Masao Abe and Martin Heidegger', in Donald W. Mitchell (editor), Masao Abe: a Zen Life of Dialogue, Boston: Charles E. Tuttle, 1998, p 297. 197 themselves is awakening" .227 It is delusion to think that self

comes forward to confirm the world; enlightenment is the world

coming toward the self to confirm the self.

It is not a huge leap to see how Heideggerian 'thinking' and

Degen's claim that practice and enlightenment are the same can

be related to painting. Firstly, to elicit beingness means

forgetting the ego-self, to be confirmed by 'the myriad things'­

cultivating openness to the world that precludes any pre­

conceptions. Secondly, there are things which 'call' and if we are

attentive enough, they demonstrate how we are connected to the

world. The 'thinking through' what has presented itself is non­

calculative, non-objectifying, and non-conceptualizing.

Shikantaza is faithfulness to being, but it is not passive- it is the

active contemplative mind which is also pure 'seeking•.228

Painting is faithfulness to this kind of thinking that uses one's

entire body and mind and thinks through the things in the world that present themselves as riddles. In no way can the 'objects' of the 'thinking through' be manufactured. For instance, I can't

decide to make work about 'identity' which is already doomed in the sense there is already a conceptual closure, however there is a

narrative of sorts in that what is revealed is the total dynamism of

227 Dagen, 1985, p 69

228 Ibid, p 31. 198 the world, and within that 'identity' may be an issue. My painting

'instruments', to borrow from Anna Chave's use in reference to

Rothko, are the grid, colour, the splat and the portrait.

The Grid

The most prominent structural element in my painting is the grid.

Like Reinhardt, my grid is meant to state underlying oneness as the first principle, however there is an added dimension, in that it is not used only to delineate surface unity but is modular as well.

The deployment of the grid in my work may owe its origins to its

Modernist forebears but philosophically it functions spatially as combination of Hua-yen and Dagen. In Hua-yen Buddhism, spiritual energy moves outwardly through an infinite number of interconnections. The Hua-yen matrix in potentiality stretches to infinity and presents the underlying unity between things. Hua

Yen holds that each phenomenon is of ultimate value because it is intrinsic to the 'now'- energy is diffused centrifugally throughout the universe. In Dagen we find that the path of selfhood and individuated form is on the other side to the infinity of Hua Yen.­

Dagen focuses more on how every single thing dwells within its

"dharma-situation' absolutely. The energy described by Dagen is inward and centripetal. His writing on total exertion [gujin], activity-unremitting [gyojtl, and total dynamism [zenki] are his

199 understanding of what constitutes each absolute moment of self

in the world. Noted Dagen scholar, Hee-jin Kim describes the

spiritual energy of both as complementary- neither is actually

complete without the other.229 The absolute nature of self, the

no-self of impermanence and the ineffable are not mutually

exclusive- they are all facets of being. What I am interested in is

enacting the relationship between absolute selfhood and the web

of conditionality, which both allows self to come into being and at

the same time causes self to be empty. The modular nature of

the grid gives me structural freedom. In theory, any one of my

paintings could extend out to infinity and similarly, each unit can

be regarded as a painting in itself. The individual panel is

equivalent to a jewel in the Hua-yen "Net of lndra". The

configurations of units whether it is 2; 5; 7; 20 or 1000 panels

constitute a moment. In any other given moment the painting

could be dismantled and a new configuration can occur.

Although each single unit can be regarded as a complete painting

in itself, a fullness of meaning is achieved because it exists in

relation to other units. Each configuration is also a painting in

itself but, as a singular entity, it relies on the relationship of its constituent parts for its existence. I have included in the

illustrations a photograph of my studio since my working method

229 Hee-jin Kim, 'Existence/Time as the Way the Ascesis', The Eastern Buddhist, 200 demonstrates the Buddhist principle of how all phenomena are aggregations of elements that re-configure ceaselessly from moment to moment [figure 24]. All the panels I use are cut the same size and are therefore interchangeable. A 'completed' painting is always made up of bits and pieces from panels painted on previous and current occasions. I never set out to make a painting from scratch. Panels worked on from the past are-always part of the aggregation. The grid embodies two very significant and seemingly opposed ideas- the boundless and the particular.

In 'The Originality of the Avant-Garde', Rosalind Krauss critiques the grid. She writes "for what is striking about the grid is that ... it is extremely restrictive .... when we come to examine the careers of those artists who have been most committed to the grid ... their work virtually ceases to develop and be comes involved, instead, in repetition".230 She cites Agnes Martin and Ad Reinhardt as artists 'caged' by the grid.231 What Krauss does not take up is the contemplative. For Reinhardt "the absolute stasis of the grid, lack of hierarchy, of center, of inflection .. .its hostility to narrative".

[Krauss] is entirely to the point. Reinhardt deals with the absolute

'now', you cannot have narrative if your work is concerned with

230 Rosalind Krauss, 'The Originality of the Avant-Garde', in Harrison and Wood, 1992, p 1062. 2311bid. 201 Figure 24: Lindy Lee in Studio, Wigram Rd., Glebe, Sydney, 2000. (photo Chris Pavlich The Australian) 'this moment'. If you are concerned with 'this moment' you are dealing with contemplation, that is, meditation. In meditation form needs to be rigourously held in order for the experience of

being to be thoroughly encountered.

Colour

Both Rothko and Reinhardt abhorred the idea that they could be considered as colourists and yet colour was fundamental to their

practices. There can be no doubt that Rothko employed it with

unrivalled nuance and fullness. Reinhardt wanted his work to be colourless but as I have written his colorlessness is iridescent. In the depths of the darkness, Reinhardt's paintings are brimful of ungraspable, unknowable colour. In my work, I concede quite openly that colour is one of my primary tools.

Colour is easily theorized in a way that symbolic and cultural content can be the subject of intellectual discourse but what is of interest to me is how colour triggers associative meaning even before we are conscious of it. To use a Merleau-ponty term, colour has an 'invisible lining' 232 According to Merleau-ponty, we only know red because it exists in the world- we know it

232 Maurice Merleau-ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Northwestern University, 1968, p131.

203 through our experience of it. When we see red, we see the red of

Mother's red dress, the red of blood, the red of flesh and vitality,

the red of the red flag of China, the red of heat, the red of anger

and so on. These articulations are not immediately in our

consciousness but they are present to us nonetheless. In terms of

colour, we often recognize that we are brinking on a mood or a

series of associative connections before they are clearly discerned

through language. Every few years, a colour has appeared in my

consciousness that then becomes the focus for the riddles

constellated in my life. The process is entirely intuitive, and, in

the beginning, blind. These kinds of attractions are not merely

aesthetic choices, often a colour has arrived which 'I' might not be

particularly fond of but it is nonetheless insistent. The colours in

my 'autobiography~n-order~of appearance, are black; red;

ultramarine blue; purple; orange and a light green, reminiscent of

celadon and jade. Each colour is a koafi233 a question that cannot

be answered using intellect. The 'answer' can only be demonstrated when there is some self-realization. The process is

233 Although there is a koan curriculum, which was formalized by Japanese Zen monk Hakuin [1689-1768] and is still currently being used by Zen students, there are also 'natural koans'. These 'natural koans' relate directly to the subjectivity and experience of the individual student.

204 cumulative, and increasingly as the range continues to grow, although I might in the instance of a single painting use only one colour, all the other colours are still implied.

For an installation entitled "No Up, No Down -I Am The 10,000

Things" I did at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1995, I wrote this accompanying text [figure 25]:234

BLACK The underlying mystery and unity of all things,

Invisible Unseeing Unseen Silent Motion of Non-events Event Without Moment Utmost Causation Causeless Ceaseless Indeterminate Awareness of hidden things Movement Beyond Itself to its Idea Pervasive Presence Nothing to take hold of Darkness & Excessive Brightness Clarity & Obscurity Illumination Loss of Illumination Loss Death Forfeiture Of Fear and Exultation Black is not as Black as all that

RED Blood red vitality, passion, fire, life

Fortuity Actuality To the Limits of Beauty Carnal Corporeal Matter Substance Volition Deeds and Words Virtue, Moral Order and the Discretion of Human Gesture The Psychology of Some Pure Event Zip! Zero! Shimmer! This instant- without limit! Heartbeat and Duration All Spirit in the End Becomes Bodily Visibly

234 Lindy Lee, 'No Up, No Down- I Am The 10,000 Things', Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1995.

205 BLUE Deep, vast and introspective -the life of the spirit

Recognition of Will Resignation of Will Abdication of Will Fidelity and Grace Remembrance Evocation Separation From Love Separation from Error Separation from Appearances Translucent+ Silent My Utopia Darkness and Excessive Brightness Illumination Loss of Illumination Redemption Transformation Appearance Shines

PURPLE The direct mix of blue and red it is often dark and murky, it is also very rich.

Ascensional Psyche

Uncertain Neither Choice nor Chance Grit Endurance Reluctance Hesitation Sedulity Perseverance Binding Unconsoling Struggling in the Ocean of Yes and No Of Fear and Exultation From an Undeciphered World Economy of Whispers\ The Imagined Disharmony of the Spheres Virtue in the Process of Becoming Ulterior Function The Pleasure of Perfect opposition The Psychology of Forgetting To Move Beyond Choice The Fiftieth Gate

ORANGE The black stone at the centre of the universe. pure transmission, gold, the luminosity in each and every thing that becomes apparent when given proper attention.

The True Mystery of Mercy Soundless Fate Fidelity and Grace Honour the Black Black+IBack+Biack Appearance Shines Now!

206 - · JIIU· • .~ ·-. u 11Pi . "" ·~ 1

~,,,,,,

Figure 25: Lindy Lee, No Up, No Down, I am the 10,000 Things, 1995, installation, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Many of these phrases are culled from my reading at the time­ usually Nietzsche, Reinhardt and various Zen texts. They have also appeared as the titles of work. In the act of uncovering the many associations that these colours have for me, I realized how richly they evoke the 10,000Things. Dogen's myriad of dharmas, which arise to authenticate the self, is often translated as the

"10,000Things" denoting infinite number of experiences that combine together to make the 'self'.

When I wrote this text, "green" had not yet appeared. It's colouring- a mix of jade and celadon, is evocative of the oceanic as well as harking back to my ancestral heritage, but at the most personal level it is this dilemma. All things exist as an intrinsic part of the ocean of coming and going, each thing is empty by virtue of interdependence but each thing exists and must be clearly seen in its absolute truth. This applies particularly to the

'myself' in relation to the rest of the world. How do you hold the

'absoluteness' of self without being stuck in either of the extreme notions of the 'form only' standpoint- permanent essence and ego projection or the 'emptiness' pole of complete self-negation in face of the infinity of relationships that make up the universe.

208 THE SPLAT

The way the self arrays itself is the form of the entire world. See each thing in this entire world as a moment in time. Things do not hinder one another, just as moments do not hinder one and other. The way-seeking mind arises in this moment. A way-seeking moment arises in this mind. It is the same with practice and attaining the way. Thus the setting itself out in array sees itself. This is the understanding that self is time.235

Dagen's understanding never sees 'self' in any way as a

contained subject that confronts the world. When Dagen speaks

of 'self' in 'array', he is speaking of self as a moment which

encapsulates the totality of the universe as it exists in that second.

Fundamentally, there is nothing 'outside' of self- The entire

universe is the dharma body of the seJf.236 In the last few years the 'splat' has emerged as a principal element in my work [figure

26]. This 'splat' may seem a reference to Western abstract

expressionism but it bears a much stronger affinity to the tradition of Chinese Ch'an Buddhist "Flung Ink" painting. In Gaze

in the Expanded Field, Norman Bryson wrote:

235 Dagen, 1985, p 77. 236 ibid, p 163. 209 Figure 26: Lindy Lee, Home Departure 1999, oil, wax, polymer paint on board. 150 x 164 em. In the case of flung ink painting, Ch'an's solutions is to disfigure the image, the bipolar view, by opening onto the whole force of randomness. As the ink is cast, it flies out of the enclosure or tunnel of the frame, and opens onto the field of material transformations that constitute the universal surround. The flinging of the ink marks the surrender of the fixed form of the image to the global configuration of forces that subtends it. Eidos is scattered to the four winds. The image is made to float on the forces outside the frame. It is thrown as one throws dice. What breaks into the image is the rest of the universe.237

Bryson gives a useful interpretation of the process of flung ink, however he does not grasp the full implications in terms of selfhood. He speaks of the forces of 'randomness' but situations are only random if we do not see things as their totality. From a

Zen perspective, it is not the randomness that is opened out but the universe exactly as it is- in that configuration, in this particular moment and if one takes on Dagen's perspective, the

'self' which flings the ink is indeed empty of 'ego-self' but is not a passive conduit- The way the self arrays itself is the form of the entire world. 'Self' is not inactive but it does not assert itself over and above any situation, it is the situation- the site of convocation, a gathering up of the momentum of the entire universe at that point. It is as Bryson describes, the cast ink does mark the surrender of fixed form [of both image and self] but what Bryson misses is that it is the dharma body as the entire

237 Norman Bryson, 'The Gaze in the Expanded Field', in Hal Foster (editor), Vision and Visuality: Discussions in Contemporary Culture, Number 2, Seattle: Bay Press, 1988, p 103. 2 11 universe that casts the ink. The totality of everything is expressed in the flinging of the ink and in the image that results. A master calligrapher is able to read states of mind by reading the strokes a student produces with a brush. Each moment of self- consciousness, unconfidence/overconfidence, and lack of integration is revealed in the tremor or brashness of the line. It is the same with the splat and splash of flung ink. This method of painting is not concerned with individual expression, as are many

Western Expressionist movements of the past century but rather the 'inner law' of the cosmos. In an essay in aesthetics, entitled

"The One Stroke Method", Buddhist monk Shih-t'ao [d.1718] wrote "this one-stroke contains in itself the universe and beyond; thousand of myriads of strokes all begin and end here... A man should-be able~to shuwthe entire universe in one stroke".238 For the ancient Chinese the dynamism of the universe presences in the perfect stroke whether it is a brushstroke or ink dot. The term shi was used for this vital energy or breath of the universe. This is a term contemporary Western culture is familiar with however there is another meaning that is more difficult to translate; Shi also indicates what falls between the static and the dynamic. For the Chinese, reciprocity between oppositions fuelled the universe.

238 In David E. Cooper [ed.], Aesthetics: The Classic Readings, Oxford: Blackwell Publications, 1997, p. 67. 212 A painting with shimaintains the tension between what is perceptible and what is imperceptible, between Form and

Emptiness, tathata and sunyata, absolute self and the 10,000 things. The slightness of the ink stroke in a Chinese watercolour not only denotes the rock but the immensity of the landscape as well,- the solidity of matter evoking simultaneously mutability. In my painting, this tension is expressed in the oppositions between the rigid form of the grid and the motion implied by the splats, abstraction and figuration, darkness and luminosity, the historical and the unhistorical.

In 1995, I went to Beijing Art Academy to take up an artist's residency for four months. I had intended to study calligraphy, however I discovered after a very short time that it was overloaded with social codes- the obligation to Chinese history was too burdensome and restrictive for the explorations I wanted to pursue. The silence of painting, which I had sought, was overlayed with nationalistic baggage. Calligraphy in China, as it was revealed to me then, was a very patriotic activity. After initial disappointment, the experience was liberating both creatively and personally. In relation to identity, I realized that I am not Chinese in any of the ways in which that term might usually conjure but I am free to re-configure my own

213 Chineseness. The same applies to the 'splats'. In my intention towards silence and self-expression, in the Zen sense, I am very loosely speaking, re-inventing calligraphy. There are two modes used- mostly I use hot wax, pigmented with oil colour, as the splatting 'agent' which ensures that the gesture lands as it is exactly- the wax sets at the moment of impact. I also employ the fluidity of inks and washes, which are left to dry without intervention on my part. In both I have no way of determining the end result. As Bryson puts it, everything that subtends the universe at that moment makes the image.

The Portrait

There is one obvious departure from Rothko and Reinhardt in my work- the use of figuration. For Rothko and Reinhardt the figurative was too fraught with historical associations that obscured rather than clarified experience. My dilemma was that temperamentally, I am an abstract painter, that is, my concerns are about beingness, which can't be pinned down through representation. However at the time I started out to be a painter, it was abstraction that was too heavily coded. In some ways, it was the same problem I faced with calligraphy- no matter that the original intention was of silence and directness, the processes of history inevitably overlaid additional meanings on top of original intention. 214 The essential task in writing this thesis is to understand why

silence in painting is such a priority for me. The transmission of

Zen teachings is based on direct apprehension of things-as-they­

are, being-as-it-is, beyond words. Rothko and Reinhardt used

abstraction to assert 'being' as fundamental to the workings of

painting. Despite their differences, they both conveyed

momentum and flux in their work in a way that was beyond word

or image. They had at their disposal a new language- abstraction

that had not been exhausted in terms of primary stylistic

innovation. For me, however, my early attempts to find a direct,

non-representational way of painting failed, every brushstroke

was frustratingly full of references to the history of Modernist

Abstraction. Seeing Rothko and Reinhardt's work in the flesh

showed me that silence in the richest sense could be experienced

in painting but as an artist living in a different epoch, abstraction

had become an 'ism' and along with every other art 'ism'.

Reinhardt reflected Not ask how did art once arise, rather how does it arise ever again in each genuine work anew.239 In his

black paintings that genuine moment arises hypnotically afresh over and over again but they arose out of a particular historical

239 Ad Reinhardt, '[Art-as-Art]', c. 1966-1967, cited in Rose, 1975, p 75. 215 moment. The moment we live in is Postmodern, where amongst other issues the glut of images and information is a formidable aspect of our times: nothing is new, everything seems derivative.

Living with so many representations provokes questions about what is authentic and real. From my Zen standpoint, authenticity is recovered in direct engagement with the world- in first degree experience of The 10,000 Things. What is real is the concrete reality of things-as-they-are, conditioned through the absolute law of impermanence. Rothko and Reinhardt chose non-figuration as means to express evanescence in being whereas I include figuration in order to re-invent the possibility of presenting beingness in painting. Words and images too are evanescent because they are also subject to transience. Dogen wrote a great number of words in his lifetime including this waka:

Not limited By language It is ceaselessly expressed So, too, the way of letters Can display but not exhaust It 240

240 Dagen Eihei, 'Furyu monji' ('No reliance on words or letters'), cited in Steven Heine (editor), The Zen Poetry of Dagen, Boston: Tuttle Publishing, 1997, p.103.

216 Words can be a direct means of achieving a plenitude of meanings and ideas, which are multivalent rather than merely descriptive- there is a longstanding tradition within Zen to offer poetry as demonstrations of states of enlightenment. Dagen wrote: "It is a pity that [the conventional Zen Masters] do not know that thought is words and phrases or that words and phrases release [or break though] thought". 241 Images can also break through representation. For instance, Rembrandt evokes sublime and revelatory moments in his portraits, which open out endlessly to existence rather than define and delimit. In the best of portraiture, what is presented is never definitive but an infinite number of fleeting disclosures. Occasionally the splats scattered over the faces in some of my paintings are misunderstood as violent erasure. The splats do obscure details of the face but for me, the portraits and splats are fundamentally the same. Each is the coalescence of a singular moment in time, which all phenomena are. Splatting over the faces enriches the sense of evanescence [figure 27].

The Dark of Absolute Freedom

This chapter began with identifying the central question behind my work as the nature of who 'I' am- a question in all probability

242oogen Eihei, cited in Heine, 1997, p 3. 217 formed in childhood when I first noticed that I was 'different'.

From very early, I experienced alienation from both 'White'

Australia and 'Chinese' Australia. When I went to school I felt like

everyone else but I certainly didn't look like anyone else. My

Brisbane childhood and adolescence was full of schoolyard and

more sophisticated adult racist innuendo. The "White Australia

Policy" was still in force when I was in High School. However, I

experienced an even stronger sense of alienation from the

Chinese community where I might have looked like everyone but I certainly didn't feel it. Their frames of reference were foreign to

me and besides that the signals sent out from Chinese Australians were very mixed. In his slide performance "Sadness". William

Yang tells of how he found out that he was Chinese: on his first day at school in North Queensland, William was taunted by classmates as a "Ching-chong Chinaman." He didn't understand what that meant but he knew it was something evil. This was confirmed by his brother who replied to William's questions about this by saying with glee, "Yeah, and you'd better get used

218 Figure 27: Lindy Lee, Blood Vertica/1999, oil, wax, polymer paint on board. 210 x 30 em. to it!" The message I was given by my family was to act 'whiter than white', that is, assimilate or suffer the consequences of being different but then again I was supposed to be proud of my ancestral heritage too. Self-image was distorted through racism from both sides. Being advised to bury essential aspects of who you are- even if the advice is given with the best intention­ results in unconsciously thinking there is something shameful and unacceptable in what you are. It's hardly surprising that my work revolves around questions of what 'self' is. My shift in focus from

Postmodern appropriation to loosely speaking the 'Identity politics' of the 1990s was less a transition than an evolutionary process.

As I have already outlined, one of the most liberating experiences

I have had was returning to China where I discovered that I wasn't

Chinese but this epiphany had to have a framework to develop in and that was Zen Buddhism. Where Ad Reinhardt was eclectic in his choices of spiritual influence, I am not. As a spiritual path, only Zen (with its rich flavouring of Taoism) is of essential interest to me. Maybe the reasons are a matter oftemperament as much as anything else- I like rising at dawn for long hours of meditation, and, in part, it is a reclamation of my own ancestral heritage. I wonder, sometimes, how it is that my parents two

220 most recalcitrantly 'Western' children took to Chinese ways- my

second oldest brother returned to live in China and I took to the

great Ch'an Masters.

In all of my meanderings through Nietzsche, Heidegger, Rothko,

Reinhardt and Dagen, am I any closer to discovering what 'self'

is? I think so and the following koan sums it up for me:

When Tozan was a young monk, he was leaving Ungan. He asked, "After your death, If I am asked by others whether or not I have your portrait [the essence of your Dharma] what should I answer?"

Ungan, after a long pause, answered, "Just this, this!"242

Tozan pondered the meaning of" Just this. this!" and sometime

later, while he was crossing a stream, caught sight of his

reflection and thoroughly awakened to the meaning of his

Master's mysterious words. He composed these lines after his

experience:

I meet him wherever I go. He is the same as me, Yet I am not he! Only if you understand this Will you identify with Tathata243

242 Tozan and Ungan were the Japanese names for the Chinese masters Dongshan and Yunyan. 243 "Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism" tr. Chang Chung-Yuan p.60

221 Nothing I can ever say about myself or anyone else will ever give adequate explanation of who I am or anybody else is, and yet in every instance here each of us is, in complete totality. Individual actuality is an absolute and changing aggregation of conditions and experience. There is nothing fixed about 'me'. The word

'enlightenment' is often exchanged for the term 'awakened'-

Shakyamuni Buddha is also known as the" Awakened One". In the sleepy thickness of afternoon meditation in the early days of

Sesshin, the Tanto will often admonish students to "wake up! "244. The admonishment is not just about literally shaking off the tiredness but awaking to one's original nature, that is, to be grounded in each changing moment.

For most of this chapter, I have concentrated on developing my philosophical standpoint rather than describing my work but painting is a way of thinking through one's life in Heidegger's and

Dogen's sense. That is, I am making 'the Way' as I walk- practice and 'enlightenment' are realized in the same moment. What is realized in each moment is 'self', precisely as Dogen puts forward

- 'self' is the flowing and is entirely inseparable from the total dynamism of the universe. All of the 'signature' characteristics of

245 Tanto is the Japanese term for the Senior Zen student in charge of the Meditation Hall (Dojo) during Sesshin 222 my work, the grid, colour, faces and splats have developed over a lifetime because I am driven towards this understanding. The grid concerns interconnectedness, the colours are 'the 10,000 things'. The portraits and the splats present form as an aspect of ebbing and flowing in the ocean of coming and going.

223 Conclusion

The levels of identification I feel for Rothko and Reinhardt are complex.

For Rothko, there is a profound empathy for his sense of division from the world and a recognition of how important one's own 'will' or driveness and tenacity can validate 'self'. Reflecting back to the beginning, when I was trying to find a shape for this thesis, it was

Reinhardt who I esteemed most. I had thought that I had outgrown

Rothko but in fact, in the course of all the writing and thinking, I have grown back into him again. Maybe one of the single most important events for me as an artist was traveling to Paris to see the Rothko retrospective. I joined the ranks of those who have wept before his paintings. Whatever his shortcomings, conceits and stuckedness or maybe because of them, he allowed us, his believers, to experience

'unexpected revelations'. Rothko was faithful to his own imperfections and so produced the 'miracles' he sought.

Emotional identification from his viewers is not something that

Reinhardt would have approved of. The one unequivocal thing I can say about Reinhardt is that he is still elusive to me and no doubt, he would have approved of that. I can, and have named the reasons for why his work is so important in its influence on my own practice- his sense of rigor, ritual, repetition, silence, meditation and timelessness,

224 but at the end of the day, no matter how many erudite words I write about Reinhardt's work, they cannot contain the experience of it. In the l_ast chapter, I called upon Zen monk Tozan's enlightenment experience as a way of expressing what 'self' is. Master Ungan's reply to Tozan's question about what the essence of his portrait might be was, "Just this, this!". The same can be said for Reinhardt's work.

The darkness of his 'black' paintings does not lead us to obscure and murky depths but to moments of illumination of 'just this, this!'.

My work may or may not have anything like Rothko's grandeur or

Reinhardt's rigor but it too uses silence, immediacy and my own understanding of voidness as central issues. In a very real sense, my art practice began from the childhood ponderingsabout what "I" was.

Seeing Rothko and Reinhardt's work, in different but essential ways, provided a compelling glimpse into an authentic substratum of being ulterior to opinion, attitude and discourse. Their paintings are never

'about' anything- they are states of being.

For my generation of artists, the question and pursuit of originality was a very vexing question. Certainly the nature of 'originality' was heavily scrutinized in the 1980s with the advent of Appropriation Art and

225 Postmodernism.245 Where the-1980s crit!q_ue of originality focused on the impossibility of anything but repetition, my work critiqued originality and the artist from a truer originality. For me, the problem with privileging the 'original' is that it diverts attention from the more meaningful question of what it is to be authentic, that is, to be true to one's circumstances and life. Originality is too polluted with notions of

'newness' and as I have stated in Chapter 4, we are all to a degree,

'bad' copies. The only way we can know our own 'authenticity' is through our direct experience of beingness. Reinhardt had written prolifically during his lifetime and all of it is fascinating but the statement which has become like a personal"koan" to me is Not ask how did art once arise, rather how does it arise ever again in each genuine work anevv246. This is a statement about an authenticity grounded in the experiential. The practice of meditation shows that as

'beings', we never step into the same stream twice- each moment is always fresh, new and unique. Painting for me, both as an individual creative practice and as something to be viewed has the potential to give back to us silent and direct experience and reconnect with the actuality of who we are. In Rothko, there is the experience of emotional depths and in Reinhardt we have the experience of

245 One of the first major exhibitions I was in was the Sixth Biennale of Sydney: Origins, Originality and Beyond, Art Gallery of New South Wales (and other venues), Sydney, 1986., directed by Nick Waterlow

246 Ad Reinhardt, '[Art-as-Art]', c. 966-1967, cited in Rose, 1975, p 75. 226 continuous emptying. In my work, I convey self as an ever changing aggregation of states- birth and death in every moment.

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