Imaging the Void: Making the Invisible Visible an Exploration Into the Function of Presence in Performance, Performative Photography and Drawing

Home , James Lee Byars, Ulay, Yves Klein

Imaging the Void: Making the Invisible Visible An Exploration into the Function of Presence in Performance, Performative Photography and Drawing.

By John Lethbridge

A thesis submitted as fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

The University of New South Wales Faculty of Art and Design June 2016 ORIGINALITY STATEMENT ‘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, or substantial proportions of material which have 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 contribution 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 …………

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Date ……………01 – 06 - 2016………......

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I express my heartfelt gratitude and sincere thanks to my supervisor Dr. Phillip George for his unwavering theoretical support during the stormy ride of this thesis. His impressive technical mastery was equally invaluable in developing the research practice to a quality beyond previous standards. Phil’s openness to the twists and turns of the research theory and practice allowed the exploration to develop a focus from a broad perspective into an in-depth and specific inquiry into the nature of presence within performance, performative photography and performative drawing.

Secondly, I would like to offer a special thanks to the support of Dr. Rosemary Beaumont who in the completing stages of thesis development gave invaluable criticism on how to address notions of ‘presence-awareness’ and much more, within an academic framework.

DEDICATION

This thesis is dedicated to Lydia Duncan (1918 – 2015) who in the mid nineteen eighties introduced me to the notion of a multiplicity of selves and the cognition of pure awareness. For thirty-five years we discussed the nuances of self, consciousness and psyche. Her presence and insights provided much depth and clarity to my understanding of these most subtle and elusive substances.

IMAGE LIST

1. Yves Klein: Leap into the Void. 1960 2. Selfie Images 3. Yves Klein: Leap into the Void. With and without Bicycle 1960 4. Marina Abramović: with Ulay (Frank Uwe Layiepen). Gold Found By The Artists. Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, Australia 1981 5. Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present. Museum of Modern Art, New York 2010 6. Marina Abramović: Performing Herman Nitsch’s blood performance rituals 1973 7. Marina Abramović: Thomas Lips. 1975, 1993, 2005 8. Marina Abramović made me cry. The Artist is Present. Museum of Modern Art, New York 2010 9. Marina Abramović: Re-performance. Joseph Beuys - How to explain pictures to a dead hare. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 2005 10. Joseph Beuys: How to explain pictures to a dead hare Galerie Schmela, Düsseldorf 1965 11. Yves Klein as Orchestra Conductor, Gelsenkirchen 1959 12. Yves Klein: The Ritual Transfer of Immateriality. Series 1, Zone 6 1962 13. Joseph Beuys: I Like America and America Likes Me. René Block Gallery, New York 1974 14. Joseph Beuys: I Like America and America Likes Me. René Block Gallery, New York 1974

15. James Lee Byars: The Death of James Byars 1982 16. James Lee Byars: The Perfect Kiss performed at the University Art Museum, Berkeley 1978 17. Lucinda Childs performing James Lee Byars’s The Mile–Long Walk at the Carnegie Museum of Art 1965

18. John Lethbridge: Sensorama 1. 2011 - 2016 19. John Lethbridge: Flesh Bodies. 2011 - 2016 20. Francis Bacon: The Painting 1950 21. John Lethbridge: Wing Bodies. 2011 – 2016 23. John Lethbridge: Imaging the Void. Installation View, UNSW Galleries, Sydney, Australia, 2016 24. John Lethbridge: Imaging the Void. Installation View, UNSW Galleries, Sydney, Australia, 2016

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Statement of Authentication…………………………………………...………...... 2 Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………...... 3 Dedication……………………………………………………………………………………………...... 4 Image List………………………………………………………………………………………..……...... 5 Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………………..…...... 7

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………………….…10

Introduction: Imaging the Void: Making the Invisible Visible………………………..…11

Chapter One: Performative Photography 1.0 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………….……13 1.01 The Selfie………………………………………………………………………………………...... ….15 1.02 Leap into the Void…………………………………………………………………………....…….18 1.03 Presence and Photographic Theory………………………………………………………...21 1.04 The Process of Revealing………………………………………………………………....….…22 1.05 Performative Photography………………………………………………………………...... 22 1.06 A Procedural Description of Imprinting Presence……………………………………23 1.07 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………….....25

Chapter Two: Methodologies of Self and Presence 2.0 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………….………………26 2.01 Self As Process……………………………………………………………………………………….26 2.02 Double Becoming……………………………………………………………………………...... 29 2.03 Three-layered Self-presence Model……………………………………………………...... 32 2.04 A Framework of Presence…………………………………………………………………...... 38 2.04.1 Timelessness………………………………………………………………………………...... 39 2.04.2 The Void………………………………………………………………………………………...... 39 2.04.3 Dynamic Creativity………………………………………………………………………...... 41 2.04.4 Immanence……………………………………………………………...... 42

2.04.5 Luminosity……………………………………………………………………………………...... 43 2.04.6 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………..…..45

Chapter Three: Presence 3.0 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………...... 47 3.01 Contemporary Presence Theory…………………………………………………………...…48 3.02 Pure presence…………………………………………………………………………………..…….50 3.03 The View……………………………………………………………………………………………...... 55 3.04 Transcendent Empiricism…………………………………………………………………….....56 3.05 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………...... 60

Chapter Four: The Case Study Artists 4.0.Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………...... 62 4.01 Marina Abramović and Timelessness…………………………………………………...... 63 4.01.1 Performing Presence………………………………………………………………………..…65 4.01.2 Divine Diva…………………………...…………………………………………………………....69 4.01.3 Presence and The Love To Be...... …………………………………………………………73 4.01.4 Re-performers……………………………………………………………………………………75 4.01.5 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………….…77 4.02 Higher Self of Marina Abramović and Fundamental Self of Yves Klein...... 80 4.03 Yves Klein and The Void...... 83 4.03.1 Smitten With Divinity...... 84 4.03.2 Yves Klein: The Shaman-Trickster...... 88 4.03.3 Conclusion...... 91 4.04 Joseph Beuys and Dynamic Creativity...... 92 4.04.1 Everyone Is An Artist...... 95 4.04.2 Joseph Beuys: Shamanic Artist...... 96 4.04.3 Conclusion...... 101 4.05 James Lee Byars and Immanence...... 102 4.05.1 Perfect Immanence...... 105 4.05.2 Perfect Performance...... 106 4.05.3 Becoming Perfect Presence...... 109 4.05.4 Conclusion...... 111

Chapter Five: The Research Practice: Becoming Presence 5.0 Introduction...... 112 5.01 Self-transparency...... 114 5.02 The Performance Site...... 116 5.03 Studies of Flesh Bodies: Performative Photography...... 119 5.04 Studies of Wing Bodies: Performative Drawing...... 126 5.05 Conclusion...... 133

In Conclusion: A Framework of Presence...... 136

Abstract

Imaging the Void: Making the Invisible Visible

This research examines the question, how does presence function in performance, performative photography and drawing? Performative artists, who shift perceptions of self, time and space by focusing inwardly, explore the internal depths of mind and are seen to be - ‘imaging the void’ thereby they transform invisible internal states of mind into the production of presence.

The invisible phenomenon of presence is examined via the artistic practices of the case study artists. The research focuses on Marina Abramović and timelessness, Yves Klein and the void, Joseph Beuys and dynamic creativity, and James Lee Byars and immanence, in order to develop a framework of presence. Identifying and articulating attributes of presence within these artists’ practice is through the seminal text by Longchenpa, ‘You Are the Eyes of the World’, an early 14th century Tibetan Dzogchen Buddhist text on presence.

The origins of practice, in the case study artists and my own, will be made via the use of a framework of presence comprised of five attributes: luminosity, timelessness, the void, dynamic creativity and immanence. It is proposed that opening up to these states of mind is how these artists work with presence. Presence is the sense of being present, here and now; it is also the experience of the self, mediating internal and external environments. The conscious experience of presence is a state of presence-awareness. Presence is the felt sense of being in the world and is understood here through contemporary presence theory and a framework of presence.

From formless, to a sense of presence, is the dynamic creative process highlighted by the case study artists. By going beyond the directions of popular culture that define the prevailing art world, these artists bring to our attention invisible dimensions of life and nature that can challenge assumptions of practice and process. They have become discordant beacons in a contemporary art context. The philosophy and artistic practice of presence is an area that I contend deserves in-depth focus, and this research adds its contribution.

Introduction: Imaging The Void, Making The Invisible Visible

In the age of global ubiquities, and the phenomenon known as the selfie, where the photographer performs to the camera to document their ‘presence’, we need to ask what is at play here? The deconstruction of this performative event needs exploration. What is this ‘performance’ about and what is this phenomenon called the self within the selfie. The research will shed new light into performative practice and into the subject of that performance, the self. I will use photographic theory, metaphysical theories and selected key artists operating within this space to ask: How does presence function in performance?

The term presence is generally conceived as the subjective feeling of one’s own existence, of being here. This is only one aspect of presence, an experience of the core-self and being in the world; there are others, as Damasio’s model used in the research defines. According to presence theory, presence is responsive to changes in internal states and the external world and is experienced in degrees of intensity. This interface is where presence is ‘workable’ in performance. Presence, whether it is extended into the social world, in life or internally directed, responds to these conditions. These variables of self-location offer a method of analysing qualities of presence in performance.

Applying contemporary presence theory to case study artists is a method of interpretation that includes the process of the performance-self and the particular attribute of presence. The presence framework developed by the research is a method of orientation to investigate claims of universal qualities in the art production of the case study artists. This approach provides insights into methods of mind training used to generate states of presence. To build its proposition, the research selects specific performances and artist statements that support an interpretation of presence sourced from the 14th century seminal text You Are the Eyes of the World by Longchenpa.1

1 Longchenpa. You Are the Eyes of the World. Novato, CA: Lotsawa, (Trans) 1987.

Performative presence is also the action of the gestural image of the ‘selfie, which plays into this evolving phenomenon of the self-portrait’.2 Factors of selfie images, ‘immediacy, ephemerality, and incessant performativity’, are applicable to the research.3 What is the ‘self’? This question is addressed in the research. The ‘instantness’ of the selfie sits in contrast with the considered and deliberated approach of the case study artists. Some of the pre-conditions for intentionally maintaining presence show a long gestation period and training phase by the case study artists to perform their signature attributes of presence. It is contended that this training intensifies the sense of presence in a performance and any consequential image making.

2 Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year, 2013, ‘A photograph that one has taken of oneself’. 3 Murray, S. Digital images, photo sharing, and our shifting notions of everyday aesthetics. Journal of Visual Culture 7, 2008.

Chapter One: Performative Photography

1.0 Introduction

This chapter introduces the phenomenon of the selfie in personal photography as a type of performative photography that has links to the research practice. The approach of ‘sensing’ an image as used in ‘selfie’ photography is explored, as it is relevant to the sensing into presence of the performance-self in the research practice. The seminal example of this is Yves Klein’s ‘Leap into the Void’ performative photograph of 1960, one of the most recognized photographs of the late modernist avant-garde. This image is researched and analysed for its methods and processes of constructing and performing a ‘presence’ based image.

The first of the processes of the research practice is defined as ‘revealing’. This is a philosophical and working concept for the research practice. It uses photography as a method of exposing deeper layers of the self and presence. Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes’s 1981 book on the theory of photography, is drawn on as an approach to theorizing presence in photography. It has gained extra theoretical weight with the development of current presence theory, which supports the basic principles of Roland Barthes’s perception of photography.

The notion of a performative self-image as a process of revealing is developed into a methodology. Exposure to the camera’s gaze reveals the conditions of the ‘here and now’. How presence is revealed to the ‘camera’s gaze’ in the performative action is dependent on the present moment and what is naturally arising; alignment to what is naturally arising is called the nature state. It is a kind of participation where the axis of subject and object give way to a unity of space with its experience of non-separation with the environment. Three key concepts of performative photography are examined in the research: the sense of presence known as becoming presence: the action of the performance-self as a process of becoming and the function of photography to create ‘a certificate of presence’ (Roland Barthes’s term) through the process of revealing. It looks at performance and its photographic record through Roland Barthes’s philosophy

13 of photography and examines the notion of past presence and being present within an image.

There is a decreasing gap between this past and present presence with the emergence of the smartphone camera and the selfie. This closing of the gap is explored in the research practice as a closing of the gap between past and present through the engagement with presence as an active agent in performance. Photography is the capturing of fleeting modulations of selves and presences through the revealing action of the camera’s gaze. The phenomenon of the selfie coincides with the research development and brings to light notions of the self in self-portraiture.

Performance theorist Peggy Phelan argues that ‘all portrait photography is performative’ and I would add ‘of presence’.4 What can elevate an image in this category are performance artists who work with intent, to create the conditions for presence. Peggy Phelan refers to Roland Barthes’s labelling of photography as a ‘kind of primitive theatre’ expressing the performativity of photography.5

I reintroduce the notion of imprinting presence in photography from Yves Klein’s 1960 seminal image ‘Leap in to the Void’. This was 21 years before Roland Barthes declared ‘every photograph is a certificate of presence’.6 Presence indicates a quality that goes beyond the normal signifiers of an image and is another way of describing the photographers’ search for images that ‘exceed the frame’.7 For the research, this factor adds continuing mystery to a photograph, manipulated or not, in which a quality of presence can be visually perceived as well as theorized.

4 Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993. 35. 5 Ibid 37. 6 Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., 1981. 87. 7 Sayre, Henry M. The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989. 211.

Yves Klein: Leap into the Void. 19608

1.01 The Selfie

Susan Sontag’s notion of photographic seeing is pervasive with the evolution of the smartphone. Mediating the world through the lens of the camera has never been easier and turning that mediation onto the self is a global phenomenon. Susan Sontag writes ‘If photographs are messages, the message is both transparent and mysterious’.9 A ‘selfie’ is a photograph that one takes of oneself. This self-revealing phenomenon has gathered momentum over the last decade. It is a parallel visual phenomenon, which supports the research for outlining self as process. The selfie is a convergence of technologies and can be interpreted from different positions and theories. I view this phenomenon via the perspective of photographic self-portraiture and performance art. The ability to hold a

8 Photograph: Harry Shunk and Janos Kender. 9 Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Anchor Books, 1999. 51.

15 smartphone at arm’s length and instantly capture a self-image through the process of subjective sensing more than visual framing creates a new type of photography. Then the ability to immediately communicate that image (photographs are messages) emphasizes placement, ‘having been there in the life-world’. The ‘then’ and the ‘now’ reduce their gap and this is a factor of presence-orientated performance. It is argued that having ‘been there’ shifts more to ‘being here’ the more intensity of presence is available in performance. This is how presence impacts the image of self in photography.

The Selfie10

What is the self in the selfie? This is addressed in the research; self is argued to be a process and not an entity. The internal sensing of the selfie in image making could be a sensing into presence; if so, is presence authoring an image of the self? It could be an alignment with the inner ideal image of oneself to the displayed digital rendition.11 Here I am, and I am somewhere, is an affirmation of self. For Roland Barthes, the photograph is ‘never anything but an antiphon of “look”, “see”, “here it is’.12 The self-referencing ‘here I am’ of the selfie for media theorist

10 Photographs: Instagram. 11 Object relations theory outlines in the development of a separate self in childhood an internalization of an ideal self-image is created, which creates a sense of consistency and stabilizes the self-structure. 12 Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., 1981. 5.

Elizabeth Losh ‘makes visible its own construction as an act and a product of mediation’. Elizabeth Losh further states ‘it is important to resist overly simple emancipatory narratives that conflate use of a self-documenting technology with self-awareness’.13 The research contends that this possibility to transform the selfie into an instrument of awareness is fertile ground of inquiry. It invests this notion of self-documenting technology being used as a method of increasing self- awareness with more worth. By negotiating the somewhat true reading of narcissism and the selfie, this research develops with presence theory a more detailed account of ‘mediating the selfie’ thereby resisting the over-simplification warned of by Elizabeth Losh. Whether it functions as true emancipation of the self or personality fixation, the selfie is performative photography. There are more than 130 million photos in Instagram that fall under the hash-tag selfie. 14 Gómez, Cruz and Meyer suggest the selfie is the arrival of a new ‘fifth moment’ in photography history.15 Hjorth and Pink consider it is a sign not only of digital photography's function as a form of popular depiction, but also of the further transformations of everyday figural representation as an instrument of mediated, embodied sociability.16

Contemporary presence theory sees ‘mediated embodied sociability’ as the experience of the extended self in Damasio’s model. Mediation and embodiment occur at a core-self and proto-self level as well. Here is a gap developed and explored in this research. In the genre of ‘the selfie’, there is a double mediation of the self, presence and the smartphone with its Cyclops eye. There are two aspects of the selfie that have common ground with the research practice. They are the concepts of ‘authoring replacing authorship’ and ‘sensing replaces looking’.17 In the closed loop of performance, both these concepts fuse into a

13 Losh, Elizabeth. Beyond Biometrics: Feminist Media Theory Looks at Selfiecity. San Diego: University of California, 2012. 3. 14 Brooke Wendt. The Allure of the Selfie: Instagram and the New Self-Portrait. Amsterdam: Network Notebook #08. Institute of Network Cultures, 2014. 15 Gómez Cruz, E., & Meyer, E. T. Creation and control in the photographic process: iPhones and the emerging fifth moment of photography. Photographies 5, 2012. 16 Hjorth, L. & Pink, S. New visualities and the digital wayfarer: Reconceptualizing camera phone photography and locative media. Mobile Media & Communication. 2014. 17 Losh, Elizabeth. Beyond Biometrics: Feminist Media Theory Looks at Selfiecity. University of California, 2012. 7-11.

17 method of approach, sensing into the sense of presence. Self-authoring is a complete process of self-portraiture from source images through to postproduction enhancement based on the process of immanence detailed in the case study artist, James Lee Byars.

The selfie is revealing of its author in the attempt to generate a match to the idealized inner image of the self that operates as a fulcrum against which all selfie images are compared to. The illusion of a unitary identity gives way to different self-images that arise to the surface of life and this amplifies the phenomenon of the selfie.18 The contact between self-image and presence can be a clash, the identity structure forms into many selves, each an expressive selfie, and this can cover a subtler experience of the self, the clear sense of being present. The selfie phenomenon is fuelled by the numerous self-images that arise from the plurality of the self; the notion of ‘double becoming’, described in detail by Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, chapter (10) 1730, Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible seems an appropriate notion for the selfie.19 The becoming process is a double transformation; whatever the self is becoming is also in a process of becoming. If I transform into an animal, the animal is also in a process of transformation. From this formula, the research deduces, the self is a process involving two multiplicities in a process of constant becoming.

18 Blum, Harold. Psychoanalytic Explorations of Technique. New York: International Universities Press, 1980. Discrete units of self-representation, object-representation, and an affect disposition linking them are the basic object relations derived from substructures that gradually evolve into more complex substructures (such as real-self and ideal-self, the real-object and ideal-object representations). Eventually, they will become integrated as intrapsychic structures in the ego, superego and id. 19 Deleuze G. and Guattari, F. A. Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Chapter 10 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible... London: Athone Press, 1984. 232-309.

1.02 Leap into the Void

The seminal performative photograph for the research is Yves Klein’s photograph Leap into the Void. Yves Klein claimed to have performed a previous leap before being photographed on October 19, 1960 in his second leap, this time from the roof ledge of a pavilion at 3 Rue Gentil-Bernard, in the Paris suburb of Fontenayaux-Roses. Below, a tarpaulin was ready to catch him. There are a number of descriptions of this event although the research prefers Yves Klein’s version as it corresponds to his myth making strategies. A number of photographic versions were produced in the making of this image as recalled by

Harry Shunk, one of the photographers used in the production of this image.

Yves Klein was trained through many years of martial arts training in holding consciousness in the ‘hara’, the belly centre of martial arts and is considered the centre of being in the body. He had developed a highly trained performance-self and the performative action of the seminal image is called the ‘leap’. It is a leap into the universal dimension of the void and, according to his conviction, is pure spirit. In this image, presence is brought to the foreground. There are two mediated presences, a bicyclist riding into the distance, away from frame, and Yves Klein, leaping across frame. There are two main versions of this image, one without and one with a bicyclist and a train passing by. Both include the montaged lower section of the photograph. Harry Shunk and Janos Kender, photographers for the artist group Nouveaux Réalistes, made the photomontage. Harry Shunk called the image a ‘confection’ manufactured in the darkroom and, according to his obituary, Yves Klein climbed to the top of a wall - dived off it a dozen times onto a pile of mats assembled by the members of his judo school across the road’.20

20 Levin, Kim. Leaps into the Void: Documents of Nouveau Réalist Performance. Artnews, 2015.

Yves Klein: Leap into the Void. With and without Bicycle 196021

Manipulating presence in a performative photograph is the artist’s prerogative and Yves Klein set a precedent in November 27, 1960 with two published photomontages of his leap into the void. In Yves Klein’s fake four-page broadsheet titled ‘Dimanche’, (appropriated from the name of a Paris newspaper) he claimed for his artwork, the global appropriation of ‘all human activity on the planet for the entire day’. The photograph of Yves Klein’s ‘leap’ was originally conceived as a guerrilla intervention. The caption reads: ‘The painter of space hurls himself into the void!’ Whether Yves Klein, the shaman/showman, had purist intent or was performing the Dadaist trickster artist is unclear. Pierre Restany, Yves Klein’s collaborator and art critic, left the photograph’s authenticity open to question. Phillip Vergne, director of the Dia Foundation, recalled, ‘he appropriated something from judo into his art’ maybe implying he knew the art of ‘falling’ as well as ‘flying’.22 Yves Klein was a Judo master and in 1954 published his book ‘The Foundations of Judo’, which remains a classic reference.

21 Photograph: Harry Shunk and Janos Kender. 22 Levin, Kim. Leaps into the Void: Documents of Nouveau Réalist Performance. Artnews, 2015.

Space for Yves Klein was spirit. In the cosmology of Tibetan Dzogchen BonPo Buddhism, space is the secret dimension of the elements. It is the spatial dimension of the void, ‘kunzhi’ and known as the fundamental base of all phenomena. Yves Klein unabashedly claimed this state as the basis of his spatial exploits.23 Yves Klein’s years of martial training resulted in the ability to be present with high energy and was his method of producing presence. This was utilized in his performative leap into the void. Through the timelessness of the present, Yves Klein returns to the infinite space of the void, but it required a leap. In considering the implications of the ‘leap,’ it is interpreted by the research as a stop technique and a jolt out of subject-object consciousness and a return to the spatial dimension of presence. Yves Klein had complete conviction in his absolutist leap to imprint presence on void space. Leap into the Void with its process of imprinting presence in space was intended for the camera’s gaze.

The love for ceremony and the public spotlight indicates Yves Klein’s location in Damasio’s model is extended self-presence. From this position, presence requires more concentration, as demonstrated by Marina Abramović when performing. The intensity and concentration Yves Klein brings to performance is well documented by films of his performative events. The method of intensifying energy adapted from martial arts training is also identified in Joseph Beuys’s performances and can be traced to shamanic methods of transformation. Intensifying energy is a method to bring forth presence.

1.03 Presence and Photographic Theory

Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida claims ‘What founds the nature of Photography is the pose’. The pose is updated by the research to performative action. One contemporary beginning for performative photography was the shift of value for photographic documentation of performances to collectable primary art images. Performance artists such as Cindy Sherman performed the pose directly to the

23 Wangyal, Tenzin, Rinpoche. Healing with form, energy and light: the five elements in Tibetan Shamanism, Tantra, and Dzogchen. New York: Snow Lion Press, 2002. 122.

21 camera’s gaze. This was the late nineteen seventies and early eighties. It was a time when the boundaries between visual art disciplines were collapsing. This timeframe of about five years consolidated performative photography into a genre that continues to evolve through theoretical and technological development. Roland Barthes’s mostly semiotic understanding of the photograph is seen as the ‘absolute excellence of being as body and soul’. Reframing his insight to ‘being as self and presence’ gives Roland Barthes’s statement an experiential base through the combined processes of self as process and becoming presence. Presence is a subtle beyond that can intensify with conscious intention.

Roland Barthes’s assertion that ‘every photograph is a certificate of presence... of a reality one can no longer touch’ positions presence in the past tense, an event that has already happened which is an inherent understanding of photography. In the performative event of photography, presence is imprinted by light onto the sensor of the camera. It is forever present and, paradoxically, an image of a past presence. This dichotomy of the past and present is inherent in all photography, yet it is asserted that intensity of presence generates more presence in an image, tilting the image into the present tense.

1.04 The Process of Revealing

The concept of revealing is the research’s approach to the significance of the photographic process as a process of exploring the interiority of the artist. Photography can reveal presence and also deeper layers of self that reside beneath the established structures of social-identity, it can be deeply revealing, as the surprise-attack methods of paparazzi photographers know so well.

According to Robert E. Wood in Placing Aesthetics when discussing the philosopher Martin Heidegger, ‘the term un-concealment calls attention to the link between revealing and concealing and embodies the notion of direct

22 presencing’.24 The process of photography is both an exposure of selves and a revealing of presence. Mediated presence is present in front of the camera’s lens and is mediated by self-identities. The process of photographic revealing uncovers for performative photography what the philosopher Martin Heidegger calls the mystery of Being. Revealing presence is the prime motivation of the research and is generated through the correct alignment of self, presence and primal life force. This key triad interrelationship generates the photographic punctum, a much sought after ‘glow’ in performative photography. The punctum is described by Peggy Phelan in Unmarked as the search by Roland Barthes (as a lamentation for his mother) for the perfect image, which he called the ‘punctum’ of an image.25 Roland Barthes describes his punctum as a ‘sting, speck, cut, little hole – and also a cast of the dice.’26

1.05 Performative Photography

The revealed presence in the photographic performative action is dependent on the ‘here and now’ conditions and the inner connectedness of the performance- self to presence. It is a type of participation mystery where the alignment of context to subject and performative action generates a state of collective presence.

The theorist Laura Levin points out that ‘a number of theorists have argued the ontology of photography is intrinsically linked to performance and acknowledges Roland Barthes as the theorist most often cited within this area of scholarship and that he paved the way for this idea’. 27 Performance theorist Peggy Phelan extends the argument with ‘all photography is performative’ and I would add ‘of presence’.28 The case study artists’ function directly with methods and training to bring forth presence and exemplify how to

24 Wood, E. Robert. Placing Aesthetics: Reflections on the Philosophic Tradition. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1999. 270. 25 Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993. 34. 26 Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., 1981. 27. 27 Levin, Laura, The Performative Force of Photography. Photography and Culture, Vol 2, Issue 3, 2009. 327. 28 Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993. 51.

23 elevate an image out of the broad arena of photography into intensified performative presence.

The live action of the performance-self is a combination of the process of becoming, the revealing process of photography and presence; these are the primary elements of the performative photography. All other active elements are in continual flux. Becoming presence is a continuous state and is sometimes heightened visually within a photograph as the ‘afterglow’. This effect of luminosity found in certain photographs is labelled by the research ‘the effects of presence’ and, like Roland Barthes’s notion of the punctum, is perceived as a subtle beyond. This effect gives an indication of presence and is a major influencing factor in visual dynamics of an image.

1.06 A Procedural Description of Imprinting Presence

First, the directorial aspect of the photographer is neutralized through the use of the interval timer, which sets the camera on automatic. The timer’s beat of time is a repeating sequence of six seconds of revealing and ten seconds of concealing; this paces the flux of performance. The absence of directorial influence from photographer/director or the impact of the spectator on performance develops an open performative space for immanent processes to arise. This opens up the possibility of presence as an internally stationed state of presence to flow into the performance space. The fluid nature of the raw presence of the Australian bush gives an indeterminate edge to photography. There is a natural arising of the felt experience of raw presence throughout the site. Establishing this field of presence inwardly and outwardly generates the performance space for performative photography. It is similar to a photographic selfie session, although the orientation is not affirmation of self but it’s a shift of perspective to dissolving of self and becoming presence.

Next, in front of the camera lens, the process of self-performance starts with the method of bringing focused awareness to the embodied presence of the self. Once established, awareness is perceived as being spread through space and into

24 the environment; this is a unity of space and awareness. Within this field, the performance-self opens to space moment to moment. Deep drives and primordial images arise. The intention of the research practice is through the medium of the performance-self, the primordial world reveals elemental presences to the camera. Roland Barthes’s description of a camera is a ‘clock for seeing’ with its repeating/oscillating revealing and concealing beating the photographic rhythm of becoming presence.29

In performative photography, the performance-self and presence fuse into becoming presence. The ideal is a transparency of self when only the intensified sense of presence remains and maybe a trace of a self. The significance of presence in performative photography is twofold: first, connecting to the mediated presence of the performer is conceived as an internal shift of consciousness. Also, there is a corresponding shift from everyday personality to essential self as demonstrated by Yves Klein and Marina Abramović or direct to presence as attempted by the research practice.

Second, the photograph as a certificate of presence opens up the possibility of intensifying presence. This occurs in production and post-production. This research sees it as enhanced presence. Yves Klein set a precedent to manipulate an image for presence enhancement. It has a different set of image ethics than the authenticity of the image in traditional photographic methodologies such as Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment. Intensity drives presence as illustrated by Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void rather than notions of the correctness of representation. The push and pull of the photographic image is a matrix of presences that appear and disappear into the surface of the photograph. Fine- tuning enhances the effects of presence by bringing it to the foreground of an image.

29 Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., 1981. 15

1.07 Conclusion

Performative photography introduces notions of the ‘selfie’ from personal photography and applies these qualities to performing presence. This global fascination with the self-image and, this research adds, with embodied presence is an evolving cultural expression with viral momentum. The parameters of performative photography are established through the notion of the photograph as act of revealing and what is revealed is becoming presence.

Performative photography gives presence an after-life, a post-form beyond the performance. The performative photograph has been an integral component of the contemporary photographic tradition since the late 1970s. Importantly, in defining notions of performance with presence, the research offers an alternate method to conceptualize performance art. Rather than attempting to build a consensus for a single definition of presence, the research explores different definitions of presence to determine how presence functions in performative photography.

Roland Barthes’s statement in Camera Lucida that ‘every photograph is a certificate of presence’ is positioned as the cornerstone of performative photography. Returning again to Performance theorist Peggy Phelan’s key statement that ‘all photography is performative’ further defines Roland Barthes’s theory and is an introduction into defining the category of performance the research labels, performing presence. The research establishes the seminal image of Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void as an example par-excellence of performative photography. The key direction Yves Klein’s photograph presents to the research is like the image of a forearm in a selfie image, it is an indicator back to presence.

Chapter Two: Methodologies of Self and Presence

2.0 Introduction

In understanding how presence functions in performance and any subsequent photographic documentation, it is necessary to first establish a definition of self as the mediator of presence. The first analysis of self is by the philosopher Evan Thompson describing the self from an Indian (and Buddhist) philosophical perspective. According to Evan Thompson, the self can be experienced objectively from a third person perspective or internally as a subjective experience. It is the latter that this research focuses on as the subjective experience of self is connected to the internal felt sense of presence. The awareness of the self as ‘being in the world’ is intimately involved with presence. The second analysis of self comes from Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: ‘the self as a process of becoming involving double multiplicities’.30 The formula of double becoming presents an appropriate process to define the transformative quality of self in performance. The third analysis of self is neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s Three-layered self-presence model and summarizes the different interrelationships of environment, consciousness, self and presence. The fourth methodology is the research’s own framework of presence used to map how specifically presence functions in the case study artists and the research practice.

2.01 Self As Process

The research theory is based on the self is a process rather than an entity. This approach to self is verified by Antonio Damasio and Evan Thompson and has its antecedence in early 20th century metaphysical models that define a process of separation from the everyday experience of the self (the social self) to a process of transformation into a fundamental or source self.

30 Deleuze G. and Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: Athone Press, 1984. 249.

Performance art as defined in this research requires a mediator of presence and this mediating capacity is essential to understand how presence functions in performance. Defining the self can range from philosopher Thomas Metzinger’s extreme position in The Ego Tunnel, ‘there is no such thing as a self’ to the opposite polarity, the self as an indivisible solid entity.31 Trying to locate a self- centre within the mind and body or within the subjective experience of self has been distinctly fruitless. Nevertheless denial of the self as Metzinger suggests does not work, as there is an impression of the continual phenomenon of a sense of self that arises every day upon awaking from sleep.

The conclusion Evan Thompson arrives at is there is no independent entity but a collection of interrelated processes – physical - mental and psychological that the self is dependent upon. Evan Thompson goes on to say that the problem is that our experience of self as a unified agent is habitual and occludes the actuality of self as process. The self is dependent on ceaseless processes yet is taken to be an independent entity. The error according to Evan Thompson is to assume that the self is independently existent and is instead dependent and contingent on processes, hence ‘empty’ of any substantiality. In order to correct this delusion, Evan Thompson proposes the self is a ‘self-specifying system’ based on a ‘collection of processes that mutually specify each other and thereby constitute the system as a self-perpetuating whole in relation to the wider environment’.32

This description of self-specifying systems that constitute the self-experience operates at multiple levels – biological, psychological and social - in accord with Antonio Damasio who details this description in his self-presence model. Antonio Damasio begins with the premise that ‘the self is a process’ and proceeds to divide self-processes into three categories of functioning: the proto, core and extended self-structures. Each layer of the self in his model contains a worldview that the specific self-structure is dependent upon and also has a corresponding

31 Metzinger, Thomas, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. Cambridge: MIT Press/A Bradford Book, 2003. 1. 32 Thompson, Evan. Waking, Dreaming, Being: self and consciousness in neuroscience, meditation and philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. 331.

28 bias of consciousness. This distinction is relevant to the research for locating the qualities of the performance-self in the case study artists.

The notion of self as process challenges Yves Klein’s and Marina Abramović’s claims of an essential self with its own inner essence, a view previously outlined in early 20th century metaphysical models of self as in George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff Fourth Way School of essential-self development and currently revitalized by A.H. Almaas in his Diamond Approach of self-realization. The research takes a middle line between the self as process and an essential self in this regard and paradoxically holds both views, it acknowledges the importance of self as process for the multiple appearances of self in performance and performative photography. It also experiences some fundamental, yet difficult to define, quality of self that is unique to the individual and enhanced in performance by the selected artists. Rather than being the essence of the essential self which is a valid workable proposition and applicable in self- realization models, the uniqueness that arises is, for the research, the outcome of the interaction between self-processes and presence. Presence, here, is designated as mediated presence and has as many permutations as there are selves, yet the deeper the self, the more presence is present. By deeper, the research implies closer to the infinite ground of pure presence.

What is key and remains fluid is the focus of identification, the identity point of consciousness. Rather than leaving this process of consciousness in its everyday expression and attached to the social self, and to some degree, the core self, it is developed into conscious self-awareness, a heightened state of consciousness. This occurs when consciousness becomes aware of itself, becomes consciously self-aware and is a pre-condition for presence-orientated performance art. Consciousness in this way is the luminous light of mind that brings the capacity to ‘know’ and ‘reveal’ the different expressions of presence. The attribute of presence, luminosity, is developed in all the case study artists to a heightened degree and is a core quality of presence.

A version of self as process was also developed in the 1980s by philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari and is an appropriate model to the research as it presents a formula of self as a series of multiplicities that can be applied to all the case study artists and specifically to multiple selves of Yves Klein and Marina Abramović. For Yves Klein and Marina Abramović, the inner metaphysical processes require a separation of the essential self from the multiple psychological aspects of the personality structure. It is this self-process that defines the construction of their performance-selves. Yves Klein had a number of titles for his essential self that included ‘the conductor of the universe’. The research prefers his ‘fundamental self’ notion as it reflects a self that has a fundamental nature as apposed to socialized aspects of the personality. For Marina Abramović, it is her notion of the ‘higher self’ that reflects her spiritual aspirations in performance. Both fundamental and higher selves are specific states of consciousness, which include being conscious of awareness.

2.02 Double Becoming

Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus in the 1980’s developed a different yet related notion of self as process that aligns with Evan Thompson‘s view of self as process. This is explored through the development of the performance-self of the case study artists. Self as process opens up the creative possibility of developing a performance-self that is both essential, close to the ontological ground of presence, and also performative.

Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s formula of ‘double becoming ‘ brings clarity to highlighting the transformational aspect of self as process. It operates as a double transformational process with a built-in unpredictability. In the self-process, transforming into something else and that something else is also transforming opens up new ground for performance to explore. The second transformation of the formula is unpredictable and this is important to the research as it is outside of conceptualization. By taking the notion of the self as a process of becoming and applying this process to becoming presence, the research presents a way of

30 understanding the constructed performance selves of the selected artists. The research identifies and develops a meta-process to Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s double becoming called becoming presence and deals with the paradox of the time-based process of becoming and presence as timeless and being outside of the continuum of linear time; past, present and future.

Theorist Meagan Morris in Sexuality and Space provides a way of theorizing Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s formula as ‘a positive force of simulation without reference to models and copies’.33 Meagan Morris describes the formula as having a precise structure and is a process with specific limitations that are outlined and commented on below. In understanding how presence functions in performance it is first necessary to analyse the process of self. Double becoming is an appropriate formula for understanding the process of self and in relation to presence. Giles Deleuze wrote in his essay ‘Mediators’, ‘creation is all about mediators… I need my mediators to express myself’.34 The process of becoming in performance operates as a mediator of presence. Self-processes give a unique and fluid expression to presence. Below, I have commented on the formula of becoming by Meagan Morris as she explains with clarity how the mechanism of becoming operates. Meagan Morris states, ‘Becoming must always involve at least two terms. Not one in isolation, swept up in a process that transforms them both; if a man is becoming-insect, the insect is also changing’. Meagan Morris suggests that dual processes of transformation must be involved in double becoming. To use the research practice as an example, the flesh body is transforming and whatever it is transforming into is also transforming. This research also adds that the surrounding environment, the performance site, is also transforming moment to moment. As Meagan Morris notes, ‘double becoming involves a “parallel evolution” not a specular or dualistic structure… while the warrior is becoming- woman, the woman may becoming-animal’. The built-in determinates of this formula provide mysterious and unpredictable encounters through the simultaneous transformations occurring. According to the formula, what is of

33 Morris, Meagan. Sexuality and Space; Princeton Papers on Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992. 44-45. 34 Deleuze, Gilles. Mediators, Zone 6 Incorporations. Eds. Crary, J. and Kwinter, S. New York: Zone Books, 1992. 281.

31 importance is the ‘becoming process’ of two multiplicities.

The essential factor in double becoming is the dual transformational processes as transitions of becoming. The case study artist Joseph Beuys emphasizes the dynamism of presence through the creative attribute of presence. Joseph Beuys’s shamanic performance-self, including his signature costume is his symbol of transformation and operates within the process of double becoming. Transformative processes are central to Joseph Beuys’s complex blend of philosophical influences include Siberian Shamanic tradition and Rosicrucianism. From these traditions Joseph Beuys structured his artistic mythology by drawing on significant autobiographical events as sources for art production and myth making. Marina Abramović has also used her past traumas from early childhood to produce performances and construct her artist myth. The contribution Joseph Beuys makes to this research is to promote the dynamism of the creative principle, everyone is an artist implying everyone is transformational. The primordial feelings of body, the connection to the natural world and the energetic dynamism of the primal life force give access to the animistic experience in performance art. Reframing significant past events into the myth of the artist was a successful strategy for the development of iconic creation. Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramović and Yves Klein called on seminal past events to historically position their myth making. The process of double becoming requires a separation from the primary self-identity as both Yves Klein and Marina Abramović understood. Marina Abramović, with her Tibetan Buddhist training and its knowledge of self as process, is able to develop a strong degree of separation from the everyday personal self-identity. Construction of her higher self implies the ability to shift from the personal to the transpersonal level of self, which she names her higher self.

Yves Klein’s formula for transformation includes the fluid energetic shifts, developed from martial arts, and the transformation into his fundamental self for performance. Also, Yves Klein was a practicing Rosicrucian for six years, a process that transforms the personality into a self more essential which in the Rosicrucian metaphysical model is the Christ-Man. This links him to Joseph

Beuys who is also strongly influenced by Rosicrucian thought via Rudolf Steiner. For Yves Klein to make contact with his fundamental-self, there is a peeling away of the layers of personality to contact the core of the self often named the essential self. Whether it is framed as a fundamental-self as Yves Klein does or experienced as a unique sense of mediated presence as suggested by the research, it is a deep location of self connected to the ontological ground of Being and where mediated presences and psychic energies fuse into an expression of performing presence.

The self in Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s formula is in a continual process of becoming. These processes are according to the formula, a continual transformation of multiplicities into further multiplicities, which they call, double becoming. The self in their formula ‘is only a threshold, a door, a becoming involving two multiplicities’.35

The transformative nature of the self corresponds to the shamanic practices of Joseph Beuys whose performance-self together with his trademark costume signify a shift into non-ordinary perception. In fact, the formula of double becoming as developed by Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible in A Thousand Plateaus has a sub- section titled ‘Memories of a Sorcerer’, which is another term for shaman. Double becoming is a shamanistic transformative process. This concept offers a method to apply to the shamanistic aspects of the case study artists and the research practice.

2.03 Three-layered Self-presence Model

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio developed a three-layered classification framework of self and presence, which is adopted by this research and used as an overlay to define self-location and intensity of presence in performance. The sense of presence is a unity experience so conceptually dividing the self into three

35 Deleuze G. and Guattari, F. A. Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Athone Press, 1984. 239-252.

33 layers establishes a method of exploring presence through layers of self. Antonio Damasio labels the three layers as: ‘proto’ located in the unconscious; ‘Core’ is the sense of being there in the world; ‘Extended’ is the social sphere of life. At the ‘proto’ layer, the self is located in the unconscious where the primordial self is in touch with the no self (presence without a self). The dynamic of the ‘core’ layer is the relationship of self to the external world. The ‘extended’ layer negotiates the self and the social context. Each layer of self has a corresponding quality of mediated presence, bias of consciousness and world view. Layering the self this way reveals the particular relationship of self and presence to a facet of life.

Sigmund Freud has also previously defined the self into three parts: id, ego and super-ego, which formed three theoretical constructs of his model of the psyche. The id is the set of instinctive drives located in the unconscious, the layer of the proto-self. The ego is the self-identity in the world, the layer of the core self, and the super-ego is the critical and moralizing function of the self. It is the internal rules of parents and society that have conditioned the self. This is the layer of the extended self.

Antonio Damasio acknowledges the ‘self as subject’ is an elusive presence dispersed in consciousness and sometimes so subtle that it is there and not there. In looking at self-development through the Damasio model it is important to state that the three divisions of self are active in varying degrees all the time. The sense of presence is a direct function of these layers and the more they are integrated, the more presence is present to consciousness. The self generates optimal presence by being more in the present moment (Marina Abramović). When the three layers are working in harmony and focused in a performative action, presence is fully present.

Manipulating presence for performance occurs by making a ‘station’ in a specific layer. This intensifies that specific tone of presence; this is the subtle art of performing presence. It is an adaption of the Damasio model by the research based on analysis of the selected artists.

For the research practice, focusing on specific layers of self creates different fusions of mediated presence. In performance, to emphasis a category of self (in the case of the research practice, it is the proto-self) generates and emphasizes a specific quality of mediated presence. Damasio’s map shows the way to do this. By applying the Damasio model to the performance selves of the selected artists, the research creates an effective mapping of self, presence and worldview that gives a diverse perspective on how presence functions in performance.

Antonio Damasio’s three-layered model of presence explores the evolutionary nature of self and defines the location of the self with its corresponding presence and state of consciousness. 36

The selected performance artists emphasize presence through their iconic self- presentations and also any associated sculptural objects or installations. The specific tone of presence is comprised of the internal connection to presence and cognitive processes. Presence in the Damasio model is the defining aspect of the self and, in the Longchenpa model, the ontological ground of the self.

36 Riva G., Waterworth J.A., Waterworth E.A. ‘Damasio’s three-layered model of presence’. Cyber Psychology & Behaviour, Vol. 7, Number 4, 2004.

For Antonio Damasio, presence is an evolved natural process that is responsive to internal and external changes and can be directed through focus and intensity.37 According to biologist Robert Lanza, our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined and cannot be separated from each other.38 Shifts in the inner subjective environment, with its associated proto- self, impacts upon the core-self and subsequently ripples into the world of the extended-self, in the cultural context of presence, the site of audience orientated performance actions.

The self is built in distinctive evolutionary steps based on the primordial feelings naturally arising from the proto-self. The intensity of the primordial layer is close to the ontological ground of presence in Dzogchen philosophy so differs from Antonio Damasio in that his model allocates less presence to this layer. Antonio Damasio’s view is that primordial feelings result from nothing but the living body and precede any interaction with external life. Primordial feelings in this model are the primitives for all other feelings.

Elementary feelings of existence naturally emerge from the proto-self and these primal feelings activate the action orientated core self in relation to ‘being there’ and the external world. This is the layer of maximum presence (Damasio) and is the sense of being present in life. This is mindfulness, which is being 100 percent in the present moment as promoted by Marina Abramović. Wellness theory research shows that 46.9 percent of life is taken up with wandering thoughts.39

The extended self is also known as the autobiographical self. It is defined through biographical knowledge of past memories and anticipated futures. It embraces all aspects of cultural life and is the public me, the social persona. It is where the research positions the iconic selves of the selected artists. The extended self

37 Damasio, A. The feeling of what happens: Body emotion and the making of consciousness. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1999. 38 Lanza, Robert. Biocentrism. Dallas TX: BenBella Books, 2009. 39. 39 Killingworth, Matthew, A. and Gilbert, Daniel, T. Harvard University. Science Magazine, November, 2011.

36 generates a biography for the core self. These layers are dynamic processes and are in continuous fluctuation in relation to internal and external environments.

In Damasio’s model, the sense of presence is a direct result of the three layers. The more integrated these layers are, the more presence is present. Antonio Damasio addresses ‘the issue of how perceptual maps of our body states become bodily feelings’ and how these states are felt and experienced is integral to the understanding of the conscious mind.40 For Antonio Damasio, subjectivity cannot be understood without knowing about the origin of feelings and acknowledging the existence of primordial feelings and spontaneous reflections of the state of the body organism. While giving importance to primitive feelings as the origins of self, Antonio Damasio does not acknowledge the primordial dimension of presence well defined in Dzogchen, so adjusting the Damasio model to include this proposition refines it for the purpose of analysing performing presence.

The importance of the Antonio Damasio approach for the research is the model generates linkages between self and presence that can be used in analysing the particular aspects of mediated presence suffusing the selected performances from the case study artists. For Antonio Damasio, ‘The brain can do more than merely map states that are actually occurring, with more or less fidelity: it can also transform body states and, most dramatically, simulate body states that have not yet occurred’.41 This quote from Antonio Damasio supports how mind training can be used to generate specific internal spaces of mind. The simulation of internal body states has a direct effect on the intensity of presence. Pre-performance preparations include a wide range of mind technologies, specific to the performance practice of the artist. The accumulation of many trainings and philosophical influences over many years form a complex network of related influences between the case study artists.

40 Damasio, Antonio. Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. New York: Pantheon Books, 2010. 265. 41ibid. 108.

This research focuses on those methods related to performing presence. A century before Antonio Damasio, the American psychologist William James shows how ‘attention’ is used to create different universes for the self, ‘each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of a universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit’.42

Generating an energetically charged performance space (universe) is an important aspect of presence-orientated performance. Whether the performance space is culturally generated or naturally chosen as in elemental hot spots in nature, producing presence is a multidimensional occurrence. Attending to all known internal and external aspects of the pre-performance process sets up a context for intensifying presence. Now that most of the natural resources of the world have been claimed for mining, the current corporate focus (Face Book, Twitter, Google etc.) via the Internet is the mining of mass ‘attention’. Offering ‘free’ and addictive services captures collective ‘attention’ and data on a global scale; when attention is inducted and ‘hooked’ into the free service, then a new algorithm is introduced and remodels advertising into the service.43 Attention is the most important facility in performing presence as it is in the current focus of international corporate Internet companies. Becoming aware of what is being ‘attended to’ has become necessary in negotiating contemporary life. Exploring the case study artists’ intentions through artist statements and performance descriptions provides the material for referencing to Damasio’s model. The research can determine, in general terms, the types of mediated presence functioning in a performance-self and active in performance works.

To summarize, in the methodologies used in this research, the emphasis is on process, in particular, self as process; the basis is definitely not a belief system or faith that formulates the research theory. I am inquisitive about all metaphysical models that embrace Heraclitus’s statement (540-480 BC) on the universe, ‘all

42 James, William, The Principles of Psychology, Vol.1 New York, 1918. 43 This has been aptly called, Surveillance Capitalism.

38 things are one’ yet do not have a special affinity to any one particular method.44 Each methodology offers a particular definition of becoming presence and self as process and, together, creates a comprehensive and appropriate framework to analyse how presence functions in the case study artists and the research practice. In addition to the described methodologies of self, the framework of presence, presented next, provides the context for becoming presence, the working formula of the research practice.

2.04 A Framework of Presence

Firstly, the research selects a profile of presence based on concepts from the seminal text, You Are the Eyes of the World by Longchenpa, a 14th century Dzogchen scholar who deeply explored presence. Concepts derived from the text and applied to the framework are spontaneously arising, ever fresh, self-shining presence awareness, just this and nothing else and ‘I salute the supreme universal creativity’.

Spontaneously arising is the process of immanence, ever fresh is timelessness, self-shining is the luminosity of mind and presence awareness is presence self- arising from the void. I salute the supreme universal creativity is the dynamic creativity of presence.

The dimension of presence in this framework has five attributes: the void, timelessness, dynamic creativity, immanence and luminosity. These qualities are active in presence-orientated performance and affect intensities of presence. In this category of performance, it is possible all attributes of presence simultaneously functioning.

The framework is applied to the four case study artists as a method to analyse how presence functions in performance. The attributes of presence are: the void

44 My current working method to metaphysical inquiry is ‘no teacher, no guru, no method, no path’ implying no intermediary framework between self and existence or mediated presence and pure presence.

(Yves Klein); timelessness (Marina Abramović); dynamic creativity (Joseph Beuys); immanence (James Lee Byars) and, common to all, luminosity.

All descriptions of ‘attributes of presence’ are prefixed by the directional notion of ‘towards’. Attributes are navigational tools for life and performance as much as being methodologies and states of mind.

2.04.1 Timelessness

Marina Abramović has developed to a very high degree being in the present moment. The relationship of being in the present moment and ‘being presence’ is indivisible. It is central to her performance practice and teaching. The history of time is imbedded in our memories and weaves backwards into our early past. It is a deep infrastructure within our unconscious that forms our extended self, what Antonio Damasio calls our autobiographical self and phenomenologists call the narrative self.

Contemporary art practice can be paradoxical; in Marina Abramović’s oeuvre; the content has been strongly autobiographical. The artist’s autobiographical self and its mythicizing of personal history clashes with the power of the present moment which is free of past. The highly trained performance-self is the opportunity to be released from past conditioning through the absorption in the present moment where there is the absence of linear time.

Marina Abramović demonstrates, for the research, timelessness. By maintaining attention continually in the present moment with the mind technique of Theravada Vipassana, Marina Abramović’s chosen method, attention is honed, time and time again, into the present moment with a single pointed focus. This puts thoughts in neutral and a spaciousness of mind develops, becoming the clarity of the absolute ‘now,’ the timeless zone where there is no past or future.

2.04.2 The Void

The void is an inner space that encompasses everything. It is the context for all manifestation and includes the performance-self and its self-images. To define this boundless state of mind is to create boundaries so the research proposes to explore the void through the attributes of presence-awareness, which defines the void as the spatial dimension of presence.

The Zen teacher D.T. Suzuki states that sunyata is ‘the emptiness of the void that indicates Absolute reality and is beyond all characterizing attributes or descriptive adjectives’.45 It is beyond presence and yet the very ground of presence. It is indescribable as, in this state of boundless spaciousness, all self- images and forms including mental concepts are extinguished. It is called pure awareness, pure being or pure presence and cannot be attained through any practice as practice implies a dualism. It is a specific state of consciousness that is a vast emptiness and the closest approximation in cosmic life would be ‘black holes’ where space devours all content. In this research, it is the absolute primordial space of presence where the self stands on the event horizon between non-existence and existence. It begins as the primordial ground of presence and extends into the infinite ‘beyond the beyond’. Here, it is possible to understand the challenge to define the void. It is mostly described through terms of negation or absolutism. It is a state of mind that can descend or arise in the self and wipes away all self-structures. The paradox is that the ultimate ground of presence is groundless. Modified for the research, the void is the performance space, both internally and externally. In keeping with Longchenpa’s Dzogchen philosophy, space is the element of the elements and is known as condensed void. It is the context without any trace of content. It is the prior state of performative photography and performative drawing in the research practice.

Much has been written about Yves Klein’s claim to spiritual experiences and heightened states of mind in the name of art. Marina Abramović in her lengthy career also makes similar claims by focusing on the immaterial aspects of

45 A Zen Life by D. T. Suzuki, 2006 is a 77-minute documentary about Daisetz Suzuki (1870-1996)

41 performance. Yves Klein’s branding of the void is the central focus of the research. For Yves Klein, and in the seminal text You Are The Eyes Of The World by Longchenpa, the purity of the void is the totality of space known as the radiance (of the condensed void). Becoming one with space opens up the possibility of a participation in life, through the mystery of unknowing. For Yves Klein, to achieve spatial unity was one of his spiritual goals. From the totality of space, known as the elements of the elements, emerges the four elements of fire, water, air and earth and from these Yves Klein identifies with and uses the element of fire. He was deeply influenced by Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Fire and used this element in the production of his sculptures and images. Fire has a very powerful and hard to control elemental presence as living in the Australian bush confirms. On a psychological level, fire is the dynamic creative enthusiasm evident in Yves Klein’s performances.

The ‘process of becoming’ as defined by Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari is appropriate to Yves Klein with his desire to attain ‘oneness with total space’. Becoming one with space for Yves Klein opened up the possibility for ‘the mining of the pictorial immaterial zones, extracted from the depth of the void, which I possessed at that time’.46 For Yves Klein, like the Japanese Zen calligraphers and brush artists, imagination occurs as a creative force that arises from emptiness.

2.04.3 Dynamic Creativity

Wearing his philosopher’s hat, Joseph Beuys declares ‘everyone is an artist’ and this is a salute to the universal creativity of presence and is available to everyone. Creativity that arises from the space of presence-awareness, namely conscious awareness of presence, is essentially different than most cultural production in contemporary art. The creative impulse is a natural dynamic arising from inner space or, as framed in this research, the void. Dynamic creativity is an expression of that boundless spaciousness and arises mostly free from the constraints of conceptualization.

46 Ottoman, Klaus, Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein, Spring Publications, 2007. 198. An excerpt from Yves Klein’s “Chelsea Hotel Manifesto”.

In the research practice which is based in nature, both performative photography and also the performative drawing component are visually developed from an intuitive process that is dependent of an inner clear spaciousness of mind and being in the present moment.

The ‘self’ as defined in the research practice is known as the mediated presence of Flesh Bodies. In the performative drawing component based on the artist’s original macro photographs of natural forms, the research practice produces a series of images titled Wing Bodies and Deep Bodies; it is the same preparation of an inner spaciousness and clarity of mind as used in performative photography that allows for an immanent process of image development. To say it is, first and foremost, a metaphysical process is probably the closest description available. Body gestures and movements in performative photography and performative drawing processes come directly from the emptiness, they appear to be self- arising in an emergence of dynamic creativity. What also occurs during these processes is a dissolving of linear time into the ‘timelessness’ of the present moment.

2.04.4 Immanence

Immanence is a term pointing to an inherently in-dwelling yet somewhat intangible omnipresence. Immanence is an open term and can be linked to the notion of ontological oneness. It is in contrast to any notion of ‘transcendence’, such as the ‘transcendence to god’ and its inherent dualism. If the concept of god as spirit is used, it is embedded in and seen as an expression of the natural world and the natural state of the self. Giles Deleuze’s idea of pure immanence works on the equality of being, embraced by the research in its adopted term ‘flesh bodies’ where presence is not specific to the human condition and is equally everywhere and seamless. As Longchenpa states in the seminal text, You Are The Eyes Of The World, it is ‘the site and home of everything’. Immanence denies any hierarchy of self from the natural world and yet does not exclude the notion of difference.

Differentiation is a ‘process of becoming’ and is the creative dynamism of constant change. Immanent processes relate to the totality of life and not only the human condition. Each attribute of presence has its own unique methods of realization and immanence offers a specific approach in its connection to presence-awareness. Immanence used in this research is specifically referenced to performance. For Giles Deleuze, immanence is the impersonal and subjective power of life. Here the attribute of dynamic creativity blends with immanence as an inherent quality of the primal life force.

The easiest way to understand immanence is to view it as a ‘bottom-up’ process with a sense of natural arising. This contrasts with the ‘top-down’ approach with its conceptually dominant position. In Theatres of Immanence, Laura Cull writes: ‘Deleuze says that his concept of immanence is built up from “the great theoretical thesis” of the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza; namely, the notion of existence as “a single substance having an Infinity of attributes” and, correlatively, of bodies or “creatures” as “modifications of this substance”, produced without the intervention of “a moral, transcendent, creator God”.47 This interpretation of immanence has a close affinity to Longchenpa’s 14th century definition of the dimension of presence that considers immanence (spontaneously arising) as an attribute of presence, although not the baseline. In terms of artistic processes, immanence is a very different approach to holding a dominant position of creative authorship or agency. For the research practice, out of the void, performative actions and drawings appear as natural immanent arising’s and coloured with presence.

2.04.5 Luminosity

Luminosity within this framework is defined as consciousness with its capacity of knowing. Why call it luminous? The term reflects the power of consciousness to illuminate all appearances. At its most fundamental level, consciousness reveals life to the self. Without consciousness there would be no perception and

47 Cull, Laura. Theatres of Immanence. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 25.

44 no self-awareness. When consciousness, which originates from the body-mind of the self, unites with pure awareness, it becomes omnipresent.

The Dalai Lama, in writing about Dzogchen and the lineage of the seminal text You Are The eyes Of The World, states this important concept of reuniting consciousness called ‘child clear light’ (the mind) with mother clear light, pure awareness.48 This coming together of consciousness and awareness implies consciousness that arose with the development of mind originated from primordial awareness and is in essence the same as its source. This is one of the most controversial claims that permeate Indian and Tibetan philosophical theory and is adopted by the research not as an act of faith but a perception towards the performance. With this in mind and the knowledge of how internal states of mind determine outer reality, presence-awareness can be seen to permeate the primordial natural world of the performance space of this research practice and everything in it including the performative flesh body. This worldview supports an animistic interpretation of the site where presences are active and acknowledged in the elements and all flesh bodies transiting the space. Holding this level of awareness, as a permanent state is a highly disciplined training. Sailor Bob Adamson of Melbourne, Australia, is a non-duality teacher of reality who argues presence-awareness is a permanent state of self that only needs to be (re)cognized and is not an attainment. Bob Adamson provides the full-stop to the research’s key phrase of spontaneously arising, ever fresh self-shining presence- awareness, with ‘just this and nothing else’, implying, for the state of presence, no one need go beyond this realization. It is the ‘full stop’ for all dualism of the mind. Dzogchen uses the word ‘Phat’ that operates like a sting-whack of the ‘kyosaku’, the flat Zen stick to immediately bring consciousness back to the present moment.

Evan Thompson makes a comparison between Western and Eastern philosophy of mind. For Evan Thompson, the other-illumination viewpoint, which projects consciousness into the subject-object dynamic of ordinary perception, is the

48 The Dalai Lama, Dzogchen: The Heart Essence of the Great Perfection, Snow Lion Publications, 2000. 21.

Western philosophical approach. Objectifying consciousness is itself a dualistic process and places the emphasis on the contents of consciousness, what the self is aware of, but the actual process of awareness, as Evan Thompson points out, is primary. This Indian and Buddhist philosophical understanding of consciousness of awareness as developed by Longchenpa is the chosen approach of the research. Consciousness from the self-illumination viewpoint is luminous, knowing and revealing.

This extraordinary state of ‘conscious awareness’ is simplicity itself. However, making this state a permanent station requires many years of advanced training in dissolving the self into transparency so that it does not claim or define the state as its own. This state is not claimed by the research practice but is used and intensified in its short durational performances. By the process of dis- identification from the primary self-structure, presence-awareness can shine its light of consciousness on itself. Presence with this emphasis is to be conscious of the presence of awareness and is the precondition for performance. It is the transformation of ordinary and everyday consciousness into an exquisite perception of life that offers the opportunity to experience the ‘suchness’ of existence. This awareness of reality is a radical shift of perspective described as pure perception, seeing life directly, without the filters of thought processes. I would add this state is all-inclusive and does not exclude any ‘multiplicities of becoming’, which are the content of consciousness.

I use Longchenpa’s Dzogchen philosophical model because of the inclusion and integration of the earlier animistic spirituality of Tibetan Bon Po into Dzogchen and directly applicable to the research practice. It offers a fundamentally different approach to the primordial nature of the Australian bush than first nation Australian spirituality. Nevertheless, both approaches see its reality as ‘buzzing’ with sky and earth presences in an animated worldview.

2.04.6 Conclusion

The methodologies used in the research provide a wide range of references for examining how presence functions in performance and in the performative philosophy of the case study artists. The described methodologies develop and establish two propositions, self as process and becoming presence. In detailing the process of self with the formula of double becoming, the research maps a profile of each performance-self as developed and presented by the case study artists. The three-layered model of self-presence outlines the dynamic of presence and self to inner and outer environments. It is a model to locate the category of self and type of presence functioning in performance. A framework of presence, based on Longchenpa’s definition of presence, divides pure presence into five attributes and applies these attributes to the case study artists to demonstrate how specific attributes of presence function in each of the selected artists performance and philosophy.

Chapter Three: Presence

3.0 Introduction

I salute the supreme universal creativity, the spontaneously arising, ever-fresh, self-shining, presence-awareness, just this and nothing else.49

This chapter develops a profile of presence using contemporary presence theory in parallel with the description of presence derived from the seminal text by Longchenpa. Also included is Giles Deleuze’s concept of a ‘plane of pure immanence’ as a closely related concept to Longchenpa’s ‘pure presence’. Both use energetic intensities and shifts of perspective (point-of-view) to produce intensities of presence. In common also is functioning through subjectivity and working at deeper levels than the subject-object experience of self and other. Giles Deleuze’s concepts come directly from the Spinoza philosophical tradition and Longchenpa adds to the tradition of Dzogchen first established in Tibet from India in the 8th century. It is confirming for the research that two completely different philosophical traditions, in very different timeframes, arrive at similar conclusions. Giles Deleuze brings an impersonal perspective to the process of immanence and Longchenpa adds the universal perspective in his text You Are the Eyes of the World. These perspectives from the seminal text in combination with Giles Deleuze’s Plane of Pure Immanence combine in a theoretical basis to explore presence in this research.

Presence is the felt sense of one’s own existence, known as ‘being there’. In performance art, this subtle sense is developed with trainings of mind and body. Presence is continuous, self-arising and the mind can be aware of it. Combining Presence with Awareness creates the composite term presence-awareness, which is the method of becoming presence derived from Longchenpa’s You Are the Eyes of the World. It is not really a method, more of a re-cognition. Presence is not

49 Concepts derived from the seminal text You Are the Eyes of the World are used to construct the research’s Framework of Presence.

48 time-based; it is experienced in awareness, in the present moment. Mediated through different self-structures adjusts the varying degrees of presence intensity. The self-structure closest to the fundamental ground of presence is known as the essence or source self and is called the fundamental self by Yves Klein and the higher self by Marina Abramović. Developing a presence orientated self is found in all the case study artists. It is speculated by the research that the source self evolves from the psychic fingerprint, and the original personal essence that is present at birth before the development of an individual self- identity. In performing presence a shift occurs from the processes of the everyday identities to another set of self-processes that consciously involve the substance of presence. Becoming presence is what performance artists do, how they maintain this invisible substance is the focus of the research. The double becoming of the performance-self demonstrates everyone is a work of art and the self is a creative process. The dynamic interrelationship of presence and self is argued to generate a myriad of expressions. The research uses concepts derived from Longchenpa’s definition of presence and distinguishes five attributes of presence for the proposed framework. Within the theory and practice of the case study artists the research examines attributes of presence, often layered beneath the presentation of the performance. This is done in order to explore how presence directly functions in performance and is extended into the research practice of performative photography and drawing.

3.01 Contemporary Presence Theory

The research defines presence using Antonio Damasio’s three layered self/presence model. Antonio Damasio defines a method using categories of proto, core and extended selves and associated presences to map the dynamics of mediated presence. The mediating presence of the self is responsive to changes in internal states and the external world and mapping the psychological location of the self gives a prediction to the quality of presence and its intensity. In Damasio’s model, all three layers of the self/presence model are active in varying intensities. Adjusting the alignment and integration of these three layers of presence according to Antonio Damasio can produce conditions for enhancing

49 presence. When the layers are not integrated or interrupted, an absence of (or connection to) presence can be experienced.

Riva, Davide and IJsselsteijn in their mapping of presence differentiate the experience of presence into its components. They detail the favourable conditions for presence and outline internal and external determinants of presence. They divide internal and external determinants of presence and acknowledge the complexity of sensory data and various cognitive processes involved in the production of presence. For Riva, Davide and IJsselsteijn, ‘there is consensus that the experience of presence is a complex, multidimensional perception, formed through an interplay of raw (multi-) sensory data and various cognitive processes – an experience in which attentional factors play a crucial role as well’.50 The implication by Riva, Davide and IJsselsteijn in their mapping of presence is, first, that presence can be produced under favourable conditions and, second, differentiation between internal and external determinants of presence allows consideration and preparation for the internal state of presence. The self and its relation to the inner and outer environment affect the intensity of presence. The totality of both environments impacts on presence, either to enhance or diminish the connection to presence by the self. This could simply be remaining present over duration (timelessness) and its natural unfolding (immanence) both are considered to be attributes of presence outlined by the presence framework. Being conscious of awareness (luminosity) and the spatial dimension of presence (void) together with the primal life force (creativity) form the composition of the research’s concept of presence.

3.02 Pure Presence

I outline a definition of the dimension of presence based on You Are the Eyes of the World, a Tibetan Dzogchen Buddhist text of the early fourteenth century.51 This gives the dimension of presence a theoretical foundation. From this text I have selected and interpreted the terms ‘Non-conceptual, ever fresh, self-shining,

50 Riva G. Davide F. IJsselsteijn W. A. (Eds.) Being There: Concepts, effects and measurement of user presence in synthetic environments. The Netherlands: Ios Press, 2003. 51 Longchenpa. You Are the Eyes of the World, Novato. CA: Lotsawa, (Trans) 1987. 19.

50 presence awareness’ to identify and amplify attributes of and conditions for presence. Non-conceptual is clear space of mind beneath the stream of thoughts, known as the internal void space. Ever fresh is the timelessness of being in the present. Self-shining is the luminosity of consciousness, the screen upon which life appears. Presence-awareness is presencing. Just this and nothing else is an addition from another source (Bob Adamson) yet in complete accord to the immanence of presence in the seminal text. Another line from the text provides the creativity of the universe, pure and total presence (Longchenpa) seen as the function of the dynamic creativity of the primal life force. Each of these attributes is emphasized in the selected artists’ approach to performance. Often in performance a number of attributes are active simultaneously.

The background of Dzogchen is Bon, the ancient autochlonous, and pre-Buddhist, animistic religious tradition of Tibet. According to its tradition, Bon originated in Central Asia 17,000 years ago. Bon religion declined with the spread of Buddhism in Tibet and subsequent persecution. In the 8th century the Nyingmapa Buddhist tradition began and spread both Tantric and Bon Dzogchen teachings. The embrace of both approaches became known as Dzogchen Buddhism. In the 9th and 10th century Bon religion was again persecuted but in the early 13th century the first Bon monasteries were established in Tibet; Longchenpa writing his Dzogchen You Are the Eyes of the World can be located in this phase at the beginning of the 14th century. Dzogchen is a complete system in its own right and also an inherent component of Bon and Buddhism. There are numerous and sometimes contradictory strands of Dzogchen that contain a rich hybrid of influences. This research continues in this integrating synthesis by combining Giles Deleuze’s ‘pure plane of immanence’ with Dzogchen’s ‘spontaneous arising of presence-awareness’, the non-centred source of everything. 52

Longchenpa opens You Are the Eyes of the World with its anthem ’The Jewel Ship’, ‘naturally serene, seamless like space, embodying wholeness, the unity of

52 This research distinguishes between consciousness as being conscious of some content and awareness as the actuality of being aware.

51 ever-fresh awareness and its field, unchanging, impartial, not biased towards being or nonbeing, I salute the supreme universal creativity’. This is a statement describing the omniscience of presence-awareness that is referenced in this research as the ontological ground of presence. By establishing the ground of presence it becomes possible to explore its attributes.

Presence, the experience of ‘being there’ in existence, is approached through the understanding of You Are the Eyes of the World where the notion of presence is explored directly. Presence in this context cannot be separated from Awareness and is referred to in this research as a composite term, presence-awareness. The experience of being aware of presence requires being in the present, that is, consciousness is not focused on memories or future expectations, and it is attentive to presence. In The Jewel Ship, the anthem of You Are The Eyes Of The World, the basis of all life including the self is the supreme universal creativity otherwise known as presence.

Different metaphysical lineages stress different aspects of the ontological ground of the self; an important coupling is awareness and emptiness. Intrinsic emptiness emphasizes the void. Longchenpa emphasizes presence as the core of reality and includes the void, the space as its source. In Dzogchen, there are no distinctions between the attributes of presence; they are a construct of the research to enable analysis. Presence as the core of reality with the void fused as its source translates into the notion of space being condensed void according to Dzogchen, so establishing the correct view of ‘space as presence’ is important. This interpretation of space is a precondition for the research practice. The inner space of the mind and the outer space of the sky are one space and this could be a possible interpretation of Yves Klein’s view of the void.

By recognizing the deep and subtle traditions of Tibetan Bon Po Dzogchen and Tibetan Dzogchen Buddhism, the research dips into these philosophies and uses a perspective called ‘the view’ to support the proposed definition of presence. The philosopher Slavoj Zizek would call this a type of new age Western Buddhism and it is to some extent true; nonetheless the research is empirically

52 grounded in the research practice. When Longchenpa is applied to the selected artists it delivers a unique perspective on presence and broadens the definition of presence. It does this by viewing performance and its photography through the lens of presence and its attributes. Misreading philosophical texts is one method of how philosophy advances so this research develops by decontextualizing Longchenpa and Giles Deleuze in order to build its framework of presence.

The Dzogchen understanding of presence views nature as an interconnected and dynamic whole, one substance. The dimension of presence although not separate from the flow, is at the same time its own ontological ground. The natural state of presence and the animistic understanding of the elements detailed in Tibetan BonPo Religion present a way of connecting directly to primal qualities of nature, through presence.

Dzogchen is a complete methodology in its own right, but it is through the Tibetan Buddhist Nyingmapa tradition that it has become more widely known. The first Tibetan teacher of Dzogchen was Garab Dorje in the 8th century; his Golden Letters, Three Statements That Strike the Essential Points clarify the Dzogchen process: first, ‘one is introduced directly to one’s own nature’; second, ‘one definitively decides upon this unique state’; third, ‘one continues directly with confidence in liberation’.53

One’s own deepest nature is understood to be the all-inclusive state of presence- awareness and is ‘penetrated directly’ by bringing awareness to presence. Maintaining this view of presence is the discipline, as demonstrated by Marina Abramović. The view is the meditative training of the mind required to ‘continue directly’ and shift the identification from a self-orientated perspective to the view of presence as the heart essence of life. Although distinctions are made for research purposes, the nondualism of Dzogchen makes no distinctions between space, presence, awareness and energy. It is one substance and this ocean of

53 Garab, Dorje. The Golden Letters, New York: Snow Lion Publications, 1996. 37.

53 presence can also be outwardly discovered everywhere but it is easier to sense in the elemental hot spots of the natural world.

Dzogchen philosophy holds the perspective that, from the beginning, everything is perfect and naturally arising and requires no improvement; it’s sometimes called the meditation of non-meditation. This develops an intuitive aesthetic, as you become the eyes of the world. James Lee Byars constantly points to this notion of perfection in his art, it is the perfect moment, perfectly arising. The immanent process in performance art is exactly that.

The essence of Dzogchen is that presence (of) awareness or awareness (of) presence is the ground of everything, so whatever is naturally arising from this ground is comprised of its substance, presence-awareness. It is a view of life that is equivalent to the process of immanence where there is no authorship or agency to creative production. There is no transcendental authority or artist-self acting as agent of creativity; it is all perfectly and spontaneously self-arising.

In Dzogchen practice, attention is given to the felt sense of being present and the requirement of this category of performance-self is to enter into this felt sense of presence, considered by Dzogchen to be inseparable from the ontological seamless dimension of presence. The notion of ‘seamless presence’ indicates one substance of presence. The challenge is to remain in presence-awareness with its openness to whatever arises. Again, there is no distinction between inner and outer. From the perspective of the self, it is mediated presence and, at the same time, it is vast presence. The philosophical view of Longchenpa is essential as it is from this perception the research practice approaches performance art.

Buddhism with its focus on emptiness reveals the non-existence of a self-centre but Dzogchen does not exclude the self, instead he positions it as a medium of presence implying that the self is also pure presence and is a naturally arising dynamism of creativity. There is no striving for self-realization, only the cognition of our natural state as presence-awareness and this Longchenpa understands to be ‘the supreme ordering principle of the universe’. The Jewish Kabbalah views

54 this ‘ordering principle’ as the universal template. An often-used description in nondual terminology describing the template is choiceless awareness, which is like a mirror and reflects all forms. The template of this research is similar and focuses on the attributes of the mirror of awareness, ‘spontaneously arising, self- shining, ever-fresh, presence-awareness, just this, and nothing else’. In Kabbalistic nondual theological terminology it is a vessel of creation, ‘just as forms are reflected in a mirror, the ‘sefirot’ of the Kabbalah is the template and form of everything that exists’. 54 Just as the sefirot is viewed as the template of all form, Longchenpa outlines omnipresence with a similar function: ‘there is not a single state, which is not this vast state of presence. It is the site and home of everything’. 55

Dzogchen does not use any training or methods that involve a movement away from what is occurring moment to moment. Methods of transformation, (into a higher-self) or the gradual refinement of the self (self-realization) by purifying qualities are not adopted. Instead, understanding is achieved through the instant recognition of the fundamental ground of reality and remaining in this space, in this context, for the duration of the performance. This stepping into or falling back into a field of seamless presence is the orientation for performance in the research practice. Presence perceived as primordial is operating most strongly at a primordial level of proto-self; this contradicts the Damasio model that allocates less presence to this location but this is my experience. The core-presence is less internalized and is in the world; this is the standard Heideggerian definition of presence as ‘being there’. The proto-presence is primordial with intense feeling- states, which indicates to the research that the internal proto-presence aligned with core-presence is a powerfully intensified station of presence for performance.

54 Isaiah, Horowitz. The Generations of Adam. New York: Paulist Press, 1996. 55 Longchenpa, You Are the Eyes of the World, Novato, CA: Lotsawa, (Trans) 1987. 49.

3.03 The View

The experience of presence-awareness is developed through what Dzogchen calls ‘the view’. Buddhist teaching has three aspects: view, meditation, and activity. In Dzogchen ‘the view’ is most important.56 Applied to the research practice, establishing ‘the view’ generates an open state of being present and aware, preconditions for performance. The realization of pure presence is completely free of all mediating self-identities and is often the goal of metaphysical practice such as Zen Buddhism. It is where all becoming stops. Becoming is process and time-based. The genius insight of BonPo (with its animistic origins) Dzogchen is the all-inclusiveness quality of presence. It makes no distinctions. The process of becoming is seen in this research as a display of dynamic creativity, an attribute of presence being the site and home of everything. The view of presence- awareness spontaneously and naturally self-arising (the plane of pure immanence) is heralded here as the one substance. Its medium of expression or process of becoming is the self. Understanding the performance-selves of the selected artists is to know that underneath the becoming process of their self- presentations are deeper states of presence that have been developed through skilful means, experienced through attributes of presence or directly in its dimensional aspect. It is these developed states that enhance the aura of presence surrounding the performance-self.

3.04 Transcendent Empiricism of Giles Deleuze and Longchenpa

Giles Deleuze defines transcendent empiricism as ‘pure immediate consciousness with neither object nor self, a movement that neither begins nor ends’.57 This definition has a strong correspondence to Longchenpa’s understanding of the dimension of presence-awareness in that it is self-arising with no beginning or end. In describing it as a movement, this reflects the attribute of presence in its quality of dynamic creativity. Having no beginning or end locates it beyond time. It is pure and immediate (in the now moment and

56 Dorje, Nuden. Being Right Here: A Dzogchen Treasure Text. Commentary, James Low. New York: Snow Lion Publications, 2004. 7. 57 Deleuze Giles, Pure Immanence, Essays on a Life, New York: Zone Books, 2001. 26.

56 unmarked by past or future) and, extending this line of thought, is conscious of itself, is self-aware. This parallels the seminal statement by Longchenpa that forms the basis for the attributes of presence used in this research: spontaneously arising ever-fresh self-shining presence-awareness, just this and nothing else is combined with the dynamic creativity of the primal force. The two ontologies of Giles Deleuze and Longchenpa are supportive of the research’s claim of immanence as an attribute and expression of presence. Slavoj Zizek in Organs without Bodies; a play on Giles Deleuze’s Bodies without Organs, considers the Deleuzian notion of transcendental empiricism to be the genius notion of Giles Deleuze.58

Giles Deleuze and his Bodies without Organs are applicable to the impersonal position of the research practice in its Flesh Bodies series. An alternative is the philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s book on Giles Deleuze Organs Without Bodies that is interpreted by this research as organs of perception that bypass self-referencing of the body-mind. Some metaphysical methodologies such as Hindu Tantra and Islamic Sufism consider the five bodily senses have counterpart inner senses, implying that it is possible to inwardly taste, touch, hear and see presence as well as sense presence. The research uses inner sensing of presence. The internal body image is known through object relations theory to be our deepest self- identification. Attaining some separation from this deep identification of the body-self assists in freeing perceptions from the attached filters of this internal image. Just as Giles Deleuze offers the plane of pure immanence, Longchenpa offers the dimension of presence with similar potentials.

This paradoxical notion of transcendence and empiricism indicates a plane of experience deeper than the objective reality. This plane is beyond dualism of subject and object as with Longchenpa. Deleuzian reality and Dzogchen reality correlate in the notion of non-authored natural arising of existence, the plane of pure immanence. Immanent performance does not need agency unless the flesh body is considered the agent of presence.

58 Zizek, Slavoj. Organs without Bodies, Deleuze and Consequences. New York: Routledge, 2004. 4.

Slavoj Zizek’s choice of an immanent artist is the painter Jackson Pollock. For Slavoj Zizek, Jackson Pollack could be the ultimate ‘Deleuzian Painter’ with his action paintings that actualize through (Pollock’s) pure intensity. I would add that the fire paintings of Yves Klein also deserve this accolade. Energetic intensity combined with the state of being present activates presence; this was Yves Klein’s method for the production of presence.

Dzogchen is one of the lifetime practices of the Dalai Lama and in his book Dzogchen: The Heart Essence of the Great Perfection sets the conditions for immanence and supports the spontaneous arising of life, presence and awareness. They are, ‘view like a mountain: leave it as it is. Meditation, like an ocean: leave it as it is. Fruition, rigpa: [awareness] leave it as it is’. 59

The Dzogchen view of ‘everything is perfectly and naturally arising in the majestic creativity of presence’ is applicable to James Lee Byars’s performance approach. There is some level of conceptualization in his performative sculptures, a philosophical stance but the performances go beyond these conceptual restraints into performative presence in a process of immanence. The core-self space of James Lee Byars and the strong connection to ‘being in the world’ allows for effortless performance as with Japanese Noh Theatre, one of his seminal influences. The immanent process is natural to the core-self. His performances are not of a long duration or could be one continuous life performance; in fact James Lee Byars always seems to be in performance mode, it is a Fluxus attitude where there is no separation between art and life. This is contrasted with Marina Abramović, coming from the extended-self where the use of determinism, a top-down approach, is required to be present over such long durations

Slavoj Zizek remarks in Organs without Bodies that transcendental empiricism is ‘the infinite potential field of virtualities out of which reality is actualized’.60 For

59 The Dalai Lama. Dzogchen: The Heart Essence of the Great Perfection. Snow Lion Publications, 2000. 50. ‘Rigpa is defined as the all-embracing spontaneous presence’. 60 Zizek, Slavoj, Organs without Bodies, Deleuze and Consequences. New York: Routledge, 2004. 4.

58 the research, self as process and the double becoming process emerge from this Deleuzian space of transcendental empiricism. Performative presence combines Giles Deleuze’s concept of becoming and Longchenpa’s notion of presence to produce interlocking aspects of the performance dynamic. The introduction of the Deleuzian notion of transcendent empiricism resonates with Longchenpa’s description of presence and provides a contemporary perspective on immanent processes, the attribute of presence used by James Lee Byars, Joseph Beuys and the research practice. Giles Deleuze’s metaphysical realms are an open interrelated and reciprocal reality in which continual transformative processes of self and the world occur. Giles Deleuze shifts the emphasis to the process of becoming and sees the self as a series of identities in constant transformation, as used in the research practice.

The notion of presence in contemporary theory is closely associated to the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s understanding of presence as ‘being in the world’ and corresponds to the Antonio Damasio core-self as having the strongest connection to presence. Martin Heidegger explores the coming into presence in his notion of ‘origin’. He uses the term to indicate ‘the origin of something is the source from which its essence originally springs. The question concerning the origin of the work of art therefore asks how its essence springs forth; thus it asks about the source of its coming-to-presence’.61 Following Martin Heidegger’s notion of origin, the source is equated to the dimension of presence. Through processes of becoming, the self differentiates from the source into identity, yet carries forward its originating essence, called presence in this research. Presence mediated by self-processes implies a loosening of attachment to the primary self- identity as apposed to the self as an ‘integrated single entity’. Perceiving the self as a process of multiplicity, as defined by Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, supports the view of self is a process by Antonio Damasio and Evan Thompson.

The experience of presence is made conscious by sensing into the natural presence within the body with open awareness and then extending this

61 Wood, E. Robert. Placing Aesthetics. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999. 292.

59 perception beyond the body. This process is a method of producing presence for performative actions. Natural presence is the invisible raw substance used, intensified and formed by the performance-selves of the selected artists. This process is the methodology of making the invisible visible. There are varying levels of emptiness and the spatial dimension of presence at its deepest is the void. Therefore imaging the void requires a mediator to give form to presence and the construct of the performance-self is developed as a container for intensified presence. The case study artists consciously develop and construct the iconic performance-self, as a proto-creative process before the performance begins.

Bob Adamson, who, in his nineties, is a leading teacher of non-dual perception of reality from Melbourne, presents with clarity the realization of presence- awareness. He is, at the time of this writing (2016), a living first person account of presence: ‘realize that you are aware of presence right now, of being present. You know you are. What did you have to do for that to happen? It spontaneously arises’.62 This description of presence focuses directly on the state of presence- awareness, and is according to Dzogchen the essence of everything that appears and disappears. Bob Adamson continues to point out the omnipresent nature of presence, ‘it is constantly, spontaneously, always and ever rising, the vibration, pulsation or throb of that intelligence is happening spontaneously. There is nothing to start it, nothing to stop it’. 63

The interplay between states of perception, energy, and sensory data input (the world and internal states) contribute to the sense of presence-awareness. The performance-self inner states of mind and energy of the body combine with the energetic field of the performance site and directly affect the intensity of presence. Being conscious of the subjective inner sensing of presence with the objective sensing of presence, being in the world, combined with the creative dynamism of the life force, form a powerful technique in generating the field of awareness for the production of presence.

62 Adamson, Bob. Presence Awareness. Salisbury, United Kingdom: Non Duality Press, 2004. 9. 63 ibid

Different approaches by the case study artists to the sense of presence-awareness are explored and the methods to develop and maintain presence are unique to each artist. Performative photography gives presence an after-life, a post-form beyond the performance. The performative photographic tradition has been an integral component of the photographic tradition since the late 1970s. Importantly, in defining notions of performance with presence, the research offers an alternate method to conceptualize performance art. Rather than attempting to build a consensus for a single definition of presence, this research presents multiple views to determine how presence functions and this is applied to performance and performative photography.

3.05 Conclusion

In describing the Dzogchen view generated from ‘the spontaneously perfect universal creativity’ to the lifeworld, Longchenpa considers it the way to directly experience the pure fact of awareness and its field of presence and, according to Longchenpa, this is the heart of all experience. Dzogchen means ‘the heart of great perfection’.

To sum up, the research method of producing presence: using self-observation, sensing into the natural presence of your own existence; maintaining a focused attention on this presence; observing the continuous energetic flows of the creative dynamism of the primal life force, inside and out. This unity of awareness, its field of presence and the dynamic process of life are the three processes active in this category of performance.

Ideally, the performance-self is spacious, present, and aware. By being fully in touch with the continual process of immanence and the spontaneous dynamism of creativity, the performance-self is surrounded by attributes of presence. It is along these lines that the research practice travels, not as an ideal goal, more like an orientation to the performance of art in life.

Chapter Four: The Case Study Artists

4.0 Introduction

The case study artists are chosen to amplify attributes of presence by focusing on one specific aspect of their practice that supports the research’s framework of presence. The research is not a historical approach; instead it locates a specific attribute of presence and uses the research’s methodologies to explore that quality of presence inherent in a performance. Whenever possible the research focuses on primary source material to build its profile of presence. All case study artists are engaged in an immaterial approach to art practice as initiated by Yves Klein. Joseph Beuys and James Lee Byars are interconnected through shamanism. Marina Abramović also aligns her practice with Yves Klein and the immaterial although her mid nineteen seventies performances were intense raw and cathartic solo actions steeped in Beuysian overtones. It was in Australia, in 1981 that the shift to presence-oriented performances began for Marina Abramović and also the use of performative photographs as an adjunct to the performance action. At this time, the contemplative techniques from Tibetan Buddhism become apparent in her performances. Having had the most direct contact with Marina (and Ulay) performances, it is easier to develop a more in-depth profile on her designated aspect of presence so the case study on her work spreads into a deeper and more analytical inquiry. Yves Klein and Joseph Beuys are complex artists with many philosophical influences, so a thin slice of their philosophy and artistic production has been highlighted for research. The most obscure case study artist is James Lee Byars who called himself the most famous unknown artist, which he was. He gathered in his lifetime an art cult following of which I was included, ever since coming into contact with his performative sculptures in the 1980s. His influence can be found in the oeuvre of Marina Abramović. His status as a major artist of the late 20th century is gaining recognition. The case study artists are used to develop a framework of presence, the central focus of the research. In this sense, the research’s main focus is on immaterial attributes of presence prominent in the case study artists’ performance and philosophies.

4.01 Marina Abramović and Timelessness

Performance is one of the most difficult art forms: you have to deal with presence. You have to be there, here and now, 100 percent.64

In the evolution of her disciplined meditation practice to be continuously present, Marina Abramović creates a vessel for presence. The relationship of body, consciousness and the moment of now are synchronized into the performance-self. Around the performance-self, the audience interacts and resonates (or not) with her mediated presence or it is experienced through the context of performance as spectacle. Marina Abramović inducts sections of her audience into the power of presence through the power of now. Dr. Richard Alpert, better known as Ram Dass, produced a classic metaphysical book, ‘Be Here Now’, that became a significant influence in its context during the early 1970s. Eckhart Tolle deepened the understanding two decades later with his populist book, The Power of Now. It is revelatory to totally experience the ‘suchness’ of now. These books offer a perennial perspective that continues to be reframed and re-presented. In the ancient texts of Dzogchen, the present moment is the primary condition for presence. Marina Abramović’s challenge in performance and to the audience is to be continuously consciously present and ‘be here now’. This is the principal method of her performances and of this research practice. In naming the three ingredients required for performance - Marina Abramović synthesizes her performance elements to the fundamentals - consciousness, body and the moment of now.65 I would add a fourth: the primal life force that charges the body and outer atmospheres as philosophized and used by Yves Klein in his atomic battery.

In the Damasio Model, Marina Abramović performs in the location of the extended self and intensifies presence through a concentrative meditation. Her developed ability to maintain presence-awareness with concentration over

64 Abramović, Marina. Personal Structures Symposium. Venice Biennale, 2011. 65 ibid

63 long durations can awaken deep internal states of mind for herself and for others. Unity consciousness and unconditional love are examples of the powerful effects of presence. Not only that, her self-description of the artist body being a narrative body in performance art locates it in the layer of the extended-self, therefore maintaining presence in the highly public contexts of her performances require extraordinary concentration and practice to be successful. As Antonio Damasio argues, all layers of self are functioning simultaneously. It is the degree of immersion in a particular self that brings it to prominence. Where the performance-self is located in Damasio’s model brings detail to the category of self-presence active in performance. The location of self is the context of and influences the direction of performance and type of environment explored. The extended self performs in the cultural or public context where there is, according to Antonio Damasio less presence, more individuated self.

In an interview Marina Abramović describes her central focus: ‘Everything is about mind. The body is a tool. And the mind controls it. Our mind is the subject we need to understand, how to use it’. 66 Consciousness connected to breath is called vipassana; it is a training of the mind and body to remain present while feeling the flow of the breath into and out of the body. It is an open, non- judgmental frame of mind that acknowledges all arising perceptions yet does not engage with them. This method is Marina Abramović’s key to the success of a performance event. While the concentrative approach begins the performance, meditation states can shift into a more receptive approach. For Marina Abramović, generating presence by being in the present moment are the fundamental factors of her performances. It requires high energy and concentration to remain focused in the present moment and Marina Abramović steps into her higher self for the duration of the performance to achieve this. Marina Abramović in an interview at the Venice Biennale 2011, talks about stepping into her higher self used in performance: ‘You step into another kind of

66 ibid

64 mental and physical construction when you perform, your concentration is so high’.67

An earlier influence on Marina Abramović was the theosophist H.P. Blavatsky and her work Isis Unveiled, with its ‘One Reality’. 68 In Madame Blavatsky, it was the phenomena of psychic energy that fascinated Marina Abramović. It requires high psychic energy, focused in the present moment to step into another self-construction called the higher self for the duration of the performance. The performance-self of Marina Abramović could be interpreted as Yves Klein’s atomic battery and radiating generator for tapping into the energy collective of the audience; this maintains focus and energetic radiation outwards while seated in presence for the duration of the performance.

4.01.1 Performing Presence

Marina and Ulay Gold Found By The Artists. Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, Australia 198169

67 Abramović, Marina. Personal Structures Symposium. Venice Biennale, 2011. 68 Blavatsky, H.P. Isis Unveiled, Collected Writings, First published 1877, The Theosophical Publishing House, 1972. Founded the Theosophical Society with Col. Olcott, William Judge and others in 1875. 69 Photograph: John Lethbridge. Image courtesy of the Art Gallery of NSW.

In the early nineteen eighties, performance started to become ‘being present’ for Marina Abramović and her performance partner Ulay (Frank Uwe Layiepen). For these early performances, they wore their signature costumes of red for Ulay and black for Marina, as they sat in silence opposite each other for seven hours a day for two weeks in Gold Found By The Artists, 1981, Art Gallery of NSW, Australia. In my experience of this performance, silence and stillness generated a subtle fluctuating state of presence throughout the gallery space. There was a python snake curled around a boomerang and amongst gold nuggets on the table. Three mediated presences, silent and aware. The snake intensified the emanation of silent and aware presence and introduced a primordial component to the performance; it was the elder of the triad. There was, prior to this performance, a two-week preparation where they isolated themselves from the social context and prepared themselves for the discipline of performing presence. In these early durational performances, the subtlety of presence could be collectively ‘felt’ uncluttered by celebrity projection. The presentation of mindfulness in a contemporary Australian art context was strangely radical for that time.

Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present. Museum of Modern Art, New York 201070

70 Photograph: Artpedia.

It was the beginning phase of this category of performances for Marina Abramović and that reached epic timeframes in her performance The Artist is Present in 2010 of 512 hours. In examining the performance, The Artist is Present, it is possible to consider it on the level of presence, the level of energy and the outer level of spectacle. The experience of presence in performance is subtle and different for each spectator as fluctuations of presence-connectedness is an active network in public performance events. In the energetic exchange between performer and spectator, presence becomes a dynamic field of wavering intensities as the sense of self, moves in and out of connectedness to presence. Anchoring in presence is remaining consciously in the present moment. Below the stream of thoughts, fluid internal essential states arise in the space of being present. This research has used Marina Abramović’s experience of unconditioned love that can arise in extended timeframes of durational performances as with long meditation retreats. The process of being present in presence dissolves separateness into unity consciousness generating experiences of totality.

The Attentive Art of Meditation71

In this comparative table, James H. Austin in Selfless Insight details the two main approaches to meditation. Marina Abramović, Yves Klein and Joseph Beuys are

71 Austin, James, H. Selfless Insight. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2009. 151.

67 located under Concentrative Meditation. James Lee Byars and the research practice are located under Receptive Meditation.

The deceptively simple meditation method of vipassana, observing the in and out movements of one’s breathing, develops the faculty of attention. Directing attention by focusing on the breath develops a quality of single-pointedness required for long duration performances. Single pointed attention or concentrative will is used to maintain presence in highly public cultural contexts of performance art. Maintaining connection to presence from the extended self is an expansion because presence is distanced from its strongest ground, core self- presence.

Any outward distractions can cause breaks in presence as observed when Marina Abramović’s ex-performance partner Ulay, unseen for thirty years as the myth goes, is suddenly seated in front of her. The video clip of this went viral and shows a break in the internal holding of presence as consciousness and love moved outward.

The self-referential and absorption component of the concentrative approach gives indications to Marina Abramović’s iconic self-image as a disciplined machine for public display. Yves Klein also functioned with a similar concentrative approach. His flamboyant atomic battery required intense concentrated will to charge and radiate presence in his intensified space of spirit.

The iconic performance-self for the case study artists is a launching platform into presence and is soon left behind as the overall duration of the performance unfolds. Maintaining attention in the present moment as self as process floats in and out of consciousness is inwardly challenging - not to be pulled out of the present moment by outward distractions that cause ‘breaks in presence’ and interrupt the connection of consciousness and the sense of being present. This research method for the production of presence is to loosen the grasp of self- identity to the iconic self and consciously sense presence in the present moment. Presence in this way is less filtered. The important aspect of this process is

training the mind to enter into a state of timelessness, the moment of now.

Marina Abramović lists herself as a conceptual artist and her performances are not naturally immanent processes so she uses a top-down approach and the performance is authored by thought. Yet, because of the long durational times of her performances, the process of immanence becomes active. It is the spontaneous action events that occur within the extended performance that reveal immanent processes. Such immanent actions occur more notably within the later stages of the performance process. Lydia Brawner’s essay, The Artist is Present: Performing The Icon gives an astute and insightful first person account of Marina Abramović The Artist is Present with an example of ‘immanent process’ within the overall performance. Lydia Brawner observes, ‘Abramović would occasionally stand between sitters and slump to the floor in a modified yogic child’s pose before returning to her seated position to receive the next sitter’.72 These micro-events of immanent processes did not make it into the documentary of The Artist is Present or past her censoring autobiographical self.

4.01.2 Divine Diva

In examining the evolving autobiographical iconic creation of Marina Abramović as divine diva, this research explores myth-making strategies previously employed by Yves Klein and Joseph Beuys, and must include Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. For Marina Abramović, it began to establish itself in the early nineteen eighties when the cult of personality was beginning to develop around the construction of Marina and Ulay. The cult of personality is an established aspect of the performance-self and all case study artists engage in Yves Klein’s concept of proto-art of the self-entrepreneur. Marina Abramović, Yves Klein, Joseph Beuys and James Lee Byars are self-promoters through the process of myth making which in turn envelops the performance-self. For James Lee Byars it is only to a lesser degree because of the freedom from recognition his mostly hidden face afforded him.

72 Brawner, Lydia. The Artist is Present, Performing the Icon. Women & Performance, New York: New York University, 2013.

The conscious intention to construct a performance-self for the development of celebrity worship has been described by Lydia Brawner in her essay The Artist is Present: Performing The Icon. Lydia Brawner positively redefines Marina Abramović’s critical label of ‘Diva Hokum’ as ‘the process of one’s own icon making, a control of image and message that becomes integral to the structure of the work, and a balancing act between the performance and its afterlife’. 73 All the case study artists perform with Lydia Brawner’s redefined ‘diva hokum’ approach to performance.

To observe how presence functions in performance it is necessary to differentiate between the everyday self, the performance-self with its shamanistic rituals, and the simplicity of presence, of being present over duration. Celebrity status saturates presence with personality and gives it a gloss. It is presence mediated through the layer of the narrative-self. This is one of the paradoxes of Marina Abramović’s performance practice: the more awareness of presence is functioning, and the less the process of becoming is active. In pure presence there is no becoming, it is what Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call becoming imperceptible. Separating the authenticity of presence from the aura of celebrity distinguishes how presence functions through self-construction. The iconic-self is a creative construction of the artist and a projection screen for the audience. The research suggests a way of processing presence and self, where becoming presence is a meta-process to self as process with its double becoming. The performance-self functions through these two simultaneous processes, double becoming and becoming presence.

The contemplative quality of Marina Abramović’s later performances is in stark contrast to her groundbreaking early works with their shamanic rituals that were primed by her time with the Austrian performance artist Hermann Nitsch and his blood performance rituals.

73 ibid

Marina Abramović performing Hermann Nitsch’s blood performance rituals 1973

These early performances link to Joseph Beuys’s performance approach through the employment of self-invented shamanistic rituals such as Thomas

Lips, 1975.

Marina Abramović: Thomas Lips. 1975, 1993, 200574

74 Photograph courtesy of the Sean Kelly Gallery and the artist.

This performance locates the performance-self close to primal feelings of the unconscious and to the proto-self layer of presence. Marina Abramović distances herself from any overt acknowledgement of Joseph Beuys; however, there are many linkages through shamanistic practices evident in her performances. Through identifying with Yves Klein’s use of terms such as immateriality, Marina Abramović positions herself next to Yves Klein and reflects similar cosmic aspirations. In Mono Kultur #35 Marina Abramović said ‘all my life I have been preoccupied with immateriality in my work. So the main mission of my institute is to preserve immaterial art’.75 Her arrival at this vision of art was not through mimicking Yves Klein but developed slowly over four decades of her own authentic and dedicated artistic practice. Nevertheless, alignment and placement are political manoeuvres especially in the American Art context of Marina Abramović who moved to New York at the beginning of this century. Parallels are established with Yves Klein’s understanding and use of certain key concepts mirrored decades later in Marina Abramović’s oeuvre. By avoiding any overt association with Joseph Beuys, who was for some a dark figure of German fascism, Marina Abramović does her best to provide iconic linkage with Yves Klein. Here Yves Klein’s notion of a proto-art entrepreneur comes into play in the realm of Marina Abramović’s narrative self with control of image and message. The artist’s biographical history can be a creative endeavour of alignment, what to emphasize and what to exclude in a work of myth making.

Why Marina Abramović declares I’m not a f*cking guru is because claiming the status of guru-hood signals all self-becoming has ceased.76 And yet Marina Abramović uses spiritual technologies of the guru, techniques such as silence, heart to heart communication, stillness, nondual presence and eye-to-eye contact. Spiritual communication is an integrated structure around a unifying centre and defined by the teacher, the message, the audience, the site and the time, all of which are operating in recent Marina Abramović performances.

75 Anderson, Laurie. In Conversation with Marina Abramović. Bomb Magazine, 2003. 76 Whitney, Erin. Why Marina Abramović Is Not Your F*cking Guru. Huffpost. June, 2015.

Performance requires a mediator of presence. Marina Abramović has extended her performance repertoire to include not only her own re-performances of historical performances but also others to perform her earlier works. A new move is Marina Abramović’s Generator (2014), which sees the complete removal of herself as primary performer; furthermore, Marina Abramović uses sensory restriction, with blindfolds and noise cancelling headphones for the audience, who then become performance-selves performing in performance space. A Fluxus related concept, the space of Generator is life and art intertwined. This references Yves Klein’s exhibition of an empty white space at Galerie Iris Clert, The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State of Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility (1958) often referred to as ‘The Void’.

4.01.3 Presence and The Love To Be

Bob Adamson, an Australian teacher of nondual reality, considers ‘the love to be’ a fundamental effect of presence. The arising of feeling states triggered by durational performances and exemplified in ‘the love to be’ effect of presence is explored in The Artist is Present. The shifting field of audience feeling-response to Marina Abramović’s performance process is triggered and activated in different ways by the artist. Again Lydia Brawner comments: ‘this bargain of love for self- sacrifice contains an obvious theological referent at its core. It became an emotional performance to watch and one that touched me deeply, something that would be impossible to access in re-performance; it moved past the simplicity of the diva into something closer to the divine’.77 Abramović’s pain body of flesh becomes evident in the end phases of long duration performances and this can induct the empathetic feelings (depending on type) of the audience.

According to Marla Carlson in Performing Bodies in Pain, Marina Abramović solicits her audience’s emotional engagement by offering up her pain. As she enters into presence through the extended social self and its iconic status, projections of glorious and tormented late-medieval virgin martyrs that reside deep in the history of the western psyche can easily be read into the pain aspect

77 Anderson, Laurie. In Conversation with Marina Abramović. Bomb Magazine, 2003.

73 of these performances.78 Pain as previously stated can activate feelings of empathy and love as well as outrage at the masochistic implications inherent in self-inflicted pain.

Although ‘love’ is not included as an attribute of presence in this particular metaphysical framework, it is considered to be one of the major effects of presence. It is included indirectly through the attribute of dynamic creativity where creativity is framed as an expression of love, the love to be.79 In nature, this primordial effect is evident; everything has a love to be. Marina Abramović in conversation with the performance artist Laurie Anderson commented, ‘every single person in the audience is important. I don’t have this kind of feeling in real life, but in performance I have this enormous love, this heart that literally hurts me with how much I love them’.80

When the boundaries of self dissolve in presence, qualities such as lovingness can become an effect of presence. Marina Abramović in this quote reveals how love can arise when sitting in presence. Bob Adamson calls this ‘the love to be’, the love of existence and everything that exists. Whatever comes into this field of perception is loved. It is a universal type of love, a love for everything in the universe. Marina Abramović trained in Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism in the 1980s to develop the mind of clear light, which is pure presence, another term for the un-conditioned state of mind. In this clarity of mind, experiences like ‘enormous love’ can arise along with feelings of unity consciousness. The experience of the ‘love to be’ or the ‘love for all’ is well recorded in metaphysical literature. For example, the contemporary American teacher from the Zen tradition, Adyashanti, in his dharma talks confirms this experience of universal love that can arise with contemplative processes. He also adds, ‘with the realization of

78 Carlson, Marla, Performing Bodies in Pain, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 78. 79 In metaphysical models such as Islamic Sufism, love is an important mode of connection to the absolute. It is through ‘the beloved’. The poems of Rumi and Hafiz take this direction to its sublime state, a rebirth in love and creativity. 80 Marina Abramović in conversation with Laurie Anderson is discussing The House With the Ocean View. Bomb magazine and quoted in Brawner, Lydia, The Artist is Present, Performing the Icon, Women & Performance, New York University, 2013.

74 love-unconditioned, there is an acknowledgement of the precariousness of existence’.81

Unconditioned love experienced from the extended-self centre, firmly held, is as Marina Abramović describes, ‘this enormous love that hurts’. The dualism between a strongly held self-centre using concentrative meditation techniques and the audience generates energetic polarities that charge the atmosphere. Yet presence and its ‘love to be’ is not bounded to polarity and the seamless quality of presence does not recognize boundaries of self and other, so is experienced in a encompassing dynamism when a strong self-centre is maintained.

Marina Abramović made me cry, The Artist is Present. 2010 82

Presence can be said to be ‘openness to existence’ so the exquisite vulnerability that arises with this type of love may account for the pain of the heart expressed by Marina Abramović. A performance site is a restricted time or place to allow full expression of the dimension of unconditioned love, however it can be expressed through the eyes as in the case of Marina Abramović. The temporal nature of existence accounts for the sensitivity inherent in ‘the love to be’ and can be felt towards all flesh bodies as it expands into the world.

81 Adyashanti. Emptiness Dancing. California: Open Gate Publishing, 2004. 115. 82 http://marinaabramovicmademecry.tumblr.com

4.01.4 Re-performers

Lydia Brawner, one of Marina Abramović’s re-performers offers a first person account of her experience of being a re-performer and of the three-month duration of The Artist is Present (2010) performance. This is referenced to explore the dynamism of this marathon performance event.83 The re- performances were occurring upstairs, while Marina Abramović was performing downstairs.84

In the performances of the re-performers, the connection to presence is variable depending on training but the symbolism and visual effect is similar. In describing the notion of re-performance, the Museum of Modern Art website in advertising The Artist is Present claimed a transmission of presence, ‘in an endeavour to “transmit the presence of the artist” and make her historical performances accessible to a larger audience’. The exhibition includes the first live re-performance of Marina Abramović’s works by other people ever to be undertaken in a museum setting’.85 The research makes the distinction between presence and concept and suggests, the former is experienced through resonance and it is the concept components that transmits. What are being carried across from the original performance in re-performance are the conceptualizations and its energy components that reconstitute the re- performance work. Holding presence is left to the re-performer’s ability to be present and aware over duration.

Previously, Marina Abramović had re-performed historical performances such as Joseph Beuys’s How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (Joseph Beuys 1965) (Marina Abramović 2005). In these performances, it was her highly trained mediated presence performing, not the transmitted disembodied presence of Joseph Beuys. If Joseph Beuys’s presence was there, it’s a shamanic spirit

83 Brawner, Lydia, The Artist is Present, Performing the Icon, Women & Performance, New York University, 2013. 84ibid 85 The MoMa website. http: www.moma.org Quoted in Lydia Brawner, The Artist is Present, Performing the Icon.

76 visitation. Mediated presence is specific to and uniquely toned by deep aspects of the self. This uniqueness is called personal essence and known in psychology as the psychic fingerprint. In Islamic Sufism, it is the pearl beyond price.86 Presence gains natural expression through what Giles Deleuze calls the mediator and becomes an exquisitely unique expression when mediated through the pearl beyond price.

Marina Abramović Re-performance. Joseph Beuys Joseph Beuys How to explain pictures to a Dead Hare How to explain pictures to a Dead Hare 2005 87 1965 88

Applying the formula of Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s double becoming, the re-performer of The Artist is Present exhibition is becoming Marina Abramović, the performance artist through appropriate training in mind and body and the ritual of performance. Becoming performance artist is becoming mediated presence and the mystery factor, namely any other mysterious transfiguration process that naturally arises as the second becoming. Reconstructing the history of performance art with different re-performers expands the performance

86 A valuable contemporary understanding of the pearl beyond price is A.H. Almaas. The Pearl Beyond Price: The integration of personality into ‘Being’. Berkeley, CA: Diamond Books, Almaas Publications, 1988. 87 Photograph: Attilio Maranzano. Courtesy of the Marina Abramovic Archives. 88 Photograph: Ute Klophus. Performed at the Schelma Gallery, Dusseldorf, 26 November 1965

77 context with unknown blends of mediated self-processes and gives these historical performance events an important second life.

4.01.5 Conclusion

Construction of Marina Abramović’s celebrity self is a conceptual and creative proposition all case study artists engage in when proposing their metaphysical theories to the art world and beyond. Deeper than the celebrity self is another position of self imaged in Yves Klein’s essential proposal, ‘a painter must paint a single masterpiece, himself, and thus become a sort of atomic battery, a sort of constantly radiating generator that impregnates the atmosphere with his pictorial presence fixed in space after it’s passage’.89 Marina Abramović’s higher self is a mix of strong presence, powerful will and ‘look at me’. Yves Klein’s fundamental self is a mix of high energy, strong presence and showmanship. Celebrity presence is a good example of presence fused into a narrative self. The public body and public life of Marina Abramović reflects this tension, between the actuality of presence and the process of becoming celebrity through the construction of an iconic self-image. Her icon making has the inherent complexity of double becoming, when the performance-self turns into an icon, what is the icon turning into? For the research, the icon transforms into the resonating presence of timelessness.

The sheer ability to hold presence through the extended-self in the public arena for such a timeframe confirms the high level of mind and body training undertaken by Marina Abramović. In public performance, presence is more abstracted from its natural state, the core self. As Marina Abramović says, ‘performance is one of the most difficult art forms, you have to be 100 percent conscious’. The challenge is maintaining presence in the social context. Marina Abramović’s mind training over forty years is her key to sustaining presence- awareness over long duration. For the research, this is the true art of presence. Throughout the nineteen eighties, Marina Abramović studied Tibetan Buddhism

89 Ottmann, Klaus. Yves Klein, Overcoming The Problematics of Art, The Writings of Yves Klein. Spring Publications, 2007. 14.

78 with its mind training in the clear light of mind. Basically, the mind training is to situate presence in the present moment while disidentifying with self. The process of mind is to enter into an unfocused yet pervasive field of awareness. Performances of presence activate a portal into timelessness and reintroduce the stillness of silence into contemporary art practice. The present moment is the timelessness zone. Being continuous present in the here-now greatly increases the sense of presence, which is unshackled from the filters of past experiences and future projections. Both Yves Klein and Marina Abramović confirm the centrality of the present moment in the production of presence for performance. Sculpting this invisible yet pervasive phenomenon that is felt and sensed for performance is a subtle art form pioneered by Yves Klein, Marina Abramović, James Lee Byars and Joseph Beuys. Marina Abramović has taken this subtle art of presence and transformed it into timelessness mediated by the iconic self. In contrast, the approach to presence by the research practice is more in line with a Beuysian worldview, the raw presence of the Australian bush with its wide diversity of mediated-presence flesh bodies in networks of connection fuse with the double becoming of the performance-self and its shifting states of presence. At times the sense of self disappears and only presence remains.

As discovered by Yves Klein, just presence is enough. For the case study artists, the presence of the artist, first and foremost, is the primary creation. Joseph Beuys confirms this with, ‘everyone is a work of art’ and the case study artists actualize this statement in their performances. Between the intensified presence of the performance artist and oscillations in the audience’s collective presence, space pulses in strange rhythms. These rhythms the research argues are ripples and waves of mediated presences generating the different effects of becoming presence. There are times when presence is a still lake and becoming ends.

4.02 Higher Self of Marina Abramović and Fundamental Self of Yves Klein

My fundamental self is at war with my multiple psychological personalities.90

Shamanism offers concepts to understand the performance art of Yves Klein and Marina Abramović. In Polynesian Kahuna shamanism the name for infinite presence is ‘Kumulipo’, the source of life. The key method in Kahuna is to become close to this source through the development of a high self. To define the higher self of Marina Abramović or the conductor of the universe (the fundamental self) of Yves Klein, the research applies the Polynesian Kahuna model of three selves.

Yves Klein as Orchestra Conductor, Gelsenkirchen 195991

Principles of Polynesian Kahuna shamanism connect directly to Yves Klein’s celebration of the imaginary, ‘the world is what you think it is’ and ‘there are no limits’.92 Marina Abramović’s methods can be observed in the shamanic principles of ’energy goes where attention flows’ and ‘now is the moment of

90 Ottmann, Klaus. Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein. Putnam: Spring Publications, 2007. 135. 91 Photograph: Charles Wilp. Yves Klein, Artists Rights Society, New York. Paris. 92 King, Serge, Mastering Your Hidden Self: A Guide to the Huna Way. London: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1985. 20-25.

80 power’.93 In developing a definition of Yves Klein’s fundamental self or Marina Abramović’s higher self, the Kahuna shamanic model of self provides an referential interpretation by, indicating shifts of perception required for the development of the essential nature of a high self. The high self is ‘aurnakua’ in Polynesian Kahuna shamanism. Serge King, a Hawaiian Kahuna shaman, writes, ‘the aurnakua can also be known as the source self, since it is the source of individual life, purpose and expression. In that respect it is the God Within, and the kahunas treat it as an inner being rather than as a spirit that lives in the sky someplace’.94 Kahuna’s model of three selves presents an equivalent yet different orientation of self to Antonio Damasio’s Three-layered self-presence model. Serge King describes the Kahuna model as follows; low self; ku, connected to the subconscious; middle self, lono, connected to the conscious mind; and high self, aurnakua, connected to super consciousness and which informs the other two selves.95 Super consciousness has many connotations; the research understands it as a shift from subject-object consciousness to the undivided field of awareness sometimes called ‘intelligence energy’.96

Understanding Marina Abramović’s higher self through shamanism opens up another interpretation of her methods. The high self of Kahuna is composed of a united male and female self and is a god unit functioning with light and truth. It guides the middle and lower selves including the physical body, kino, as with Marina Abramović’s performative higher self to her performing body. Both Yves Klein’s fundamental self and Marina Abramović’s higher self are psychological shifts from everyday self-structures to deep levels of self-identity. The psychologist C. G. Jung called it the archetype of the Self, the self of all selves. For the ancient Kahuna the high self must be recognized and invited into our lives and this integration is self-mastery. Although the research practice does not utilize higher self constructs and works directly with presence-awareness, it recognizes the authenticity and validity of this ancient method of self-realization. In this method, the task is to get beneath the psychological identity structures to

93 ibid 94 ibid 95 ibid 96 Adamson, Bob. Presence Awareness. Salisbury, United Kingdom: Non-Duality Press, 2004. 18.

81 the source of self, which is closest to pure presence. It can be seen as a journey of recovery and a reintegration of attributes of presence buried by the development of personal identity.

Another approach to the essential nature of the self is through psychology and the notion of a psychic fingerprint. The research argues the psychic fingerprint is the kernel of the source self. The ‘blue pearl’ of Kashmir Shaivism is the subtlest covering of the inner self. In Siddha Yoga literature the ‘blue pearl’ is a phenomenal manifestation of self-essence, the blue dot. ‘When seen in meditation it is like seeing the soul’.97 Whatever this pearl of great price is called in different spiritual traditions, it points to some essence of self unique and of great value, the pearl beyond price. The research sees it as the originating natural presence of self and is presence-awareness mediated by essential qualities of the self, qualities that were present before the development of self- identity. The processes of conditioning in the development of identity during early life explored by object relations theory cannot account for the mystery of the deep patterns of epigenetic histories that contribute to the self’s lineage and uniqueness. Presence at its purest is seamless and invisible. Mediated at the deepest level, it takes the expression of the blue pearl.

The 13th century Indian Marathi philosopher and Saint, Jnaneshwar Maharaj, explains, ‘the radiant and sublime blue colour of the pearl can be seen directly in meditation and potentially [when stabilized] the shimmering blue light expands to fill the whole universe’.98 In other words, the blue pearl of the individual self expands into unity consciousness, a Kleinian infinite blue universe. For the philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, ‘ First there is nothing, then there is a deep

97 Muktananda, Swami. Does Death Really Exist? Siddha Yoga Publications, 1995. 121. The blue dot, which we call the Blue Pearl, dwells in the spiritual centre in the crown of the head. It is the body of the Self. All consciousness is contained in it. All of the dynamism of the breathing process comes from the Blue Pearl. When that light enters the body, the rhythm of breathing begins. When it departs from the body, consciousness departs from the bloodstream, the nerves and the lungs, leaving everything limp and lifeless. "Death" is simply the name we give to the departure of the Blue Pearl from the body. 98 Jnaneshwar, Maharaj. The Nectar of Self-Awareness. SYDA Foundation, 1979.

82 nothing; then there is a deep blue’.99 Yves Klein’s Blue Revolution had been previously experienced by the artist Wassily Kandinsky who wrote ‘the deeper the blue, the more powerfully it draws man towards infinity and awakens in him the nostalgia for Purity and for the ultimate suprasensibility’.100 For Longchenpa, ’the pristine awareness of the creativity of the universe is non judgmental and free from all discursiveness. Serene and Insubstantial, like the sky, we call it unborn’.101 He goes on to say, ‘whoever fully comprehends and actually experiences this is called a [blue] child of the majestic creativity’.102

4.03 Yves Klein and The Void

A painter must paint a single masterpiece, himself, and thus become a sort of atomic battery, a sort of constantly radiating generator that impregnates the atmosphere with his pictorial presence fixed in space after its passage.103

Yves Klein (1928-1962) was a French artist who broke new ground in a number of directions in contemporary art practice. He was a pioneer in the development of performance art and the overt use of metaphysical philosophy as an inherent factor of the performance process.

Yves Klein pioneered the development of proto-performance art, proto- conceptual art, proto-land art, proto-pop art and a proto-art promoter, thus helping to seed many artistic directions that developed subsequent to his death. In this sense Yves Klein extends key aspects of conceptual and artistic celebrity promotion from the legacy of Marcel Duchamp as the enigmatic Godfather of contemporary art.

99 Bachelard, Gaston. Air and Dreams. The Blue Sky, Chapter 6. Dallas: Dallas Institute Publications 1988. 161-174. 100 Wassily Kandinsky quoted in Nicolas Charlet, Yves Klein, Paris: Vilo International, 2000. 85. 101 Longchenpa, You Are the Eyes of the World, Novato, CA: Lotsawa, (Trans) 1987. 49. 102 ibid 103 Ottmann, Klaus. Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein. Putnam: Spring Publications, 2007. 14.

The research allocates the void attribute of presence to Yves Klein and, as with the other attributes, is also applicable to other case study artists. The centrality of the void in Buddhist philosophy and also shamanic spirituality makes it the primary attribute of the framework of presence. The void is the spatial dimension of presence and is interchangeable with the notion of pure awareness. It is the ‘emptiness’ of Buddhist philosophy and the foundation of the dimension of presence. It is the creative source of all images, hence ‘imaging the void’.

In the Damasio model, Yves Klein performs from the extended self in a social context. As with Marina Abramović, Yves Klein uses a concentrative meditation technique that requires an intensification of energy to produce presence. For Yves Klein these techniques were developed from his years of martial arts training. Yves Klein’s flamboyant atomic battery requires intense concentration to charge and his martial arts training prepared him for this capacity to use energy in an intensified field; it is assumed by this research that he used the concentrative mediation approach. In documentary films of Yves Klein, the intensity of his single-pointed concentration and accumulation of high energy is apparent.

4.03.1 Smitten With Divinity

Powered by Catholicism and intense devotion to Saint Rita, Yves Klein mixed his version of Catholicism with Rosicrucianism and spiritual aspects of Japanese martial arts to create the basis for his cosmological philosophy. His performance-self loved basking in celebrity status although deeper into Yves Klein’s philosophy and artistic practices were authentic and transcendent aspirations to a supernatural power. Yves Klein had complete conviction in his return to ‘Eden’. Eden is space and space is spirit in a relational dynamic of I/Thou and an expansion into God. Yves Klein’s artistic practice speaks in the language of Christian divinity. Yves Klein exclaims, ‘Through absolute art, that is to say through the living illumination that I become ... by immersing

myself in the limitless eternal sensibility of space, I return to Eden’.104 Intensified space for Yves Klein presented a freedom from the material and the potential of the immaterial flight into the sacred space of spirit.

One of Yves Klein’s early influences in his metaphysical philosophy and then applied to his art practice came from his years of study in martial arts, in particular, the abstract movements in Judo called Kata. After many years of martial arts training Yves Klein concluded his training with five months study of Judo in Japan, he was awarded the highest grade, Black belt fourth Dan. In 1952, Yves Klein wrote in an instruction book, The Foundation of Judo (Le Fondements du Judo), ‘Judo helped me to understand that pictorial space is, above all, the product of spiritual exercises, Judo is, in fact, the discovery of the human body in a spiritual space’.105 It was from this first career choice, a passion for Japanese martial arts, that the research identifies the mind training and notes the influence of Zen Buddhist philosophy with its emphases on ‘emptiness’ in his philosophy.

In addition, Yves Klein’s wide-ranging interest in the spiritual caused him to research and train in Rosicrucianism for six years. This is in common with the influence of Rudolf Steiner’s version of Rosicrucianism on Joseph Beuys. Yves Klein began his studies of Rosicrucianism when at eighteen years of age. In 1947 he signed the infinite blue of the sky in his imagination, which marked the beginning of his myth making for artistic self-promotion. Like Joseph Beuys, Yves Klein’s transformational mythology required a foundation and this signing of the infinite marked the beginning of Yves Klein’s ‘Blue Revolution’ where he embraced infinite space through the perception of primordial awareness. Phillip Vergne wrote in Earth, wind and fire or to overcome the paradox of Yves Klein, the molecular child who wrote to Fidel Castro on his way to Disneyland that Yves Klein

104 Ottmann, Klaus, Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein, Putnam, Spring Publications 2007. 167. 105 Ottmann, Klaus, Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein, Putnam, Spring Publications 2007. 4.

85 truly ‘sought to embrace: space, void and freedom’.106 For the research, they are indivisible elements of presence.

Yves Klein’s breakthrough event occurred when using (unbeknown to him) the Dzogchen ‘sky gazing’ practice. This contemplation practice is called ‘trekcho’ which means ‘cutting loose’. It is a single focused contemplation for remaining in the natural state of presence-awareness while using eye sense consciousness to remain in union with space. When mastered according to Tenzin Wangyal, one can see primordial awareness itself through the physical eyes.107 If this were a possibility as stated, it would be a sublime example of making the invisible visible.

Rosicrucianism is a Christian mystery school and dates back to 17th century Germany. It is a combination of Christian faith and passion. As previously noted, passion, which is intensification, is used in the production of presence. For the Rosicrucian there is no such thing as void space, to them, space is Spirit and matter is crystallized space or light.108 The Rosicrucian teachings of Max Heindal, a Christian occultist, astrologer, and mystic, still circulate from his Californian Rosicrucian Fellowship, which Yves Klein studied for six years. The training influenced Yves Klein’s philosophy and is a blend of Christian doctrines and Greek Corpus Hermeticum, the Latin Asclepius. Max Heindal reflects in his Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception ‘on the void that so many consider an important topic now. I hold the following: there is no such thing as the void, nor can there have been, nor will ever be…’109 Max Heindal is separating his ‘not-void’ from any notions of Buddhist philosophy with its emphasis on emptiness; his was pure spirit. Yves Klein knew the centrality of the ‘nothingness’ from Japanese Zen Buddhism through his time in Japan. His approach to emptiness blended with his

106 Klein Yves: The Void With The Full Powers. Catalogue. Hirshhorn Museum and the Walker Art Centre, 2011. 45. Deleuze’s child concept used in the title denotes a constellation of micro perceptions that give birth to the molecular child. 107 Tenzin, Wangyal, Rinpoche, Wonders of the Natural Mind, The Essence of Dzogchen, New York: Snow Lion Publications, 2000. 124. 108 Klein: The Void With The Full Powers. Catalogue. Hirshhorn Museum and the Walker Art Centre, 2011. 51. 109 Heindal, Max. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception. Chapter 9. Available on the website, The Rosicrucian Fellowship, www.rosicrusian.com Max Heindal had been inspired by attending lectures by Rudolf Steiner in Germany, went to California and set up his Rosicrucian Fellowship.

86 strong Catholicism and Rosicrucianism to formulate his version of the void as pure spirit that was inclusive of the void.

A close collaborator of Yves Klein and philosophical support was the art critic and writer Pierre Restany who formed a ‘partnership’ with Yves Klein. It was Pierre Restany who claimed that Yves Klein’s signature IKB (International Klein Blue) colour, used in his paintings, imaged the void, ‘this full void, and this nothing which encloses Everything Possible’.110 For Yves Klein, his IKB monochrome paintings were not paintings but presences of the invisible.111

The art critic Donald Kuspit argues that in these works, ‘the artist is attempting to function shamanistically’ and was attempting to articulate what Yves Klein called ‘the great emptiness’.112 The void is central to shamanic traditions and in Polynesian shamanism is called ‘Po’ and in New Zealand Maori ‘Te Rare’. Yves Klein’s artworks were described as portals to immaterial sensibility and as such were ‘alchemical and beyond time. It represents nothing’.113

The costume of the performance-self is a second skin of power and a prominent feature in the performative photographs of the case study artists. Yves Klein’s shamanic costume of the performance-self, formal black dinner suit and tuxedo was established a few months before Joseph Beuys appeared in his trademark shamanic costume of the fishing jacket, felt hat, and sulphur boots.

Enthusiastic about the philosopher Gaston Bachelard, Yves Klein adopted Gaston Bachelard’s phrase ‘first there is nothing, then there is a deep nothing; then there

110 Restany, Pierre, Yves Klein: With The Void, Fire at the Heart of the Void, New York: Journal of Contemporary Art Editions, 1992. 111 It was the constant inhaling of the fumes of IKB paint that contributed to his heart attack and death at the age of thirty-three, the age Christ died, leaving him with only seven years of artistic production. He packed into those seven years, nonstop production of performances, projects and artworks. 112 Kuspit, Donald. The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting: 1890-1985. Exhibition Catalogue, New York: Abbeville Press, 1986. 113 McEvilley, Thomas. Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962. Conquistador of the Void, Houston, Texas: Houston Institute for the Arts, Rice University, 1982. 24.

87 is a blue depth’ as representative of his creativity.114 This statement for Yves Klein, used in lieu of any art objects, was enough of an art gesture. Like James Lee Byars, Yves Klein considered his presence was all that was required, just by being there (in presence) altered the nature of space surrounding him. Nothing needed to be added in terms of artistic production. This is a re-visioning of how artists function in space, and space perceived as ‘condensed void’ or ‘spirit’ establishes the foundation of metaphysical performance for the research. Presences impregnate spirit, and this for Yves Klein was the true spectacle of the void. It was the purity of presence that was the true sensibility of artistic production; he called this ‘pure sensibility’, and was direct immediacy and perception. To achieve ‘direct perception’ requires an advanced training in mindfulness to attain an inner clarity of mind unfiltered by thought.

In 1961 Yves Klein gave a talk at the Sorbonne, The Evolution of Art towards the Immaterial, in which he clarified his metaphysical process: ‘water and fire shot from the heart of the earth to unite in the void. The void is definitely purified by the combined intervention of these two elements’.115 By interpreting Yves Klein’s use of the elements with alchemical symbolism, it is easy is understand his self- positioning as a resurrected Christ figure. The hermetic secret used by Yves Klein is the union of fire and water. By burning himself in the fire at the heart of the void, the ashes (of Yves Klein) could be reborn as a Phoenix. Self transformed into a Phoenix needs to dive into the water to overcome the effects of fire, seen as solar ardour in the service of cosmic salvation. Pierre Restany in Fire at the Heart of the Void claims, ‘Klein identifies with the Son in the liturgical trinity. He takes his place to the right of the Father, absolute gold of immortality, and to the left of the Holy Spirit, the blood of divine love’.116 By identifying with the Christ- Man, Yves Klein receives his second baptism by fire which alchemically, is life purified.

114 Bachelard, Gaston. Air and Dreams. The Blue Sky, Chapter 6. Dallas: Dallas Institute Publications 1988. 161-174. 115 Restany, Pierre, Yves Klein: Fire at the Heart of the Void, New York: Journal of Contemporary Art, 1992. 22. 116 ibid

4.03.2 Yves Klein: The Shaman-trickster

Yves Klein, the shaman- trickster instigated celebrity culture into mid 20th century art. From Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol to Joseph Beuys and Marina Abramović, artists have exploited the power of the public image. Yves Klein’s self-entrepreneurship is legendary and was a propaganda tool used for self-aggrandizement that verged on hubris. Dressed in his signature black tuxedo and white gloves, Yves Klein stepped into his fundamental-self to be conductor of the universe. His intensity has been described as ‘obsession’ and, as presence theory states, the production of presence is intensified through single focused attention. Using his martial art training he reached for what is a shaman’s quest, the level of pure energy and direct perception of energy as it flows in the universe, called by the research ‘primal force’. Yves Klein’s flamboyant ‘atomic battery’ requires intense concentration to charge and he used his training to intensify the energetic field surrounding him.

Photography’s potential to capture the invisible is at the heart of Yves Klein’s use of the medium and his constructed images become realities in their own right, not just a record of an event. Performative photography as primary art originated from Yves Klein’s interest in documenting his public performances and happenings to promote his career to a larger consumer audience by publishing and printing his images and articles in a faux newspaper, Dimanche. In it he wrote ‘the link between spirit and matter is energy. The combined mechanism of these three elements generates our tangible world… and one will be directly within spirit and matter, without any intermediaries’.117 This is understood in the research practice as the merging of consciousness of the inner world, the outer world and the surrounding activated primal life force.

117 Yves Klein: The Void With The Full Powers. Catalogue. Ottmann, Klaus’s essay, Yves ‘Le Philosophe’. Hirshhorn Museum and the Walker Art Centre, 2011. 299.

Yves Klein: Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, Paris 1962118

Yves Klein orchestrated his performances from a conceptual position. The ritualized quality of his performative gestures is exemplified in Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility at the Pont au Double in Paris in 1962. Yves Klein invites collectors to purchase a ‘zone of immaterial pictorial sensibility’ of indeterminate dimension for a sum of gold. In exchange, collectors were given an original receipt, which they were instructed to burn, while Yves Klein threw the gold he received for the work into the river Seine. This performative event was photographically documented and was the only record of the work with the exception of a few unburned receipts.

Photography used this way and as used by the research practice reflects the tension between the actual performance, photography as documentation and photography as residue of process, which becomes primary artistic expression. Yves Klein often hired professional photographers to record his performances and included enhancing the image in postproduction. However, Yves Klein did not publicly acknowledge what was in fact theatrical deception or basic

118 Yves Klein and Dino Buzzati engaged in the ritual transfer of immateriality, January 26, 1962.

90 photographic dark room manipulation that transformed the documentary photography into Yves Klein’s imaginative art of the immaterial. There is a multiplicity of selves in his performative photography. Yves Klein is an example of how early conceptual art used photography to make the invisible visible.

Yves Klein appropriated indiscriminately from everywhere and did not bother to acknowledge sources. For Yves Klein, ideas are to be owned by all.119 Yves Klein like Joseph Beuys engaged in a re-writing of biographical history for the purpose of myth making. This was to support the cultivation of his public persona, the iconic self. For each of the case study artists, the development of the performance-self is a conceptual project. Yves Klein dressed in a tuxedo and white gloves signified the conductor of the universe as well as his own mythology. Joseph Beuys a few months later created his signature shamanic costume of fishing vest and felt hat. This creation of a public persona also applies to Marina Abramović and James Lee Byars who celebrate the cult of individualism while claiming universal states of being. It is a relational approach as opposed to the research practice, which is immersive and process orientated. The production of performance art initially needs a performer, a mediator of presence; how this mediator is dressed up or down is a vital component of performance and gives signals to the process of double becoming in play. The research’s interpretation of Yves Klein’s deep process of double becoming is that the first becoming is from the multiplicity of psychological selves to the fundamental- self; the second becoming is transforming into the Christ figure. As Max Heindal’s Rosicrucian Fellowship states, ‘at present we are labouring to form the Christ within, but when the inner Christ has grown to full stature, He will shine through the transparent body as the LIGHT OF THE WORLD’.120

Yves Klein had achieved a focused and powerful sense of presence-awareness developed through mediative trainings in mind and body enabling him to intensify presence and, as he claims, saturate the space surrounding him. Space is condensed void in Dzogchen philosophy and, in Yves Klein’s philosophy, space is spirit and

119 ibid. 266-283. 120 Heindal, Max. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception. Chapter 9. Available on the website, The Rosicrucian Fellowship, www.rosicrusian.com.

91 matter is light. The connection between the two for Yves Klein was energy. One of the principles within Japanese martial arts is the concept of sutemi; its essential component: suti is defined as ‘abandon the body’. It means to discard, throw away. Abandoning the body requires dis-identifying from sets of self-concepts that are considered to veil presence, and identification with body image is the earliest and deepest self-concept to be released from. It is the beginning of the binary experience of self and other. Yves Klein’s leaps into infinity may have used this aspect of sutemi from martial arts training in his performative actions. The leap was a launch, lift-off and set-sail to impregnate spirit with intensified presence. Yves Klein calls it ‘an atomic battery and radiating generator’ of energy befitting a master of martial arts but is it the inner experience of the void, which is a complete and total emptiness.

4.03.4 Conclusion

The question remains as to whether Yves Klein actually experienced the void as an inner space of the mind where all boundaries of self disappear and with it the experiencer. The experience of the void is known through a recollection of the disappearance of a self. It is the absolute state of non-existence. However, the all- inclusiveness of the Dzogchen anthem ‘The Jewel Ship’ warns about taking such a position, stating it is neither being or non-being, existent or not. There are no clear demarcation lines between imagination and actuality in Yves Klein’s approach to presence.

Here is the paradox for the research: expanding a self-centre through iconic-self development in theory reduces the experience of universal states, which dissolve any solidity of self-entity. Thus the research questions the degree of actual universal immersion in the void attained by Yves Klein. The research asserts the illusionistic nature of a self-centre, so how can an illusion, a construct, claim such universal states of being and in terms of the void? Yves Klein’s fundamental self is a deep and more transparent self-construct that could possibly experience universal dimensions of space and presence. Yves Klein had complete conviction about the actuality of the void and his performances where he dissolves into infinity. For the spectator his performances required acts of faith. According to

92 the first principle of shamanism, ‘we create our own reality’ and, Yves Klein reminds us, ‘the imagination is the vehicle of sensibility, transported by the imagination, we attain life, life itself, which is absolute art’. 121

4.04 Joseph Beuys and Dynamic Creativity

This universal creativity sums up the unique reality, which is the core of all spiritual pursuits and teachings.122

Creativity within the presence framework is the dynamism of presence. In promoting his famous statement, everyone is an artist; Joseph Beuys drew attention to the universal transformative potential of creativity. Joseph Beuys is assigned the attribute of dynamic creativity for the presence framework.

Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) was one of the most controversial artists of the late 20th century. He was difficult to contextualize in art history as his art celebrated creativity and subjectivity, when a key position of postmodernism is a rejection of traces of the artist’s subjectivity within the creative process. His artistic practice stood in contradiction to American Minimalist Art and Conceptual Art of the time. At the same time, Joseph Beuys was an increasing presence in Germany, and the international Documenta exhibitions made him an influential figure, both as an artist and a teacher. Joseph Beuys wanted to liberate creativity from the cultural ghetto of the dealer-critic system, which he considered ‘outmoded’. His expanded concept of creativity wanted to transform humanity through the globalization of creativity, the future of humanity depended on it. Joseph Beuys was a major figure within the system attacking the structure of the art market. Joseph Beuys co-founded the International Free Universities as a non-profit organization and based on a manifesto written by Joseph Beuys.123 These were established in a number of countries. Its aim was to create an organizational place of research, work and communication to ponder the future of society.

121 Yves Klein: The Void With The Full Powers. Catalogue. Introduction. Hirshhorn Museum and the Walker Art Centre, 2011. 27. 122 Longchenpa. You Are the Eyes of the World. Novato, CA: Lotsawa, (Trans) 1987. 22. 123 International Free Universities operated from 1973 to 1988

The increasing commercial power of the dealer-critic system during the late nineteen eighties reduced his influence. Within two years of his death, all the International Free Universities had closed down. This closure, combined with the arrival of the new zeitgeist in German painting in the early nineteen eighties and with it the rise of the international art market, took over from any Beuysian socialistic tendencies in contemporary art that remained. This also occurred in Australia with the rise of the art market and the closure of many non-commercial artist-run spaces. Power shifted. Joseph Beuys’s short-lived reign as the ‘guru’ of the avant-garde was over but not his influence. Joseph Beuys was the last of the modernists in a postmodern era and was far removed from postmodernist Andy Warhol Pop reality, yet both projected mass-media personas of iconic status for very different reasons. Joseph Beuys wanted social transformation and Andy Warhol wanted fame and money. Cultural production shifted from modernism and away from Joseph Beuys’s pre-modern shamanistic rituals that were steeped in religiosity and the sacred. The Byzantinist Otto von Simson argues Joseph Beuys broke new ground for Christian art in a post-war world.124 For Joseph Beuys, the world was in need of transformation and this occurs through universal creativity and by inciting a creative humanity. His method to achieve this was through the sacred by employing shamanistic rites or rituals.

Joseph Beuys’s statement everyone is an artist concurs with Longchenpa’s approach to creativity; I salute the supreme universal creativity. For Joseph Beuys, his performative actions were suffused with the transformative quality of creativity and used with shamanic intent. His method for this was called social sculpture and was intended to develop new social structures. In his role as shamanic healer, he applied shifts of beliefs and transformative perceptions of reality with remarkable results. Joseph Beuys co-founded the German Student Party and later the German Green Party, which I suggest would make the Green Party the greatest ongoing collaborative social sculpture conceived by an artist,

124 Mesche, Claudia and Michely, Viola. Eds. Joseph Beuys: The Reader, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007. 5.

94 now operating in over seventy countries. His shamanistic definition of social sculpture is ‘how we mold and shape the world in which we live’.125

Joseph Beuys as a social activist was acknowledged as an organizational speaker for the Greens, addressing creativity in the context of schools and universities, science and economics. He promoted his concept of expanded art to the broader public context. His expanded model of the creative process implied that every aspect of life could be approached with ritual and creativity.

In the Damasio model, Joseph Beuys is located at the core-self layer and with strong roots into the proto-self. The core-self is the strongest natural presence location with its centre in ‘being in the world’. This combination of locations gave Joseph Beuys a centred, deep and reciprocal connection to the earth elements. He used a concentrative meditation technique in performance, achieved through shamanistic perception and ritual. In an interview, Joseph Beuys reveals the importance of shifting perception and how he generates a constellation of micro perceptions. He comments, ‘In order to have access to every single point of view, you really need an acute sense of perception’.126

4.04.1 Everyone Is an Artist

In Chris Thompson’s book Felt on Joseph Beuys and Fluxus, Loywrien Wijers, a writer and friend of Joseph Beuys, suggests that the statement everyone is an artist made famous by Joseph Beuys may have originated from the Fluxus artist Robert Filliou, the artist is everybody.127 Robert Filliou was deeply immersed in Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen practice and his Fluxus version emphasized Longchenpa’s approach to creativity. This synthesis broke down divisions and blurred the boundaries of art and life.

125 Thompson, Chris, Felt, Fluxus, Joseph Beuys and the Dalai Lama, Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 44-45. 126 Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Malden, Mass: Blackwell 2003. Joseph Beuys in interview with artists, Enzo Cucchi, Anselm Kiefer and Janis Kounellis. 127 Wijers, Loywrien. Writing as Sculpture 1978 - 87. London: John Wiley & Sons, 1996. 126-133.

While possibly claiming this Fluxus, Dzogchen inspired utopian vision of Robert Filliou as his own as Loywrien Wijers suggests, Joseph Beuys takes the statement and stamps his intensely personal branding by reframing the statement to everyone is an artist. He saw how this notion represented a new impulse and vitality that could be applied to his own artistic philosophy. Joseph Beuys’s biographer, Caroline Tisdall, considers that everyone is an artist could also mean everyone is a shaman, implying everyone is transformative.128 Everyone is an artist is a challenge by Joseph Beuys for everyone to become conscious of the innate creativity available; it is a cognition of the creative dynamism of presence and, according to Joseph Beuys, can transform the world. Joseph Beuys’s formula is the organic unity of art and economy framed by Joseph Beuys as ‘Humankind’s creativity is the capital. The money is not the capital’.129

Joseph Beuys offers an explanation of his famous statement everyone is an artist to theologian and curator Friedheim Mennekes in his book Beuys zu Christus (Beuys on Christ) by emphasizing the potentiality inherent in the statement.130 Joseph Beuys considered the future of humanity depended on mobilizing creativity and his concept of expanded art addressed this concern. He wanted to expand the notion to include all of humanity. Global creativity was a utopian idea that had the potential to release creativity from its cultural ghetto, the art world and transform the world. Messiah, maybe - Joseph Beuys’s creative dynamism in combination with love of the earth is a deep navigational direction in art practice and a potent formula in a time of an overheating world.

In the following three statements that address what an artist could be, everyone is an artist, the artist is everybody and the artist is the universe, all develop a concept of expanded art. Joseph Beuys’s everyone is an artist draws attention to the healing and transformative qualities of creativity and confirms the need to integrate this state of our being as an evolution in consciousness. For Marina

128 Water, Mariko, Namba and Fridman, Eva, Jane Neuman, Shamanism, California: ABCLIO, 2004. 26. 129 Wijers, Louwrien. The Dalai Lama talks to Louwrien Wijers. Holland: Kantoor voor Cultuur Exracten 1982. 95. Included in this book is Embracement of East and West, Joseph Beuys in conversation with the Tibetan Dzogchen scholar, Lama Sogyal Rinpoche. 130 Mennekes, Friedheim. Beuys zu Christus. Stuttgart: Catholic Biblical Association, 1989. 51.

Abramović, the artist is the universe moves the context from global to cosmic to imply the infinite inner and outer universal dimensions are available for art.131 Robert Filliou’s original statement, the artist is everybody, establishes creativity has a given and not a stretch into the self or cosmos, but it can be. The research does what Joseph Beuys may have done with Robert Filliou’s original statement; it reverses the order of Marina Abramović’s definition to produce the universe is the artist, namely, the universe as pure presence is dynamically creative and the artist is everybody is a co-creator in this dynamism, conscious or not.

4.04.2 Joseph Beuys, Shamanic Artist

The complexity of a Joseph Beuys action is open to multiple interpretations through its elemental symbolism and can be examined from many vantage points. The position the research takes towards this complexity is to focus its lens on everyone is an artist statement by Joseph Beuys and the shamanic implications of his art practice. It examines Joseph Beuys through his shamanic self and its corresponding shamanic worldview. His position correlates with Longchenpa’s salute to supreme universal creativity.

In Polynesian shamanism (Wana Kahili) there are four levels or worlds of experience: the ordinary world, the psychic world, the dream world and the world of being. Serge King renames these as the objective, subjective, symbolic and holistic worlds and adds that these worlds are common to everyone and that the only difference is the shaman uses this worldview with intent and consciousness. The first principle of ‘Huna’, the Polynesian philosophy of life, is ‘the world is what you think it is’, in other words ‘we create our own reality’. Serge King in his essay, ‘Seeing Is Believing’ goes on to expand this principle by suggesting ‘the way to change experience and to use nonordinary abilities within

131 Abramović, Marina. Mono Kultur #35. 20.Marina Abramović’s complete statement; ‘the deeper they look inside themselves, the more universal they become. The artist is the universe, the artist is the universe, the artist is the universe’.

97 a given reality is to shift from one set of beliefs (assumptions, attitudes and expectations) about that reality to another’.132

Joseph Beuys: I Like America and America Likes Me. René Block Gallery, New York 1974133

By wearing his shamanic power costume, Joseph Beuys signals to the audience a shift of reality and an intensification of presence through ritual. His use of specific materials in a process of constant transformation became the hallmarks of his artistic practice. Materials used such as cooking lard, or ‘fat’, are naturally transformative due to atmospheric warmth. For Joseph Beuys, the shaman ‘stood for something that was in a position to bring both material and spiritual contexts into a unity’. Becoming presence positions the performance-self between unity and multiplicity in a similar placement. In his coyote performance, I Like America and America Likes Me, an overstatement by Joseph Beuys, two mediated presences locked in a cage form a dynamic exchange, human animal shaman and wild animal. Sidestepping a political reading of this artwork, which refers to the plight of the North American first nation, the fusion of two presences in

132 King, Serge, Seeing Is Believing: The Four worlds of a Shaman, Doore, Gary, Ed, Shaman’s Path: Healing, Personal Growth and Empowerment. Boston: Shambhala, 1988. 21-23. 133 Photograph: Caroline Tisdall

98 resonance heightens the energetic exchanges within the cube of caged space. As Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari state in A Thousand Plateaus, ‘ Becomings-animal are basically of another power, since their reality resides not in an animal one imitates or to which one corresponds but in themselves, in that which suddenly sweeps us up and makes us become – a proximity, an indiscernibility that extracts a shared element from the animal far more effectively than any domestication, utilization, or imitation could: the Beast’.134 The research agrees yet takes a different angle by considering that becoming can evolve into presence and is the meta-process of becoming presence. From this position, the caged space, coyote and shaman are networked into one oscillating presence.

Joseph Beuys: I Like America and America Likes Me. René Block Gallery, New York 1974135

As a celebrity construct, Joseph Beuys in his iconic signature costume became more famous than his artworks. His style of power dressing signified shamanic intention. The fisherman’s vest and his felt hat, an English Stetson, and sometimes his alchemical sulphur encrusted boots were possessed with indwelling spirits transforming them into shamanistic power objects. Alchemical boots symbolize elemental transformation and directional indicators. Felt was used in all categories of Joseph Beuys’s warmth sculptures and signified ‘a

134 Deleuze G. and Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Athone Press, 1984. 279. 135 Photograph: Caroline Tisdall.

99 completely different kind of warmth, namely spiritual warmth or the beginning of an evolution’.136

The symbolism of ‘fat’ is built into his well promoted, transformation myth of being in a plane crash during the Second World War in the Crimea, badly injured and rescued by ‘Tartar’ shamanic nomads. According to Joseph Beuys he was covered in animal fat and wrapped in felt in order to stay warm as he underwent his healing process, which was a shaman’s initiation and he was accepted as one of them. There is a question of authenticity to certain aspects of this myth building. Re-writing biographical history for the cultivation of an iconic self- image is a core creative process for the case study artists, as it accumulates power to effect change. The fishermen’s vest as a transformational symbol could have twice-born Christian symbolism; he was reborn into Christ and Christ was a fisher of men. Joseph Beuys was a teacher of a new concept of expanded art, hence a fisher of disciples and he gathered a wide cult following. Again, the first principle of shamanism, ‘we create our own reality’.

Joseph Beuys was introduced to performance art in 1962 through the Fluxus group that included the Fluxus Dzogchen artist Robert Filliou and John Cage, the “immanent” sound composer. Fluxus, with its nonconformist blend of art and life, promoted the spontaneous performance process. Joseph Beuys, influenced by this, did not rehearse his action, but instead had a loose script where he positioned the objects to be used in performance. As with the research practice presented here, it is moment-to-moment nuances in the felt energetic presence that loosely guide, like a Beuysian script, the direction of the performance.

Joseph Beuys’s performative actions operated within a timeframe of forty-five minutes to nine hours and were mostly unscripted. This timeframe allowed the audience space for interpreting their life experiences into the actions. His performative actions were described as intense, intimate and autobiographical, qualities that can also be directly applied to early Marina Abramović

136 Thompson, Chris, Felt, Fluxus, Joseph Beuys and the Dalai Lama, Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 113.

100 performances. A Beuys action is effecting social change through ritual whereas Marina Abramović’s recent performances are more fundamental and have a different kind of ‘change effect’. Being presence-awareness is enough of an artwork as Yves Klein previously discovered. Here everyone is an artist transforms into everyone is a work of art. Joseph Beuys’s works of art were traces and remains of ritual; action fragments that function as portals into a Beuysian universe.

The influence of Rosicrucianism through Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy and meditation techniques had a deep impact on Joseph Beuys and is an entry point to analyse the formation of Joseph Beuys’s meditation practices and his relationship to elements used in his performances.137 Rudolf Steiner’s shamanistic methodologies developed what he called ‘spiritual eyes’ and a new form of perception that responded to the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms. This training consists of becoming minutely aware of invisible forces and energies contained in the natural world. This develops an intuitive awareness and reverence for the natural world. The meditator’s life force and the natural life force of, for example, a plant are enveloped in what Rudolf Steiner called a ‘small luminous cloud’. Rudolf Steiner said this must be intensely felt and must be experienced free from all other thoughts.138 For Rudolf Steiner, this created a new form of creative interaction with the inner powers of the kingdoms not formerly seen, hence ‘making the invisible visible’. Joseph Beuys was in essence a Rosicrucian. In a lecture in 1985 Joseph Beuys called Rudolf Steiner ‘the greatest man of our time’, indicating how influential his philosophy was on Joseph Beuys.139

137 Here is another crossover connection; Max Heindal: who had previously been vice-president of the Theosophical Society of Los Angeles, had a revelation after hearing a cycle of Rudolf Steiner lectures in Germany, 1907 and then returned to California where he formulated his Rosicrucian Fellowship and published The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception in 1909 which was an important early influential text for Yves Klein who belonged to the Fellowship for six years. In addition, Marina Abramović was, in her early metaphysical development, influenced by the writings of Madame Blavatsky, founder in 1875 of The Theosophical Society, the earlier spiritual society for Max Heindal. Joseph Beuys through the influence of Rudolf Steiner is Rosicrucian inspired. 138 Steiner, Rudolf. The Essential Rudolf Steiner, Start Publishing, LLC, 2013. 139 Rodin and Beuys. Catalogue. Dusseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2005. 182.

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4.04.3 Conclusion

The dynamic creativity of presence can be observed in the ever-changing, transformative processes of the natural world. This is the universality of dynamic creativity. Joseph Beuys’s intense self-invented rituals of art in a performative transformational process lies at the heart of becoming presence or becoming spirits in the realm of spirit. Is this just Joseph Beuys’s utopian dream or a deeply experienced lived reality? Through performative actions in poetic creation Joseph Beuys shows how to intensify presence with dynamic creativity harnessed through self-invented ritual. Joseph Beuys’s shamanistic-self performing transformational processes has many overtones of the high self of Kahuna. Joseph Beuys’s concept of expanded art demonstrates the dynamic creativity of presence and is applied in the research practice with its animistic connections to the natural world. Joseph Beuys’s statement, everyone is an artist is expanded to all flesh bodies and into the primal elements through the concept of universal creativity which sums up the unique reality defined by the title of the seminal text You Are the Eyes of the World.

4.05 James Lee Byars and Immanence

One perfect, two perfect, all perfect. One Perfect means that pure and total presence is complete. Two perfect means what is made by the mind is complete.140

James Lee Byars was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1932 and studied art and philosophy at Wayne State University. His first exhibition in 1958 was a legendary event in the stairwell of the Museum of Modern Art and lasted one day. He then moved to Japan for nearly a decade where he presented many performances. He moved back to New York in 1967 and spent increasingly more time performing in Europe where he moved permanently in 1972. He is widely recognized and has been the subject of numerous international gallery and

140 Longchenpa. You Are the Eyes of the World, Novato, CA: Lotsawa, 1987. 39.

102 museum exhibitions. He died in Cairo in 1997.

James Lee Byars was an interventionist and often made a point to participate in art events such as Biennales uninvited. By not being constrained by official selection and market forces, he was free to maintain an attitude of life being a continuous performance. His transgressions into the established contemporary art context allowed him access, while remaining free from the imposed styles and trends that can shackle an artist to art world hierarchies.

James Lee Byars maintained a degree of anonymity while calling himself the most famous unknown artist in the world. The English artist Banksy by maintaining anonymity would earn this position now. The immanent processes of James Lee Byars’s performative sculptures appear to happen by chance. Curator and writer Klaus Ottmann called his performances ‘chaotic attractors’, at once controlling and summoning random events.141 His brand of perfect immanence elevates random events into heightened reality. Applying the process of immanence, namely orchestrating the ever present quality of presence and its inherent equality of being, to James Lee Byars and his performative sculptures provides a way to understand his spontaneous appearances and disappearances in performance art. Like Yves Klein, James Lee Byars was much interested in the symbolism of the colour ‘gold’. Dressed in golden suits as a second outer shamanic skin, gold was for James Lee Byars the colour from nowhere. In a conversation with Gunter Theil, James Lee Byars stated ‘gold leads me into the infinitely mystical’. 142 The colour gold is another way he bridged the immanent space between the material and immaterial, the physical and metaphysical. The performances of James Lee Byars are known as performative sculptures and are immanent processes; he spontaneously appears, presents his presence, using some self-invented ritual and then disappears.

141 Ottmann, Klaus. The Art of Happenstance The Performative Sculptures of James Lee Byars. Sculpture Magazine, Vol. 21, No.9, November, 2002. 142 Heinrich, Heil. Ed. The White Mass. Interview: Gunter Theil with James Lee Byars. Kunst- Station, Sankt Peter, 1995. 72-88.

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James Lee Byars: The Death of James Byars 1982143

The Death of James Lee Byars, a performance piece by James Lee Byars, has simple and absolutely minimal instructions: ‘Quietly lie down and quietly get up’. James Lee Byars’s performances move between dualities of the eternal and the present moment, and the immaterial and material. The crosscurrents and the in- between spaces of these dualities enabled James Lee Byars to blend science and his version of mysticism into a philosophy of ‘perfection’. In performance, his fleeting impression of a body in space is backed by the philosophy of ‘just your presence is enough’; an approach to presence also performed by Marina Abramović from the other end of the spectrum using extended durational time in performance.

143 Photograph, Graham Burn.

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In the 1973 Venice Biennale, James Lee Byars had printed on thousands of thin pieces of tissue paper 'YOURPRESENCEISTHEBESTWORK' (Your presence is the best work). James Lee Byars was dressed in one of his Japanese Noh Theatre influenced shamanic costumes that range from gold, red, pink and black. Appearing on the rooftop of the main entrance pavilion, he showered his message upon visitors. It was a call for them to become part of the actual presence of art. Presence is another approach to experience the underlying dynamics of art and life. James Lee Byars’s adaption of Shinto ritual and Japanese Noh Theatre merged into a Zen-like hidden-self presence that could elevate seemingly random gestures and actions into orchestrated performance rituals. This is also true for Joseph Beuys who used Siberian shamanism in the same way. Joseph Beuys was a familiar spirit for James Lee Byars and a friend.

The research utilizes a particular aspect of the oeuvre of James Lee Byars that connects to presence, by focusing on the implications of performative action itself and the shamanic costumes that clothe presence. James Lee Byars’s actions or more precisely his non-actions, simply present presence as performance. He is known as a conceptual artist backed by training in philosophy. His philosophical ideas ranging from Wittgenstein to Aristotle featured heavily in his works.

In the Damasio model, James Lee Byars is located as with Joseph Beuys at the core-self layer. His being in the world operated with a strong sense of appearing in the world and disappearing. The meditation style is receptive and open to the impact and synchronism of the world and beyond into universal spaces.

4.05.1 Perfect Immanence

An example of an immanent performance is The Death of James Lee Byars - Five Points Make A Man (1994). In Brussels the artist initially lay on the floor of the gallery and, after he had risen, he placed five crystals to indicate the body’s two legs, two arms and head. In the Venice version of this performance, James Lee Byars substituted drops of water for the crystals. Grounded in minimalism and

105 the human form, his love of ephemeral beauty and perfect form produced intensified sculptural presences that indicated sublime states of being in the universe. His later works expressed the paradoxes and contradictions between the physical and the metaphysical, which is an underlying theme of this research, becoming and presence, self and cosmos.

To directly perceive life as an immanent process is to enter into ‘the eternally perfect world’ of James Lee Byars. This heightened reality celebrated by James Lee Byars is pure Zen. In this reality of direct perception, the term ‘eternity’ within Zen ‘is a world of ever thusness, it presumes no moment of creation, no creator, no specific creative force’.144 It is a world of ‘suchness’ seen as the actuality of things as they are without interpretation. The second aspect is the notion of ‘perfect’. It sees everything as ‘perfectly arising’ and intrinsically correct which can be summed up in a somewhat clichéd statement: the universe does not make a mistake. That everything is as it is and is perfectly right implies a total acceptance of the ‘moment to moment’ spontaneous arising of the world. The third quality of the ‘eternally perfect world’ is ‘immanence’ described by James H. Austin in Zen and the Brain as ‘the presence of the ultimate reality principle, embedded entirely within and throughout the whole physical universe’.145

A continual theme of James Lee Byars is the immanent perfection of life as it is. In an audio work by James Lee Byars, he proclaims, ‘perfect is my death word’. To James Lee Byars, even death is perfect. James Lee Byars has been known as a ‘hunter of the void’, the space of infinite potential. His contemplative actions suffuse most of his performances and evoke the void through silence. Much like the title of ‘Yves Klein With The Void, Full Powers,’ 2011 retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum and Walker Art Center. All the case study artists are hunters and finders of the void.

144 Austin, James, H. Zen and the Brain, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: MIT Press, 1998. 554- 556. 145 ibid

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4.05.2 Perfect Performance

The Dzogchen view of ‘everything is perfectly and naturally arising in the majestic creativity of presence’ is present in James Lee Byars’s performances. There is a level of conceptualization in his performative sculptures, a philosophical stance, but the performances go beyond these conceptual restraints into performative presence in a process of immanence. The core-self space of James Lee Byars and the strong connection to ‘being in the world’ allows for effortless performance as with Japanese Noh Theatre, one of his seminal influences. The immanent process is natural to the core-self. His performances are not of a long duration or could be one continuous life performance; in fact James Lee Byars always seems to be in performance mode, it is a Fluxus attitude where there is no separation between art and life. This is contrasted with the performances of Marina Abramović who is centred in the extended-self and where the use of concentrative will is required to be present over such long durations.

Appearing as half showman, half Shinto priest, James Lee Byars ‘erupted’ a performance into life with a single action. An artist statement made famous by John Cage, the Zen influenced, Fluxus connected, immanent composer, states ‘art should not be different than life but an action within life’.146 The notion of ‘chance’ seeded into 20th century art by Marcel Duchamp and applied to the contemporary music context by John Cage, radically re-envisioned music by introducing silence and chance sounds present in everyday life. Immanent processes, through a process of accidents, ruptures and momentary appearances in life, provided for James Lee Byars elements of life to enhance upon. This is known as ‘immanent authorship’. Everything has performative potential.

146 Duberman, Martin, B. Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community, Dutton, New York, 1972. 349. John Cage’s full statement is: In Zen Buddhism, nothing is either good or bad, or ugly or beautiful. The actions of man in nature are an undifferentiated and complex of events, which hold equal indifference to the ultimate factor of oneness. No value judgements are possible because nothing is better than anything else. Art should not be different than life but an act within life. Like all of life, with its accidents and changes and variety, and disorder and only momentary beauties. Only different from life in this sense: that in life appreciation is passive like listening to a sound complex of a bird, waterfall and engine, whereas in art must be a voluntary act on the part of the creator and the listener.

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James Lee Byars signature image presents a type of enigmatic surrealistic Marx Brothers type of performance that sometimes last only a few seconds. An example is James Lee Byars’s performance The Perfect Performance Is Standing Still where he climbs on a pedestal for a few seconds and stands still, then climbs down and disappears. A variation of this action is The Perfect Kiss in 1978. Presented at the University Art Museum at Berkley, every day at noon for two weeks he would mount a pedestal in the foyer of the museum, perform the action of a slight pursing of the lips as he stood on the pediment, and an instant later climb down and depart.147 Was it a kiss from presence to presence or a kiss to the universe? Maybe it was the kiss of perfection.

James Lee Byars: The Perfect Kiss performed at the University Art Museum, Berkeley 1978

147 Elliot, James. The Perfect Thought, Works by James Lee Byars. Berkley: University of California, 1990. 57.

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James Lee Byars’s repeated use of ‘perfect’ operates as a modifier that permeates all of his art, the perfect death, the perfect silence, the perfect word and the perfect book to name a few. For James Lee Byars, immanence is married to perfection, as they both reside in the experience of ‘suchness’. The attitude is that everything is perfectly arising, whether the self is in agreement or not. How could it be any other way? To disagree is to turn against the momentum of the primal force. It is this alignment with the life force that sees perfection in each moment. James Lee Byars incorporates many qualities of Zen and what he has in common with the other case study artists is the ability to pay total mindful attention within the performance actions. The influence of Japanese Zen Buddhism, Noh Theatre and Shinto ritual become indivisible components in a James Lee Byars performance that provides, in the here and now, instant intensified performances of presence. Core creativity immanently arises through these trainings of perception as purified presence.

Lucinda Childs performing James Lee Byars’s The Mile–Long White Paper Walk, Carnegie Museum of Art 1965

There is a strong connection in James Lee Byars’s performative sculptures to the early 1960s immanent performance art of the Goat Island, the Living theatre and the Judson dance group where a group member of the Judson dance group,

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Lucinda Childs, dressed in a full length ostrich feather costume performed James Lee Byars’s The Mile Long Paper (1964-1965). The theatrical component of James Lee Byars is associated not only to his influence from Japanese Noh theatre but to the wave of early minimal performance art and experimental dance where artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Morris collaborated with dancers and choreographers. Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown, for example, featured in this hybrid between performance art and dance. Yvonne Rainer performed in 1970 her work called Chair/Pillow, where chairs and pillows are props for simple everyday actions of sitting, standing, holding and throwing. These movements are elevated through focused attentiveness from the ordinary sense of usage to the perfect action (of a James Lee Byars performance).

4.05.3 Becoming Perfect Presence

James Lee Byars, when he climbs on a pedestal, becomes transitional between human and sculpture. He calls his performances performative sculptures, and becoming a sculpture, a work of art, generates an immediate separation from the everyday social self. Not that James Lee Byars was much identified with the everyday self, as he seemed to be in immanent performance all the time.

Becoming a performative sculpture is a borderline event and a process of becoming. For James Lee Byars ‘the perfect performance is standing still’. Here stillness is understood as a rupture from the frenzy of doing, of everyday life. The rupture brings consciousness back to the present moment, back to presence. All gestures from a state of presence are suffused with its qualities. A fleeting kiss from a state of presence is a kiss of presence as with any action coming from presence. Simple minimal gestures arising from presence are loaded with the effect of presence, the love to be. It is primal life affirming and an intensification of mediated presence for performance.

‘The love to be’ begets becoming. Becoming is an involutionary process, a curling back within. Involution into presence generates two movements; one of

110 intensification of energy as with all the case study artists and the second movement is becoming imperceptible. The latter, imperceptibility, can lead to the end of all becoming and into pure presence. However, becoming presence in its universal dimension is becoming everything. The research explains this process towards the universal in the following sequence. When James Lee Byars climbs onto the pedestal, he automatically becomes the pedestal, becomes the space, before becoming stillness and in becoming stillness he automatically becomes presence.

James Lee Byars’s artistic production is related to the simplicity of Zen thought; it strips the veils of representational illusion and exposes the quality of immanence. The writer James Elliott suggests his artwork presents ‘invisibility as the unseeable emblem of ungraspable immediacy, the perfect openness to the possible that each moment offers’.148 Perfection is when everything is seen as intrinsically correct and perfect. There is no transcendent principle involved, just a state of ‘suchness’ that pervades the metaphysics of James Lee Byars’s philosophy and art. Three metaphysical concepts are applied to James Lee Byars’s artistic practice: the eternal, perfection and immanence. The eternal is the timeless zone of the present, perfection is the moment-to-moment suchness of life and immanence the spontaneous processes of performance in art and life.

The involutionary process is the beginning of becoming presence and there is no logical order to transformations towards presence. For Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari becoming ties together the whole evolutionary chain, from microorganisms to animals to the galaxy. For the research, it is presence that ties the transformational processes of becoming to everything. Both are correct. Becoming everything (toute le monde) for Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari brings into play the cosmos with its molecular components and also Longchenpa’s definition of presence as ‘the site and home of everything’.149

148 Elliot, James. The Perfect Thought, Works by James Lee Byars,. Berkley: University of California, 1990.71. 149 Longchenpa. You Are the Eyes of the World. Novato, CA: Lotsawa, (Trans) 1987. 48.

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4.05.4 Conclusion

James Lee Byars’s performative sculptures reflect varying degrees of immanent processes. With James Lee Byars’s performances, the research explores a different durational approach to presence-orientated performance, one that last only a few seconds as demonstrated by James Lee Byars. This is in relation to the extended time durations of Marina Abramović (512 hours). The aspect of duration in performance is defined by James Lee Byars through the fleeting time frames of immanent processes. What immanence offers is a reduction of authorship, representation and imitation. What immanence increases is the spontaneous arising of creativity without the need for a dominant idea or cultural reference. The essence of immanence is a radical method of performance that heightens presence in performance because it brings self as process into an immanent process of presence in a fluid state of suchness and not determined by concepts or self-images.

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Chapter Five: The Research Practice: Becoming Presence

5.0 Introduction

The word shamanism (like the word Buddhism) is a Western academic invention of the early 19th century. It is a collective term to cover all animistic practices of many first nation spiritualties. It is a particular type of awareness where the shamanic self is in conversation with all aspects of natural life - trees, creeks, non-human flesh bodies, the sky, the earth, the water and the air, and, importantly, the patterns and relationships between them. Serge King, a Hawaiian Kahuna shaman, describes the prerequisite condition of the shamanic experience is ‘to get out of his hard head and into the body’.150 Marina Abramović repeats this request in her realized dream for the Marina Abramović Institute, a Bauhaus inspired teaching facility; she considers ‘it will provide an increased awareness of the participant’s own self, to make the connection, to the emotions and physicality of the body. People live in their heads; they don’t live in their bodies’.151 Will her understanding of self include the notion of the self as process? It is unlikely as Marina Abramović has consolidated her philosophy of the higher self and that locks it into spiritual practices that promote ‘self-realization’ as an end goal. For the research practice, any metaphysical realization hinges on increasing degrees of self transparency, for this creates an internal spaciousness of unmediated presence so any notion of self-realization is rejected and replaced by the process of self-transparency, the self becoming a ‘dot’ as Sogyal Rinpoche describes it.

As a preparation for performance, awareness of presence is achieved by sensing inwardly through the body’s energy to presence and outwardly to the raw presence of the natural world.

150 Doore, Gary, Shaman’s Path; healing, personal growth and empowerment, Boston, Shambhala, 1988 Chapter 6 Seeing Is Believing: The Four worlds of a Shaman, Serge King. 21-23. 151 Abramović, Marina (interview) Mono Kultur, #35, 2014.

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The above diagram details shifts in perception to produce presence-awareness within the performance-self as used in the research practice. Each aspect of the diagram intensifies the production of presence and increases the state of awareness held during performative photography and performative drawing. Surrounding and supporting the performance-self is the primal life force.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj in his book I Am That presents an authentic detailed first person account on being and self.152 Nisargadatta claims the state of Being is when ‘the consciousness of one’s own being, of the world, and of its supporting primal force are experienced all at once’.153 Applying this formula to producing presence and using the above diagram activates a strong internal and external sense of presence for performance. Consciousness spread in three directions, as described, immediately stills the mind to produce what Yves Klein calls the void and the research knows as inner silence or void space and are the ideal preconditions for this category of performance.

The research formula of becoming presence is a meta-process that lies beneath any double becoming of the selves. These two simultaneous processes are active in performance - one is the linkage to presence and the other is the multiplicity of selves. In a state of pure presence all becoming stops. The self closest to presence would have less becoming and more presence. Longchenpa’s assertion for pure presence is ‘there is not a single state, which is not this vast state of presence. It is the site and home of everything’.154 Self as process according to

152 Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj was one of the acknowledged sages of 20th century India. 153 Nisargadatta, Sri, Maharaj, I Am That. (Trans) Frydman, Maurice. Durham, North Carolina: The Acorn Press, 1973. 64. 154 Longchenpa. You Are the Eyes of the World. Novato, CA: Lotsawa, (Trans) 1987. 48.

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Longchenpa is also an aspect of the vast state of presence and confirms no separation of self and presence.

5.01 Self-Transparency

Francis Fukuyama describes a process of dis-identifications required to reveal a Factor X, seen in this research as the fundamental self (Yves Klein), higher self (Marina Abramović) or collectively known as the essential-self. Francis Fukuyama wrote ‘what the demand for equality of recognition implies is that when we strip all of a person's contingent and accidental characteristics away, there remains some essential human quality underneath that is worthy of a certain minimal level of respect – call it Factor X. Skin, colour, looks, social class and wealth, gender, cultural background, and even one's natural talents are all accidents of birth relegated to the class of nonessential characteristics’.155 It is what remains when layers of identity are stripped away along with a lived past, and anticipated future. This is a stripped down and streamlined version of a self. Nevertheless, it is still a self and hence a boundary in an unbounded field of presence. It is an essential quality of self with a deep connection to presence.

Marina Abramović, Yves Klein, Joseph Beuys and James Lee Byars form this essential human quality into a higher, fundamental or shamanistic self. The research practice in Flesh Bodies works directly with presence and the first skin boundary as a permeable membrane between inner and outer worlds. The flesh body is closer to a transparent-self than the high self. It starts to lose its identification with humanness through an impersonal and equalizing association with all flesh bodies.

When the structures of self become more transparent, there is a return to its fundamental nature that may or may not require a self-structure. It is not that the primary self-structure is liquidated. It is made transparent by seeing through and dis-identifying with layers of self-identity. This opens up the territory for self as process and an exploration into the multiplicity of selves that exist beneath

155 Fukuyama, Francis. Our Posthuman Future, London: Profile Books, 2002. 149-152.

115 the previously fixed primary structure of the self. When the self is transparent and presence comes to the foreground of consciousness, then self as process can extend in both directions of evolutionary linkages and range from pre to post human configurations. This turns the previously fixed self-structure into an expression of mediated presences for performative photography. In 1978 James Lee Byars exhibited a sculptural word image for the concept of the transparent self; a huge marble slab engraved with a minuscule text: ‘I Am Imaginary’.

Using Damasio’s model, the self-location of the research practice is the proto-self. The process of revealing the unconscious to consciousness is a well-known surrealist art method and used to explore the deep interiority of the self-process. Another result of making the unconscious conscious is an expanded openness to potentials of self as process, unblocked from the containment of the primary self- identification.

Establishing inner and outer space for creative production is not based on any dominance of authorship. The space is achieved through the discipline of being present, ‘moment to moment’, a condition prior to thought and yet including all thought. The category of proto-self used in the research practice is located next to the ontological ground of presence. This is the location for the source self as its fusion is mostly presence with enough selfhood to generate a mediator of presence. Instead of configuring a fundamental self thus setting a self-structure as with Yves Klein and Marina Abramović, the research argues the process of becoming presence equally intensifies presence with a minimal self-structure. Beyond the proto-self, the research posits the no self or transparent-self and unmediated presence, where self disappears and presence shines unhinged from all identifications. This is the intense encounter with the experience of ‘suchness’ in the lifeworld. According to Longchenpa, there is nothing to attain, only the recognition of the ontological ground of presence as the fundamental foundation of self.

For the research practice, the more presence that is present, the less self is dominant. More presence equates to less self. This is a key concept for the

116 research practice - the meta-process of becoming presence. This direction of becoming is a mysterious end game for the self as it is reduced to a ‘dot’, ideally for the duration of the performance.156 This can generate an unfiltered perception of the lifeworld and a sense of omnipresence.

5.02 The Performance Site

John Lethbridge Sensorama 1, 100 X 300cm, 2011– 2016

As the intention of the research practice in Flesh Bodies is to connect to primordial presence, the closest hot spot is the local creek bed at the base of Mount Wandella, on the far south coast of NSW, Australia (a mountain sacred to the Indigenous people of this region, the Yuin). The performance site is located in the amphitheatre of the creek bed at the base of the mountain, a fifty meter stretch of creek frontage with its southern orientation that produces a south light ambience. It is highly active with non-human flesh bodies, imposing rock outcrops and caves that have strong animistic overtones. The raw unmediated presence of the natural world can be easily accessed and sensed in this location.

In stepping into the photographic site, the performance-self shifts perspective

156 Wijers, Louwrien. The Dalai Lama talks to Louwrien Wijers. Holland: Kantoor voor Cultuur Exracten 1982. 93. Included in this book is Embracement of East and West, Joseph Beuys in conversation with the Tibetan Dzogchen scholar, Lama Sogyal Rinpoche. Lama Sogyal Rinpoche: ‘For instance, in meditation. When you use the ‘outbreath’ just the out-breath. First you think: ‘I am breathing out’. Slowly, slowly the ‘I’ goes away: ‘Am breathing out‘ Slowly, slowly ‘am’ dies: ‘Breathing out’. So that one becomes functional. In function one is there. One is the action. One is happening. So pure, so fine, that one becomes almost a dot. And in that dot one begins to develop certain poise, a poise, and a clarity vision, out of which comes the art’.

117 from a subject-object consciousness to an immersion in the raw presence of site. There is a panorama of presences that surround the site and is beyond any single focused subject-object viewpoint. The mediated self-presence and the unmediated raw presence seemingly fuse to generate a unified field and generate a space where the multiplicity of selves can burst into expression. The oscillations between self as process and a state of presence converge in the dimension of presence. Self-processes wax and wane into consciousness as does the animated effects of presence through its attribute of dynamic creativity.

This connection to the primal quality of presence has a relationship to the performance art of Joseph Beuys, which is to perform transformative healing of the umbilical cord between humanity and earth. The process of healing performed by Joseph Beuys in his role as the artist-shaman was enacted through self-invented rituals. By the early nineteen eighties, it was obvious to many, including Joseph Beuys, that the split between humanity and the natural world was rupturing.157 While the research practice does not attempt such a healing on a grand scale, establishing a deep connection to the natural world is in itself a natural healing through the sense of unification with natural life, internally and externally.

Joseph Beuys had a shamanic connection to the animistic pre-Christian spiritual traditions of Germany where the male and female Gods lived in the elements. The monotheistic traditions according to Joseph Beuys removed the spiritualization of the natural world by cutting away this connection.

157 Wijers, Louwrien. The Dalai Lama talks to Louwrien Wijers. Holland: Kantoor voor Cultuur Exracten 1982. 93. Included in this book is Embracement of East and West, Joseph Beuys in conversation with the Tibetan Dzogchen scholar, Lama Sogyal Rinpoche. ‘Joseph Beuys: In the Western world there is one result for all the needs that is coming from this one-sidedness of working with the so-called analytical science… That was for many natures in the Western world the cutting of an umbilical cord. So then, the people were completely alone. Lama Sogyal: Very much so. It is very interesting; in tantric Buddhism there is no God. You don't accept God, but yet there are Gods. Joseph Beuys: I think, they must find the God in themselves. Lama Sogyal: In themselves, and also there are actually the energies that are possessed in spirits, like the land, and trees, and water, certain kinds of energy, or the element of the elements’.

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Amalgamating spirit into a single transcendent God removed the spirit from the earth. In the Dzogchen philosophical view and practice, spirit is everywhere and the role of a transcendent absolute is taken over by a non-transcendent yet all pervasive presence-awareness, which is the innate quality of the universe.

The research practice identifies with the impersonal category of becoming a ‘flesh body’ rather than any identification with a version of the iconic self, used by the case study artists. The extreme iconic position of the self-authoring ‘individualized’ artist gives way to an impersonal singular notion of flesh bodies. This sidesteps the hierarchy of the human condition as the most evolutionarily advanced. There is no distinction made between human and non-human flesh bodies and certainly no higher self in operation.

The Fluxus artist Robert Filliou referred to his art practice as a type of proto- practice for what would become the art of the future; he described it as ‘the art of losing oneself without getting lost’.158 This is also the aim of the research practice, to lose the boundaries of self as much as possible and merge with the primordial environment of the performance site. This shamanic connection emphasized by Joseph Beuys is through elemental connections to nonhuman wildlife and to the elemental presences of the natural world. In this context, presence and presences are dynamically and creatively suffused into primal life. There is an unpredictable flow of elemental presences during performance; the wind, water, sky and massive rock formations all express the dynamism of raw unmediated presence.

Using the research formula of becoming presence and the double becoming of Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the performance self is positioned between the state of presence and the psychological multiplicities of the self that naturally arise during a performative action. These performances access the sensitivity of the proto-self with its foundation deep in the unconscious. There is a peripheral field of awareness that embraces all that can be felt and seen.

158 Thompson, Chris. Felt, Fluxus, Joseph Beuys and the Dalai Lama. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 56.

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These performance actions function through perceptual and psychological immersion. It is also working with what is available, the reciprocity between mediated presence and raw presence of nature, a figure in the bush.

5.03 Studies of Flesh Bodies: Performative Photography

John Lethbridge Flesh Bodies, 80 X 80cm, 2011 – 2016

The performative flesh body is in touch with the dimension called by the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in The Visible and the Invisible, ‘wild being’. Primordial qualities of the Australian bush can activate the primal nature that is deep within the unconscious. It literally is, becomes intense, becoming animal, becoming presence. The photographic series titled Flesh Bodies reflects back to Muybridge’s famous ‘battery of cameras’ arrested motion photographs as interpreted by the English painter Francis Bacon who produced some of the most compelling series of paintings in the 20th century using the flesh body. This series of Flesh Bodies shows related figurative concerns to Francis Bacon. Freeze-

120 framing and the arresting of movement by the application of the blur are captured through long camera shutter speeds.

Francis Bacon: The Painting, 198 X 132cm, 1950

In these studies of the Flesh Bodies, there is a connection to Francis Bacon’s view of the flesh body. The connection is that bodies are in a state of intensity, transformation, and are resistant to specific narrative interpretations. Francis Bacon succeeded in transmuting photographic presence to painted presence through the psychic drives and energetic knots of his unconscious.159 As an example, the elements in Francis Bacon’s 1950 painting titled Painting express ‘traces of Michelangelo’s use of muscularity and androgyny combined with Muybridge’s photographic movement and infused with Francis Bacon’s electric procedural approach.’160 This image appears as an x-ray into Francis Bacon’s internal Oedipal site as can be interpreted in this series of Flesh Bodies. However, a psychological reading of

159 By ‘knots’ I mean the complexes of psychological energy configurations that often generate the repeating and obsessive themes of the artist. 160 Harrison, Martin. In Camera, Francis Bacon. London: Thames & Hudson, 2005. 100.

121 the performative photographs is not the focus and is left to the spectator to contemplate if required. The emphasis on the flesh torso in Flesh Bodies has this commonality with Francis Bacon. The blurring of the boundaries between polarities of masculine and feminine, self and other, human and animal reduce subject-object dualism. It is a movement towards another kind of androgyny, one that goes beyond standard gender descriptions, into the terrain of Giles Deleuze’s ‘bodies without organs’ or Slavoj Zizek’s ‘organs without bodies’. In these images, gender identification is exchanged for a dynamic mobile identity point that immanently flows between male, female, animal, alien and elemental. The research practice employs the process of psychological fluidity, used in shamanic practices to connect with spirits.161

It is noted that, in object-relations theory, body identification is the first and deepest layer in the early development of self-identity, so shape shifting at a bodily level is a deep transformative process. Giles Deleuze’s impersonal singular view of life, a body without organs, supports the equalling out of all sentient life forms; Flesh Bodies uses this impersonal ‘equalling out’ category of Giles Deleuze through the common ground of consciousness. It extends further into the non- sentient elements of rock formations and flowing creek experienced as living elemental entities. This series attempts to escape the tyranny of the binary and all gender ideologies including biological essentialism through its equalling out of human and non-human flesh bodies. The visual space of Flesh Bodies is where opposites are brought together as presences. D.T. Suzuki, the Zen teacher who is credited with introducing Zen to Western thought, said, ‘Zen brings one into intense contact with the surrounding world’ as does presence.162 When

161 Stutley, Margret. Shamanism: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2003. 10. In 1968, Basilov visited the village of Cavo to meet an old Uzbek transvestite shaman called Tasˇmat-bola (born 1886), who was blessed by a Shamaness. He acquired a number of helping spirits (paris) who enabled him to heal people by divining which consisted of throwing a piece of cotton wool into water and watching its movements, thereby providing the required information as to the cause of the diseases and the cure. It was said that if he refused to wear women’s clothes as demanded by his spirits, they would suffocate him in the night. 162 A Zen Life by D. T. Suzuki, 2006 is a 77-minute documentary about Daisetz Suzuki (1870-1996) credited for bringing Zen Buddhism to the West. Suzuki considered Zen to be a floating cloud and

122 immanent composer John Cage attended the celebrated series of open classes by D. T. Suzuki at Columbia University from 1951 to 1957, he understood through Zen philosophy the interpenetration of all beings. Applied to the field of music John Cage’s idea of equality is ‘how sounds were equal rather than one sound being more important than the others and I try to make music so each sound be heard, not as subservient to other sounds, but as equal’.163

The impersonal level of Flesh Bodies activates fluidity in the self as a process or a series of processes. The process of double becoming reveals previously hidden invisible psychic energy constellations with their internal dynamism. The deep intra-psychic entities that arise in performance are intensely elemental in their mediation of presence. The creative emergence expressed in these images reveals a multiplicity of selves that exist in the deeper layers of the unconscious. All expressions of self operate as mediators of presence in greater or lesser degrees and it is to the intensities of the deep internal selves that the research practice focuses upon.

The notion of a flesh body becomes the internal site for experiencing mediated presence in performance. The flesh of the natural world is the presence of the elements that dominate the site in the form of large rock outcrops and caves into the mountain. The inner experience of presence is achieved simply by placing attention on the inner energetic field of the flesh body. Outwardly, there is the sense of being in tune and at one with the dynamism of raw presence. The unmediated raw presence that exists in the Australian bush combines the mediated presence of the performance-self and the primal life force. This unity of site, performance-self and primal force greatly diminishes the habitual authority of the self-referencing centre, called by James H. Austin in Selfless Insight, the ‘I, Me, Mine’ experience of self.

The discipline is to remain intensely stationed in the present moment for the duration of the performance while holding the sense of inward and outward not attached to Buddhism. Pure Dzogchen also differentiates itself in the same way from Dzogchen Buddhism and Dzogchen BonPo. 163 ibid

123 presence. This is the preliminary training for performance. The elemental presences of the bush and the natural arising of selves (mediated presences) fuse into the field of awareness and combine to form the dynamic conditions of performance for the research practice. The measure of presence-intensity in this context is dependent on the capacity of awareness to embrace these three aspects.

Inner and outer sensing of presence connects consciousness to the primal force of life. It is a freedom from what the philosopher John Locke called the ‘self’, comprised of consciousness, memory and personal identity. By stripping away memory and personal identity, consciousness is released and is more able to identify with presence. This discipline develops a connection to inner stillness that appears as thoughts slow down and disappear. At its most fundamental level, the spaciousness of presence is the void. This is embedded in Yves Klein’s perception of space as condensed void, an ancient Dzogchen view. This evolves a perception of reality unfiltered by mind and life naturally arising in the vast state of presence.

According to the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty ‘What we call a visible is, we said, a section upon a massive being, a grain or corpuscle born by a wave of Being’ resonates with Longchenpa’s dimension of pure presence.164 Longchenpa states, ‘there is not a single state, which is not this vast state of presence. It is the site and home of everything’.165 Presence-awareness offers a method of expansion into the vastness of a presence-saturated reality for creative production.

Shifting perspectives is a shamanic technique, which is well used by Joseph Beuys and inherent in the research practice. From the process of self- multiplicities to the animating impersonal life-presences, the performance-self is subject to an intricate process of immanence. Internal psychological dynamics of the performance-self have a direct influence on the mediated presence of the flesh body. Sensing presence stretches and internalizes the five empirical senses

164 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968. 136. 165 Longchenpa, You Are the Eyes of the World, Novato, CA: Lotsawa, (Trans) 1987. 48.

124 of the body and turns the senses (normally outward in direction) into an inner focus of perception. It is argued that the dimension of presence, the site and home of everything, is a continuous invisible medium in dynamic flow.

The research speculates that dis-identifying with the primary-self structure and its demarcation boundaries releases psychic complexities that were excluded in the early self-conditioning process. It also reveals unrealized psychic potentialities for integration and expression. In Damasio’s model, the core-self and extended social selves are our usual understanding of self. As ascertained by the early childhood development model of object-relations theory, certain fundamental qualities of our potential were blocked in expression through the socialization process and therefore play out in the interior world. It is argued that this energetically charged interiority forms a deep creative reservoir of self- multiplicities for this research practice.

The research practice in developing a process of self-fluidity, that is immanent by nature and stabilized in awareness, presents a dynamic version of self as process for performance. This performance-self is immersed in the dimension of presence and activated by the Deleuzian plane of pure immanence. The organic process of immanence supports the unpredictable and changing balance of ‘presence’ and ‘becoming’ during a performance event. The notion that ‘all is naturally and perfectly arising’ links to performance artist James Lee Byars’s constant use of the notion of Perfection. The Japanese Zen Buddhist notion of ‘suchness’ considers everything is perfectly arising in the suchness of life. It is firmly seated in Longchenpa’s inspired description of the dimension of presence, spontaneously arising, self-shining, ever-fresh, presence awareness, just this and nothing else.166 Giles Deleuze talks of a ‘being of sensation’ and this research speaks of subtle sensation, the sensing of presence with awareness. From this inner state of sensing presence, selves spontaneously emerge and disappear in

166 As noted before, ‘just this and nothing else’ extends Longchenpa’s description by the Melbourne based teacher of nondual reality, Bob Adamson whose early training was in the Hindu tradition of Nisargadatta. He often uses Dzogchen texts as the Tibetan Dzogchen and non-dual Hindu Vedanta traditions come to the same conclusions about the nature of reality, one substance.

125 consciousness. It is this dynamic of ‘the one and the many’ that the performance- self is situated between. This space is forged between unity of presence and the processes of becoming and is viewed as a continuum. The performance-self is pivotal and occupies a critical position between the invisible and the visible within this continuum. It is argued by the research that the process of becoming presence is a meta-process that lies underneath the double becoming of Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

In Freudian psychological theory the personal unconscious and its imaginative expressions are comprised of past impressions and repressions that generate entities of the unconscious, known as ‘complexes’. Without judgment, these energetic configurations provide a source of selves for performance. Other interior selves stretch into deeper realms of the impersonal unconscious requiring identification with the proto-self category of self and its connection to primordial life. In this layer of self, the intensity of primordial feelings becomes conductive to the intensification of presence. There is a high degree of self- transparency from this layer because of its proximity to ontological presence. From this location, the boundaries of raw presence and the embodied presences of flesh bodies interweave and give rise to animistic expressions. It is an animated field of presences that surrounds the flesh body of the performance- self. This includes the unmediated presences of the site’s elements - trees, rocks, water, air, sun, moon and all nonhuman flesh bodies.

Performative photography goes directly to the second life approach bypassing audience participation and is observed in space and time by the camera. The elemental dynamics of the site and the time of performance, together with the flesh body, all imprint presence photographically. This is the power of the ‘selfie’ used in the research practice. The main photographic coordinates for these performative photographs are the crystal clarity of a long depth of field by using the maximum depth of field setting available on the camera lens and slow camera speed. This sets up the continuum between the polarity of slow body movements resulting in traces and blurs and the atmospheric sharpness of the location. The camera records the energetic flow of the raw presence of the

126 natural world and mediating presences of flesh bodies, which concisely sums up the performative photography of the research practice.

5.04 Studies of Wing Bodies: Performative Drawing

The precondition for performative drawing, as with performative photography, is training in maintaining an empty spacious mind. This generates an inner clarity and spaciousness so the drawing processes can arise from this space. So becoming present is the beginning of the immanent process for performative drawing. The images are not authored by thought so the process starts with the raw and visually chaotic close-up images of rock formations and other natural forms that are formed into elemental presences. Each image is developed as one performance and is developed through non-conceptual ‘process only’ operations. Many images remain unresolved at the end of a sitting and are considered failed performances. It follows the same process as the performative photographs of Flesh Bodies, which also has a large reject quota.

By allowing stillness to descend or emerge within the mind, the process is free from most conceptualization. From this inner spaciousness arises the process of immanent drawing. The images function directly with a visual intuitive response; in this sense it is a durational performance of the eye and hand engaged with the surface of an image. This process is common to many artists’ methodologies although what aligns this drawing practice to performance are the developed meditative pathways to bind eye and hand movement into one unified and spontaneous performative gesture that takes place over one duration of time. The discipline is to only use visual perception without intervening thoughts. It is a specific state of consciousness developed through an artistic practice and is guided by intuitive ‘knowing’. Intuition is defined by the research as a ‘knowing’ without preliminary thought processes and trusts the internal ‘aha’ phenomenon as the rudder that steers performative drawing to completion. An image is an emanation that transmits presence from deep inner spaces and excludes as much as possible concepts and outer references.

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What are of interest in this process are the elemental presences that visually swell up from an internal spaciousness un-authored by concepts. Drawing in this method gives expression to the inner landscape of the mind. The creative expressions of these images are the contents of the unconscious and the drawing process sometimes gains access into the deeper impersonal realms of the unconscious to reveal sparks of luminous content. The research sees the images as mostly mirroring the internal landscape of the imprinted psyche and also the possibility to go beyond all psychological imprinting and into the luminosity of the universal void. Whereas Yves Klein leaps into the void, these images leap out of the void as luminous presences.

The research details one series, called Wing Bodies, to unpack the complexity within the images. The title is a reference to how Wing Bodies of the unconscious defy gravity and fly through psychological spaces. This component of the art practice can be seen as an archaeological ‘dig’ into the unconscious of the artist and beyond.

Its method is simple as previously stated; through quieting the mind of its conceptualization process and working with visual intuition, images naturally arise from the photographic source material. The source material is twofold: one is of close-up macro photographs taken by the artist of natural forms, rock formations and the other is fragments of the natural world such as a decaying wing of a moth sprinkled with rain droplets. These are evolved into images through photographic image manipulation software that is worked as a performative drawing process.

Themes of transformation ripple throughout these images. Seen as a process of becoming presence, darkness is transformed into light, into the luminosity of the monitor’s screen, a metaphor for consciousness. It is through the process of becoming presence that internal bodies within the unconscious naturally arise into form. The critical factor of performative drawing is dependent upon developing a state of silent awareness with its suffusion of presence before any drawing action takes place. These ‘non-authored by thought’ images refer back

128 to process art of the nineteen seventies where art was the residue of process as much as it relates to the surrealistic process of ‘making the unconscious conscious’ as exampled and made famous by the artist Louise Bourgeois. This process of non-conceptual awareness and creative intuition is ancient as demonstrated by Japanese Zen brush drawing and calligraphy, also seen as a performative drawing. The only rule established for performative drawing is that the image is required to take a complete form in one sitting and not be conceptualized during the process. With Japanese Zen imaging, it is a sudden instance of a performative gesture, whereas these performative drawings last for a longer duration.

Further photographic enhancement can take place on the successful images as with performative photography but images are not substantially reworked. This is in keeping with the performance attitude towards these drawings. The rules are guidelines to keep an image on track and to honour the emergence of dynamic creativity in a process of immanence. This is ‘towards’ the attribute of immanence because dominant themes of the personal unconscious can be traced throughout the series. Sometimes the repeating internal themes give way to deeper layers of the internal landscape revealing more primal interplays of energies. These are gifts from the unknown. From the ‘raw’ photographic source image, invisible energetic forces of the unconscious emerge in a process of drawing immanence.

Every visual element in these drawings is suffused with presence. These images can be interpreted through their symbolism although this is not the primary intention. What is ideally intended is to reveal qualities of presence in the energetic interplays at all levels of the unconscious, personal, impersonal and universal. They are empirical manifestations of the unconscious and are suffused with varying degrees of luminosity coming out of the subjective darkness of inner space. Here I am using luminosity within the subject-object tradition of Western philosophical thought and not from the framework of presence.

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The central psychic figure that sometimes appears in these images is seen as personal proto-presence. This equates to Damasio’s proto-self with its presence residing mostly in the unconscious. It is this self-presence that appears as a key player in the powerful polarities imaged in these drawings. These are classically known as the conflict systems of the unconscious. They play out a full range of expressions. Free from the restraints of external social conditioning, the super ego in Freud’s terms, they defy outer laws of life - most importantly, containment of the instinctual ’id’. Another freedom besides the continual shape shifting is freedom from the law of gravity. In these images, it’s possible to fly in the same way that dream reality offers.

Without psychoanalysing these images, and it is possible to do this, the focus of the research practice is on methodologies and processes. The mysterious nature of these expressions of unconscious that arise is a combination of activated internal dynamics (the content) and spaciousness (the context). These images can appear in contradiction to a personally held worldview and self-image so a non-critical approach to the subject matter is essential. Some of these internal presences fall outside cultural values and challenge the artist’s own acceptability. A motivating attitude to the artistic process is the notion of curiosity and a sense of allowing whatever wants to emerge, a freedom of expression. This introduces the revelatory factor in the self-revealing process of shining a light into the unconscious. Peeling away layers of self-identity exposes more universal layers of the unconscious. Within the image, specks of luminosity arise through the collision of raw material, the macro photograph and creative dynamism.

Correlations are found in the research practice between events in outer life and the image making process; together they weave a path of artistic exploration. Consistent themes reoccur in the anthropomorphizing of natural forms into internal figures of the mind and give a psychic charge to the particular figurations. It is these charged internal images that populate the inner landscape of the mind of the artist.

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In both performative photography and performative drawing in the research practice, the utilization of rock formations and caves links to a shamanistic view of the earth as the feminine principle, the (impersonal) obscure female as the philosopher Augustin Berque describes it. Augustin Berque in Thinking through Landscape notes ‘in ancient Greece, the creatures in nature – serpents, lions, nymphs, Polyphemus, the rural gods - all live in caves. The cave is their natural dwelling, which serves as their palace’. He goes on to say the function of a cave ‘is where fumes come from’.167 An interpretation could be that the fumes are the winds of the spirit and the animating principle of presence, the creative dynamism of the primal life force.

Living in the Australian bush for two decades, together with the animistic principle of shamanism where the earth is the sacred feminine, sets up the background to these images. Inner psychological complexities are projected into the natural world. The evolution of alien figures in these images form into presences of the unknown. Transfigurations of masculine, feminine, animal and elemental attributes contribute to the composite structures of imaginary figures within the image.

The underlying intention of these images is to open up to the depths of the unconscious in the classic sense used by the Surrealist artists – making the invisible visible. The images are considered to be empirical manifestations of the artist’s interiority and are ‘present’; as distinct from ‘represent’ the subjective space of the unconscious. Opening up to interior spaces and trusting the process of natural arising, the interior world can release its sometimes-disturbing contents imaged in Wing Bodies.

As suggested by Antonio Damasio, the self as process has a unique connection to presence and organically emphasizes different attributes of presence. This contributes to the range of expressions that move from human to non-human in the process of becoming. Images that come from the layer of the self, called by Antonio Damasio ‘proto-self’, have deep tentacles into the unconscious. In

167 Berque, Austin. Thinking through Landscape. New York: Routledge, 2013. 23.

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Damasio’s model, ‘the self is built in distinct steps grounded on the proto-self. The first step is the generation of primordial feelings, the elementary feelings of existence that spring spontaneously from the proto-self’.168

For the research practice the proto-self position for performative drawing gives access to the intensity of primordial feelings and establishes a connection to the primal force of life. Activated by creative dynamism, the process of becoming originates from the depths of the unconscious. Antonio Damasio considers primordial feelings to be the primitives for all other feelings.169

John Lethbridge: Wing Bodies. 80 X 80cm, 2011 - 2016

It is considered by the research that the Wing Bodies series of images is a reflection of the felt primordial nature of presence. Both self and presence are dynamic processes so stabilizing levels of fluctuations in presence is achieved

168 Damasio, Antonio. Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. New York: Pantheon Books, 2010. 45. 169 ibid

132 through the intention to remain in the present moment for the duration of the performance (Marina Abramović). By generating an inner spaciousness, the void (Yves Klein), all manifestation, including human and non-human selves, appear and disappear. That is the inner experience of the research practice and, it is the conviction of the artist, that when successful, images do capture traces of presence.

The landscape of the mind pictured in the research practice is a reservoir of energies, selves and attributes of presence that become available when opening to the mind’s interiority. The unconscious is the realm of the uncanny as it contains the powerful energetic polarities that exist within the unconscious and outside of social conditions and values. It not only contains the psychological energies that are not accommodated in the primary self-structure, known as shadow phenomenon, but also contains more fundamental states of presence as emphasized by the case study artists. Just as in dreams, sequences of psychological shadow play out in these images. Psychological transformation can be identified in the transitional images of performative drawing.

David Morgan, writing in Re-Enchantment, argues the philosopher Friedrich Schiller’s claim: art could teach people how to be free by inwardly reconciling the opposite aspects of human nature that Friedrich Schiller felt were the source of enmity and strife in social life.170 Art’s ability to work beneath social conventions as considered by Friedrich Schiller is an important freedom. Reconciling opposites is a by-product of the deeper dimension, the seamless field of presence. Longchenpa describes, ‘All that is has me – universal creativity, pure and total presence – as its root. How things appear is my being. How things arise is my manifestation’.171 If I take the entire unconscious including the notion of a universal unconscious as internally, which I am, as the content, then the spaciousness of mind (the context) including all attributes of presence are available for art. In these drawings, void space functions, as the generator of dynamic creativity and immanence is its process.

170 Elkins, James and Morgan, David, Re-enchantment, New York, Routledge, 2009. 30. 171 Longchenpa, You Are the Eyes of the World, Novato, CA: Lotsawa, (Trans) 1987. 32.

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5.05 Conclusion

The research practice, by stripping off the second skin costume and equalling out with other flesh bodies in the bush, generates a sense of openness and increased alertness. This peeling away generates a heightened state of attentiveness and receptivity to the constantly shifting atmospheres of the performance site inhabited by a wide diversity of non-human flesh bodies and elemental presences. What the demand for equality implies is, by removing identity from all of a person’s characteristics, what remains are some essential human qualities understood by the research as a high self (Yves Klein, Marina Abramović) or the reduction of a self to a ‘dot’ with its high degree of transparency and presence.

Imaging The Void. Flesh Bodies, Installation View, UNSW Galleries, 2016

Responding to elemental presences of the Australian bush, the performance-self merges into this flow of presence. The performance site, observed through Longchenpa’s ‘view’ uses presence-awareness as a method to perceive reality for performance. It develops a 360-degree awareness of felt presence in the location while condensing the definition of self-entity into an impersonal flesh-body in a process of double becoming. The performance site with its presence-saturated context requires an aware sensitivity to the nuances of the self’s inner and outer environments and the primal life force. Within the immanent processes of performance, there are connections to non-human presences and the site’s elements. Presence-awareness is used to re-vision the performance site into animistic patterns of presence. Self as process also functions in the research practice as self as mediated presence with its unique tone of presence gives form

134 and image to presence. By not separating the self from the dimension of pure presence, self as process in performance becomes an essential aspect of performing presence, the mediator of presence.

The process of initially quieting the mind for performance sets up the inner space for performance. Clarity of mind is the base preparation for performative photography and performative drawing. It is directly related to the case study artists who enhance the performative atmosphere with different techniques of mindfulness and shifts of worldview for the production of presence. Letting go of primary self-identification and its process of becoming into the process of

Imaging The Void. Deep & Wing Bodies, Installation View, UNSW Galleries, 2016 becoming presence is an internal shift of direction achieved by the research practice. Through processes of immanence, presence suffuses both performative photography and performative drawing. The research practice connects and uses all five attributes of presence; it establishes the space of the void, anchors into timelessness where performative actions function through processes of immanence. Images arise through the process of dynamic creativity and are luminously revealed via the photographic process. From the void of the imaginary, the elemental presences arise into form. These energetic configurations assert presence within void space, within its spatial dynamics of the frame. These elementally inhabited panoramic landscapes of the mind are built from the artists internal conflict systems of the unconscious and beyond, into the deep layers of internal space.

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The art of presence for the research practice is sculpting the self into presence- awareness with its corresponding nondual worldview and merging this state into dynamic creativity through performative immanent processes.

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In Conclusion: A Framework of Presence

The research’s original theoretical contribution to knowledge is a framework of presence derived from the seminal text by Longchenpa, You Are the Eyes of the World. Applied to the four case study artists, it is a method to analyse how presence functions in performance, performative photography and drawing. Attributes of a framework of presence are: timelessness (Marina Abramović), the void (Yves Klein), dynamic creativity (Joseph Beuys), immanence (James Lee Byars), and, common to all, luminosity.

Each attribute of presence presents a portal into the sense of presence and its state of being in the world. These attributes function creatively and sculpt performance. They are navigational markers for performance and dispense with the binary of self and other. Attributes of presence are also inherent qualities of natural presence, common to everybody. Because of the development of identity, all or some qualities of presence remain buried in the unconscious covered by identity structures. Others operate below consciousness and are unacknowledged. The meta-process of becoming presence is performed through attributes of presence or directly with presence-awareness. It is deeper and underneath self as process. Both become interpenetrative processes when creatively active in performance. The research argues that performative actions function with mindfulness, presence and shifts of worldview to create a specific category of performance, called by the research, ‘performing presence’.

Marina Abramović demonstrates timelessness. By maintaining attention continually in the present moment with the mind technique of Theravada Vipassana, Marina Abramović’s chosen method, attention is honed into the present moment with single pointed focus. This puts thoughts in neutral and a spaciousness of mind develops becoming the clarity of the absolute ‘now,’ the timeless zone where there is no past or future. When time dissolves, eternity appears.172

172 This is also the eternal aspect of Yves Klein’s flight to ‘Eden’. In Japanese Zen Buddhism, the state where time dissolves is known as ‘inside Kensho’.

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Yves Klein demonstrates the void. In Yves Klein’s philosophy, space is spirit and matter is light. In Dzogchen philosophy, space is the element of the elements and is considered to be condensed void and matter is condensed presence via the elements. The connection between the two, for Yves Klein, was energy, the primal life force. The void is the space that encompasses everything. For Yves Klein, performance is the presence of the performance-self that imprints on void space. The void for Yves Klein is pure spirit, the great emptiness, his ‘Eden’. Defined through the attributes of presence, the void is the deepest spatial dimension of presence.

Joseph Beuys demonstrates dynamic creativity in his self-invented rituals that induct an alternative reality through shifts of perception and intensification of presence through transformative ritual. His famous statement and a central focus of the research was everyone is an artist, which points to the natural creative impulse in everyone. Dynamic creativity is a natural arising from emptiness or, as framed in this research, the void. Expressions arising from this empty spaciousness are free from the constraints of conceptualization yet are uniquely coloured by their passage into form through the unconscious. Universal creativity is the expressive quality of presence-awareness and is, for Dzogchen, the creative dynamism of pure and total presence.

James Lee Byars demonstrates immanence. Understanding immanence is to view it as a ‘bottom-up’ process with a sense of natural and spontaneous arising, moment-to-moment. He demonstrates being within the profound ‘suchness’ of every moment, which is pure Zen. Through processes of chance, accidents, ruptures and momentary appearances in life, immanent processes provide for James Lee Byars elements of life to enhance upon in art. This is known as ‘immanent authorship’. Everything is expressing presence and has performative potential in every moment.

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Luminosity within this framework is defined as consciousness with its capacity of knowing. Described as luminous, it reflects the power of consciousness to illuminate all appearances. At its most fundamental level, consciousness reveals life to the self. Without consciousness there would be no perception and no self- awareness. Consciousness from the self-illumination viewpoint is luminous, knowing and revealing. To be consciously aware is simplicity itself, yet maintaining this state over duration is a highly developed and disciplined practice. In this sense, the mind and body trainings of the case study artists are paramount in the production of intensified presence for performance.

The research defines one major attribute of presence for each case study artist although combinations of attributes are active in all the selected artists and form interweaving patterns of presence. The case study artists demonstrate through their performances how to intensifying presence for performance art. How the performance-self takes the natural state of presence and forms this invisible substance into intensified presence is unique to each of the case study artists.

The research practice artistic formula for becoming presence is the combination of a mediator, consciousness, space, the present moment and the natural arising of immanent processes of life. This connects to the five attributes of presence; first it establishes the space of the void through quieting the mind and the practice of timelessness by anchoring consciousness in the present moment. Luminosity is applied through the focus of consciousness on awareness, being aware of awareness. The energetic component of presence is the dynamic creativity of the primal force. Performing presence functions through spontaneous moment-to-moment creative processes of immanence.

To conclude, this research builds on Yves Klein’s breakthrough approach to performance art and he worked obsessively to present it; just my presence is enough. Yves Klein declared ‘an artist must “simply” be, where he is, very intense and radiant’.173

173 Yves Klein: The Void With The Full Powers. Catalogue. Ottmann, Klaus. Hirshhorn Museum and the Walker Art Centre, 2011. 108.

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Chapter Five: The Research Practice: Becoming Presence

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