Zen and Tao influence on Western Art 禪與道對西方藝術之影響

20^th Century Abstract painters of the west personally or in groups were involved in Zen, Tao, Theosophy, Vitalism, Heideggerian existentialism, Gestalt therapy and Action Painting. Consequently, they were influenced by Zen and Tao, either directly or indirectly. In articulate worldviews that recognized the individual as intimately connected to each-others world by the very nature of existence.

Zen masters developed special forms of painting and calligraphy both as modes of meditation and as visual teachings. ³³ These dynamic forms had an important influence on modernism. Western artists became fascinated with the artistic potential of dynamic abstract brushstrokes. Some moved beyond forms into Zen philosophy.

Few if any Western artists achieved the spontaneity of Zen masters, but Enlightenment was an ideal that inspired many in their non-religious quest for the transcendent. Along the way, they gained glimpses of Nothingness which can only be known intuitively. They also learned what it is to be totally spontaneous, if only for a moment.

During the 1880s and ‗90s Zen influence on art popularly influenced the occidental artists. Among the first were van Gogh who loved Japan deeply and painted himself as a Buddhist priest, Gauguin who painted a work called ―Nirvana‖ which he hoped to reach but never did. These ideas will be analyzed later in chapter 4.During the art school studies in France, Monet was exposed to Japanese Viyoe‘s wood block prints which captured beautifully colored visual effects. Monet and his contemporaries completely reflect the main stream in recent Chinese and Western painting. ³⁴

Art comes from and is realized in a place before language, outside of the discursive mind. It shares this place, the place of emptiness, with Buddhist meditation practice.³⁵ Kandinsky‘s watercolor In the Circle from around 1911-13 is an early example of a form that would replace his beloved horse as a symbol of power. Some fifteen years later, he told the psychologist Paul Plaut, ―If…in recent years I have preferred to use the circle so often and passionately, the reason (or cause) for this was not the

33 Deisetz Tei Taro Suzuki, ‗Sen Nuddhism and its Influence on Japanese Culture‘: P.33

34 National Palace Museum, ‗Chinese and Western Style in Nineteenth Century‘: P.19

35 Jacquelynn Baas, Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today, P.

10

‗geometric‘ form of the circle, or its geometrical characteristics, but rather my strong feeling of the inner force of the circle in its countless variations.‖ The art historian Peg Weiss has argued that possible inspirations for Kandinsky‘s circles include Lapp and Siberian shaman drums, as well as cosmological concepts. One could infer another possible source: the circle of enlightenment –the wholeness of form and emptiness expressed in ―countless variations,‖ from the circle of the ―both vanished‖

stage of the Chinese Ch‘an Oxherding Pictures to Zen brush drawings of the enso, Japanese for ―circle (Fig. 40, 41, 42).‖ ―A circle is a living wonder,‖ Kandinsky wrote in 1937, in an essay entitled ―Empty Canvas.‖ According to Kandinsky‘s biographer Will Grohmannt Kandinsky was essentially Eastern in his personality.³⁶

The historian of Asian art Michael Sullivan has linked Kandinsky‘s concept of resonance with that ―cornerstone of Chinese aesthetic theory‖- chi-yiinsheng-tung (―spirit resonance‖) - defined by the Chinese painter Hsieh Ho in the sixth century :

―Early Chinese painters felt that this ‗spirit‘ was a cosmic force.³⁷

The suggestion in The Coffee Grinder of a ―window‖ that opens from material to immaterial reality hints at a Tantric influence. This work was done at the end of 1911, the same year that Jacques Bacot‘s Tibetan collection, which included Zen circle, was shown at the Musee Guiment. Duchamp may even have attended or discussed this exhumes Buddhist sculpture.³⁸

―Rotational movement is one of the most obvious characteristics of Tibetan rites,‖

wrote Jacques Bacot in his first published Musee Guimet lecture. Coffee Grinder depicts a machine that through rotational movement transforms individual coffee beans, whose form resembles the female exterior genitals, into a substance that can be

36 Jacquelynn Baas, Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today, P.

61-62

37 Ibid, P. 66-67

38 Ibid, P. 85

made into a stimulating-an awakening-liquid. Perhaps the best-known Tibetan examples of rotational movement are prayer wheels-rotating wheels or cylinders bearing or containing inscribed texts. Small ones are twirled on sticks; very large ones are turned using a mill powered by flowing water. Tibetan prayer wheels are modeled on the Wheel of the Dharma, the wheel the Buddha drew on the ground when he preached his first sermon, ―Setting in Motion the Wheel of the Dharma.‖ Sometime in 1913 – the year after his return from Munich Duchamp attached a bicycle wheel to a stool. He kept it by his chair in his studio so he could easily set it spinning. In Buddhism, the wheel is associated with turning the wheel of the Dharma-the liberating truth set in motion by the Buddha.³⁹ Tosi Lee has made a convincing case for the connection between Duchamp‘s choice of a wheel for his first ―readymade‖

and the Buddhist Wheel of the Dharma (Fig. 43, 44). In the Buddha‘s first sermon the wheel stands, among other things, for the newly enlightened Buddha‘s determination to turn the wheel of truth in this world. In early Buddhist art, the Wheel of the Dharma is represented by a wheel placed on top of a throne or pillar.⁴⁰

Duchamp‘s began constructing The Large Glass in 1915, which titled - Grand Vehicule - the French term of ‗Mahayana‘. Four elements on the right side of the lower, ―bachelor‖ half of the glass allude to Buddhist ―perspective‖. At the top is a small circular form described by Duchamp in his 1965 etching (a magnifying glass to focus the splashes).‖ It hovers above three ―Oculist Witnesses,‖ whose wheel-like shapes were supposedly based on French oculist charts. Duchamp first developed these circular forms in 1918 in a piece he referred to as ―the small ‗Glass,‘‖ evoking the name of Buddhism‘s other main branch, Theravada or Hinayana-in French, Petit

39 Jacquelyn Baas and Mary Jane Jacob, Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art, University of California press, P. 19

40 Jacquelynn Baas, Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today, P.

86-87

Vehicule (―small vehicle‖), because it focuses on individual enlightenment, as opposed to Grand Vehicule, which focuses on the enlightenment of all beings. The Zen circle of The Small Glass is an actual magnifying lens, and Duchamp inscribed the piece: ―To Be Looked At (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close To, for Almost an Hour.‖⁴¹ Cage stated that, he could have found ―Buddhist poetry‖- not theory, but something more like enlightenment fables-in books like The Gospel of Buddha According to Old Records, which Paul Carus, out in lonely LaSalle, Illinois, had compiled in 1894 out of texts and stories from the Buddhist canon. The Gospel was so successful that Soyen Shaku asked D. T. Suzuki to translate it into Japanese.⁴² Either Duchamp absorbed Buddhist teachings from books, or he got the point all by himself, because in Fountain he proposed a view of the human mind that perfectly resonates with Buddhism. ⁴³

Cage was so heart beaten after the death of Duchamp; he was like an old Zen Master who wouldn‘t tell you even if you did ask. After Duchamp‘s death, Cage spoke with his wife that, ‗you know, I understand very little about Duchamp‘s work. Much of it remains mysteries to me‘. She replied, ―It does to me too.‖

In the last decade of his life the famous American Japanese sculptor and painter Isamu Noguchi made Ojizousama or ‗Jizo‘, a nineteen-inch, slightly vertical stone with a circle carved in its middle. When the former relocation camp internee represented the United States at the 1986 Venice Biennale, he showed Ojizousama in an exhibition entitled ―What Is Sculpture?‖

41 Jacquelynn Baas, Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today, P.

88-89

42 Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats, P. 45

43 Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats, P. 48

For Cage, Duchamp had always been a teacher who acted without speaking, who spoke through his work, and who had brilliantly proposed an art indistinguishable from life.⁴⁴

The bodhisattva Jizo is the compassionate protector of the dead, especially children, and of travelers. His Sanskrit name, Kshitigarbha, means ―womb of the earth‖. Jizo‘s stone form, which can be as simple as a barely carved rock, appears along Japanese roads, at intersections, in mountain passes, and at the entrance to graveyards. The circle carved into Noguchi‘s Jizo could be a reference to the womb or to the wish-granting jewel that is his attribute. It is also another enso, resonant with Mu, nothingness. ⁴⁵

Another cubist New York based painter Adolph Frederick Reinhardt ("Ad"

Reinhardt)‘s journey towards Zen is also fascinating. Around 1940 he had abandoned Cubist-influenced abstraction in favor of the overall pattern of collage, and by the late 1940s he was creating black-and-white ―calligraphic‖ paintings and luminous ―brick‖

paintings. His shapes gradually became larger and more contingent until he achieved the brilliant variations on a single color exemplified by Red Painting of 1952. For the next four years, Reinhardt focused on two colors: red and blue. In 1955-56 he began to darken his colors dramatically, first in vertical canvases and then in five-foot-square paintings bearing nine black five-foot-squares arranged in a symmetrical cross or Zen circle shape. ―Five feet wide,‖ he was quoted as saying, ―just the width of a man‘s reach.⁴⁶ In language that echoes his reverent descriptions of Buddhist sculptures, Tantric Mandalas, and Chinese landscape paintings, Reinhardt declared his black

44 Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats, P. 98

45 Jacquelynn Baas, Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today, P.

122-123

46 Jacquelynn Baas, Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today, P.

127-128

paintings to be ―pure, abstract, non-objective, timeless and changeless.⁴⁷ His mature geometric abstractions emerge as a distinct formulation to effect as concentrated state of ―sacred‖ awareness:

i. Symmetry – geometry – perfection – absolute ii. Centrality – frontality – black – rectilinear iii. Finished before begun?

iv. Thought – contemplation – meditation v. More is less – much in little – latent vi. Conventionality – repetition

vii. Quietness – ―holy‖ – sacred – symbolic

With the work of the composer and artist John Cage, the relation of Buddhism to Western art came out of the closet. Cage freely acknowledged the significant impact of Buddhist philosophy on his life and his work.⁴⁸ In a 1992 interview with Laurie Anderson for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Cage explained how he came to Buddhism:

―I had read The Gospel of Sri Ramekrishna. I became interested, in other words, in Oriental thought. And I read also a short book by Aldous Huxley called The Perennial Philosophy, and from that I got the idea that all the various religions were saying the same thing but had different flavors…So I browsed, as it were, and found a flavor I liked and it was that of Zen Buddhism. It was then that Suzuki came to New York, and I was able to go to Columbia once a week for two years to attend his classes.‖

47 Alexandra Munroe, The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989, p. 290

48 Jacquelynn Baas, Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today, P.

159

Cage seems to have begun reading about Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, before he began attending the lectures of D. T. Suzuki around 1950.⁴⁹ In 1960 grove press published D. T. Suzuki‘s Manual of Zen Buddhism. The purpose of this book, Suzuki explained in his preface, was to share with Western students of Zen what ―the Zen monk reads. Suzuki often cited the esoteric ink painting by the zenga artist Sengai Gibon (1750-1836) as the quintessential embodiment of the universe and hence a diagram of satori. (Fig 49) He interpreted Sengai‘s three fundamental forms as geometries of formlessness and infinity which underscored his own view of emptiness (Sunyata) as the essence of Zen enlightenment.⁵⁰

Suzuki reproduces an early Chinese woodcut version that ends with an ‗empty circle‘

and a Japanese version of Kakuan Shien‘s twelfth-century elaboration, in which the

‗empty circle‘ is only stage eight. Kakuan, Suzuki tells us, thought the shorter version

―some-what misleading because of an empty circle being made the goal of Zen discipline (F. 41, 42). Some might take mere emptiness as all important and final.⁵¹ Painter Agnes Martin, born in the same year as John Cage, was among the first, along with her friend Ad Reinhardt, to absorb and reflect the lessons of Zen Buddhism in her art. If in his paintings Reinhardt contains and conveys the rich darkness of the mind, Martin strives to contain and convey the elements of the natural world within the elements of two-dimensional expression. These are primarily line and color;

though line and light might be a better way to describe it, for some of Martin‘s most powerful paintings have no color at all.

She was apparently influenced by the sixteenth-century Chinese poet Pu-ming, whose verses are quite surrealistic and deep in nature. In the early 1960s Martin gave her

49 Jacquelynn Baas, Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today, P.166

50 Alexandra Munroe, The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989, p. 199-200

51 Jacquelynn Baas, Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today, P.

207

paintings and drawings, which were empty of anything but simple grids, titles like Flower in the Wind and Grass, evoking Pu-ming‘s ―lilies of the field and its fresh sweet-scented verdure.‖ She herself indicated that her own philosophy integrated heavy does of both Taoism and Buddhism: ―My greatest spiritual inspiration came from the Chinese spiritual teachers; especially Lao Tzu…My next strongest influence is the Sixth Patriarch Hui Neng…. I have also read and been inspired by the sutras of the other… Buddhist masters. Zen influence is readily apparent in Martin‘s Cow, a painting from 1960 (Fig 47). Its brown circle could almost represent the ―Both Vanished‖ (Fig. 41) episode from the Zen Oxherding Pictures about the taming of the mind.⁵²

By the late 1960s radically abstract Indian Tantric art - made to be used as perceptual aids to meditation - was increasingly available to artists like Martin and Irwin. In 1969 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presented Fifty Tantric Mystical Diagrams in an American museum. Ajit Mookerjee‘s Tantra Art, which influenced the art of Jasper Johns, came out in 1966, with new editions in 1971 and 1977.⁵³

According to Richard Tuttle, who was influenced by wabi-sabi (the Japanese aesthetic of impermanence) and by Chinese calligraphy, but who has more recently been engaged in an effort to shift his (and our) energy from an east/west to a north/south axis:

―Such a haptic, four-dimensional conception of energy is reminiscent of the Tantric Buddhist circles, whose visualization cultivates profoundly aesthetic as well as spiritual perceptual awareness, and which is organized in reference to the four directions. The earth turns from west to east, so east-west energy has to do with time.

52 Jacquelynn Baas, Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today, P.

215

53 Jacquelynn Baas, Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today, P.

207, 209

North-south energy, on the other hand, is related to the poles of our planet-to space‖.⁵⁴

Irwin and Turrell collaborated on a project for the U. S. Pavilion at Expo 70, Osaka.

Their collaborator was Edward Wortz, who would drop out of the space program and become a gestalt therapist at the Los Angeles Buddhist Meditation Center. The focus of their investigations, like isolated meditation periods inside a black, soundless anechoic chamber, was to devise mechanisms (art) that would ―make people conscious of their consciousness…The experience is the ‗thing,‘ experience is the

‗object.‖⁵⁵ Irwin pursued the possibility of an edgeless painting with a series of convex silver-white disks whose material form, when attached to the wall and lit, dissolved in the interplay of its own shadows (Fig 45).

The abstract color films of California artist Jordan Belson likewise function as what Pran Nath would call ―a psychic phenomenon; A song of the universe. Samadhi (1967) (Fig 46) is a gradual metamorphosis of emerging and receding circles that evoke planetary globes and the pupil of an eye. While Bleson‘s images in part from live photography, they are documentary ―visions of [his] inner eye‖ that correlate with his phenomenological experiences of advanced yogic meditation.⁵⁶ Several of his films are based on specific South Asian metaphysical texts and concepts. Belson acknowledges his fellow abstract filmmaker James Whitney for developing the mandalic potential of the graphic film with works such as Yantra (1957) and Lapis (1966).

54 Jacquelynn Baas, Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today, P.

211

55 Alexandra Munroe, The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989, p. 297

56 Alexandra Munroe, The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989, p. 290

By 1969, the year Carl Andre made Zinc Ribbon. He had developed his concept of

―sculpture as place‖ and wrote: ―A place is an area within an environment which has been altered in such a way as to make the general environment more conspicuous.‖

This approach reflected his interest in Zen gardens designed for Buddhist monastic contemplation as ―ancient exemplars of field sculpture‖ and experiences that induce

―an ecstatic change of state.‖ He later noted how ―[he] found in Kyoto this kind of calm, fierce calm, a kind of fierce attention, a fierce equilibrium.‖ Increasingly, he saw mass culture as inimical to art and described his Minimalism as a process of emptying art to arrive at ―blankness,‖⁵⁷

Another artist De Maria emerged as an intermediate, proto-Minimalist artist. Her reference to a mandalic cosmogram can be seen in an earlier work, Triangle, Circle, Square (Fig 48), which quotes the famous Buddhist cosmogram by the eighteenth-century Japanese Zenga artist Sengai. (F. 49) De Maria orchestrated Minimalist means and contemporary disseminations of Asian cosmologies to intentionally create an art of sublime immanence.⁵⁸ The three forms of triangle, circle and square has been analyzed in the 3^rd chapter sub chapters 3.2.2, 3.2.3 and 3.2.4.

Among the Seattle painters, Morris Graves was the most profoundly influenced by Tobey‘s ideas about Asian art. Graves achieved such emblematic authority with his painting Black Buddha Circle an image that occurred to him in a ―waking vision.‖ It is one of the few works to explicitly reveal his profound understanding of Buddhist art forms. Using the predetermined dimensions of the stretched canvas, Graves duplicated the Circle ―palace‖ format of a square enclosing a circle containing a deity represented, in this case, by diaphanous layers of ―white writing.‖ At each of the four gates, or ―cardinal directions,‖ of the palace is another deity; Graves chose plant

57 Alexandra Munroe, The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989, p. 296

58 Alexandra Munroe, The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989, p. 296

forms to serve this purpose. By retaining the traditional ―sacred geometry,‖ Zen circle became his schematized map of cosmic consciousness.⁵⁹

My main consideration is that the influence of the Zen and Taoism on the Western

My main consideration is that the influence of the Zen and Taoism on the Western