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The relationship between spirituality and contemporary art has become one of the more fruitful areas of study. The last decade has witnessed several exhibitions that have explored this connection: Negotiating Rapture at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (1996); Faith: The Impact of Judea-Christian Religion on Art at the Millennium at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut (2000); The Inward Eye: Transcendence in Contemporary Art at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (2001); Magic Markers: Objects of Transformation at the Des Moines Art Center (2003); and, recently, 100 Artists See God, a touring show organized by Independent Curators International (2004-2006). Nor has this growing interest been limited to museum curators. Scholars and art critics such as Erika Doss, Eleanor Heartney, David Morgan, and Sally Promey have focused in recent years on the important, complex, and usually ambivalent role that religion has played in the development of modem art and American visual culture. More generally, this interest within the art world reflects and responds to the increase in religious discourse in the United States over the last de~ade, a trend which has animated political and cultural debates and which has intensified since the events of 9/11. Religion and spirituality have become part of the public arena in unprecedented and often intensely polemical ways, giving new depth to de Tocqueville's observation in the late eighteenth century that America is a profoundly and uniquely religious nation. Into this teeming context comes Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art, edited by Jacquelynn Baas and Mary Jane Jacob. The book makes a significant and original contribution to the discussion, particularly since much writing about religion and spirituality polarizes the debate. Baas and Jacob bring the real "East" back into the discourse, showing how Buddhism's approaches to spirituality differ from those of Western religions and how they offer revelatory ways of looking at both art-making and spiritual practice. This volume is just orie of the outgrowths of Baas's and Jacob's larger collaborative project entitled Awake: Art, Buddhism, and the Dimensions of Consciousness. From 1999-2005, Baas and Jacob brought together artists, curators, critics, and other arts professionals to explore the relationship between the "meditative, creative, and perceiving mind and the implications of Buddhist perspectives for artistic and museum practices in the United States." This elegantly designed book contains 26 essays by the project participants, accompanied by interviews with several of the artists and a useful glossary of terms related to Buddhist thought and practice. Among the contributors are philosopher and critic Arthur Danto; Carol Becker, artist, historian, and dean of faculty at the School
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of the Art Institute of Chicago; art critic Kay Larson, who is also managing editor of this journal; Zen Buddhist priest Yvonne Rand; Marcia Tucker, founding director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York; and Eleanor Rosch, professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Several artists also contributed to the book, including Laurie Anderson, Marina Abramovic, Sanford Biggers, Ann Hamilton, Mariko Mori, Bill Viola, and Zhang Huan. As Baas and Jacobs point out in their introduction, the American intelligentsia has been fascinated with Buddhism since there was an American intelligentsia. In 1844, Ralph Waldo Emerson published "The Preaching of the Buddha," an excerpt from Eugene Burnouf's Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism, in his Transcendentalist journal The Dial. But it was not until the 1950s that Buddhism became a more prevalent influence in the lives of American artists, writers, scholars, and philosophers. One of the driving forces in this spreading influence was Japanese scholar of Buddhist thought D. T. Suzuki, who delivered a series of lectures at American universities in 1951. Suzuki had been publishing books on Buddhism in English since 1898, and his lectures drew an audience that included J.D. Salinger, Thomas Merton, and John Cage. As the 1950s wore on;' Cage became one ofthe catalysts for the emergence of Buddhism as a formative influence in the arts. So dynamic and widespread has this influence become that it would be hard to find an artist who has not been exposed to Buddhism in some way or become interested, if only briefly, in Buddhist thought. The reasons for this influence are numerous, but Baas's and Jacobs's book shows how Buddhism's non-violent approach to life, its celebration of the present moment, and its non-dogmatic spirituality offere~ a creative alternative to postwar American society's celebration of violence, materialism, and conformity-the society that so many artists were trying to escape and critique through their art. The editors define Buddhism as "a system of what the Dalai Lama calls 'inner sciences,' based on the experiences and teachings of the historical Buddha Shakyamuni"; this system "maps out the ways for studying and for training the mind, and leads ultimately to the dismantling of negative states of mind and to the cessation of suffering." Accordingly, Bass, a former director of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, and Jacob, an independent curator, sketch out an ambitious and utopian goal for the larger Awake project: to "elucidate the common ground between the creative mind, the perceiving mind, and the meditative mind." Ultimately, both the project and this book are about consciousness: deepening and expanding it, exploring its limits, and reflecting on its implications for the development of the self and the transformation of society. It is no coincidence that these are also the goals of much contemporary art since, say, Marcel Duchamp: to stimulate, expand, deepen, and challenge consciousness, and sometimes also language and experience itself. And that is Baas's and Jacob's broadest point. Buddhism's influence on art is "not as a prescriptive religious doctrine, but as a perspective that has achieved a state of synthesis with some important elements of art practice." If one goal of contemporary art is "to cultivate the potential for satisfying aesthetic experience engendered by an open, aware state of mind," as Baas and Jacob write, then Buddhism, with its parallel agenda of heightened awareness, is a natural ally. The editors set up a provocative relationship between Buddhist religious practice and artistic aesthetic practice, and throughout the book they keep that relationship open and fluid, incorporating not only
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essays in which religious practice is seen as influencing artistic practice (the conventional reading of the religion-culture dynamic), but ones in which artistic practice is seen as influencing, challenging, and deepening religious practice. In the pages of Buddha Mind, Buddhist thought suggests that attending to contemporary art can assist us in our religious practice, just as attending to Buddhist practice can help us experience contemporary art more deeply. That reciprocity is an original and valuable contribution to the study of religious and artistic discourse.
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One important theme of Buddha Mind is that one need not be a Buddhist to make or interpret art in a Buddhist manner. "The relationship of Buddhism to contemporary artistic practice," observes Baas in her introduction, "can be explicit, implicit, or the work may resonate with insights characteristic of Buddhism." This inclusive approach enables each of the contributors to define both Buddhism and contemporary art in his or her own way, according to the ways they have accessed both practices. Many do not identify themselves as Buddhist. There are too many essays here-and too many good ones-for me to offer a cursory summary of each. Instead, I'll look at three contributions which, in their diversity of insight and perspective, will sketch the broad contours of this volume. In "Upper West Side Buddhism," philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto offers a personal account. Danto takes care to distance himself from Buddhism as a set of religious beliefs and practices, going so far as to declare that "the meaning of Zen for me came when I had in a way begun to outgrow it." Danto's relationship with Buddhism began when he was a Fulbright student in Paris in 1950 and purchased a Japanese print by Kuniyoshi. After visiting an exhibition of Japanese art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art a few years later, Dan to entered into what he calls "the Buddhist phase of my life, not that I was ever the least bit interested in undertaking some regime of disciplinary meditation that would transport me into a sphere of higher enlightenment. Nor had I the slightest inclination toward asceticism." Instead, it was all about art: "It was through the art that I became acquainted with Zen, and I was particularly rr'toved by the fact that Zen itself could be practiced through making art." This experience of Zen helped Danto become aware of and experience the neo-avantgarde that was taking shape in New York in the 1950s, from the "happenings" that Cage created with friends like Robert Rauschenberg and Merce Cunningham to the Fluxus movement-artistic practices motivated by a desire to break down the distinctions between "art" and "life." Danto offers insightful comments about the connections between Buddhism and the avantgarde art of the 1950s, but it is his observations about the link between Buddhism and his work as a professional philosopher that are most interesting. A philosopher spends a lot of time reading, and Danto came to be aware of an "aesthetics of analytical writing, which at its best had the clarity, the concision, and the logical beauty I felt I had experienced in Japanese art." He even refers to the "canonical writers of analytical philosophy" as "Zen masters of philosophical prose." In addition to this aesthetic kinship, Dan to perceived in Buddhist thought a valuable approach to the mind-body problem with which analytical philosophy was then struggling, particularly in the work of Gilbert Ryle, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Dan to thus credits Buddhism for helping him produce his famous and paradigm-shifting 1964 essay, "The Artworld," which focused on
BUDDHA MIND IN CONTEMPORARY ART
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the philosophical implications of Andy Warhol's exhibition of Brillo Boxes at the Stable Gallery. "What I had gotten from Buddhism," Danto recalls, was the idea "that there need be no outward difference between art and life .... Nothing need distinguish artworks from mere real things. It is not that they are not distinct. It is that the difference between them need not be visible." In an equally rich but very different essay, art historian Tosi Lee explores Buddhism's influence on Marcel Duchamp. A Buddhist reading of Duchamp reveals a fresh layer of complexity in the artist's conceptually knotty work. Lee's "Buddhist reading" of Duchamp isn't an exercise in against-the-grain revisionism; it emerges from the artist's own documented interest in Buddhist thought and practice. Dada, the artistic movement with which Duchamp is often associated, called for (in the words of French poet and fellow Dadaist Tristan Tzara) "the return to a quasi-Buddhist religion of indifference." Lee speculates that Duchamp was deeply affected by a trip he made to Munich in 1912, which for some reason he kept a secret and which might have exposed him to a massive collection of South Asian art. Lee examines several of Duchamp's most enigmatic and wellknown works, such as his famous cross-dressing alter ego Rrose Selavy (a name that puns in French on both "eros, c'est la vie" and "arose, c'est la vie"-"watering, that's life"). Lee argues that this female/male character relates to the iconography of the compassionate bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara (Kuan Yin), who often takes th~ form of a woman and carries a vessel of water which alleviates suffering. Similarly, Lee suggests that Duchamp's famous mustachioed Mona Lisa, entitled L.HO.O.Q., is patterned after a Buddhist icon of the sexually ambiguous but mustachioed Avalokiteshvara. He points out that Duchamp once suggested "L.H.O.O.Q." consisted of four letters rather than five and that it could be pronounced phonetically-in other words, with a silent h to sound like the English word "look." In Buddhist tradition, Avalokiteshvara "looks at" the suffering of the world. This is provocative stuff. Lee's Buddhist interpretation of Duchamp serves to connect many different strands of the artist's aesthetic project, offering a plausible and convincing interpretation of his pacifism, his radical redefinition of art, and the sources for much of the symbolism in his artwork. Lee's essay might mean that Louise Norton's 1917 comparison of Duchamp's Fountain ("the notorious urinal," as Lee calls it here) to "a lovely Buddha" was perhaps more accurate than we had previously imagined. The third contribution I'll call out is Kay Larson's evocative essay "Shaping the Unbounded," which offers, to my mind, the most fertile path for continued reflection on the relationship between Buddhism and art. Robert Rauschenberg famously remarked that he worked in the "gap" between art and life. Larson's provocative essay argues that the "concept of a gap is itself an expression of a crack in the bedrock of Western culture since the time of Plato." Larson writes that"[ a]lthough the practices of contemporary art have been through a sea change, the language we use to envision and describe spiritual issues in contemporary art has remained embedded in habituated dualism." Her essay, therefore, is about the language we use to describe contemporary art, much of which has, despite itself, filled the gap between art and life. ''At a certain point in the history of contemporary art, artists simply stopped creating a gap"; instead, they played with the overlap, using objects and practices that were purposefully drawn, and remained rooted in, life-like Duchamp's urinal and Rauschenberg's "found objects." (One of Larson's pro-
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vocative implications here is that art, like life, can serve to shape language and thought: it can "embody" experience in new ways because it can transcend the current limits of language, or perhaps can be even more advanced than language.) Larson critiques this Western approach through an analysis of the assumptions guiding both Kandinsky's book Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912) and art critic Donald Kuspit's essay "Concerning the Spiritual in Contemporary Art," which was published in the catalogue of an influential exhibition on spirituality and modern art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1986. Both Kandinsky and Kuspit assume that spirituality involves an escape from the given, material present-in short, a privileging of "transcendence" over "immanence." In other words, both proceed from the notion that transcendence is to be found not in complexity but simplicity, and not in the material but the immaterial. For Larson, the antidote to this Western dualism is Buddhist practice, which she defines simply as "a ceaseless return to ordinary things." Buddhism views "transcendence" and "immanence" as "exactly one and the same," she writes, and thus offers a "worldview characterized by seamlessness and wholeness: life and art perfectly joined; indeed, never separate for a millisecond." Larson takes John Cage as an example of Buddhist artistic practice that doesn't merely fill this gap, but reveals the gap itself to be artificial, a "boundary" that separates nothing, a "container" that contains nothing: a chimera that has obscured rather than clarified our understanding of experience. This, for Larson, is why art continues to elude definition: "In the non-dual universe, every frame is just a performance born of its moment. Hence art's amazing capacity to leap out of every boundary created for it." Therefore, "spiritual art" need not look a certain way nor be interpreted in a certain manner; it need not seek to escape from the complexities of life. Larson thus poses a poignant question: "What is the subject of 'spiritual art,' then, if not daily life?" Or more broadly, what is "spiritual art" anyway? How does it differ from art that is not spiritual? Larson's Buddhist analysis generates these provocative questions and many others.
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Buddha Mind is an important contribution to the growing literature on art's relationship to spirituality and religion. But its aspirations sometimes exceed its reach. An important goal of the Awake project, according to the editors, is "changing institutional practice." However, there is very little in the book that offers directi
But as many people of Danto's generation discovered, the absence of distinctions between "ordinary life" and "religious practice" usually meant that the "religious practice" disappeared, a victim of the conventional progressive bias against religion as something that evolved from primitive forms, rules, and dogmas and which is unnecessary
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(even an encumbrance) in the quest for higher states of consciousness. The growing interest in spirituality and religion in the twenty-first century, however, seems to argue otherwise. Philosophers, sociologists, theologians, and, particularly, artists, tell us that there is no "thought" or "belief" that is not also a "practice"-an action with symbolic value. So our practices shape our beliefs. The Buddhist perspective, which is in some ways echoed in the teachings of Christianity, asserts that there are only false distinctions between the sacred and the secular-but not because all life is secular; rather, because "ordinary life" is profoundly sacred and religiously charged. This is definitely not Danto's perspective, for he prefers a Buddhism that helps him to think about philosophy and art, not a Buddhism that would help him become a better person or make a claim on his actions. Yet, ultimately, that is what religious belief and practice entails: an awareness that one is notyet the person one should be and that one needs to "be transformed," as Buddhist teacher, author and former monk Stephen Batchelor puts it in his contribution, "Seeing the Light: Photography as Buddhist Practice." The Danto-style interpretation of Buddhism as something that has little to do with actual religious practice is reinforced by its cultural status, at least in the United States, as something Batchelor calls a "philosophy or psychology of mind." But this is a blinkered view. As it has been practiced in the East, Buddhism i~ profoundly communal and fully rooted in daily practice. Yet in the U.S., ever since its admiring but partial embrace by Emerson, Buddhism has become another branch of romantic individualism. This, of course, perpetuates the mind-body dualism in a subtle form, as we modern Westerners, who privilege individual cognition as the defining characteristic of our humanness and give short shrift to the role of community in the individual's development, bring Buddhism inward and turn it into a disembodied, subjective abstraction. In so doing, we take away Buddhism's social function and its imperative of change. We don't become better people by thinking nicer thoughts about our neighbor or our enemy; we become better people by actively doing things for those neighbors and enemies, such as feeding them, clothing them, and blessing them. Similarly, Buddhist practice must find concrete expression in actual museum practices on the administrative, curatorial, or educational levels. It isn't sufficient for museum professionals to embrace Buddhist thought or even to practice Buddhism; this individual thought and practice needs to be worked out institutionally. Unfortunately, Baas and Jacob do not offer strategies or programs for moving from private to public transformative action. Buddha Mind is refreshingly non-partisan, embodying Buddhism's own irenic approach in a way that could serve as a model for all art-and-religion discourse. But taken together, these essays run the risk of presenting Buddhism as an antidote to Christianity and other, sometimes pernicious Western ways of thinking, such as dualism and individualism. It might be helpful to remember that Christian thought, at least as originally constituted, bears significant similarities to Buddhist thought. Certainly Christianity has as much to teach American individualists and mind-body dualists as Buddhism does. I hope that the Awake project in general, and this book in particular, will stimulate an interest among artists and museum professionals in exploring the riches of other spiritual traditions, including some closer to home. Perhaps they will even encourage us to ask what contemporary art can contribute to our understanding of those other religions. John Cage
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was deeply influenced not only by Buddhism but by the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart; surely this raises equally provocative questions about Cage's art-and about Christianity-as his affinity with Buddhism does about creativity and Buddhism. Directly and indirectly, then, Buddha Mind suggests valuable ways to redraw the conventional lines along which contemporary art, religion, and spirituality have been analyzed and interpreted. The editors and contributors reveal that contemporary art, even when it lacks explicit religious or spiritual content, can teach us something profound about religion and spirituality. De Tocqueville's observation about America notwithstanding, we twenty-first-century Americans do need to learn more about how religion and spirituality inform our lives, not to mention more about the role that art plays both in spirituality and in life. Daniel A. Siedell (dsiedelll @unl.edu) is curator of Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
