Brice Marden

Brice Marden Cold Mountain 

Brenda Richardson (Menil Foundation Inc, 1992)

1. The Three Perfections

Painting, calligraphy and poetry are held in highest esteem by the Chinese.

Calligraphy has been the most widely practiced.  Originated as picture-writing, but very few characters now retain any traces of this and mostly combine phonetic and semantic elements.  Evolution:

• o   Large Seal Script latter part of Chou dynasty (1045-256BC)
• o   Small Seal script Ch’in dynasty (221-206 BC)
• o   Clerical/Official style Han dynasty (206BC – AD 220)
• o   Square or Standard style soon after Han – orthodox script ever since
• o   Running and Draft scripts evolved alongside this – fluid, rapid to execute

(http://www.art-virtue.com/styles/tsao/)

Last three are most commonly used – others considered archaic

In Han period calligraphy achieved the status of an art form, reaching a peak in work of Wang Hsi-chih, the ‘sage of calligraphy’

Several of the literati of the late Northern Sung period were eminent calligraphers

Brushwork used in painting and calligraphy grew closer and greatest painters were usually proficient calligraphers.

2.  A Journey of Ghosts

On Han Shan and the T’ien-t’ai landscape, fleeing a false life, the Zen way to enlightenment. HS lived in poverty, an eccentric.  We have his words in his poems, but the calligraphy is by subsequent copyists.  Mostly made up of 8 lines, each comprising 5 characters and paired into 4 couplets – the visual form adopted by BM

HS lived at Cold Cliff and took on the name HS which means Cold Mountain.  As well as being a geographical place, this refers to a state of mind – one of renunciation equated with enlightenment, the Buddha within.

Video on Han Shan (interviews with translators, animated readings of poems)- http://www.cultureunplugged.com/play/2457/Cold-Mountain

3.  Weights and Leanings

On BM’s awe of Jackson Pollock, esp for his late works which critics conventionally see as a falling away from the earlier ones.  For BM White Light (1954) is ‘among the greatest and most fully resolved paintings ever made in the west’.  ‘The great thing about Pollock. . . was his conviction that each work is part of a continuing quest.  To be an artist is not about making individual works.  To be an artist is to do your work and let your work express the evolution of a vision. . .  it’s part of a living situation.’

Admires the fact that he never took the easy route; the amount of work and thinking within each painting.

Of JP’s very calligraphic drawing Untitled, 1950: ‘. . . it’s just three forms drawn with strokes of pure energy.  It is one of the most compelling works in the history of art.

Sees that the apparent layering in the paintings is deceptive, that there’s an organic weaving back and forth through the ‘layers’ creating areal space between them.

‘. . . if you’re responding, you enter a world that is really inexplicable.  The painting’s world is only explicable in the sense that it is what you’re looking at. . . That’s why painters make paintings: to have you be in that place.’

Speaks of JP’s Scent as being burned in his mind.  And the black and white paintings as being so strong and bizarre: ‘They have weights and leanings in them that you just can’t understand at all.’ 

The intense energy that comes from looking at a JP painting.

BM keeps postcards of JPs work on his drawing table and books on him to hand; frequently visits his paintings in NY.

Other source of awe is Cezanne – in both the process of works evolving, ‘a true relation between artists and the art they make’:

‘The whole thing about making a painting, is that the next painting is supposed to be a better painting.’

4.  Mountain-Water

= Chinese term for landscape painting.  According to Tsung Ping (375-443) the primary mark of excellence of a painting is that it reveals the artist’s true feeling, their communion with the landscape’s essential nature, not that it is realistic.  This essential nature is not obvious from the landscape’s physical features but is revealed to the artist through direct experience of the heart/mind, transferred via eye and hand to the painting and there available to be directly apprehended by the viewer.  So it is transcendental, it goes beyond physical appearance; spiritual communion.  It is relational.

The mountain is a revered space where supernatural powers can be attained and ultimately immortality.

Chinese aesthetic theory has as much a spiritual basis as formal/technical. 1^st two criteria in critic Hsieh Ho’s influential 6^th century list are ‘rhythmic vitality’ and ‘bone/structure’.

Emphasis is on the brushline.  ‘To paint is to draw boundaries’ (1^st century Shuo wen, dictionary). The brushstroke is both descriptive and expressive.

Poetry has as much a place in a painting as objects.  In this way calligraphy becomes incorporated in art.

Emphasis on the moment of execution (dance-like) rhythmic vitality, the personality of the artist and the spirit of creation, intuitive awareness, enlightened states.

According to myth, in far-off times fabulous beasts emerged from the Yellow and Lo Rivers bearing on their backs the Tortoise Characters (so writing like the marks on a tortoise shell) and the Dragon Chart (precursor of I Ching?)

1984 BM saw ‘Masters of Japanese Calligraphy’ exhibition in NY.  He was in the midst of working on stained glass windows for Basel cathedral so formalized religion was already at the forefront of his mind. He was captivated by the energy of the calligraphy and kept a copy of the catalogue to hand at all times. Went from this to Chinese poetry.

He saw calligraphy as a form of drawing that for him was an opening to a meditative state.  He read Chinese poetry in translation and started exploring Chinese poetry, life, politics.

Began work on his Etchings to Rexroth, the translator of Tu Fu’s poems and was thinking about the relationship between form and content.

Was then given a copy of Red Pine’s translation of the Cold Mountain poems (he already knew of Gary Snyder’s) in which the calligraphy and translation are printed on facing pages – enabled him to make a connection between the visual form of the characters and the emotional/spiritual meaning.  Fascinating evolution of his drawn response to these, first based on the form of the written poems, then joining calligraphy with image: 

‘I think of Chinese calligraphy as simply the way I see it, not knowing the language. . . But if someone translates a piece for me, and I hear the relationships I am affected by that. . . I use the form of calligraphy, then it disappears, but, it’s always there, in some way. . . The drawings now look more like Chinese landscape and less like calligraphies. . . For me, drawing is about the state that the person would be in who’s standing in the drawing looking at the mountain, it’s about sensing that.’ (Notes there is usually a figure on a journey, a pilgrimage, in a Chinese painting)

5.  A Better Painting

1988 began work on drawing and small paintings inspired by Cold Mountain and often loosely incorporating forms from nature – spiral shells, palm fronds, body parts (often a sense of dancing figures) – ‘natural objects turning into, and not quite turning into, abstract forms.’

Retained the glyph-and-line structure of the poems.

‘[The works] starts out with observation and then automatic reaction, and the back off, so there’s layering of different ways of drawing. . . ‘

In December took delivery of the materials for a 12’x9’ painting which became CM 1. The size was a deliberate challenge in terms of retaining movement and life.  Thinking a lot about which of JP’s paintings worked and why – when they communicated a sense of JP being fully engaged, struggling both formally and spiritually with the work.  He was aiming for paintings in which both ‘he and the viewer can get lost as characters in an unfolding story of each individual’s personal telling’ (BR)

6 months after completing this one in 1989 he set up 5 more to work on contemporaneously (though never on more than one on any one occasion).  Each was to look different from the other in terms of palette and marks.  He didn’t want them to be just large drawings – wanted to allow a relationship to develop between ground and lines. To be carried right across the painting.  Found the size daunting – any decision had

Took till 1992 to complete all 6. 

Basically monochromatic, carefully mixed blacks, diluted with terpineol, wiped back, painted over, grays, gray-greens.  Some colours took days to mix.  It didn’t occur to him for a long time that this was the palette of traditional Chinese painting.  Makes a mark with an extended brush and immediately scrapes it off with a palette knife. Kept layers very thin; lots of scraping, sanding and rubbing back, use of solvents between layers. Lines became translucent.

All the mistakes, re-thinkings are dimly or clearly visible – honesty.  Positive erasures.

Spends more time looking and thinking than actively painting

Happy to paint with people around him and plays a wide mix of music. Relaxed but focused.  Fluid body movements, dancing energy.

Still drawing and also made a print series – etchings and aquatints, their stages of development photographed.  Drawings more easily done in a more meditative state because freer, more automatic; in the paintings, every mark had to be considered.  But he tried more for this in the paintings – losing himself, going beyond rational control.  When he looks now at photos of the different stages, he finds it hard to relate to the process ‘I don’t know what I did to get them to this place.’

He keeps going till the work is ‘fully resolved’, ‘right there’, ‘out on the plane’ – though he’s unsure whether he could take a decision about this (exhibition deadlines usually assert their timeframe)

6.  The Everyday Mind

Chinese expression for a piece of Zen calligraphy is hsin-yin, ‘heart print’ – or hsin can translate as mind or spiritual nature.

BM’s starting point was the 40-character structure of HS’s poems but the result does not look like calligraphy; at most, there is some conjoining of form with content that is rooted in calligraphy.

He describes them as ‘open situations’ i.e. to a certain extent open to differing interpretations

In painting he understands himself as moving along a visual path towards something he doesn’t know about.  ‘It’s more like knowing yourself by forgetting about yourself, learning not to be so involved with yourself.’

Deepening understanding and appreciation of Zen.  Came to see that art was less about creating the perfect painting and more about striving to live a perfect life, from which perfect painting might flow.  ‘. . .  the Buddha’s perfect.  And you can become perfect.’   Buddhahood is lived out in the everyday.  For the Chinese, a truth is only arrived at through experience living in the world, not abstractly; their paintings and calligraphy mirror this.

Family is at the heart of his life.

 ‘What is Marden’s is light. This is a subject that has become his.  He sees everything in terms of light.’ (BR)   He’s said ‘Color is a way of arriving at light.’ – light is what gives vitality, life. (The kind of light the paintings are hung in is also critical.)

The unfolding of the works, the dialogue between them he believed is the crucial thing about his work.  And feeding into that dialogue is everything he has lived through, thought about, painted. ‘Cold Mountain is not about Cold Mountain. . . Cold Mountain is about Brice Marden.’ (BR)

Mark Tobey

Ed Kosme de Baranano and Matthias Barmann (Ambit, 1997)

KdB: Tangle of color on line

From 1935 developing calligraphic marks – 1944 exhib of White Writing (he later likened this to an explosion of flowers over the earth): interweaving white filigree lines which appear to vibrate – sensation of light and movement, completely covering surface, freezes time in its own moment, like something alive, intertwining light that creates multiple points of focus, the painting as a place of action rather than a representation, becomes its own reality, movements rather than subjects, ‘Writing the painting, whether in color or neutral tones, becomes a necessity for me.’ Meditative, gestural, free but controlled.

Min Chih Yao ‘The influence of Chinese and Japanese Calligraphy on Mark Tobey’ (Chinese materials centre 1983) – influence of cursive writing – curvilinear, threadlike, slight variation of widths, esp Japanese kana style.

Fields of light or suggestions of

Interconnecting streams of colour, wandering, nomadic. Plastic energy.

Expressed the rhythms of the city.

Importance of spaces between

Superimposed brushstrokes destroy those beneath.

Dilute paint, sumi ink

Spent 4 months 1934 in monastery in Kyoto learning about brushwork. Discovered here ‘the magic of a line that never closes’.  This period provided him with an enduring lifestyle and view of the world.  But quite clear he was a westerner, doing this as a westerner.

For him calligraphy was not an abstract art but an art that gave form.

Essay

In search of light: an investigative trail

For the past eighteen months I have been working with tracing paper and its interaction with light sources.  For the past thirty years I have been meditating regularly, exploring the nature of mind and its experience.  It didn’t take me long to notice that certain words – ‘translucent’ and ‘luminous’ – are, in particular circumstances, used to describe both this very ordinary paper and the meditating mind.  Tracing paper, when exposed to light, appears to hold and radiate it.  The mind, when deep in meditation and unimpeded by the usual clutter of thoughts, grows clear and what it experiences is less solid than usual, more like light.  I wanted to discover if this was a chance connection or whether there might be something interesting in it.

My investigation began with finding out how tracing paper works, what is going on when we see it as translucent.  This led me into an exploration of how we perceive colour and objects generally, the implications of which began to seem colossal and to point me back towards meditative experience.  Along the way I looked at artists working with light, including Robert Irwin, who challenges viewers to think about seeing and what is seen.

Tracing paper is made of cellulose which during the manufacturing process is compressed, trapping bubbles of air which slow down and diffuse the passage of light.  Light striking a sheet of tracing paper refracts and scatters many times within it until it emerges at some surface location – either passing right through (though less than would through a transparent sheet) or reflected back.¹  The effect is to spread the light through the sheet so that it appears glowing with light – luminous – and has a quality of softness, blurring objects perceived through it.  We are able to perceive that the sheet is translucent rather than opaque because of its partial transparency, this blur, and a quality of highlighting on its surface.²

This is a very particular instance of visual perception – the emission of light from a source, its handling in a certain way by the receiving object, a kind of experience in the viewer.  But it kindled my curiosity to find out more about visual perception in general, to gain a clearer comprehension that might inform my art practice.  What follows is a summary of my current understanding of a process that begins with the radiation of light from the sun (or other light source) and ends with my seeing an image.

The sun emits electro-magnetic radiation in the form of photons travelling along differing wavelengths.  As they travel through the earth’s atmosphere they interact with atoms and molecules of gas which can absorb and re-emit them, sending them off in fresh directions. There is a wide spectrum of wavelengths, running from from the decreasingly longer and lower in energy (radio waves, microwaves and infra red) through the - to us - coloured spectrum and then to the increasingly shorter and higher in energy (ultraviolet, x-rays and gamma rays).  When they eventually arrive on earth and strike an object, the properties of that object’s surface will determine whether they are bounced off it or absorbed.  For example, a certain kind of surface will reflect back all the waves in the perceptible spectrum and will be seen as white by a human being; another will absorb the part of the spectrum that would be seen as blue and yellow and only reflect waves eventually seen as red.³

In this way an object’s qualities narrow down the range of photons received by a human eye, which in itself is sensitive to only some of them.  What then follows is a complex cascade of chemical reactions which successively filter the incoming data.  The retina is lined with about 120 million rod cells and five million cone cells which have light receptors on their surface. Inside the cells are proteins that change shape as they absorb photons, triggering the production of neurotransmitters.  But as there are only about a million axon fibres leading to the brain, the data must be reduced in complexity by a factor of about 100 e.g. by ‘bunching together’ variations in light reflected from the object in a way that makes it possible to be seen as one colour.  The neural network on receiving this screened information sorts and distributes it to different areas of the brain.  In these areas a hierarchical arrangement of receptors continues to process the data, drawing on already stored information, until a visual form emerges which the mind can apprehend.⁴

A number of significant conclusions can be drawn from examining the perceptual process:

1.  We never see a thing ‘as it is’, only as reflected light, and therefore much of the world is visually imperceptible to us. 

2.  Objects are not intrinsically coloured.  Colour is an interaction between reflected photons, the retina and the brain.

3.  What we see is distilled out of a mass of data into something that our mind can make sense of.  William James at the end of the nineteenth century suggested organisms ‘sculpt’ their world out of all the sensations they receive, and species sculpt differently: a hummingbird, a horse and a human inhabit visually different worlds.⁵  

4.  Most of the perceptual process occurs at a pre-conscious level, and the conscious mind is just a recipient of the outcome of this.  Merleau-Ponty, reflecting on this in his influential ‘Phenomenology of Perception’, concluded that vision is always shadowed by this invisible process:

‘There is. . . another subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am here, and who marks out my place in it. . . Space and perception generally represent, at the core of the subject, the fact of his birth, the perpetual contribution of his bodily being, a communication with the world more ancient than thought.’⁶

5.  The pre-conscious perceptive process is a creative one.  Some writers and artists go so far as to suggest that we are all therefore artists and that the world we perceive is a work of art⁷   If this is accepted, the nature of conscious creativity needs to be re-thought.

6.  The sequence of events from light source to perceived image is such a complex and mutually affecting one that it is hard to see experience any longer as made up of discrete objects and beings.  It seems more accurate to think of them as part of an interconnected network or energy flow.

These conclusions have the power to shatter our habitual way of thinking about the world and our place in it.  Out of the shards of a world made up of conscious subjects directly seeing separate objects exactly as they are emerges one that is contingent and fluid – and we are included in that contingency and fluidity. 

How can artists create if they have this kind of understanding of their experience?  I want to look briefly now at aspects of the work of Robert Irwin.

In his mid-twenties in the early 1950s Irwin spent eight months on solitary retreat on Ibiza, absorbing Zen teachings and experiencing the emptying out of his mind and ego.  On his return he evolved over a number of years a minimalist way of painting to try to communicate this meditative state.  He seemed particularly sensitized to effects of light and experimented with conveying something of these, for example in canvasses covered with subtle dots that seemed to glow, and later curved translucent discs in controlled lighting conditions.  The more carefully he observed, the more he realized that it was light that gave environments their particular qualities.  He began to make light itself his medium, creating apparently simple large-scale structures in which white and coloured lighting played with translucent and opaque materials, and whose purpose was to make viewers become more aware of the actual experience of seeing light, its effect on them and how it shaped their environment.   

‘What I’m really trying to do is draw their attention to, my attention to looking at and seeing all of those things that have been going on all along but which previously have been too incidental or meaningless to really seriously enter into our visual structure, our picture of the world.’⁸

Despite its Zen origins with all their connotations of bareness and austerity, this heightened awareness of light has an enriching effect:

‘We perceive, we shape the world, and as artists we discover and give value to our human potential to “see” the infinite richness (beauty?) in everything, creating an extended aesthetic reality.’⁹

Artists creating with light – and I could have included others here such as James Turrell, Bill Viola and Dan Flavin - are dissolving the apparent solidity of the world we inhabit and exploring the true nature of our experience.  It seems no coincidence that some of them have a background in Buddhist meditation, which shares the same goal.  It is through this meditation practice that a luminous state of mind can be accessed, as these Tibetan teachers write:

'By letting the mind be uncontrived, in its natural state, the gross concepts will cease.  The experience of luminous emptiness will arise.'  (Gotsangpa)¹⁰

'The consciousness is transparent, radiating and clear, without drowsiness and dullness, and one thinks one understands all phenomena.'  (Karmapa Wangchug Dorje)¹¹

So it can be argued that we have a more accurate communication of reality  and a deeper experience of that reality, converging in light and hence attracting similar descriptions such as ‘luminous’ and ‘translucent’.

This essay opens up avenues for further exploration, both through research and in my art practice. I am interested in investigating further the links between pre-conscious and conscious creativity; whether it is valid to say that we are all artists, and how artists can draw on pre-conscious material.  In my art practice I want to further manipulate translucent papers and lighting to point more clearly to the nature of our visual perception of the world.

1.      Richard Yot, Light for Visual Artists: Understanding & Using Light in Art and Design (Laurence King Publishing Ltd 2011)

2.      Roland W Fleming and Heinrich H Bulthoff, Low-Level Cues in the Perception of Translucent Materials (ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, Vol. 2, No. 3, July 2005)

3.      Yot, Light for Visual Artists

4.      Mark C Taylor, Refiguring the Spiritual (Columbia University Press, 2012)

5.      William James in Principles in Psychology, quoted by Mark Taylor

6.      Quoted by Mark Taylor

7.      E.g. Kay Larson and Bill Viola in ed. Jacquelynn Baas and Mary Jane Jacob, Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art (University of California Press, 2011)

8.      Quoted in Jacquelynn Baas, Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art (University of California Press, 2005)

9.      Ibid.

10.   Quoted by Karmapa Wangchug Dorje in Mahamudra: The Ocean of True Meaning (Edition Octopus 2009)

11.   Ibid.

Ad Reinhardt

Jacqueline Baas, Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art
(University of California Press, 2005)

Member of American Abstract Artists Group 1937-47, did a master's in Asian art history. Critical of abstract expressionists - antithesis of what would be called art in far east, where intensity and consciousness are based on repetition and tradition.
Often described as monk-like in his way of living.  Zen practitioner.
Gradually eliminated imagery in his art - evolved through calligraphic and brick-like forms to a cruciform of subtly varied shades of one colour - red, blue and then black. Trying to avoid any expression of ego.  Looking for a kind of purity.
His paintings to take time to absorb and to be absorbed by.  One critic wrote that they reduced the viewer 'to the sole organ of his or her vision....What one then perceives, in the blackest of the 'black' paintings, is no longer the infinitesimal variation of color, but the always fleeting, always dubitable, beginning, the promise of a speck of light, the 'last vestige of brightness' ' (Yve-Alain Blois)  The painting as a moment in a process of consciousness.
A lot of theorising e.g. in his Twelve Rules for a New Academy 1953 - very connected to Buddhist teachings on emptiness/nothingness
https://users.wfu.edu/~laugh/painting2/reinhardt.pdf

Abstract painting, Blue 1952

Isamu Noguchi

Jacqueline Baas, Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art
(University of California Press, 2005)

Having trained under Brancusi, initially worked with stone.  Influence of Japanese Zen gardens:
"In Japan the rocks in a garden are so planted as to suggest a protuberance from the primordial mass below...We are made aware of this floating world through consciousness of sheer invisible mass." 
We see the stone and sense what is invisible - both are part of the work.
Saw himself as interpreting the East to the West through sculpture.
Moved to Kyoto, started to work in clay, but saw an art that was beyond made objects and in a way of life.
Concept of sculpture evolving into a relationship of form and space that illuminates the environment in which we live.
Started to work with light.

Developed paper lanterns, akari, for general sale.  'The ideal of akari is exemplified with lightness (as essence) and light (for awareness). . . the quality is poetic, ephemeral, and tentative.'  His father had written a poem ending with the line 'Alas, my soul is like a paper lantern in the rainy world.'

Still working in stone - forms influenced by Buddhist iconography (zen circle, lotus).

In the year before he died he wrote: 'I don't think that art comes from art.  A lot of artists apparently think so. I think it comes from the awakening person.'

Nine Floating Fountains, 1970

John Cage

Every Day is a Good Day: the Visual Art of John Cage
(Hayward Publishing 2010)

Where R=Ryoanji, drypoint etching 1988

His visual art-making integrated with composing, writing, performance, Zen practic
Use of 'chance operations' (using I Ching) downplayed the role of the self and displaced creativity and choice on to the questions he asked and away from outcomes.  They were a way of stopping wilfulness and anxiety from interfering in the process; 'the person is being disciplined, not the self.'  Led to solutions he might not normally consider. Able to delight in them more freely.

Did not resonate with the abstract expressionists. 'I wanted to change my way of seeing, not my feeling.'  

He had 10 words that acted like guideposts in his methodology: method, structure, intention, discipline, notation, indeterminacy, interpenetration, imitation, devotion and circumstances.

Wanted to create work that wasn't showy, that needed the viewer to pay close attention to it.

Ongoingly experimental including with technology.

Eninka 28, 1983

Had a lifelong small-scale practice of drawing and etching around stones, 'a form of meditation'.

Ryoanji 17, 1988

'Art is a way of life. . . Art when it is art as Satie lived it and made it is not separate from life (nor is dishwashing, when it is done in this spirit.'
'The attitude I take is that everyday life is more interesting than forms of celebration, when we become aware of it. That when is when our intentions go down to zero. Then suddenly you notice the world is magical.'
'I found through Oriental philosophy, my work with Suzuki, that what we are doing is living, and that we are not moving towards a goal, but are, so to speak, at the goal constantly and changing with it, and that art, if it is going to do anything useful, should open our eyes to this fact.'

Favourite saying Japanese 'nichi nichi kore ko niche' - every day is a good/beautiful day.

Shibusa aesthetic

Shibusa - Extracting Beauty
Monty Adkins and Pip Dickens (University of Huddersfield Press, 2012)

This is about the interaction of two contemporary artists, one visual and the other working in sound, with the Japanese aesthetic of shibusa - particularly as found in katagami, stencils traditionally used for kimono design.  Because of my own longstanding work with Japanese textile patterns I wanted to understand the philosophy behind them.

Shibusa has 7 elements:

simplicity - expressing the essence of design elements, to create calm in the viewer; a spare elegance but with sparkle

implicitness - the surface hints at an invisible core or depth of feeling

modesty - a high level of understated craftsmanship

tranquillity

naturalness - spontaneous, intuitive

everydayness - joy in ordinary things

imperfection - e.g. asymmetry, rough surfaces

Overall shibusa objects balance simplicity and complexity, and have a certain 'feel' to them.

                                             

   

(Not to be confused with the better known wabi sabi aesthetic which is more severe and supports the exaggeration of imperfections.)

I found myself resonating with most of these; perhaps my earlier work with cardboard has helped me grow into them.  I wonder if they might provide a more conscious framework for what I'm doing now.  

This website has interesting examples on it of contemporary Japanese design

http://www.studiokotokoto.com/