Tomasz Sikorski
Introduction
to the book
KOANS
IN POWER PLANT / ARTWORK AS A KOAN
Beautiful
is that which we see,
more
beautiful that which we know,
but by
far the most beautiful that
which
we do not comprehend.
Nicolaus
Steno, 1673
Hakuin,
famous and highly distinguished Zen monk, wrote in the 18th
century,
If you
choose a koan and keep studying it continuously, your thoughts and
desires of ego will die down. It will be as if an unfathomable
precipice opened up before you and you would not have any support for
your arms and legs. You are looking straight into death’s eyes and
your heart is beating as if you had fire in your chest. Then you feel
that you and koan make a unity, and the body and mind are leaving.
Such experience is considered to be an introspection into our nature.
You have to keep going forward, and thanks to this great
concentration you will certainly reach the inexhaustible source of
your nature.i
Some works of art, especially
contemporary art, affect us like Buddhist koans. This thesis is
confirmed by the works collected at the exhibition, the papers read,
and texts written (including a polemic one), as well as a collection
of paper squares which you have in front of you.
It
does not matter if a work of art may be a koan or not, if some of the
works are koans or not – this way of thinking leads you astray.
What matters for our deliberations is the fact that both a Zen koan
and a work of art can make people plunge into an abyss: abandon
dichotomy, certainties, knowledge and habits, language and the whole
culture. Both koans and some works of art make us transgress the
boundaries of intellect, they release us from the confusion of words
and cognitive schemata, they arouse the inherent genius of our mind
and direct it to the world of the absolute. The means used are
dissimilar but the effect of the impact is the same. Buddhist koans
are instruments opening the mind. So are some works of art. It has
happened, as various Zen scribes boast, that a koan brought
enlightenment to a disciple, but Zen masters say that in a perfect,
absolute enlightenment there are eighteen major awakenings and
endlessly many minor awakenings. Can the hunger of art be satisfied?
There
are more analogies between koans and works of art – disbelief in
words, contextualism, linking together separated worlds, exposing the
fictitiousness of ego,
blurring of boundaries. And, strangely enough, both here and there
the same voice resounds that repeats that it cannot speak.
Daisetz
Teitaro Suzuki detailed koans at length, but did he appreciate
contemporary art? Being an expert on Zen, could he perceive koanic
structures elsewhere? Two foundations of Zen are koan and zazen. One
is the eye that can see, the other a foot which supports. For ardent
followers it could be the whole world. Suzuki cannot have known
Robert Gober’s or Juan Muñoz’s works, because he had died before
they were written. The physicist, and Noble prize winner, Steven
Weinberg equates comprehensibility with lack of sense.ii
“The longer you watch it, the
better
you do not understand it”, said Jarosław Kozłowski, an artist,
encouraging to watch a certain film.iii
A
familiar Buddhist, during a many-day-long Zen practice, known as
sesshin,
asked the participants a question: “Can a work of art be a koan?”
The answer was unanimous, “Either it is a koan, or it is not a work
of art”.
This statement arouses joy, but its radicalism probably results
rather from the zeal of faith than from a recognition of the so
called “art world”. It is rather a postulate than a fact, yet it
is good because otherwise we would have to deal, like Midas, with
pure, indigestible gold. One way or another, evoking states of mind
is an art, whether you use a work of art or any other instrument.
In
1988 Marek Sobczyk made an oil painting of two people on one horse
and gave the picture the title What
Do Pairs of Mongols on One Horse Know about Death?
In
1999 Marcin Berdyszak constructs a billiard table, whose top
rhythmically wobbles and a lone billiard ball (the Earth? “Me”?)
endlessly knocks at the impenetrable borders (maybe the borders will
let go?). The escape route for the ball is blocked by oranges
(nature? its own?). Actually we do not know what is lamenting here:
the ball in her forced pursuit of freedom or the cusion in the name
of coercion of order?
Mirosław
Bałka shows a plate escaping beyond the edge of obviousness,
accidentally captured on a film. This escape is a trap: it never
ends.
Robert
Szczerbowski presents The
Bronze Cast of Six Gold Bars Turned into Lead.
So what can we see? Pure metal or alloy?
In
the boundless emptiness of the white, like in a trap, there are stuck
three chess knights made by Andrzej Dłużniewski. They do not jump,
because there are no squares. Lack of rules immobilizes them, they
have gathered closely together, turned in one direction. Are they
listening to something? Maybe they are galloping in their own
imagination, to the rhythm of shivers sent up and down their spines?
Piotr
Kuka, like the hero of Antonioni’s Blow
Up,
takes a photograph in the park of something which is uncertain if it
has ever happened. (Possibly) it can’t have happened. This photo
does not prove anything, only creates a possibility for its
existence. The truth is a creation, not a fact.
Using
three everyday objects, not created for being watched, and one
mysterious, light as a butterfly, object made of shining metal, Koji
Kamoji creates a situation which we are watching from above, from
the cosmic level of our eyes, because the shiny butterfly has perched
deep down on the floor, just before a meditation pillow. Does the
meditating person have to disappear for the butterfly to appear?
Ryszard
Ługowski enables us to watch the clouds of air flapping like
computer streams of numbers, like a shoal of escaping fish, twirling
in the water and with water, in both directions at the same time.
Czekalska
and Golec paint three black, organically glittering holes in the
luminous white, like leeches on the body of emptiness (hideous,
persistent, but true, though unnamed).
Janusz
Bałdyga places at the wall something that looks like a ladder, but
the spaces between its top rungs are carefully closed, and the whole
thing is covered with a metal mesh. Helplessness arouses the desire
to overcome it. But if I become a bird flying over the ladder, I will
not care. Just like the geese from a poem from the collection Zenrin:
“Wild geese do not intend to leave their reflection, water does not
care if it reflects their image”.iv
To be unable and care or to be able and not care?
Leszek
Knaflewski places on the floor four male legs in black pressed
trouser legs, topped on both ends with feet in black shoes. (Legs?
Feet in shoes? Impossible: shoes are real, feet are not.) The legs
are lying at the wall on which an immaculate shower mixer tap is
mounted, silvery like dentist’s tools, sparkling like a jewel.
(Immaculate? The hose of that shower ends with a spike, rather than
with a shower head. It is not a shower at all! What is it then? What
is it when the whole is titled The
Ballet of Passive Resistance?).
It evokes some thoughts, but you do not know exactly what thoughts,
Alice’s spirit seems to be whispering. To paraphrase Blyth’s
words (What
is Zen?)v:
an ordinary artistic meaning is absent from these works; what remains
is a dark flame which burns in all things. It is seen with the belly,
not with the eye, with a vague feeling coming from our guts.
Any
descriptions of the works of art are only temporary, extremely
subjective interpretations, self-acting foam of poetic mood and
persistent traps of words. These phenomena, things, situations, these
works should be seen, and their presence felt. They are created to be
watched. Not necessarily for an hour, as once Duchamp said ironically
(at the same time he must have really wanted it). The visual koan
affects your mind through your eyes, not through the interpretation
of words. And let the illustrations included in this book affect you
so, let them evoke such state of mind towards which words are flying
like moths, and only rarely do they return, like a poetic phrase. Or
like a koan. Or a work of art. A moth flies in again through the same
window.
While
planning the exhibition, I was choosing particular works of artists,
or after presenting its script I asked artists to suggest a special
work for the exhibition (Bałka, Golec, Kamoji).
Since
2006, I have been persuading a number of people scattered all over
Poland to participate in a theoretical session titled A
Work of Art as a Koan.
All my invitations have been accepted. The realization of the
three-part project (exhibition – session – book) was fulfilled in
2009, thanks to the openness and quick decision of Zbigniew Belowski,
Director of the Mazovian Centre of Contemporary Art “Elektrownia”
in Radom. Other people who greatly contributed to its realization are
Leszek Golec, an artist and yogi, linking the East with the West (or
vice versa) and Andrzej Mitan, a good spirit of art and artists,
artist and Hermes in cat’s skin.
Andrzej
San admits that he does not know Zen, but he had to take part in the
Radom session because in 1993, in his paper on the state of
contemporary art critique he placed a very handy conclusion: “A
work of art should be […] not understood, but incomprehensible,
not interpreted but uninterpretable,
and this uninterpretability may sanction errors, a set of errors
which ‘decorate’ the work, add to it a charm of mystery,[…]
‘feminine charm’ ”.vi
In
her pioneer doctorate thesis (1997), Irena Rychłowska claimed that
“A work of art
assumes
the role similar to the role of koan in Zen Buddhism”.vii
During my
defense of habilitation thesis (2000), I presented an exhibition of
koanic works and a text Question
and silence. A work of art as koan.viii
In 2002
Przemysław Trzeciak suggested that we should reject interpretations
and look at Muqi’s Six
Persimmons
(13th
c.) as a “visual koan”. And although this painting is an answer
to a koan, and not koan itself, the very term visual
koan
slightly opens the hitherto closed door.
Jacek
Dobrowolski, one of the few Bodhidharmas who brought Zen from the
ends of Asia to Poland (coping without a cane boat) in the 20th
century, an ex-hippie, writer and Buddhist, deciphers the koan of
mystic, omniscient smile in its trans-cultural manifestations,
perceives koan-character of Jesus’ words and asks in conclusion,
“Are your smile and
Buddha’s
smile the same or different?”ix
Michał
Fostowicz, a mountain hermit, painter, poet and writer, a researcher
of the mysticism of the East and West, a Blake expert, presents a
work of art as information paradox. Maciej Magura Góralski, a
musician (once a punk-rocker), author of lyrics, Buddhist and an
expert at Buddhism, Dalai lama’s friend, sees ultimate koan in an
artist’s ego.
For a thinking mind, the greatest koan is its own life. Apparently,
one of the most important koans that Buddha Siakjamuni had to cope
with, was a question “What is the sense of life in the face of
inevitable disease, old age and death?”x
Góralski-Magura, asking his
master for a koan, heard “You Yourself Are Your Koan!”. And
perhaps everybody (according to Beuys’ postulate) may take it
personally, but Magura, the main Magura’s koan, can be a koan also
for somebody else. And some paintings, some sculptures, some scenes,
some events can be koans. To those, for whom for some reason a
picture may not be a koan, a koan in the form of a picture will
simply never happen.
Bogusław Jasiński,
philosopher, writer, marathon-runner, a mountain ascetic, created a
self-consuming term “koanic thinking” which he applies to
deliberations of creative character although, as we know, the truth
and beauty are in the beholder’s eye, and artistic value and
“koanic character” – in the guts of the person who experiences
it, not in his head.
Krzysztof Jurecki, historian
of art, an expert at artistic photography, ascetic and yogi,
emphasizes the deep existential sense of koanic art and gives its
various examples – from Kosuth to Fijałkowski. Adam Sobota, also
from the group of Polish Bodhidharmas (they all coped without a cane
boat), excellently knows both Zen and contemporary art. In his text
he indicates both clear similarities, and significant differences
between koans and art.
There are
four languages. The first is the language of daily life, in which
everything is mixed: senses and nonsense, information and emotions,
habits and instincts, contents and pseudo-contents self-generated by
using the language. The second is relative, common and dominating.
This is the language of intellect and science. The third, used
sporadically and mistrustfully, is the language of the world of the
absolute – paradox and mysticism. The fourth language is both
relative and absolute. It is the language of poetry and art. And a
true language of Zen. I hope that the book you have before your eyes
will speak in this very language.
I would like to thank the
organizers, the producing and editing team of “Elektrownia”, and
I wish you, My Noble Unknown, inspiring feelings while looking at
this book as well as interesting reading of texts, although they are
woven from creepers.
Tomasz
Sikorski (concept and editing), KOANS
IN POWER PLANT / ARTWORK AS A KOAN,
published by the Mazovian Center for Contemporary Art „Elektrownia”,
Radom, Poland 2009, ISBN 978-83-928809-2-9
ii
J. Horgan, Koniec nauki[The End of Science], Prószyński i
S-ka, Warszawa 1999, p. 326.
iii
A. Kępińska, Energie sztuki [Energies of Art], Wiedza
Powszechna, Warszawa 1990, p. 13.
iv
A. Watts, “Zen w sztuce” [Zen in Art], in: J. Sieradzan, W.
Jaworski, M. Dziwisz (ed), Buddyzm [Buddhism], Biblioteka
Pisma Literacko-Artystycznego, Kraków 1987, p. 180.
v
R. H. Blyth, “Czym jest zen?” [What is
Zen?], in:
Kurz zen, ed. M.
Fostowicz-Zahorski, E. Hadydoń, J. Jastrzębski, N. Nowak, A.
Sobota, Thesaurus Press, Wrocław 1992, p. 124
vi
A. Saj, “Zniesienie krytyki”
[Abolition of Critique], Format 1993, no 3–4 (12–13), p.
108.
vii
I. Rychłowska, Sztuka pytania. Dyskurs wokół sztuki polskiej
lat 90-tych [The Art of Asking. Discourse
about the Polish Art of the 90s],
doctorate thesis, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the
Polish Academy of Sciences, Warszawa 1997 (typescript).
viii
T. Sikorski, Pytanie i milczenie. Dzieło
sztuki jako koan [Question and Silence. A Work of Art as Koan],
2000 (typescript).
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