niedziela, 9 listopada 2014

Tomasz Sikorski WORK OF ART AS A KOAN

Tomasz Sikorski

Work of Art as a Koan


 Various koans and other surprising aporias  may stun man,
from which he leaves renewed, awoken, and even sometimes
– illuminated. Can paintings and other works of art do this?
I think so. I claim that some works of art act like Buddhist
koans. To avoid any misunderstanding, I would like to stress
from the beginning: only some works of art may act like
koans , because it is not true that all art encourages us to
transgression, directs us to the absolute world and creates
a chance for illumination. Koan, just like a work of art in the
Western tradition, does not have any absolutely right definition. Koans are very diverse, and they are diversely understood, described and commented, but their nature always lies in a revelation of the truth, covered by thinking
and language forms, and in liberating the inner genius
of the mind. 

A work of art, just like a Buddhist koan, may
provoke an experience, usually sudden and short-lived, which
releases the mind from a confusion of notions and gives
a chance for an insight, or even an illuminating awakening.
Gadamer says that “there are situations about
which we can say that they ‘make us speechless’ ”. We also
have silent amazement  and silent admiration . In contact with
a work of art, a paradox or koan we can be struck dumb.
 Language disintegrates, and only single words are left
which we are clutching at, but they do not form a coherent
whole. Not only do we not know how  to say anything:
we do not know what  to say. Just like a Zen student with
 a new koan – we become a lump of doubt . The wobbly state:
comprehensibility – incomprehensibility, clarity –vagueness,
certainty – uncertainty , is similar to a pendulum which in its
continuous motion oscillates between the two extremes. It is
in this zone of “between” that we usually remain: we neither
understand nor not-understand, neither know nor not-know.

 This process proceeds analogically in contact with
(certain) works of art: a man loses his mind for a while, is held
between the swinging wings of a pendulum, is struck dumb,
and afterwards, there suddenly may appear a momentary
unification of the Jungian unconscious (primeval wisdom
and the deep “gut knowledge”) with consciousnesses
(relative wisdom, built on the dichotomy me – not me ). This moment of unification of the wobbly structure of the mind (balance, samadhi ) is not permanent, there must occur a break-down of that state and a return to a relative level of
consciousness. In 1974, Jacques Barzun wrote that
“a man may feel only an owner of the whole art, and
not its separate level or part; the whole is absorbed by
osmosis rather than by the work of intellect”. The triggering
sparks are different (koan – painting) but what follows
them is the same. Psychological processes of perception and
experience are analogical, the final effect may be the same.
On the ground of neurophysiology, an interesting
attempt at explanation of insight and illumination is
the theory of Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall, who
distinguish three kinds of intelligences and explain that
parallel neuron networks ensure processing of data by
association (emotional intelligence), and linear, or serial
neural networks enable a rational, logical processing
of information (rational intelligence). While the oscillations
of the 40 Hz frequency, which embrace the whole brain,
 are a means via which our experiences become
unified and placed within the framework of a wider meaning (spiritual intelligence). Suzuki:“Certainly, eyes can see and ears can hear but it is the mind as a whole that experiences satori.” 

While art, in its majority, provides us with personal
expressions, sensations, weirdness and experiences of purely
“retinal” character, or it allows us to read it like a newspaper
announcement, koanic works of art do not symbolize
anything, they do not want to delight, or excite with the
form, they do not communicate any particular meaning,
do not moralize, agitate, protest, they do not persuade us
to do anything, do not indicate anything, they even do not
convey any, so called, “message”, but – like Zen koans – they
lead a student/receiver out of the confusion of language, out
of the reasoning mechanisms and cultural dogmas. Such

a state of mind and such art are a real treasure.

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