The Dialectic of Space: Anselm Kiefer and Tibetan Sand Painting

A tension exists between human activity and the natural environment as reflected in both human and geologic history. The uniqueness of our experience of the landscape is manifested in both the visible topography of the land and evidence of human interaction with the environment.

This dialectic compels us to understand and experience landscape art by asking specific versions of the general question: “How is Art” rather than “What is Art”(which Mary Anne Stasniszewski asks in her book, Believing is Seeing: Creating the Culture of Art.)  With regard to landscape, Trevor Paglen in his essay, “Experimental Geography”, tells us that art production itself is based on two things, materials and space. The “how” of art in the case of landscape therefore addresses the spatial dimension of our experience, as well as how this is conveyed through the materials used to create the image.  It answers the question, “how is the land experienced?” by considering materiality, spatial dimension, time, and topology, all of which are key factors in this dialectical exchange. 

In this critical analysis, I compare two treatments of landscape from widely different traditions and approaches to this concern: the art of Anselm Kiefer, specifically his masterpiece Osiris and Isis; and the genre of Tibetan sand mandala paintings, particularly the sand painting created in five days by the Drepung Loseling monks at Sonoma State University in 2011.  Though representing vastly different cultures and histories, these two are intertwined in the convergence of past and present – Kiefer’s allusion to the ancient Egyptian myth on the one hand, and on the other the emergence of Tibetan sand painting into the full glare of modernity from its origins and centuries of practice cloistered not only in the monasteries of Tibet, but also behind the Himalayan isolation of Tibet itself. 

The Nazi regime was a particularly convulsive cultural and political turning point in modern human history. German artist Anselm Kiefer, born at its dying moment, confronted Nazi myths and tropes and the devastation it wreaked on all of Europe, but particularly on the German landscape. Kiefer’s work Osiris and Isis is one record of this devastation. Tibetan art, on the other hand, linked as it is to the spiritual enterprise of Buddhism, has survived mostly unchanged for hundreds of years, even through the violence of Chinese subjugation and exile.  But despite the obvious contrasts, there are many important points of contact between these two oeuvres: both use landscape, space and architecture toward compelling spiritual ends.

                                              

Let us begin with Kiefer’s Osiris and Isis. This large (12 ½ x 18 foot) painting shows a large steppe, a temple mount, seen from below, towering at a skewed angle in forced perspective, filling the entire picture plane with a massive sense of volume and weight.  We are situated nearby, as if we could almost touch it.  We are in its space, directly confronting its huge presence. This is an axis mundi, a focus of energies that leads in a circular fashion around its square circumference to its pinnacle. Like a burial mound, this stepped architecture alludes to death, but its gradual stages of elevation and evolution seems to point to hope and promise. We are invited to walk the path from bottom to top in a kind of ancient, mimetic ritual. There is a sense of the ominous here too, by the dark palette of rust browns and blacks that smear the surface of the painting.  Kiefer disrupts the surface and accentuates the surface topology with debris such as a television circuit board, copper wire, organic matter and porcelain shards, a technique that viscerally elicits a sense of tactile discomfort. The spatial torque of the over-extended, two-point perspective further adds to the disorientation.

Author Simon Schama, in his powerful book, Landscape and Memory, writes that Kiefer reinvented the traditional forms of landscape and history painting, by turning “back to German Expressionism, for the raw texture, the gritty materiality, of historical truth….Kiefer was concerned with a different kind of integrity: that of the undisguised storyteller, the orchestrator of a visual Gesamtkunstwerk: a total experience, at once operatic, poetic, and epic. So he pushed the plane back down, using aggressively deep perspective to create the big operatic spaces in which his histories could be enacted.”

Besides the inherent and implied meaning of the materials and spatial techniques in the painting, the title Osiris and Isis points us to a mythic level of meaning, wherein the story of the Egyptian gods helps us understand through allegory the meaning of the cultural and historical heritage of postwar Germany. In the epic Egyptian myth, Osiris’s brother Set kills him out of jealousy and scatters his body parts around the kingdom. Isis, both the sister and wife of Osiris, finds her husband’s remains and ultimately resurrects him. By both the title and method of the painting, Kiefer clearly refers to the trauma and destruction of Germany and the hope for reunification and purification. Kiefer thereby questions contemporary German history, in terms of its totalitarianism, use of technology, and implementation of its policy “the Final Solution “– all dangerous tropes that dehumanize, separate, and demonize the “other”.

The topological landscape of the temple mount represents the concretization of these mental attitudes. Kiefer spatially symbolizes the journey for purification and reunification by inviting us on a “walk-around”. The path we are to take begins at the bottom, and as we proceed we encounter pieces of German identity (the detritus, “stuff” of historic record), elements that will eventually aid in rebuilding a new German identity. Kiefer thus creates a visual statement about the complexity of human existence on this scarred planet. He engages the mythic figures of Osiris and Isis to deepen our understanding of that experience – it becomes a personal spiritual statement and a universal moral imperative. 

Such a statement is unusual in the contemporary Western artistic practice, but it is a major theme in Far-Eastern artistic traditions.  And in Tibet, it’s by far the dominant mode, as befits a society pervasively centered around Buddhism.  

Tibetan sand paintings are mandalas, and are therefore an integral part of Tibetan Vajrayana (Tantric) spiritual practices. For centuries, the ritual involved in the creation of sand mandalas was only seen in monasteries, but they are in recent decades “performed” by Tibetan monks in numerous venues, including art museums and college campuses. As shown in the accompanying video of the creation of the Green Tara Mandala at Sonoma State in 2011, the monks paint a spatial equivalent to a cosmogram, a “map” of the sacri mundi, the two-dimensional spatial depiction of earthly manifestation. The creation is enacted in a few days, which mirrors the telescoping of experience over time into the present moment. 

The architectonic space of the sand mandala has at once a mythic, a physical and a spiritual aspect.  It contains spiritual and historical figures and symbolic decorative elements within a complex arrangement of stepped spaces of circles and squares radiating out from a central orb.  The detritus of existence, whether from fear, ambition, power, or competition, become opportunities for growth and purification on the path to enlightenment. The process invites our memory of healing forces in the shape of deities, and evokes a better future.

The physical space is which these spiritual realms exist is represented in the sand mandala by the geometric topology of colored sand set in place, grain by grain over the time of its creation. The sacred space begins at the center and slowly “unfolds” to the outer edges of the composition. The monks apply the sand particles by vibrating a slender metal funnel. The picture plane lies flat, and the point of view is aerial, as if we were a bird floating above the creation of the world.  Elaborate shapes, religious decorations, and symbols of the religious deities define the pictorial space. Representing the earth and all its aspects, the mandala becomes an act of prayer. The process reveals a seamless connection between idea and object.  Art here is transformative and experiential. In the making and in the resulting perception of the mandala, we feel this sense of participatory and existential realities.  Worshipers circumambulate the completed mandala both physically and imaginallyduring the associated rituals.  The spiritual path is experienced through time, and marks a process of development.  In the end, the mandala, like life, is ephemeral and is destroyed in a ritualistic ceremony with the particles of sand placed in flowing water.

The cyclic nature of the process is worthy to note. Both Kiefer and the Tibetans acknowledge that the spatial element supports the act of transformation. Whether we circumambulate around the cosmic steppe, the sacred mount of German history, or the symbolically manifested universe, we experience space as inherently full of meaning. 

Similarly, the land we live on contains a mystery that can be reenacted in thought and deed. The relationship between human history and the landscape is dynamic and in constant flux.  Nature, ecosystems, the environment, the biosphere, and the landscape – all refer to a sense of space as a container in which the complexity of life is played out.  The horrific and the beautiful hold hands in this cosmic dance.   In the end we stand speechless, with a sense of awe that the world is.

References:

Andrews, Malcolm. Landscape and Western Art. New York, N.Y.: Oxford UP, USA, 1999.


Paglen, Trevor. “Experimental Geography//2008.” Nature: Documents of Contemporary Art (2012): 104-6.


“Sacred Tibetan Sand Mandala Time Lapse.” YouTube. CSUSonoma, 18 Apr. 2011. Web. 19 Mar. 2012. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyqVDewZ2kU>.

Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. New York, N.Y.: Knopf, 1995, 126.

Staniszewski, Mary Anne. Believing Is Seeing: Creating the Culture of Art. London: Penguin, 1995. 1-100.

                                                          

Summary for First Residency at AIB 1/2012

From Auschwitz to Honolulu. That sums up the journey that brought me to the Art Institute of Boston MFA program. The visceral dichotomy between Auschwitz and Honolulu has informed my work over the past ten years. But as Oliver Wasow so aptly asked in my first AIB group critique, “What is the connection?”

The first residency has helped me frame this question and to begin to formulate an answer, circling back to Valois, with many other circles in between. “Finding Valois” signifies a journey for me, one of finding direction, and internal circumambulations around ideas and process.

I experienced both how hard it is to articulate the core ideas in my work and the disconnect between what I think my work is about and what it actually delivers. My marching orders are apparent: clarify the message and refine the visual language to convey clear meaning.

To address these concerns, I have reviewed the many valuable critiques from advising and non-advising faculty, fellow students and visiting artists. These critics agreed that portraying the contradictions between the beautiful and the horrific is an ambitious goal, and that there are many ways to approach it.

Laurel Sparks suggested that experiences of beauty and horror can be overwhelming, but awe can emerge from both, thus addressing the complexity of human experience. The polarities of the circle of experience are not necessarily resolvable, but they are fertile ground for investigation.

Laurel and Tony Apesos suggested that I look at Alexis Rockman and Martha Rosler, who negotiate the contradiction between beauty and horror with unique styles. Rockman depicts apocalyptic natural disasters and Rosler juxtaposes opposing ideas in a visual dialectic using photomontage. Tony referred particularly to Rosler’s “Bringing the War Home” and “Beauty is Only Skin Deep” as examples of visualizing contradiction.

Hannah Barrett suggested I look at Anselm Kiefer, who represents the horrific without aestheticizing it by avoiding the depiction of actual place and objects. Instead he uses materials and process to signify the horrific. Hannah also mentioned Nancy Spero and Leon Golub, who create a visual discourse to explore the overlap of beauty and cruelty.

A couple of people suggested that I look at other artists who deal with beauty or horror to see what kind of visual language is employed. On the side of beauty, Luminist painter Martin Johnson Heade of the Hudson River School explored the transcendental landscape, illuminating utopia through scale and detail of natural forms. On the other hand, in the realm of the horrific, Michal Mazur’s black and white monotypes in Robert Pinsky’s translation of Dante’s Inferno reflect the intense darkness and lifelessness of hell. The contrast between these two artists’ work is stark. Heade’s soft, painterliness and careful rendering of natural forms are sharply at odds with Mazur’s monochromatic, dark, mysterious abstractions with aggressive marks.

Critiques by Oliver Wasow, Rob Sullivan, Deborah Davidson, Kathleen Jacobs and Jarrod Staples added to the discussion about the element of process. For example, as a printmaker I am familiar with the idea of multiples, though I use multiplicity less for printing editions and more in the image-making process itself. Deborah suggested I further explore that approach by using Robert Morris’ Verb List, and generally exploring methodologies that stimulate new ways of finding marks and ideas for development.

But process has to influence the resulting image, and Kathleen questioned whether I have engaged process enough for that to happen. She suggests I err on the side of excess, exercise less control, be more cathartic, and seek a visual language that suits the message. As several critics mentioned, breaking away from one’s comfort zone, “getting in your own way”, can suggest new possibilities.

Another suggestion by some of the critics is for me to explore ideas without dependence on symbolic place-setters (i.e. orchids, Birkenau barracks) by finding a more abstracted language of “mark-making” and materials. For example, painter Peter Hoss uses large format drawing and collage with vigorous marks to convey a sense of violence, disconnection, volatility and agitated movement. Deborah suggested using frottage, made famous by Surrealist Max Ernst, as another kind of mark making. In fact, I plan to explore frottage in upcoming weeks, using rubbings from trees, rocks, grass, sticks, and other random pieces of natural debris.

Additionally, people suggested I look at a number of different artists: William Kentridge, Roni Horn, Gerhart Richter, Dorothea Rockburne, Barnett Newman, Michael Hizer, Chihara Shiota, Ann Wilson, Mona Hatoum, Lucio Fontana, Mark Tansey and Philip Taaffee, among others. Common threads of deep interest to me among these artists are how they make marks, present diametric juxtapositions, incorporate geometric and organic forms, embrace multiple perspectives, and imply natural processes and systems.

I am of course also interested in the role of historic memory and the landscape, and in what ways works on paper contribute to contemporary thinking in postmodernism. Several people recommended Landscape and Memory by Simon Schama, so I knew it was a “must read” and will certainly be an ongoing resource. I have ordered Robert Pinsky’s translation of Dante with Mazur’s illustrations. Also waiting patiently on my bookshelf are the Whitechapel series on various topics including Beauty, the Sublime, the Archive, and Color, Dora Apel’s book, Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing, and The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram. A colleague has lent me her hefty hardcover copy of Regarding Beauty, a catalogue of the amazing exhibit at the Hirshorn Museum that I missed in 1999. Slash: Paper Under the Knife edited by Martina D’Alton, recommended by Deborah Davidson, will inspire further exploration in cut paper; Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton; On Photography by Susan Sontag; and Bernice Cross’s Allegories of Modernism: Contemporary Drawing, will provide the groundwork for further investigations of the universal and personal in our experience of the landscape.

I have always felt the dynamism of our planet, this earth, and our relationship to it and that our identity and subjective reality are directly linked to the land. As Simon Schama argues, our very sense of self is rooted in the sense of place, “landscapes are culture before they are nature, constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock.” Schama would agree with Roni Horn who “defines place not as a fixed location but as a ‘condensation of acts’.” These acts are the accrual of historic events and the landscape holds this memory in seen and unseen ways. With a broad stroke, both beauty and horror inhabit this spatial container of the land. I am inspired by this complexity, this inevitable contradiction. “Finding Valois”, then, is really a re-orientation to the land as a sacred vessel. The challenge is to find appropriate visual language to portray the complexity.

This is where the notion of audience enters. Running through the four faculty presentations on Art and Audience is the idea that the discursive space between artist and audience has changed over time. Deborah Todd Wheeler spoke about the ”circle of exchange” where the object of art is the focus, but also a “sacred mind space” that circles back to its source through the intermediary of the audience (as friend, family, or yourself.) We are complicit in this exchange, in fact integral to it; the act of looking is not innocent. In terms of historic memory and the cultural tropes we all carry, this discursive space is pregnant with meaning and memory. It is well worth the effort to find a visual language that evokes a response commensurate with the artists’ intention and completes the circle of meaningful exchange.

I found that the presentations by graduating students Theresa Bonillo and Susan Emmerson, with very different visual languages, imparted a compelling sense of the personal and the universal. Theresa invokes memory of her deceased husband through the re-stitching of cloth, following the traces of what was left behind, and thereby evokes new meaning through re-making. A personal loss for her becomes a collective metaphor of the human condition. Susan’s cut-piece re-constructions of bodily systems, a kind of topological mapping of the human body, are mimetic containers of meaning about her personal history of doctor/patient/artist, and art/science and self. For both these artists, the expression matches the message with heartfelt honesty and genuineness.

Circling back to my own journey, starting at my home base, I have begun to navigate the territories of self and landscape, mapping the process of discovery, traveling the paths and roads where I live to re-orient my direction artistically to true north. Simon Schama aptly notes, “For although we are accustomed to separate nature and human perception into two realms, they are, in fact, indivisible. Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.” My work of the mind is of memories of walks among the cathedral of the pines, of a pond full of mallard ducks fed throughout the winters, of ice-skating on a frozen pond and wild fires that kept my toes warm, of the vertiginous verticality of the Swiss Alps, of walks through dense Polish forests and hot Sinai deserts and Hawaiian rainforests, of the blood-soaked stones of Auschwitz and Birkenau, and of the burial mounds of my parents and in-laws. Finding Valois will not be easy, but a journey well worth the taking.

Finding Valois

Here begins my adventure, finding valois.  Following a very intense 10 days in Boston for my first residency in the MFA program, I came home dizzy with information, challenges, and a bit of fear and excitement, of what is ahead on this journey. Finding Valois refers to the internal re-orientation, and to the physical exploration of materials, travel and mapping the experience, and finding the visual confluence of the sense of self with a sense of place.  Finding Valois also points to understanding the relationship between the experience of the sublime and the ugly. Landscape is both subject and object here, a container of generational, personal, and historic memory.

What visual language can speak in multiple voices?  As I explore possibilities, I see myself as a witness, not just as a bystander, but one who is both affected by and effects changes in the world around me.  The physicality of experience prompts my participation.  A discourse of materials, ideas, and contradictory bifurcated intentions characterize my current thinking.

For the past two weeks I have thrown myself into organizing my new drawing studio, now Studio B.  I reserve Studio A for my printmaking projects, etching press and storage of all my prints and framed pieces.  Wolfie, my Adirondack wolf pelt gifted to me by a Cree Indian after my father's death, is now my companion in Studio B, as I start my next body of large drawings.

In preparation for this next stage of intensive studio work, I compiled a large list of readings.  Simon Schama's thick tome, Landscape and Memory is proving to be a fabulous resource.  From Polish, Lithuanian, then Germanic and English history and mythologies of Arcadia, Schama explores the interconnection of human history and the landscape.  These myths constitute a complex system of understanding that is rooted in the landscape and persists throughout history.

Here are some of the other books I have also started to explore:
Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing by Dora Apel
Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life by Arthur C. Danto
Land and Environmental Art edited by Jefrey Kastner
William Kentridge by Dan Cameron
Roni Horn by Louise Neri
Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton
After Modern Art 1945 - 2000 by David Hopkins
Drawing Now Between the Lines of Contemporary Art edited by Downs
Whitechapel books on Color, Nature, Beauty, Sublime, and the Archive
The Short Guide to Writing About Art by Sylvan Barnet
On Photography by Susan Sontag
Allegories of Modernism: Contemporary Drawing by Bernice Rose
Phaidon's Vitamin P1 and P2 and Vitamin D
Slash: Paper Under the Knife by David Revere McFadden
The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art by Arthur Danto
Contemporary Drawing: Key Concepts and Techniques
After the End of Art by Arthur Danto
Landscape and Western Art by Malcolm Holmes

Among other activities in these past two weeks, I have started to look at various artists for their unique contributions to the discourse on Landscape and Memory.  Here are a few of them:
Anselm Kiefer
Roni Horn
William Kentridge
Dawn Clements
Dennis Oppenheim
Michael Schall
John Stoney

I also attended a wonderful talk at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art by the Korean collaborative artists Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, in conjunction to the new exhibit entitled Lines of Control. Please see the museum's website for more information: http://museum.cornell.edu/exhibitions/lines-of-control.html

The Ink Shop is also gearing up for a wonderful new show called Process and Purpose curated by Alan Singer, professor at R.I.T in Rochester, NY.  This show opens next week Friday. Including internationally known printmakers Dan Weldon and Keith Howard,  this exhibition highlights innovative prints that represent an evolution of the printmaking art form. Please see www.ink-shop.org for more information.

I am also represented in the Faculty show at Ithaca College.  The show just opened last Friday and is entitled You are Here, and includes video, photography, sculpture, prints, and paintings.  My Orchid Multiples, comprised of 60 woodcut prints, hangs in a prominent wall of the gallery! The show is a must-see.

Lastly, I registered for the 40th Southern Graphics Conference in New Orleans this March!  I will be going with my colleague Masha Ryskin from Rhode Island School of Design.  This will be my first time in New Orleans and fourth time to the conference.  My last SGC ended in a visit to the emergency room in Chicago with a very badly shattered left wrist!  I am hoping for a less painful outcome on this trip!

Coming soon:  My summary of my first residency!