Wabi

 The Japanese Tea Ceremony: a spiritual and cultural ritual a few hundred years old

Tohaku Hagesawa (painting), and Soen Shunoku (caligraphy), Sen Rikyu, mid-16th century

The tea ceremony existed before him, but it was the Buddhist Monk (and amateur architect) Sen Rikyu, in the 16th century, who really turned it into an important cultural tradition for Japan.  Particularly interesting, he introduced to the tea ceremony a particular aesthetic called Wabi.

So what is Wabi about?  Sen Rikyu designed Tea Houses with an emphasis on humility and imperfection.

Sen Rikyu, Myoki-an Tearoom entry, 1580

Like the tiny doorway into a tea-room pictured above, Sen Rikyu's tea houses required visitors, from high nobleman to simple farmer, to humble themselves and slow down, buy having to stoop and crawl through the tiny opening.  The tearoom inside is tiny, too small to stand up in, and the beams and walls forming the structure are asymmetrical, unvarnished, imperfect.  Tea is boiled on the floor of the tea room.

And here is an example of a bowl to for tea made with the wabi aesthetic:

Kizaemon Tea-Bowl, made in Korea but used in Japan, 16th-17th century

It is tipped, chipped, and blipped with scratches, unglazed spots and imperfections.  And it is this very aspect which allowed the tea ceremony participant drinking from this bowl to contemplate as he was drinking, that beauty, uniqueness and personality of all things and people come out of their imperfections.

Stupa art at the Freer Gallery

It was Saturday and I desperately needed to get out and do something fun, quickly, before I despaired at the massive amounts of homework and studying awaiting me this weekend.  So I hopped on my bike and rode through some freezing, buffeting winds to the Freer Gallery on the Washington Mall.  A quick look on the Smithsonian Institute website had informed me that they had an exhibit up called Birds in Chinese Painting, and I figured that was just what I needed to give me a little relaxed enjoyment.  

But before I reached the Chinese bird paintings, I got distracted by a room of art from ancient India.  Back in 2004, as a freshman in college, I had taken one class on Indian and Southeast Asian art history.  I loved the class; I felt as I was taking it like it was the kind of course that could open up whole new directions for my life... and yet, I realized upon as I entered room in the Freer Gallery, that this was probably the first time I had seriously looked at a work of Indian or Southeast Asian art since the class final.  So much for new life directions.  Nonetheless, though Indian Art hadn't become my life's work, I savored every minute in that gallery; it was so fun to be reminded of all that I had learned.  

Parallel to how medieval European art pretty much always had to do with Christianity and various forms of spiritual and religious practice, ancient Indian art pretty much always had to do with Buddhism or Hinduism and the various forms of spiritual and religious practice associated with these two religions.  The most important form of worship for the ancient Buddhists was circumambulation of the stupa.  A stupa is a mound-shaped structure inside which are buried relics of the Buddha.  The stupa is solid; you don't go in it when you visit, but enter through gate in the fence that surrounds it onto holy ground, and worship by walking clockwise around it, kneeling before it, and touching it.  The gates around a stupa were often fully decorated with relief carvings, like the two images here. 

Worship at a Stupa, 2nd Century BCE, Northwest India

In a move that is quite poetically self-referential, this first relief is an image, taken from a stupa gate, of worship at a stupa.  Notice the worshipers circumambulating, and kneeling, and even the handprints around the bottom of the stupa to show where people touched it in worship.  The flying guys above, (I didn't know this and had to look it up) are apparently celestial beings adorning the stupa with garlands.  

Birth of the Buddha, 3rd Century CE, Pakistan-Afghanistan Border

This is a relief from a different stupa gate 5 centuries later.  You can see the influence of classical Greek aesthetics on the modeling of the bodies.  Although she has a greco-roman body and hairstyle, the central figure of the Buddha's mother Maya stands in the traditional pose of an Indian female nature-spirit; feet crossed and one hand grasping a tree above.  The relief shows the story of the birth of the Buddha out of his mother's side (did you even see the tiny Buddha there before I pointed him out?).  My favorite thing about this image is that the guy in the crown receiving the Buddha is the Hindu god, Indra... wait, Hindu?  Isn't this a holy Buddhist image?  The ancient Indian people saw no contradiction in including holy beings from other religions.  All religions are valid paths to holy enlightenment... a tenet humans would do well to remember today.

Holocaust memorials

When I say the terms "monument" and "memorial" what associations come up in your mind?  (Picture, as an example of a classic monument, the Washington Monument, featured in the last post.) Do any of these concepts make your list?

- Massive: a monument/memorial is usually large, visually powerful, dominating the space it inhabits.
- National pride / Nationalism: almost all monuments/memorials represent moments or people important to the standard historical story of the nation.  Washington DC was full of monuments to presidents and wars considered important.  Recently, as our standard history has expanded to include histories of civil rights and minority groups as important, new monuments of national pride have been built, such as the American Indian Museum and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial.
- Memory: countries build monuments/memorials in order not to forget.

It is the importance of this last concept, memory, which is the motivation for various Holocaust Memorials all over the world. But if monuments represent national pride, how can you build a Holocaust memorial when the Holocaust was a moment of national shame, mistakes and shortcomings in humanity?  Countries like the US and Switzerland tightly restricted the number of Jewish refugees they accepted despite news of persecution; countries like France, Austria, and Italy were complicit with Nazi anti-semitic requests for most of the war. Of course the most extreme national shame is felt in Germany.

World-wide and in Germany, artists are struggling to build memorials that keep memory of the holocaust active, and inspire further learning and personal connections to the holocaust stories while resisting the traditional dominating, pride-filled structures.

Just one example, although there are an number of powerful ones:  The Aschrott Fountain Memorial by Horst Hoheisel, in the German city Kassel.  

Hoheisel was commissioned to build a memorial on the place in the town square where in pre-Nazi times, a fountain had stood.  This fountain had been destroyed in the Nazi era because its donor, Sigmund Aschrott, was a Jew, even as the donor, the donor’s family and over 3,000 other Jews were forcibly removed from Kassel and sent to concentration camps.  After the war, until Hoheisel's commission in 1987, the hole in the ground where the fountain had been was alternately left untouched, or planted with flowers.

Original Aschrott Fountain, 1908-1939, Kassel

In 1987, the city of Kassel, and Horst Hoheisel agreed that the story of this fountain, representing both the pre-Nazi Jewish contribution to the city, as well as, in its removal, horrific anti-semitism deserved a memorial.  But Hoheisel did not want to build some massive monument on top of the empty space left by the fountain, where people might come once, and quickly forget about the story it represented.  Instead, Hoheisel highlighted the aspect of emptiness: the Jews had been removed, and Kassel was left with a hole in its culture, history and the hearts of the remaining citizens.  He did not build upward, but dug out a mirror image of the original Aschrott fountain under the ground at the site.  The monument literally points visitors’ thoughts to the story beneath the surface.  Particularly interesting, visitors interact with the memorial not by looking at it as they stand in front of it, but by looking down as they stand on top of it.  Thus what Hoheisel build acts more like a pedestal than like a complete monument.  When visitors stand on it, they, their thoughts, memories and experiences are the real monument.

Horst Hoheisel, Aschrott Fountain Memorial, 1987.  Above: what the memorial looks like to visitors.  Below, what the memorial looks like underground.

I think artists in countries like the US can learn from memorials like these.  The US too has moments in history which should never be forgotten or downplayed, but which aren't exactly reasons for national pride (slavery and its legacies of racism, and the vast destruction of Native American people and cultures to name two.)  How can these best be memorialized and remembered in art?

Representations of George Washington

What does George Washington have to do with ancient Egypt, the land where obelisks were invented and erected to memorialize great pharaoh-kings (who were gods in the ancient Egyptian religion)?

Robert Mills, Washington Monument, National Mall in Washington DC, 1848-1884

While we're on the topic, what does George Washington have to do with the ancient Greek religion, and the body and pose of Zeus, the king of the Gods?

Horatio Greenough, George Washington Statue, Smithsonian American History Museum, 1840

Both these representations of Washington turn him, in effect, from a man into a god-king.  It strikes me as interesting that there was such a desire in the 1840s to present God-like images of a person who had been so instrumental in founding a republic.  This republic stood for (and still stands for), theoretically at least, the values of religious freedom and equality.  And yet those wishing to honor the republic's founder in the 1840s turned him into a god, without noticing the irony.  True, when the George Washington Statue was revealed to the public it quickly created a lot of controversy.  The controversy centered however, not around the portrayal of Washington as a god, but around the fact that he was half naked.  

There's one other ultra-famous representation of George Washington worth mentioning: Washington Crossing the Delaware, by Emanuel Leutze.  This painting takes its style and rules of representation from German Romanticism.  It was painted by a German man, who had spent his childhood in the USA, but had moved back, by the time of painting this, to Germany, and painted this in order to inspire European revolutionaries for democracy.    

We know without having to say it, that the Zeus-like sculpture of Washington is a fiction.  I mean, really, no one would believe that he actually wore bed-sheet and sat on a throne, at least not in public.  I think it's useful to remember that the painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware, is also not a realistic portrayal, something that's easier to forget.  All the details of the painting, from the mystical lighting, to Washington's leader pose, were chosen to convey larger-than-life heroism.

Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1851

Enjoy American President's Day!