Joseph McElroy's Articles on Lions Roar

Novelist and critic Joseph McElroy reflects on the works in "The Invisible Thread: Buddhist Spirit in Contemporary Art," an exhibition at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center in Staten Island, NY. Somewhere near the beginning of this experience this exhibition of largely contemporary art (and on an island I have sometimes visited as a kind of city refuge from the city)"I find in a glass case an 8-inch-high Buddha ("author unknown") and find that it is difficult to tear myself away. Almost silver in the light, this strangely fresh, 16th-century bronze might make of me secretly a connoisseur - but of what? Its tranquility? Its anchored presentness? Its elephant, lotus and moon throne? This was Friday, November 22nd, 2003, and to get here I had traveled across a chill, bright, windy harbor that I have looked at since I was old enough to look, to open my eyes, to think. You will say, "to feel." Yes; but think. To know what I'm feeling; feeling my way. Which often, perhaps too often, has seemed to be in words. Since my childhood in Brooklyn Heights. And for many decades in New York City. Leaving (for years at a time) and returning. By road, river, bridge, rail, air and by this very harbour with its tugs and oil tankers and container ships, its Statue, and Ellis Island (with that poor, piled, painful mountain of suitcases in the central hall exhibiting the lives of unknown would-be immigrants who came here long ago); and fire boats and police boats and Coast Guard patrol boats that remind me not only that I was a Coast Guard sailor at the time of that Korean War that is weirdly still with us, but that I am a resident of lower Manhattan, a few blocks from Ground Zero. And let me not leave out of this inventory what I have contemplated from so many distances during my life if not exactly meditated upon'the Staten Island ferry. It will bring you out here (connecting with a ten-minute S40 bus ride) to this Snug Harbor, as they have called the place since 1801, where I find myself walking through rooms that once housed aged mariners but now exhibitions and cultural activities and, since September 28th and until February 29th 2004, "The Invisible Thread: Buddhist Spirit in Contemporary Art." So absorbed in this show of 53 mostly American, mostly contemporary painters, sculptors, photographers, and installation and video and occasionally not quite categorizable artists, I must not forget to say that the gallery is the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, one of several landmark buildings interesting in their own right on the grounds of the Snug Harbor Cultural Center in Staten Island. To this exhibition I bring an outsider's long-time interests. And I bring questions because I want to understand, because I want to wake up every day of my life. What is Buddhist, what is American? This is what I bring and seek to take possession of and be provoked and simplified by. As if I stand somewhere between the very small Buddha I began with in the south wing - and the very large American Buddha now confronting me, 25 feet long and reclining along a fine old wood floor in the great hall of the north wing of this early 19th-century building. Based on the ancient, 40-some-foot figure of the Buddha at his death carved out of a rock outcrop in Val Gihara, Sri Lanka, this one is a brand new, air-filled sculpture of painted cloth. Huge but light, it reminds me to breathe, because its audible electric fan seems to pump up its giant breathing presence, so you hear it as almost but not quite a distraction from an imaginary silence where you stand. Or I, since I'd better speak only for myself, accepting a moment's peace like a gift from this transcendent blown-up bag of air, this majestic, shaped balloon, empty and tremendous. The sculptor, Lewis deSota, calls it "paranirvana (self-portrait)," telling us that the inflated face is his own at some future moment of buddhahood, dissolving, it occurs to me, that self that was never more than an aggregate of interactions with others (as the old texts say, and some recent fiction, even my own, might confirm). Nearby, within earshot of the fan, the northwest corner room has been subtly enhanced by Arlene Schechet's installation, "The Wheel Turns," so that the room recalls this whole place, from the original ceiling frescoes of anchors and ship's lines and knots, to all the meanings of the glinting waters of the harbour I can see through the window. Often more explicitly Buddhist in her sculpture but never more poignantly grounded than here, Schechet continues the ceiling themes above us, positioning at waist height ropes cast of palest bluish crystal so they seem to have been threaded in and out of the four walls, strands at one point broken and frayed. In the center of the floor where we must turn and turn to read them (and with our feet, as the artist invites us to do, help erase them) proverbial words printed in concentric circles speak a poetry of transience'about feeling which is like a bubble of water, perception a mirage, consciousness a ghost, our existence "a sphere which is neither Earth, nor water, nor fire, nor air," nor infinity of space, neither coming nor going, our destination the end of suffering: until we look up from this inscribed whirlpool to find in the center of the old decorated ceiling a captain's wheel to tell us we are somehow on course. But if art may focus meditation, can you make a religion out of transience? A Presbyterian hymn tune slips into my memory. What were the words? They yield for a moment to T.S. Eliot's in The Wasteland which climactically, and desperately in 1922, invokes the great spiritual voices including that of the Buddha to give meaning back to our civilization, though I am remembering in particular the drowned sailor Phlebas the Phoenician in the next-to-last part, who "Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell / And the profit and loss." The wheel of birth, death, life, turns often as I pass along these halls and cross thresholds. An intricately, brightly woven 18th-century Tibetan mandala hangs on a wall. Occupying an entire room, "Rose Mandala" (2003) by Chrysanne Stathacos seems casual. She has sprinkled many-colored petals on a circular mirror and beyond its edge, which scatter as I tread carefully and become aware of a rush broom in a far corner and, hung along the wall, bags of sweepings. An effect of everyday work and time and humble art and impermanence. The artist's comments on her intention and sources prove both rich and unneeded; the work works by itself. Christine Lahaie's motor-driven spindle in "Cam Shaft Padma" turns a double-ended, red-handled paintbrush which, in some fashion free, very slowly pushes outward, again and again before it falls back, a glass panel through which light projects luminous bubbles of shadow on the wall. I am not surprised to learn that the Buddhist word "padma" may mean a possessive passion, here evidently tempered. Less hard-edge than in other work of Lahaie's, the technology and some meditative practice of repetition may touch the viewer's physical rhythm. In her statement the artist stresses breath, like other makers of mindfulness here. The dissolving of conflict (hardly unique to Buddhism) evidently accommodates in art - or does it?"the tensions that make this small-scale mechanical work strong. It builds and releases, turns back upon itself. By contrast Max Gimblett's black acrylic circle "No Trace," seven feet across, projects the suddenness of the swift stroke. A calligraphic boldness as well as the apparent enso circle symbol of enlightenment might indicate Japanese Zen, as does the artist's elliptical explanation "all mind / no mind." Explicitly an enso, Kazuaki Tanahashi's "Forest Within" circle in green comes with an acknowledgment of the tradition. Yet "this is America, anyone should be allowed to draw ensos in her or his own way," the artist's statement continues. What he makes of the Lucent Technologies logo I don't know. Unveiling its enso in 1996 acknowledged by the graphic designers as derived from ancient Buddhist and Hindu symbolism, the company elsewhere incredibly claimed that its enso was arrived at independently. Reassociated now with the phone that Lucent manufactures, to say nothing of baseball cap, coffee mug, sports bag, delivery truck, and junk mail, it would surely have resembled for the late (always new) John Cage our ambient noise which is first of all to be listened to as carefully as trash cans rattling, Haydn's Surprise Symphony, a helicopter overhead, or my old hymn. Of all the work offered us in this exhibition, the least sensuous is the score, or three framed pages anyway, of Cage's early Sixties instrumental ensemble composition "Atlas Eclipticalis." I read the passage posted to the left from his autobiographical statement, and like his books A Year From Monday and Silence, it is fascinating. If Zen is without ritual or sacred text (the better to act)"which is probably a very non-Zen generalization (if not a slappable offense)"Cage spent much of his working life generating unforeseen, indeterminate, direct, and semi-unrepeatable occasions. Among such other early and distinguished American discoverers of Buddhism as the photographer Minor White, represented in this southeast room of the south wing with Cage, Thomas Merton was better known in the Forties and Fifties as a Trappist poet and the author of The Seven Storey Mountain than for the effect of his interest in Buddhism, which was to strengthen the natural bonds between East and West. His drawings, of the type that appear elsewhere in this issue, make a meditative calligraphy in touch with things all the more real in the silence of his monastic vocation. Cage, who was public, called himself "a ground ... in which emptiness could grow" in part through, I assume, the silence that can happen not only in those famous gaps and pauses but if you end a musical piece almost immediately upon beginning it, incidentally...

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A Poetry of Transience

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