Notes for 3 Views of Emptiness, Monash University 2001
Living in Newtown in the 1970’s might seem like a strange place to discover Buddhism. Sitting in my living room staring at a wall I thought I caught a glimpse of a buddhist concept – the void. It was as if I could see through the wall and yet there was nothing there, just emptiness. At that time I was painting in a style where the canvas was like a page in a book that I filled with imagery. I was trying to avoid representation so I painted signs and symbols. Buddhism provided an entire pantheon of imagery as well as ideas about art and its place in a belief system that seemed to explain almost everything.
Painting images of buddhist deities is a very direct way of learning about their meanings and attributes. In the 80’s when I met Karma Phuntsok, a Tibetan artist now living in Australia , I suggested painting together. I’d start with a background to which Karma would add a meticulously painted Buddha. Then I would add more, building the work around Karma’s part. Some critics find it problematic for an artist in one culture to adopt ideas or practices from another culture. Yet when working with Karma there is a comfortable almost seamless meshing of styles. His traditional thanka painting technique speaks directly to the viewer, in his own work as well as in the collaborations. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the work deals with actual contact between cultures.
When I began to practice Buddhism under the instructions of Tibetan Lamas, I found that Buddhism applied to my western lifestyle in many ways. It also continued to influence my art. As a conceptual artist in the 70’s I wanted to make art about the more unusual things I was experiencing. The practice and study of Buddhism gave me a more developed way of interacting with what was around me as well as the idea that art could interact with the real world in a moral, philosophical and instructional way. This was also true of Aboriginal art where some designs are kept secret if they are considered to be powerful or dangerous. But while Aboriginal stories and designs were private cultural property with specific functions, buddhist ideas were freely available for anyone to adopt.
The mandala, images of ritual, supernatural beings, Buddhas, ancestral manifestations and so on seemed to offer a way of escaping the tyranny of the picture plane. Flat paint has always been enough – it symbolises the emptiness in which dependent arisings form. The flat picture plane is an empty space and when I fill it with signifiers from Buddhist and other belief systems I try to stay true to its emptiness. That’s because it’s already art in its empty state and I want my imaginary reality to be continuous with this.
But making art is more than dealing with the picture plane and the illusory world that one can create on it. Sounds, prayers, chants and teachings accompany ritual and practicing as a Buddhist allows one to experience their effects. Being without any affiliations is a good starting point for making art and in this context practicing one’s own form of Buddhism is an option. By working with Karma Phuntsok and previously with various Aboriginal artists, I felt that what we were creating was outside both of our respective cultures, but not totally.
After visiting sites like Tun Huang in China or Mount Kasuga in Japan, I could paint the experience and even include quoted painting styles that I had observed. These experiences and the art styles that are associated with them then found a small fragmented place in contemporary Australian art. It is possible to consider that in past lives I may have actually been at these sites working as an artist. Reincarnation means that one could have connections to cultures other than one’s own from past lives. This could explain the obsessive nature of my own interest in Buddhism, the sense of familiarity and the wish to integrate aspects of painting styles from specific sites and movements.
When all the parts that make up the cosmos of the painting are fitted together another set of images appear that derive from the reality of the painting itself. I see Abstract- Expressionism as a predecessor to performance art and as a style that distills the essence of other styles in a way that makes it workable as a vehicle for Buddhist ideas, especially those relating to Zen. Beat poets such as Kerouac and Ginsberg found that buddhist ideas could be viewed from a western perspective as well as applied to one.
More recently the computer has helped reassess the painting process. To reinvent my own approach to painting it was necessary to first transcribe aspects of the photograph, then to digitise it using dots. Simultaneously I saw 2 dimensional painting as something that could use painterly styles, references to different belief systems and religious practice. When older cultures can shed light on contemporary issues, then painting can be used to investigate. It’s not that art reaches outside of itself, although it clearly does, it’s that art can be a conduit for experience and in so doing can actually change things.