The legend of Wu Dao Zi

There was once a painter who one day painted a landscape. [.] The artist was so delighted with his picture that he felt an irresistible urge to walk along the path winding away towards the distant mountains. He entered the picture and followed the path towards the mountains and was never seen again by any man.
- Béla Balázs, Theory of Film

Just as his contemporary the poet Li Bo [Li Bai] had drowned in a river trying to catch hold of the reflection of the moon, about whose beauty he had so often sung, legend recounts that Wu Daozi disappeared into the mist of a landscape he had just painted.
- cited and translated by François Cheng, Empty and Full: The Language of Chinese Painting, [Boston: Shambhala, 1994], pp. 28-29

“In the palace of Ming Huang, the walls were of great size and upon one of these the Emperor ordered Wu Dao Zi to paint a landscape. The Artist prepared his materials, and concealing the wall with curtains commenced his work. After a little while he drew aside the veil, and there lay a glorious scene, with mountains, forests, clouds, men, birds and all things as in Nature. While the Emperor gazed upon it with admiration, Wu Dao Zi pointing to a certain part of the picture, said: ‘Behold this temple grot at the foot of the mountain – within it dwells a spirit.’ Then clapping his hands, the gate of the cave suddenly opened. ‘ The Interior is beautiful beyond conception’, continued the artist. ‘permits me to show the way, that your Majesty may behold the marvels it contains.’ He passed within, turning round to the beckon his patron to follow, but in a moment the gateway closed, and before the amazing monarch could advance a step, the whole scene fade away, leaving the wall white as before the contact of the painters brush. And Wu Dao Zi was never seen again.”
- Andersons Catalogue of Chinese and Japanese Paintings

Borges über Metalepse (Mise en Abyme)

“Warum beunruhigt es uns so sehr, dass die Landkarte in der Landkarte beinhaltet ist und die 1001 Nächte im Buch Tausendundeine Nacht? Warum beunruhigt es uns, dass Don Quichotte Leser des Quichotte, Hamlet Zuschauer des Hamlet ist? Ich denke, die Ursache herausgefunden zu haben: solche Vertauschungen legen nahe, dass, wenn die Figuren einer Fiktion Leser oder Zuschauer sein können, [auch] wir, ihre Leser oder Zuschauer, fiktiv sein können”
(Jorge Luis Borges, Partielle Magie im Don Quichotte, in Obras Completas, Bd. 2, Buenos Aires: Emecé 1989, S. 47).

Michael Fried before Tony Smith's DIE, 1967

“The beholder knows himself to stand in an indeterminate, open-ended – and unexacting – relation as subject to the impassive object. In fact, being distanced by such an object is not, I suggest, entirely unlike being distanced, or crowded, by the silent presence of another person; the experience of coming upon literalist objects unexpectedly – for example, in somewhat darkened rooms – can be strongly, if momentarily, disquieting in just this way.”

Michael Fried: Art and Objecthood  (1967)

Jan van Eyck: DER SCHIELENDE JESUS

um 1440

Der Mystiker Nicolaus Cusanus (oder Nikolaus von Kues) lebte zu Beginn des 15. Jahrhunderts, er war christlicher Gelehrter und Kardinal. In dem Text “De visione dei” denkt er 1453 über die Gottesschau nach:

“(…) dann bringst Du mich jedoch dahin, zu sehen, dass nicht der Dich Betrachtende Dir die Form gibt, sondern in Dir sich selbst schaut (…). Was er in jenem Spiegel der Ewigkeit sieht, ist nicht Darstellung, sondern die Wahrheit, deren Darstellung er, der Sehende, selbst ist. Also ist die Darstellung in Dir, mein Gott, die Wahrheit, und das Urbild von allem und allem einzelnen, das ist oder sein kann. (…) Herr, Erleuchter der Herzen, mein Angesicht ist ein wahres Angesicht, weil Du, der Du die Wahrheit bist, es mir gegeben hast. Und es ist ein Abbild, weil es nicht die Wahrheit selbst ist, sondern ein Abbild der absoluten Wahrheit. Ich schließe also in meinem Begriff die Wahrheit und das Abbild meines Gesichtes ein und sehe, dass in ihr das Abbild mit der Wahrheit des Gesichtes in der Weise zusammenfallen, dass es insoweit wahr ist, als es Abbild ist”

siehe:

http://encyclopediaworldart.wordpress.com/tag/nicolaus-cusanus/

Thomas Struth / Museum Photography

interaktive parteiwerbung / frankfurt kommunalwahl 2006

Tony Smith's account of a nightly ride on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike

“When I was teaching at Cooper Union in the first year or two of the ’50s, someone told me how I could get on to the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. I took three students and drove from somewhere in the Meadows to New Brunswick. It was a dark night and there were no lights or shoulder markers, lines,railings or anything at all except the dark pavement moving through the landscape of the flats, rimmed by hills in the distance, but punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes and colored lights. This drive was a revealing experience. The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn’t be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had never done. At first I didn’t know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had had about art. It seemed that there had been a reality there which had not had any expression in art.”

“The experience on the road was something mapped out but not socially recognized. I thought to myself, it ought to be clear that’s the end of art. Most paintings look pretty pictorial after that. There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it. Later I discovered some abandoned airstrips in Europe — abandoned works, Surrealist landscapes, something that had nothing to do with any function, created worlds without tradition. Artificial landscape without cultural precedent began to dawn on me. This is a drill ground in Nuremberg, large enough to accommodate two million men. The entire field is enclosed with high embankments and towers. The concrete approach is three 16-inch steps, one above the other, stretching for a mile or so.”

– From “Talking with Tony Smith” by Samuel J. Wagstaff Jr., Artforum, Dec. 1966, quoted in Robert Storr’s essay, “A Man of Parts,” in MoMA’s catalogue of the Tony Smith exhibition.

David: Morton Feldman at Haus der Kunst, Munich / LP infinite endings

10 years ago, I decided to go to visit a friend of mine in Munich. He was organizing a new music concert as part of a big exhibition of the abstract expressionist Ellsworth Kelly in the Haus der Kunst. At that time I didn’t know much about New Music. So I was happy to have the opportunity to join the concert. It was in the biggest space of the Museum and it was a programme of about 6 different pieces. At the end of the fitfth one, my friend addressed the assembly to tell them that the next piece would last for 45 minutes and that it would be very silent and that people were free to leave as they wished but that they would be kind to remain as silent as possible. It was a string quartet of Morton Feldman. When they started something that I had never experienced before happened. The space got silent not as part of the cultural consensus that consist in a respect of the live event that is offered, but each spectator actively silent, because the musicians were playing in such a low volume that it was not enough to remain silent, you had to do it actively in order to hear and to listen to the music that was coming out of these instruments.

This music was indeed located at the verge of silence, at the edge of its own death. It navigated in a sort of illusory repetition with an implicit tension between permanence and disappearance. This music was projecting sounds into time. And as some people were competing in silence with the musicians while leaving. Me and a few others we were making the experience of true beauty. It was as if it would never end but at the same time it was only busy ending, throughout the piece.

2007

CATALOG ENTRY: DECEMBER No 1

WE ARE TOGETHER – DEATH IN DOCUMENTARY ART

WE ARE TOGETHER is a documentary about an orphan school in south-africa and its choir. The main focus of the film is on one family of – i believe – five children, all orphans due to the AIDS epidemic. Three of the kids are living in the orphanage, three are living in the parent’s house. Sometime during the film, we learn that the oldest brother, who still lives at home, is suffering from AIDS symptoms too. He is brought to hospital and soon after released with some AIDS medicine to be treated at home by his sisters. The plot of the film is not him or his illness, but how the kids from the orphanage choir are preparing for a concert tour to the UK. So the brother is more of a side plot.

When he is released from hospital, the sister carries him on her back home to the parent’s house. The camera follows their walk for some time, along the dusty, red sand roads alongside dry bushes, walking right behind them, as if we (camera) were part of a caravan or some hiking team, all walking in a line.

After that the film documents the brothers last days at the house, showing him in bed, and the sisters walking about the two rooms of the house, bringing him water and helping him, when he has to vomit. The camera is among them, somehow accompanying but also being a bit in the way, in between things and people. It made me feel like being a visitor trapped in an akward situation. As if being invited to a dinner and than something unforeseen happens – like a martial argument – and you have to stick around to be polite while being totally out of place. There is also a scene where the sisters sing for the brother – bringing back the central theme of the film – and the brother discussing the song with them.

We watched the film at home, on our tv and paused it roughly at that moment to go to the kitchen to do one thing or the other. I remember asking AL during the scene where the brother is released from hospital, if he was now to die. I was already somewhat irritated by then and was fearing there would be more display of suffering ahead – which there was. In the kitchen I remember thinking whether to continue watching or not and mostly, how to tell her if i should decide not to, as i was wrongly assuming she really liked the film and the scene.

What was the reason for my irritation? I greatly resented watching the dying of this man. particularly because I felt like stumbling into this, since it was not the main plot but rather an unforeseen (by me) development of the story. The back-carrying-scene particularly made me feel like a passive on looker while feeling the moral obligation to be an active helper instead. The same of course goes for the following scenes. I have an absolute certain emotional position towards this kind of representation of death: i think it is wrong. I have a hard time watching it, always had, and – as in this case – even physically resent looking at the screen. I have discussed this issue with some people afterward but have not been able to come to a satisfying moral law or argument for my emotional position.

The closest i came to such an argument was saying, that the representation of factual dying makes us passive bystanders and thereby forms a sort of bond of agreement or at least of passivity with the situation (with death). This is untouched by whether the dying is the result of an act of violence – it always is, is it not? – whether it is condemned on moral grounds. Whether you think Ceaucescu deserved the rope or not is beside the point. You become a teammate of the hangmen. What does this mean in moral terms? Is it a question of thinking death to be a shame or a natural part of life? Why do i resent becoming a part of the situation? Because i can not deal with death in general, am afraid of the presence of death? I assume that it is because of this awkward and peculiar mixture of involvement and distance: i feel on the one side involved and unable to react or console the people in the scene.

der übergang ist bewacht