Photo Essay by Philip Wood
Philip Wood shares his love of black and white photography and its rituals, for over 30 years, and those moments when natural light supports the subject or landscape, revealing its deep beauty, innocence, truth, authenticity.

I love the ritual of black and white film photography. From choosing the film and loading my camera, to the anticipation of reviewing my contact sheets and noticing when I feel some emotional impact.
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I love the ritual of black and white film photography. From choosing the film and loading my camera, to the anticipation of reviewing my contact sheets and noticing when I feel some emotional impact. Composition, cropping, choosing the paper, tone and format are all part of my creative journey. Generally when photographing I stay on the side of allowing the images to come to me rather than trying to seek them.

My connection with subject, the light, and the mood is essential as I reflect on the main intention of a particular shot. How much can I eliminate to make it stronger? Moving around the subject offers me different perspectives and opportunities. Remembering to breathe helps as I pay attention to composition, changing light, choice of lens, my settings, and depth of field. I often wait for those intimate moments of connection in nature or with people. I actually feel it in my body—when essence reveals itself, and I know something special has been created.

I always remember one teacher telling a photography class I attended 25 years ago “Let the tree see you …” stressing the importance of the relationship between not only you to the subject, also the subject’s relation to you. Bringing integrity and vulnerability to my work creates the opportunity for a deeper connection with the subject, providing space for magical possibilities to unfold.

My family, nature, and light, mixed with the stunning environment of Desolation Sound have all been a great source of inspiration over the past 30 years of taking black and white photographs. Sometimes I am rewarded with images that seem to reflect a timeless mood, simplicity and strength.

The photographs shown are primarily taken around Cortes Island British Columbia, that’s my rowboat! The exception is “Windows” which I took inside the Meditation Sanctuary at Findhorn in Scotland. I prefer working with natural light supporting the subject or landscape to be infused with their own beauty, waiting for a moment when innocence, truth, authenticity are simply yet powerfully revealed—keeping my work bare and real, with elements that are expressed more as an art than science.

Philip Wood
www.philipwood.com

All photographs: Copyright Philip Wood

In his new book, The Inspired Heart: An Artist's Journey of Transformation, Jerry tells the story of his metaphorical death and rebirth as an artist and as a man. The Inspired Heart is a self-portrait of the life of a man guided by a desire to connect to the divine, and armed only with an unwavering faith in Grace to sustain him. In sharing the tale of his remarkable survival and his surrender to life experience, Jerry writes that he hopes "to bring the mystery of this survival back to the tribe as a story.

INTERVIEW BY RALPH WHITE

SPEAKING WITH JERRY WENNSTROM
(Oct 29th, 2004)

Jerry Wennstrom is the author of The Inspired Heart: An Artist's Journey of Transformation; further information on his life and art can be found at his web site www.handsofalchemy.com, as well as in the Parabola video In The Hands of Alchemy: The Life and Art of Jerry Wennstrom. http://www.parabola.org/

1) Jerry, you wrote in The Inspired Heart "art was the church of the 1970's." Tell us about the art world in New York in the 1970's. What was your role in it?

J-In many ways the art scene in the late 70's was something fashionably safe to hang our hats on. Art, and more importantly, the life of the artist had achieved celebrity status by the late 70's. Artists doing some of the most ridiculous things imaginable were being heralded as the wisdom keepers of this new church. Most of us had read about the poor, starving artists of the past who had not been recognized until after their death. Somehow, there seemed to be an unconscious need to collectively repent the oversight. By the late 70's artists could do no wrong! They were no longer the fringy characters living quietly in the back alleys. Mainstream culture had discovered the back ally. It was Soho – the high-end hangout and place to be and be seen.

Art has always held some element of the sacred so there was some legitimate reason for mainstream culture to eventually recognize this area of possibility?late though it may have been. The essential inner power of any true movement is illusive and will vanish the moment it becomes recognizable as a form in the world. The source of inspired breakthrough will always offer up its gems in the lowlands of the unconscious where few of us are willing to go. It is the loneliness and danger of the landscape that keeps most of us at bay. Like the queen-muse wandering incognito in a bad neighborhood, she goes where no clever strategy and ulterior motive might recognize her and seek to exploit her glory. There, where there is danger, she seeks only authentic relationship and ruthlessly dismisses any impersonations. Most of us however, hope to meet up with her at the front of the bandwagon in the safety of the well-attended party on the hill.
As far as my own role in all of this goes? I certainly had a longing to join the party. However, this possibility never felt real to me. Instead I trusted the beautiful and terrifying spirit of the time that I intuited was beckoning us forward into some new, unimaginable expression in the void. This is what I gave myself to.

2) Most people cannot imagine the idea of intentionally destroying works of art that had taken so much personal time and energy to create. Why did you feel destroying your art was necessary?

J-Einstein says, "Matter never dies, it changes form." If, as I suspected, art was beckoning us forward in the direction of some greater formless experience, then the "matter" and attachment to the objects of creation would only change form and offer up something unexpected and more alive. This is what the experience of destroying the art did for me. There is no question that the act of destroying my art and giving everything I owned away involved a huge risk. I was very aware that my initial impulse might have been misguided or even insane. Realizing this, it required every ounce of courage for me to trust the small seed of intuition and higher sense of beauty I perceived, enough to let it all go.

I sensed something important stirring within that needed my full attention. Fasting helped direct this attention inward, so I fasted for as long as it took for me to see what life was asking of me. I had no idea that the final expression of this focus would be to destroy my art and give everything I owned away. After a month-long fast, two choices became clear to me. I could keep doing what I was doing and continue to live as (what felt like) a fear-based idea of an artist, or I could give myself to some formless allurement that I can only describe as something that offered Life in full measure. Making this decision was not based on reason, so there was not the logical scenario guaranteeing some identifiable, beneficial outcome. With intuitive clarity I knew that these were my choices and I chose the formless allurement of life.

It is mostly in retrospect that the true gift of this choice has revealed itself to me. I find it a bit ironic and something of a cosmic joke, that, as an artist, I have been acknowledged more for having destroyed my art than I ever was for creating it! This paradox embodies the true spirit and deeper meaning of the word "sacrifice," which means, "to make sacred." We lay our dreams and precious attachments on the altar, with a willingness to let them go forever, and the whole of our beloved creation is sanctified and returned to us in ways we never would have imagined.

3) In having no possessions, your story seems to indicate that you were actually able to be more generous with those around you. Why do you think this is?

J- Giving up possessions certainly set the conditions for acts of immediate, uncalculated generosity. Unconditional trust requires that we remain completely present and keenly aware of the needs of the moment – we can't afford to do otherwise when we know our very life depends upon it! When we have nothing more to lose, the ego has the potential of stepping out of the way and allowing the needs and suffering of others to come into the light for a compassionate response. We also develop some long-forgotten sensibility of how to manifest what is truly ours. We learn to metaphorically "paint" what we need on the cave wall and then go out and catch the beast. There is an efficiency that comes into play when we no longer depend upon the accumulation of things to make us feel safe. We come to realize that we need much less than we originally thought and the emptiness we once feared becomes our greatest asset.

4) How did you survive during this time, often without money and not knowing if you were going to eat on any particular day? Could you please describe to us the nature of your faith that enabled you to live like you did?

J- I survived by doing my best not to interfere, by trusting unconditionally and by accepting every experience that came to me as if it had been dealt by the hand of God. I could never have continued this strange and lonely journey if I had not seen how well this level of trust carried my life. The simple fact is, as long as I did not act on my fears life continued to unfold naturally, in the most miraculous of ways. If it had not, some essential part of my humanity would not have survived. If I had given into my fear and given up when things became difficult, my journey would have been devoid of any real substance or integrity.

5) You spent a great deal of time after your departure from the art scene fasting, in celibacy, and in silence. What did you learn from these sacrifices? And how did you satisfy your need to express yourself during this time?

J-At some level I feel I did not choose fasting, celibacy and silence — they chose me. They were unexpected teachers and taught me things I never could have learned in any other way and I learned something different from each of them.

Fasting taught me how to find nourishment in an inspired moment and to trust and act on my intuition. It taught me the importance of right timing in relation to these actions. It taught me about places and moments of real power that nurture the soul, which then nurtures the body. There is nothing more insistent than hunger and the primal instinct of the mind bent on survival to set one off in the direction of the barn, so fasting taught me the fierce discipline of trust under any circumstances.

Celibacy taught me how to redirect my sexual energies and how to hold and become my own feminine and not project it onto every illusory attraction that promised comfort and fulfillment. It taught me to easily remain present with others, especially women, and to enter into the heart of communication without an agenda or the interference and confusion of personal desire.

To answer your question on how I satisfied my need to express myself; I would have to say that my ideas of how one personally expresses oneself did not hold up in the face of the demands of some larger expression. Like many of us, I feared the void and believed expression needed the channel of a literal form, perceivable by our 5 senses. I learned by facing my fears that this was not true and that the soul will always find a way to express itself. What I learned in a seemingly expressionless void was how to allow expression to come through in unexpected ways on its own terms. Sometimes it would be a glance; sometimes a word, and sometimes it would be a purely energetic experience – alone or in the presence of another person. Joseph Campbell writes in his book, The Inner reaches of Outer Space that the most sublime expression of art is formless and it leaves us in a state of awe. The mystics know about this level of expression. What I learned is that the universe will express itself with or without our willing participation or our ideas of how it should be done. The beauty of the human experience is to become a willing and grateful participant in the flow of inspired communication. Sometimes the flow of communication takes literal form and is perceived as art and sometimes it does not. An inspired moment is a reality in and of itself.

6) How was returning to sexuality after 15 years of celibacy? That must have been a powerful process. Are sexuality and creativity tied together in your world?

J- After 13 years of celibacy I became quite comfortable with the discipline and had finally accepted it as a way of life. However, it was exactly at this point that things changed for me, and I became involved in a kind of tantric exploration of sexual energies. This period lasted for about 4 years before I married at age 45. At the time I was following my intuition and knew nothing about the tantric experience. As a reliable guidepost, fear often led the way. I walked into the areas of my life that I feared the most. After becoming hugely invested in the disciplined life of celibacy for so many years, sexuality was one of those areas. It was sheer terror for me to return to the exploration of sexuality, fearing I would lose my way. While remaining just outside of full sexual expression, I learned how to hold the powerful energies of sexuality. This allowed for a veritable 'Garden of Eden' experience to occur with another human being without 'the fall.' And here-in lies another paradox. The 'sexiest' time of my life was the time I spent exploring unfulfilled tantric sexuality!

7) You built a 40-foot stupa with your own hands on your property in Washington. (With virtually no background in carpentry!) Could you describe for us the importance of having sacred space in the desire to live a spiritual life?

J-Most lives have such an excess of packaging. It is important to set aside a special place where we honor the real substance of our lives and reverently express our holy longing. It is clear to me after building the tower, that the creation of a special place, even if it is a simple altar, pleases the gods and goddesses. When I built the tower, as you said, I was not a carpenter and had no idea what I was doing. However, the process of building the tower was pure magic for me. I worked long 15-hour days all summer that year and I was in bliss most of that time. Friends would arrive and help or offer the perfect advice. I would find what I needed, just as I needed it, at the local recycle. Everything fell into place so beautifully. And when the tower was complete, nine Tibetan monks literally happened along and blessed the tower with a 45-minute ritual. It was the monks who first called the tower the "Flaming Stupa." Laura Chester followed suit in a chapter about the tower in her book Holy Personal. The name just stuck after that. It is interesting to me that my tower has gotten the attention that it has, since I did not know how to build when I started. I mentioned this fact to a friend who is an accomplished finish carpenter and he said, "If you knew you what you were doing you never have built anything that exotic!"

8) Earlier in your life, your artistic medium was paint. Your art now is more interactive, three-dimensional, and mechanical. How does this art more reflect your current life with Grace than the art you destroyed years back before your metaphorical death?

J-I guess you might say that the new art comes from a more conscious grace. There is a saying, "Fools and children are divinely guided and protected." Like the fool, I guess my path as an artist was divinely guided in some mysterious way, for which I am most grateful. This is in spite of my willful attempt to control what I thought I was doing as a young artist. Fool's guidance brought me to the proper edge where I could confront the possibility of a leap into the void. This confrontation offered me the opportunity to choose conscious Being over mindless doing.

I feel the new art is more an effortless expression of the fullness of this Being. Now, all of the aspects of life are given equal consideration, equal importance, and there is a mystery that seems to come through the work that is larger than my control. This mystery never fails to surprise me.

9) The materials you use to create these days are found objects or objects that find you. You have used objects you have come upon at garbage dumps, in nature, or people's discarded items for your interactive art pieces. How does the seemingly serendipitous way you come across materials for your art affect your relation to your artwork?

J-Sometimes I feel as if the art pieces have a way of their own and know what they need better than I do. Someone will give me something or I will find a piece at the recycle yard and it will fall perfectly into place on the art piece that I happen to be working on at the time. One naturally feels blessed when this happens. The feeling is one of humble gratitude for the presence of a conscious universe. I am sure many artists have this experience when they are deeply involved in the creative process. It is as if, for just a moment, one becomes a willing participant in the conscious expansion of the "Big Bang." To feel we are doing our part to allow the mystery a say in what we do, brings about great joy and this joy translates to others.

10) There is a shamanic quality to the art you are creating. Do you think these pieces carry any magic with them?

J-It is difficult to say exactly where the magic resides, but there is certainly a kind of magic that is available in any creative process. Sometimes a work of art will carry with it something of the eternal. This touch of the eternal is what we call "great art" and we do so mostly without really knowing why.

There may be something unconsciously shamanic about my art as you suggest — others have said this. The shaman has the ability to bring spirit into matter for the benefit of the individual, the tribe and the collective whole. This is not unlike the role of the artist, however, it is not as complete an experience for the artist as it is for the shaman. Generally speaking, the artist is someone who, rattling around the unconscious, occasionally stumbles upon the prized "philosophers stone." It is a rare event for an individual to be thrown into the full blast of a shamanistic death experience and to come out of it fully awakened and able to translate the experience to others. There are probably many more half-shamans walking the streets these days, talking to themselves or conversing with spirits of a questionable origin. The land of the shaman is not as easy to inhabit as some would like us to believe.

11) Your story is the journey of one man's striving towards what you refer to as 'wholeness.' Could you please describe your concept of 'wholeness?' What do you think are the greatest obstacles in modern life to achieving wholeness?

J-Wholeness is the fullness of possibility available to all of us now, like never before. I would say wholeness is a powerful force coming through our
collective consciousness and it is raising havoc with our small ideas of our relationships, our overall reality, and ourselves, as we know it!

The parents of the baby boomers had the luxury of living in a state of half-ness, where each partner in the relationship was able to happily occupy half of their whole story. Something was acceptably complete in what they held as a couple. The generations that followed have not been able to do this – even when, for sentimental reasons, they try. It is really a much deeper issue involving our polar opposites and where we choose to set up camp in relation to these dueling aspects of ourselves. Jung talks extensively about the polls involving the masculine and feminine aspects of our selves. The problem begins when we project the undeveloped aspect of our nature onto another person. We often do this when we fall in love by falling in love with is our own reflection — exactly as we have projected it! Seven years later we feel betrayed by the beloved's inability to hold or live up to the projection. We may actually come to resent the person for the mysterious power they have over us –a power we had no business giving away in the first place!

In a particular kind of way, consciousness is demanding more of us now. I personally believe this is why there is such a high rate of divorce and why there is general discontent for anyone trying to live a partial life. When we least expect it, the undeveloped parts of ourselves crash the gates like unruly children refusing to be ignored.

We have an opportunity like never before, to transform first ourselves and then our world, into something whole and fully alive. There is some powerful new awareness coming through. It is hovering in place, available to anyone open and willing to do the necessary work required of our time.

12) So if art was the church of the 1970's, what do you think is the church of our present decade?

J-Radical departure from the known and unknowing trust and openness to the mystery is the real "church!" The prayer required of this church is a fierce and courageous discipline and the ability to hold the tension of the polarities we are experiencing in our world. To accomplish this we must first be willing to turn and look at the shadow of our own creation and give this area of the psyche the conscious attention it needs. The false church is best represented by the projection of everything evil outward onto others. The most flagrant symptom of this disease is fundamentalism in all of its forms and our refusal to take responsibility for our part in what we see going on in the world around us.

[Edited Version]

The following interview was first published by Lapis in 1996. We bring it to you a second time to mark the passage through the gate of death of one of the most creative and spiritually honest artists ever to cross our paths.

     LAPIS: Frederick, I would like to ask you about your early life.  I know you were born in Maastricht in the Netherlands, and in many ways your life has spanned this whole century.

     Franck: For me, the century began on the 4th of August, 1914 when I was five years old.  On that day, I remember walking with my grandfather and seeing a proclamation pasted on a wall by the Dutch army.  I also remember the first bombardment of Visey, which is a little town 16 kilometers south of Maastricht.  I saw a zeppelin fly over–sometimes I think I imagined it, but I remember my father saying, "Look at that!"  Then, almost at once, endless files of refugees started to trek over the border past our house.  It is as clear to me as if it happened yesterday.  I remember an old man in this endless file of people.  He was carrying a little cage with a canary in it.  I was standing there eating grapes, which I started to throw.  It was a kind of impudent gesture of compassion.

     Later, the refugees camped in an abandoned church very close to our house, and I would take them big bowls of sausage and pea soup that my mother cooked.  This went on for all four years of my elementary schooling.  At one point, a small plane, one of the first little biplanes, flew over and dropped a bomb in our playground.  Fortunately, it was a very poor bomb and it didn't explode.  There were endless processions of wreckage, endless streams of the wounded and dying in improvised ambulances passing by our window.  For me, this was the beginning of my mentality against killing and violence.  I developed a kind of allergy to war.  This began the tenor of my whole life.

     In 1929 when I was 29, the Belgians began to dig the strategic canal a half a kilometer from my house.  It sliced through a local mountain which, to us, was as high as the Alps.  They sliced right through it to build the canal.  One day when I was on a walk, I saw that they were building machine gun emplacements in the sandstone wall.  I felt that something was going to happen again, and I swore I would get out in time.  My family just thought I had an obsession with war.  In the end, they sent me to a psychiatrist friend.  The upshot was that, after our visit, he called my uncle and said, "I think we should consider booking passage to America."  In other words, after speaking with me, he too was convinced that war was quite possible.

     My father died, and I decided to go to Edinburgh, because my mother implored me not to go too far away.  In Edinburgh, I got my degree in dentistry, and practiced for three years.  But I always wanted to get out, and so came to America to explore it.  I thought it was awful.  I wasn't sure whether to stay in Europe and be overrun by Mr. Hitler or to live in this terrible place. 

     Eventually, I decided on America, and I wasn't sure what to do to make a living.  I was always very schizophrenic.  I had been tossed into a health profession, but my love was painting, drawing, music, and, another perversion, theology.  But the only thing I could earn a living with was dentistry.  I got my degree in Pittsburgh, and then later was on staff as a teaching resident in oral surgery and anesthesia.  In 1943, there was some question that I might be called up for service (in the armed forces).  It was not that I did not want to, it was just impossible.  It was my allergy.

     LAPIS: I know that in your early years in New York, you had a downtown studio in Greenwich Village.

     Franck: Yes, it was on the corner of Bleecker Street and 6th Avenue.  I think, although I can't prove it, that it was the original home of Edgar Allen Poe.  At the time that I found it, it was election headquarters for Honest Joe.  He was never elected, perhaps he was too honest.  It was a wonderful studio. Underneath it were little stores, a pizza parlor and a vegetable and a fish shop.  From my studio, I could smell the fish and chicken.  It was a wonderful atmosphere.

     Except for the two and a half days every week that I practiced dentistry on Madison Avenue, I would go to this studio and paint.  In those days, I had an exhibition every year.  I got a name and sold well, but became more and more suspicious of the art world.  I discovered it was not a world at all.  It is a little competitive subculture in the overall chain of culture in America.

     It was the early fifties.  Everyone had this flush of victory, and so there was this American ambition to offer a genuine "American art".  Artists wanted to rival, if not K.O., the European masters from della Francesca via Rembrandt and Turner to Picasso.  What happened was this canonization of self-expression–which was just a euphemism for self-indulgence–of the Abstract Expressionists, of Jackson Pollock, De Kooning, Motherwell and their epigone.  These men had every right to do what they did, but this right was usurped and exploited by curators and dealers.  The art sellers were infatuated with originality for originality's sake, innovation for innovation's sake.  Museums from coast to coast competed mindlessly to become showcases, to offer fashion shows of the New York approved haute couture of the year.  An absurd and dizzying race between the avant gardes of meaninglessness had started.

     I found that the concept of "art" itself became addled.  Inanities touted as art became a cottage industry for stylish merchandise.  There was a great emphasis placed on being non-objective.  Being non-objective also made any spiritual, social, or ethical commitment superfluous.  Which means that art had become dehumanized.

     Art which had always been assumed to arise from the heart or somewhere close to the deepest recesses of the human spirit, now had to spring either from highbrow design or else from the deepest Freudian unconscious.  It was institutionalized, and marketed with superb sophistication and unlimited hubris.  Limitless resources were available.  Meaninglessness had become an important vested interest.

     LAPIS: What about your relationship with Albert Schweitzer?

     Franck:  As it would happen, I met Albert Schweitzer by coincidence.  I had a patient, a South African heiress, who knew Schweitzer and told me that he needed an oral surgeon for his clinic in Africa.  Well, I was already living a schizophrenic life between Bleecker Street and Madison Avenue, but I jumped at this chance to go to Africa.  Why?  Well, first of all, I had been raised on Schweitzer by my mother, and I wanted to find out what motivated him, and to meet the people that he was working with.  Another motivation was that I wanted to be in intimate touch with Africa.  I knew that being there would give me the pressing urge to draw its people.  When you start to draw, as I draw anyway, it requires an absolute identification with what you draw, you have to become it.  To draw Africa, I had to become an African, and did for a little while.  I completely identified with those people.  Later, this also happened for me in Japan.  While there are cultural gaps and contrasts, as soon as I began to draw, I became Japanese as much as I had been African.

     As far as Schweitzer is concerned, I admired him.  He was really 100% devoted to anything that suffered.  I had seen him practically weep for an elephant that had been shot, or for any patient in his hospital.  In Africa, it was thought that if you can give somebody penicillin or some injection, that you could do immense good.  But he did more; he did surgery, he oversaw the men who worked for him.  He went, after all, as a missionary, on the condition that he would not preach.  This was because, after his book on Historical Jesus came out in 1908 or 1910, he was considered by the orthodox Protestants as a kind of heretic.  He didn't try to convert anyone.  But in what he did and in his motivations, he was a Christian presence.

     LAPIS: In the early 60's during the Second Vaticin Council, you went to Rome.

     Franck: Yes, but first I wrote a book on Schweitzer.  You know, writing is also very addictive.  They say, never write a book because, once you do, you will always go on to write another one.  I kept on writing and drawing, never selling my drawings, despite a great fear of destitution.  I can't sell my work.  For me, art is the opposite of merchandise.  So rather than trying to sell my drawings, I kept them.

     Around this time, I also bought a house, sight unseen.  It was a total wreck, but there was this river next to it; it was the spitting image of a river that ran past my great grandfather's house in Maastricht.  It was the same exact color, and I thought, "Here is where I would like to live."  That coincided with my going to Vatican II.

     What I didn't tell you before is that, I grew up in a totally agnostic family.  My father and my grandfather were somehow socialists and very cavalier.  But the rest of the town was 99.9% Catholic, in a very Irish way, which means it was very radical Catholicism with a beastly dictatorship in every sense of the word.  However, there was still a very archaic underground Catholicism which was Neolithic with magic and very mystical.  This attracted me very much.  Actually, I don't have an agnostic nature at all.  Catholic symbolism became the roots from which I could hang my first formations on the meanings of life.

     Around 1962, I had a revelation.  I called my wife and said, "We are off to Rome."  I had grown up with this love-hate relationship with the Holy Mother, but my relationship to Catholicism changed the first time I heard Pope John speak.  I knew something was different.  To hear him speak, I believed that the Vatican meant what they said for a change.  When I look back at that time, I still don't believe I was being naive.  There was this monstrous institution at the point of converting itself into what it is supposed to truly represent.  It seemed like a sign of hope.  But, of course, later it was all perverted.  On the other hand, there is still a marginal Catholic world now that is part of the inheritance of this "opening of the windows".  To me, they have a spiritual sense of reality in the real profound sense of reality, which you can call spirituality. 

     Pope John, I call him a Christian or a Catholic Bodhisattva.  He was a man who totally overcame all the effects of ego.  So he could not imagine, I'm sure,  representing the whole Catholic institution.  He did not worry about himself.  He said, "My bags are packed," by the time he was ready to die.  For me, there are three people in this century for whom I have absolutely unbounded devotion: there is Albert Schweitzer, who was a human being in the first place, but not a Bodhisattva.  Pope John was a human being in every respect, and a Bodhisattva.  And the third is D.T. Suzuki.

     LAPIS: How do you work artistically?

     Franck: When I can't draw, I feel mutilated.  I have never meant to imply that my own scribblings of humans, trees, landscapes, or light effects exemplify art.  My drawing simply results from the addictive eye-to hand reflexes without which I feel dead.  My eye identifies and becomes a reflex, and in that moment the image falling on my retina is transferred directly to my hand, registering the tremors of the sight.  Although this process depends upon sight, it has nothing to do with my perception of what I see.  I am not involved.  I cannot interfere, or even think about what I should do with an image, because if I do, it doesn't work.  It is purely intuitive.  Visual reality is partly, and here we begin to theorize, we could say that visual reality is the transparent "maya" of the phenomenal world.  Drawings are a probing of the Real, not as in what is hidden behind appearances.  Appearances are the manisfestations of the Real.  If you draw with this in mind and keep on doing it, and never, for God's sake, think that you're going to use your illustration for something like an exhibition, than you can become in total touch, through the drawing, with yourself.

     Drawing is like my life force, whatever that is, seismographing itself on a piece of paper.  At times, these graphs of the eye's perception are so obsessive that they convert themselves into ink paintings in which all color is muted into blacks, greys and whites.  At other moments they turn themselves into steel or stone icons that seem to summarize the process.  Creating sculpture, working in steel, is also in a sense maya.  Maya is constantly in transference, and the artist wants to make it concrete again.  This is why I call my sculptures, "icons".  Icons point at the window of the sacred or what you would call, the window of reality.

     I don't invite these icons to come, they just come, as if I were doodling in steel.  For instance,  my work entitled "Seven Generations"–that came about when I was taking a phone call.  I scribbled something down and later when I looked at it, I found it interesting.  It became the Seven Generations sculpture.  To my astonishment and joy, it seemed to communicate something or other, so that at times replicas are commissioned.  It's as if I had been mumbling something to myself and suddenly a voice behind me says, "Yes!"  Whose

voice is it?  It doesn't matter.  What matters is that it is the vox humana.

     LAPIS: You have had the Seven Generation sculpture exhibited in Trenton and Sarajevo.  What about the Unkillable Human?  Could you explain its origin?

     Franck: Yes.  There is this unkillable human at Hiroshima, and I had seen the shadow of this human being burned into a concrete wall.  The image haunted me.  After Hiroshima, I came home and dutifully I took a steel plate and placed on it the form of the mutilated human.  Before the sculpture was finished, the second figure fell out.  It was unplanned.  Now it is an empty negative.  You see the victim rising as a phoenix from the ashes.

     LAPIS: As you look back on all these 86 years and this extraordinary century that has had outstanding individuals like Schweitzer and Pope John but that has also seen so much horror, are there any concluding thoughts that you would like to give us?

     Franck: We were talking about icons and the phoenix rising.  Well, a man who has a Buddha of mine, a man with money near Washington, called me and asked if I would be willing to do a sculpture for Newark, N.J.  I said, "Newark!"  It was not exactly the place to think of for a sculpture.  But I went to the city anyway to look around.  I was deeply impressed with a project that was started 27 years ago by a young priest.  After the riots, he wanted to do something to rehabilitate the community.  He raised funds for 27 years.  He built three thousand houses, seven day care centers, he converted an old stone church into a community center.  The church is done quite well, worth looking at.  So I got very enthusiastic.  I thought, this place is much better than having a sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art.  This place has a consciousness.  So now, for instance, the phoenix you see here, I made a larger one for Newark; a phoenix rising from its ashes.

     The placement of the sculpture is very appropriate.  On one side is an elementary school and on the other side is public housing, senior citizen's apartments.  The sculpture is placed in the middle.  I designed the space as a community garden where the kids and the seniors can work together planting vegetables and flowers.  It has been dedicated and they are now working there.  For me, this is wonderful.

END

Suzi Gablik is an artist, writer and teacher whose books include Has Modernism Failed? and The Re-enchantment of Art. The following article is from a symposium on The Nature of Beauty in Contemporary Art sponsored by the New York Open Center and the International Society for Consciousness in the Arts in October 1995.

"If you're out, you're out–you simply don't count," the artist Sandro Chia once declared in an interview in Art in America. Referring to the art world, he said, "Anything that happens must happen with this system," which he went on to describe: "I work for a few months, then I go to a gallery and show the dealer my work. The work is accepted, the dealer makes a selection, then an installation. People come and say you're good or not so good, then they pay for these paintings and hang them on other walls. They give cocktail parties and we all go to restaurants and meet girls. I think this is the weirdest scene in the world."

Sandro Chia's description of the art world as a suburb of hell is all too familiar; it is a world in which artists are defined through showing or not showing, selling or not selling, and through the goals of money, prestige, and power that are so crucial to our whole society's notion of success. Within the modernist paradigm under which I grew up, art has been typically understood as a collection of prestigious objects, existing in museums and galleries, disconnected from ordinary life and action. Defined entirely in individualistic terms, the modern artist's quest was enacted within the inner sanctum of a studio, behind closed doors. This mythology of the lone genius, isolated from society, and relieved of social responsibility, is summed up for me in these comments by the painter Georg Baselitz: "The artist is not responsible to anyone. His social role is asocial; his only responsibility consists in an attitude to the work he does. There is no communication with any public whatsoever… It is the end product which counts, in my case, the picture." Recently, when he was asked on the occasion of his Guggenheim retrospective what role he believes art plays in society, Baselitz replied, "The same role as a good shoe, nothing more." And he has stated elsewhere: "The idea of changing or improving the world is alien to me and seems ludicrous. Society functions, and always has, without the artist. No artist has ever changed anything for better or worse."

Many of the beliefs about art that our culture subscribes to, that the problems of art are purely aesthetic and that art will never change the world, are beliefs that have diminished the capacity of artists for constructive thought and action. The critic Arthur C Danto has referred to this state of affairs as "the disenfranchisement of art", because the hidden constraints of a morally neutral, art-for-art's sake philosophy is that it has led artists to their marginalized condition in society. I first began to question this mythology myself when I wrote Has Modernism Failed?, and since then, many things have happened to change the situation. The environment is disintegrating, time is running out, and not much is being done. Many artists now see their role as sounding the alarm, and have felt the need to alter the direction of their art so that it is more socially and environmentally defined. Such artists incarnate different ideals and a different philosophy of life. Performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena states, for example, "Most of the work I'm doing currently comes, I think, from the realization that we're living in a state of emergency. I feel that more than ever we must step outside the strictly art arena. It is not enough to make art." In a similar vein, Chicago artist Othello Anderson states: "Carbon and other pollutants are emitted into the air in such massive quantities that large areas of forest landscapes are dying from the effects of acid rain. Recognizing this crisis, as an artist I can no longer consider making art that is void of moral consciousness, art that carries no responsibility, art without spiritual content, art that places form above content, or art that denies the state of the very world in which it exists." As many artists shift their work arena from the studio to the more public contexts of political, social, and environmental life, we are all being called, in our understanding of what art is, to move beyond the mode of disinterested contemplation to something that is more participatory and engaged. Such art may not hang on walls; it may not even be found in museums or beautiful objects, but rather in some visible manifestation of what psychologist James Hillman refers to as "the soul's desperate concerns". For such artists, vision is not defined by the disembodied eye, as we have been trained to believe. Vision is a social practice that is rooted in the whole of being.

Writing The Reenchantment of Art represented my own philosophical "break" with the paradigm of vision and the disembodied eye as the axiomatic basis for artistic practice.

For instance, I wrote at some length about an art project initiated by a friend of mine in Santa Fe, Dominique Mazeaud, which she calls "The Great Cleansing of the Rio Grande River". For several years, armed with garbage bags donated by the city, Mazeaud and a few friends who sometimes accompanied her, would meet once a month and ritually clean garbage out of the river. Part of the work involves keeping a diary, entitled Riveries, in which she writes about her experiences. Briefly, here are some extracts:

November 19 — My friend Margret drops me off at Delgado promptly at 9:00am. Because of the snow I was not sure of the conditions I would find but did not doubt a second that I would put in my day. I find a stone warmed by the morning sun which makes a perfect site for my beginning prayer. Yes, I see what I am doing as a way of praying: Picking up a can/From the river/And then another/on and on/It's like a devotee/Doing countless rosaries.

December 2 — Why in all religions is water such a sacred symbol? How much longer is it going to take us to see the trouble of our waters? How many more dead fish floating on the Rhine River? How many kinds of toxic waste dumpings? When are we going to turn our malady of separateness around?

March 19 — I can't get away from you river/In the middle of the night/I feel you on my back/In my throat, in my heart.

July 20 — Two more huge bags I could hardly carry to the cans. I don't count anymore. I don't announce my "art for the earth" in the papers either. All alone in the river, I pray and pick up, pick up and pray. Who can I really talk to about what I see?… I have also noticed that I stopped collecting the so-called treasures of the river. It was ok at the beginning, but today I feel it was buying into the present system of art that's so much object-oriented. Is it because I am saying that what I am doing is art that I need to produce something?"

Eventually, as the artist's connection with the river deepens into that of friend and confidante, and even that of teacher, she reaches a point where her relationship with the river becomes even more important than her original ecological incentive to clean it. "For the first time last month," she comments, "my meditation directed me to go and be with the river and not do anything. The instructions were clear: "Don't even take one garbage bag." Her activity had subtly shifted, until it was no longer a systematic retrieving of everything in sight, but has become her own personal dialogue with the river. The river as a living being has something to say. "I have landed in a new landscape," Mazeaud states, "where I discover the river is as true an artist as I am."

The hegemony of the eye is very strong in our culture, and to challenge the commitment to its ocularcentric, or vision-centered aesthetic, replacing it with a paradigm shift that displaces vision with the very different influence of listening, is to open oneself up to the ur-complaint that what is being described here is not art at all, but environmental activism, or social work. Many individuals who saw their own ideas reflected in my book's agenda were enthusiastic and friendly, whereas those who thought that art should be unencumbered by any moral or social purpose were resistant and unfriendly, because it seemed to undermine the way they see their task. When I lectured together with the critic Hilton Kramer a few years ago in Madison, Wisconsin, he proclaimed, with the force of a typhoon, on the podium after my talk, that things with no relation to art were now being legitimized and accepted as art, when, he claimed art is incapable of solving any problems except aesthetic ones. Kramer is in the forefront of those who believe that when art is actively engaged with the world, its aesthetic quality is necessarily compromised. I, on the other hand, consider that such art is often intensely aesthetic, because in responding compassionately to whatever it touches, it is helping to create a more beautiful world. Artists whose work helps to heal our soulless attitudes toward the physical world have my full respect and attention because, for me, beauty is an activity rather than an entity, a consciousness of, and reverence for, the beauty of the world.

In my new book, Conversations Before the End of Time, James Hillman and I discuss the river project in a way that is relevant, I think, to the issues being addressed in this forum here tonight.

Suzi: The point is, James, that within the traditionally accepted model of the artist, based on isolated individualism, it's very difficult to perceive any strong connection or direct influence that art could have on the world. That's why in my writing I have been drawn to artists who are using their creativity in ways that can have a more direct effect. Of course, it may only be a small effect, like helping a few homeless people, or healing some environmentally sick place.

Hillman: We've talked about this before, and I think there's a problem, about, first of all, why that's art, and second of all, what's the difference between that artist cleaning the river and l'art pour l'art? Because in the end, her art has no worldly effect. You say yourself that it's not really even meant to clean the river; it becomes a devotional ritual. (But for me the real problem is) what gets metaphorized in her work? Doesn't she remain in the literal world? And, as such, it's not art? She's literally cleaning the river!

Suzi: But that's a problem only if you want to define art as a separate aesthetic realm, divorced from life and quarantined to the museum or art gallery. And only if you want to insist on the Cartesian split between art and life, self and world.

Hillman: I certainly don't define art that way, but I do believe it transforms the literal to the metaphorical and mythical. Otherwise, the social comment, politics, advocacy, protest exist on one level only… For me, art is dedicated to beauty; it's a way to let beauty into our world by means of the artist's gifts and sensibilities… I think beauty needs to come into it somehow. Ideas of beauty and metaphor are necessary to what I call art.

Suzi: In another of these conversations, Satish Kumar says that in India, art was never meant to hang on walls–it's part of life. He thinks that the desert of ugliness all around us is connected with concentrating our notion of beauty in a great body of works of art to be found only in the oases of museums. In India, art is not separated from the normal flow of life. A lot of discussion is being instigated by people now who feel that until–or unless–art can reconnect with life, it's going to stay marginal, without any part to play in the larger picture.

Hillman: That's a very good point, because it shows something crucial to this civilization: that the work in the river can be put in a different context altogether, which is art in the service of… life. Like the way dance was originally in the service of the tribal community; it wasn't dance for an audience on a stage. It was a dance that helped the crops to grow.

Suzi: In our culture, the notion of art being in service to anything is anathema. Aesthetics doesn't serve anything but itself and its own ends. I would like that to change. When Hilton Kramer says that the minute you try to make art serve anything, you're in a fascistic mode–well, I don't believe that.

Hillman: I'd like to defend the cleaning of the river, for a moment. I'm going back to what you said a little earlier: it's the attempt to put art in the service of something.

Suzi: Yes, that's where the issue is.

Hillman: Art in the service of something. If we say that it's life, and if we think, for instance, of the Balinese village where everything is made to be functional and useful, for celebrations or ceremonies… you're still in service to the gods, somehow. Now we don't have that-we've wiped the gods out… So the god that art now serves is the god that dominates the culture, which is the god of commodity, of money. So it is in service, it's in service to gods we don't approve of… Now suppose the question doesn't become what art should do, but rather how do we find that which art should serve? Art is already in service, so we could perhaps change that to which it is in service?

Suzi: So the question is what could art better serve than the things it has been serving, like bourgeois capitalism, throughout our lifetimes?

Hillman: Right! And I think the artist in the river is serving a different god.

I'd like to conclude with some comments between myself and Thomas Moore that also seem relevant to our topic here.

Suzi: As I understand your sense of the soulful life, it would mean bringing art back into a more vernacular, everyday world, and taking it out of the more rarefied sphere of professionalism. You mentioned in the letter you wrote to me that you are very interested in the role of the arts in the world today. Do you see art as being an important vehicle for the return of soul?

Moore: Probably its most important vehicle.

Suzi: Do you want to elaborate on this?

Moore: Yes, there's so much to say here. First, though, I'd like to pick up on this point of yours about everyday life. There are a number of ways in which we could bring the artist back into everyday life, so that we don't just have this fringe art world that doesn't really touch on the values of the way we live, essentially. One way would be for the artist truly to feel a sense of conviviality in the society, in being part of that community, so that there's a responsibility, and a pleasure, in going into the world and being part of, say, actually designing the city… We can't suddenly begin living a more artful life, which is the avenue to soul, if in the public life around us, and in everything we see and inhabit, art is invisible.

Suzi: And so, in your thinking, that could be a whole new paradigm for a socially relevant kind of art-not precisely in the sense that's being talked about in the art world now of "political correctness" and social critique, but rather a kind of art that celebrates and participates robustly in the life-world.

Moore: Exactly. And here's another point about soul… soul enters life through pleasure. It's an erotic activity: psyche and eros going together, rather than principle and responsibility. Responsibility suggests a kind of outward superego coming in and saying, "You know, this is what you should be doing." That is not a new paradigm; we're not moving out of the modernistic world then. We're just feeling we should do something different and more responsible.

Suzi: "If we are going to care for the soul," you say in your book, "and if we know that the soul is nurtured by beauty, then we will have to understand beauty more deeply and give it a more relevant place in life. It's not only pleasure and conviviality, but also beauty that is necessary for the return of soul… " It's interesting, don't you think, that archetypal psychologists are the ones who seem to be taking the lead for a renaissance of beauty in our lives, even more than artists or aestheticians?

Robert Bly, winner of the National Book Award for poetry, is the author of many books, including The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy, The Sibling Society, Iron John and, with Marion Woodman,The Maiden King.

There were a thousand sheep admiring the Milky Way.
Birds start singing when the branch reddens.
But we usually write poems when the sun goes down.

In the Rift we saw the sun go down so often.
But every morning when we opened an egg,
The sun was there again inside the small shell.

We wanted to rip hair at death. But we had enough
To do finding big stones to cover the dead
And begetting new souls to replace them.

For thousands of years we looked up at the night.
We saw the Bear, the Hunter and his Sword.
The Bear the Hunter and his Sword stayed out all night.

We never found enough morning! One day a woman
Wept when she saw a bone reddened with ochre.
A thousand years later we put a bead in a grave.

It turned out differently than we had expected.
Dozens and dozens of stars go down every night
So that mourning is now enclosed in every egg.