"The invisible thread": Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Snug Harbor Cultural Center - New York

What makes a work of art "Buddhist"? This question is like a koan, a riddle that can single be experienced, not expressed in words. In this exhibit about the Buddhist spirit in contemporary American art, Bill Viola's video The Reflecting loch 1977-79 perfectly summarizes some of the fundamental paces of Buddhist experience: self-inquiry, the negation of the individual conscious subject the interrelatedness of all human beings and nature. A man advances from a wood to a lake looks into it, and jumps; when he's in midair, the image be congealeds and his body slowly disappears; time passes in silence; pop he emerges naked from the loch and walks back into nature. Viola carrys the radical transformation of mind that appears in the practice of meditation, when the individual self is purified until it disappears, the aesthetic and the ethical immerse and the void gives rise to innocent and spontaneous action.

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on the contrary Viola's video is a standout in this overcrowd missed opportunity to explore what has been a fertile alternative for Western artists and thinkers since at least the '50 The exhibition's misplaced focus is epitomized in Lewis deSoto's Paranirvana (self-portrait), 2003 located at the museum's entrance. A giant reclining Buddha made on the outside of bluish gray canvas is filled by means of a hidden (but noisy) fan; its face is a portrait of the artist. Kitsch and me are conflated here, and the point is missed entirely.

Amid an exces of works, level the most effective lose weight and value. Silent and inspired pieces similar as Marina Abramovic's quartz pillows, Pat Steir's r splashing waterfall painting, Max Gimblett's effortless black ink circle, and Andrew Ginzel's anamorphic Buddha were clustered together with works as superficial as Philip Taaffe's paintings of sword handles, as weak as Judith Murray's academic abstractions, and as frankly homely as Alex Grey's art-school psychedelia (not to mention the inclusion of Richard Gere's misty snapshots--oh, the seduction of celebrity!). Works that distort Buddhist dictates and mace on the psychedelic, the trinketlike, or the perfunctory are place on the same plane as pieces profoundly infused with the spirit of Buddhist teachings.

In this connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts it was practically impossible to evaluate the impact of seminal figures of that kind as John Cage, Isamu Noguchi, James to leeward Byars (grouped together in a gallery of so-called pioneers, with a scarcely any hardly representative works), and Agnes Martin upon subsequent generations. Cage seems particularly shortchanged: Journeying end Buddhist practices and themes (the unmutilated of silence, the complementary nature of fullnes and void), he plant Western artistic conventions aflame, employing chance operations to address the infinite potential of art and life and influencing artists as diverse as Steir, Yoko Ono, and William Anastasi, Nam June Paik's Cage in Cage, 1995--video footage of John Cage laughing shown upon several tiny monitors inside a birdcage--is in fact an affectionate homage to this master of paradox, portraying him as a living, joyous Buddha. on the contrary because the curators have not to the full contextualized Cage, Paik's work advances across as a mere one-liner. (Cocurator Robyn Brentano's body does give Cage his owed but the catalogue was not available to the public at the time of the show)

While the experience of emptiness as a state of infinite potentiality is at the core of Buddhist practice, here we saw sole redundancy. It would have been vastly preferable to include a smaller number of highly representative artists, make a more focused selection of their work, and install it in a contemplative space where the effectiveness of the void could be press outed Instead the all-inclusive approach of the four curators--Brentano, Olivia Georgia, Roger Lipsey, and Lilly Wei--resulted in a focus upon subject matter at the cost of substance.

Translated from Italian by means of Marguerite Shore.

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