Art Practice

With palms together,

In his book, “The Eight Gates of Zen”  Daido Loori-roshi devotes a chapter to Art as practice seeing it as one of the “Eight Gates.”  We might ask ourselves just what happens when someone picks up a brush or camera, a chisel or a handful of clay? Is there something magical or mystical about what happens next?  Maybe so, but then, the same could be said about any of the other seven gates, maybe so, maybe not.

Art is such a fickle friend and occasional foe.  Art can be creative or destructive, but no one wants to think of it in the latter sense.  We want art to be art, somehow for its name sake, above reason or intuition, and not necessarily subject to good taste. We want this so much so that nearly every sophomoric attempt at putting media together is considered “art.”  

I don’t think so.

Art, like the other gates, requires discipline.  It requires restraint in some cases and explosive, powerful thrusts in others, but in either case they are not without the discipline of practice.  Anyone can throw paint on a canvas and call it “art.”  But is it so?

To simply throw paint on a canvas and have it be “art” the artist must first be an artist, which is to say, one disciplined in the skills necessary to have the emerging image take form in ways that are meaningful to both the artist and the viewer of the work.  As in reading, the reader is as much a part of the work of the writing as is the writer herself. Worlds are created through the interaction of the reader and the writer and each reader creates his or her own world rendering the writing infinite in scope. So too, every image created in the visual arts sustains worlds of meaning too numerous to perceive, let alone count.  And therein lay the problem: the eye of the beholder, when each eye is to be objectively understood as being on the same level, everything can be “art.”   Yet,iIn truth, we are not created equal: all eyes are not the same. We each bring our unique perceptual constellation to the art itself. 

My issue isn’t with this inequality, rather it is with the notion that an undisciplined approach, even if inspired, should be considered art.  Just as undisciplined Zazen cannot be a useful gate, so too, undisciplined art is simply a show. And as we say in any case, “nothing special.’

Be well