Grace Bakst Wapner’s Scholar’s Garden

An East-West Aesthetic Dialogue

by Sara Lynn Henry

Grace Bakst Wapner: A Scholar’s Garden

Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz, NY, January 23 – March 16, 2008

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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, December 2008. Copyright © 2008 Sara Lynn Henry and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.

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Grace Bakst Wapner has made her own scholar’s garden—well, she didn’t directly make a Chinese garden but rather created a number of sculptures that come out of her own development and out of a stunning encounter with Chinese scholar’s rocks that she saw at the Metropolitan Museum and Asia Society in 2000. (Several are still on view at the Metropolitan, and there is a fine New York Chinese Scholar’s Garden available to see at the Staten Island Botanical Garden.) Wapner’s current sculptures, created over about a five-year period, were brought together for an exhibition at the Samuel Dorsky Museum, SUNY New Paltz. Individual pieces were placed on separate pedestals to carry on a dialogue with each other and with the viewer, mirroring aspects of the experience of a Chinese scholar’s garden. Individual sculptures were also vividly inflected by the configurations and life energies of the Chinese scholar rock art form and more deeply, intuitively, by traditional Chinese aesthetic modalities. These Chinese forms and aesthetic principles go a long way to illuminate her current work, and also to reveal the nature of an East/West dialogue that yields great potential and some significant contemporary differences.

The installation of Wapner’s show was suggestive of the experience of a Chinese garden; it provided a walkthrough of separate vegetal-seeming works, each on their own pedestal, presenting different heights, placements, viewpoints, exoticisms, and even eccentric fantasy. The Chinese garden tradition dates back about 2,000 years—to the Han Dynasty (c. 2100 BCE-1600 CE)—most dating from the more recent Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) Dynasties. Such individually crafted gardens were created as a place of refuge and contemplation for retired scholar officials, who had enormous prestige and power, but also who might face public flogging, imprisonment, even banishment for perceived shortcomings in the performance of their official duties! This cultured class sought the vitality and harmony of the garden and what it stood for. Wapner’s work shares in the organic finesse of this engaged mode but reveals a frisson of angst that is more characteristic of a contemporary art modality.

Some of Wapner’s individual sculptures were fashioned as chunks of a seeming environment, where one can visually explore and traverse a small terrain. In one such sculpture, Scholars’ Garden XI (medusa tree through rock with club foot), 2003, the “medusa” tree in extremis is caught in a muscular hill. The viewer approaches through two sentinels, standing like perforated undersea plants. The high-fired clay is striated as if delineating nature’s processes, reminding one of the “bone method” (ku-fa yung pi) of Chinese brush rendering with structural strokes, whereby an inner structural truth is delineated. This bone quality for the Chinese was also echoed in the wrinkled undulations of the scholar rocks placed in the gardens. To the Chinese, this inner structure is “li,” or universal principles—the order and rhythmic structural flow in all things. As George Rowley explained it, the bone method makes clear the li by elimination, simplification, and suggestion until only essence remains.(1) As one of the most important Northern Song Dynasty artists Guo Xi (c.1000-c.1090) said: “Each scene in a painting, regardless of size or complexity, must be unified through attention to essence. If the essence is missed, the spirit will lose integrity. It must be completed with spirit in every part. Otherwise the essence will not be clear.”(2) Wapner set out to create with similar structural essence and rhythm, both organically and emotionally.

Most of Wapner’s works in the show were individual vegetal/body figurations with forms that reach, join, entwine, and stretch as if animated beings, as in Scholars’ Garden XIV (three tall white forms from rock with root), 2004. These works participate in a trend in American art of the last couple of decades that could be called “Animate Sculpture,” including the work of James Surls, Bryan Hunt, David Nash, Martin Puryear, John Duff, Elisa D’Arrigo, Tamiko Kawatra, and Deborah Aschheim. These artists have responded to motifs and materials as if they were alive. Their works are animate in the sense of seeming to possess life or even to embody an inherent spirit or “soul.” This mode of art has developed as a nature underground in the contemporary scene—not fully isolated or defined. One can see further discussion in the author’s essay for her exhibition, “As if Alive; Animate Sculpture” for the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, 2000.(3)

Wapner’s encounter with Chinese scholars’ rocks propelled her yet further than she had in 2000 to discover the vitalist potential of her hand-fashioned clay medium. Like the elaborate stones collected by the Chinese literati, Wapner’s seem to be shaped as much by nature’s forces as by the artist. Her beings undulate out of a seeming earth base, which echoes the pedestals of the Chinese specimen rocks. Such Chinese pedestals were a reverberation and amplification of the life forces manifest in the stones, as seen in Rock with Two Large Perforations, (c. 17th-18th century). Such supports were often elaborate sculptural enhancements in their own right. By contrast Wapner’s pedestals play two roles: they can act more demonstratively as a descriptive chunk of earth, much like Albrecht Dürer’s Great Piece of Turf, 1503, suggesting both the above ground and the nurturing below ground. Second, her pedestals can function emotionally as core undulations of intense feeling. One can see both modalities in her Scholars’ Garden XIV (three tall white forms), 2004, with its electric root extensions and the expressive billowing earth.

Chinese scholars’ rocks were actually naturally occurring, found in earth pits or taken from lake and river beds. Originally, huge stones were brought into the scholar’s gardens beginning with the Tang Dynasty (618-907). The connoisseur enthusiasm was so great that one Emperor Huizong (reign 1101-1126) ordered the whole populations of two towns to dredge the lake beds for rare Taihu rocks for his fabulous gardens, which set out to reproduce the mountains and rivers of the world! In doing so he exhausted the imperial treasury and contributed to the downfall of the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127).(4) Scholar officials by the Song-era found that they could bring small table-top versions of the stones into their study for contemplation. Although in their natural state, these smaller rocks were often “chiseled, ground, and polished” and sometimes submerged again into water or allowed to be “scoured by wind and rain to restore the living appearance.” (5) What engaged the Chinese collectors would also leave a contemporary artist like Wapner thunderstruck; these are the flowing, changing, ascending, reaching, attenuated forms, the projections and cavities that seem to delineate the very forces of nature. To the Chinese these small chunks of nature were literal embodiments of nature’s structural forces [li] and vital energies [qi]. The forms are reminders of mountains, valleys, plateaus, clouds, grottos, caves, also of fantastic dragons, phoenixes, tigers, and even more rarely vague human figures (e.g., Rock in the Form of a Mountain with Peaks, Grottos, Stalactites, and Stalagmites, Ming, 14th-15th centuries).(6) Some of the rocks suggested to connoisseurs the land of the immortals, a place for the journey of the soul.(7) Such aggregations of forces and suggested figurations could indicate the very functioning and primal qualities of the universe; to some Chinese, the Dao itself, understood as the power that permeates the whole universe, the dynamic “path” or “way” of this power, the flow of nature.

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