[Nietzsche Circle][Hyperion]

Grace Bakst Wapner’s Scholar’s Garden

An East-West Aesthetic Dialogue

Page II

The principle that would allow a Chinese artist or connoisseur to connect to the universe was “spirit consonance [resonance], life movement” (qi yun, sheng-dong), the first of Xie He’s “Six Laws,” dating from the sixth century. These laws or principles were the fountainhead of traditional Chinese art theory and were commented upon throughout the centuries.(8) This first principle has been the most open to varied interpretation and translations, yet it is the most telling in relation to Wapner’s art for what it says about her own intuitive connection with the Chinese works and where she differs(9) “Qi,” most often translated as “spirit,” is more specifically the vital principle or natural energy of all nature—animate and inanimate--not just of living beings, as “spirit” would indicate in English. In fact to the Chinese all is qi. As philosopher Hyo-Dong Lee puts it, “…a dog is qi, a tree or plant is qi, mountains and rocks are qi, oceans and rivers are qi.” Such vital energy literally “constitutes both mind and matter.” One form of qi is constantly changing into another form.” There are in fact “occasions in which the change/transformation of qi is so extraordinary, subtle and mysterious that it transcends our grasp….” At such moments “qi” becomes “shen” or spirit in Chinese. This can be the moment when the artist’s mind and body become perfectly attuned, and resonate with the creative source of the Universe, usually understood to be the Dao (Tao).(10) It is this latter concept of qi that certainly prompts the frequent translation of “qi” as “spirit” in English. The phrase “qi yun” or “spirit consonance” suggests agreement or harmony and the translation “spirit resonance” suggests an amplification produced by a sympathetic vibration. One cannot here sort out the intricacies of how this concept has been interpreted over the centuries. One can only note that the emphases have ranged from a) the artists own qi as entering into the painting, b) the artist as connecting with the qi of objects, or c) the motifs in the painting as resonating with the universal qi, the source of the Universe. Beginning with the Song-era (960-1279 CE), the primary outlook considered that there was no separation between the life of nature and the experience of the individual.(11) As Guo Ruo-hsu (Kuo Jo-hsü), the most influential art writer of the Song-era wrote (c. 1080), spirit consonance’ (qi yun) necessarily involves an innate knowledge….It is an unspoken accord, a spiritual communion: ‘something that happens without one’s knowing it’”.(12) This opening up of the self and the expression of it within the nature art context is best stated in a comment attributed to the most famous Song artist, Fan Kuan (960-1030 CE): “ . . . for me to take people as my teachers cannot compare with learning from natural phenomena.” “It is better to study nature and better still to follow one’s own heart [heart-mind].”(13)

This is where we find Wapner, not only responding to the forms, scale, landscape qualities, and energies of the Chinese scholar’s rocks, but also intuitively to their qi resonance and life movement. She works as well with her heart-mind in her creative process. Comparing one of her works, Scholars’ Garden II (human/tree form with blue cloud), 2002, to a scholar’s rock, reveals some differences in form and content, differences that go to the core of her work and to some contemporary Western tendencies. Compared to the Rock in a Form of a Mountain with Peaks, Wapner’s sculpture looks to be as much human body as plant and earth. The structural formation of the ascending “stems” have a muscular, limb-like energy, almost an acrobatic juggling of directions, elements, and gravitational poise; heliotropic, yes, but more a reaching of two figures. This is true of other of Wapner’s works as well, e.g., Scholars’ Garden VII (cantilevered entwined forms) 2003. Frequently they present a human pas de deux of two reaching, entwining, connecting, and separating figurations, as if they were fraught with relational desire or distress.

Wapner’s current sculptures are a transformation of her Dyad Series of l993, where abstracted figural pairs connect yet creatively push and pull against each other (Risk, 1993), through seeming emotional interactions. These relational dances metamorphose into the more complex, suggestive vegetal place of the current series. What is interesting regarding Wapner vis à vis the traditional Chinese modalities is the primary impetus of the human body as the vehicle of movement, rather than more exclusively from natural growth. As well, the primary measure of content is most often inner personal emotion rather than the formative forces of nature. Certainly the Chinese nature tradition was sometimes greatly infused by the artist’s expressiveness (e.g., the artist Wen Zhengming, 1470-1599 CE), and Wapner’s personal emotion is subsumed into the natural forms. But the difference is that in Wapner, the personal expressiveness is the primary vehicle of signification and experience. Traditional Chinese artistic training involved the rendering of rocks, trees, and bamboo, and the artists were not attuned to tangible, three-dimensional body forms and movement, whereas Western training has been primarily focused on the human body, with vestiges of this body center as carrying on into contemporary art.(14) Add to that Wapner’s long time love and participation in dance, and we find that her works move out from such an expressive body core. As she said of her Dyads, “I am swimming in the water of my own body temperature.”(15) This body aspect is part of the delicious complexity of her Scholars’ Garden series in that the forms obtain a rich animate, hybrid vegetal/human life through the dialogue with the Chinese. One needs to note one more aspect of several of Wapner’s pieces—the element of struggle. This is seen in the anthropomorphic twists of her central stalks and the extensions of painful branch/limb-like forms with vivid termini, like restive hands, as in her Scholars’ Garden V (large flower with tree and red tips), 2002.

One could consider that she functions in a contemporary expressiveness that has roots back to the Romantic F. W. J. Schelling. As in Schelling’s “On the Relationship of the Creative Arts to Nature” (1807),(16) Wapner participates as artist in the “ever-creative original energy of the world, which generates and busily evolves all things out of itself.” To Schelling “art stands as the unifying link between the soul and nature and can be apprehended as the living soul of both.” In contrast to the Chinese, this process is more of a struggle, an unpredictable dialectic fraught with the novelty of self-arising spirit, rather than the relaxed attention and the receptiveness to flowing qi of the Chinese artist. For example, the Song artist Guo Xi (11th century) would “lay out a fine brush and ink, wash his hands, and clean the ink slab as though he were receiving a major guest. His spirit at ease and his interest settled, only then did he proceed.”(17) By contrast, to Schelling, “nature meets us everywhere at first with reserve, in form more or less severe….” The artist spiritually melts “this apparently rigid form, so that the pure energy of things may flow together with the force of our spirit.” The force of individual human spirit is what will allow these nature energies to become self reflective. Schelling’s formulation is more spirit-oriented than the present day, where the self becomes more central as vehicle and content, whether it be the emotional self, the deconstructed self, or the cynically self-absorbed narcissistic subject. Wapner lodges in the positive personal emotive present and also, as many contemporary artists, Wapner, unconsciously resonates with Schelling’s dialectic of “the formative science in nature and art.”

In Wapner’s art this struggle emerges from a subjective emotional center, which comes out of her own heart and her own body. We can see this in Scholars’ Garden XIII (wine budded tree through ledge), 2004, where the undulating body/tree emerges from an expressive rocklike ledge to spread its branches/limbs and disquieted leaves/hands. Now this is the special place of Wapner, both in relationship to the Chinese tradition, to Schelling, and to the Animate Sculpture mode. This is the place of the heart-mind filled with the most intense emotion. For Wapner, such a focus is an intense emotion that is part of her relationship with other people and with the world around her. She once quoted to me the Jewish proverb that only a broken heart can be filled. This notion of breaking open the heart to be filled is part of her work, but this heartedness is neither maudlin nor sentimental. Felt relationships are one of the meta-phenomena of her art. One can look to the contemporary Buddhist teacher of the 1970 and 1980s in the U.S., Chögyam Trungpa (1939-1987), who bridged the gap between East and West, in order to understand this. Trungpa talks about the heart and about searching for the awakened heart: “…if you put your hand through your rib cage and feel for it, there is nothing there except for tenderness. You feel sore and soft, and if you open your eyes to the rest of the world, you feel tremendous sadness.”(18) Now this sadness is interesting; it does not come from being mistreated. “You don’t feel sad because someone has insulted you or because you feel impoverished. Rather this experience of sadness is unconditioned. It occurs because your heart is completely exposed.” It is this kind of exposed heart that is in Wapner’s work. Trungpa says of this heart: “There is no skin or tissue; it’s pure raw meat. Even if a tiny mosquito lands on it, you feel so touched.” One can see a glimmer of this in such works as Scholars’ Garden VI (pink/red flower with green snake out of rock), 2003. Here a flower stalk and a snake intertwine. They stand on a pedestal of clay earth, showing the above ground and below. The below is striated and exposed with reddish color rubbed into a knotted central “heart,” the throbbing center of the whole. Above ground the snaky stalks are flushed with pale pink and green and the flower head suffused with a poppy pink. Color is one of Wapner’s means for effecting life qualities. One finds in her figural tensions and directness of expression, an honesty, even a fearlessness to her opening up. As Trungpa said, because you feel your heart is full, you would like to spill it out and give it to others.

Wapner can also be celebratory as in her Scholars’ Garden VIII (multiple forms with feet on rock face), 2003. Here is a lineup of fledglings on an earth base. They stretch their stalks from a row of feet, with nascent heads on stalks, mouths open, instinctively stretching in various directions for nourishment. Part of the vibrant life quality in them is a sense of humor that potentiates their exuberance. This contrasts with the deep seriousness of the Chinese Scholar’s rock tradition, which discerns monumental landscapes and mythic beasts in the found configurations. Wapner’s image emerges more directly, more intimately, from her personal body-heart core of emotion.

So Wapner learns from the Chinese, extends her means, vibrates with a similar resonance, life movement, but transforms it through her own heart/ mind/ body that locates a personalized poignancy, a tender vivid feeling at the center of each of her works.

(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, December 2008)

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