Yoga: The Art of Transformation at the Asian Art Museum San Fancisco

               Yoga Class at the Asian Art Museum led by Erica Jago




Nauli Kriya from the Bahr al-hayat (Ocean of Life) From the Exhibition Catalogue

We are blessed in California to have a first of its kind exhibition of yoga art at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. This exhibition, organized by the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian, visually traces the variegated paths of yoga practice from the late 1st millennium BCE to the present. Yoginis and yogis in sculpture and painting present us with  their abundant exuberance and compel us to rethink the globalized yoga movement in which we are so immersed. The exhibition opened with a remarkable yoga posture/asana and meditation class conducted by Erica Jago, a rising yogini from Oahu, who riveted us with a 90' sequence of yoga movements, mantra meditation, and breathing.

I have written of my partiality toward and affection for hybridity as a way out of the morass of nationalism, religious fundamentalism and ethnocentricity. No better exemplar of the cosmopolitan arc of yoga is that depicted in the painting from the early 17th century treatise, Bahr al-hayat, Ocean of Life, which was the first text to illustrate Hatha Yoga postures or asanas. It is ironic that the manuscript was written in Persian by a Sufi Shaykh Muhammad Ghawth and commissioned by the future Mughal Emperor Jahanghir. The text itself refers to the oneness of God  and to our being emanational microcosms of the macrocosmic Divine. So yoga was adapted to Sufi Muslim theology in the Mughal courts.

Thus, even in the 1600s, yoga practice had become an international and trans-religious mode for self-cultivation. May we continue to adapt yoga meditation, breathing and movement to our Universalist ideals and values!

Environmental Art as a Path to Eco-Spirituality

Andy Goldsworthy Stone River 2001 Cantor Arts Center Stanford University

 

There is a marvelous stone sculpture outside of Stanford's Cantor Art Center. A sinuous river of stone flows effortlessly through a field, reminding us of swirling vortices and  liquid life frozen in space. The first principle of Unitarian Universalism is "The inherent worth and dignity of every person". Somehow the personhood of rocks or water, let alone that of animals, escaped the crafters of this principle. I was talking to a friend who argues that dogs or cats or dolphins naturally show empathy in a way that we cannot fathom with psychological/verbal description. Yes! And I would add that so-called inanimate objects also partake of empathy when we allow our imaginations to feel our connection with them. In this way art raises us to such a level of reflection that we spontaneously sense our connection to natural objects. The river winds back and forth like our moods; the wind inspires; the rock remains steady and patient. 

Unitarian Universalists do lift up a principle, "Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part", that partially commits us to harmony with nature; but, I would say that the degree to which we find nature spirited and animated, compels us to tread more lightly and more empathically on this source of our nurturance and being.

"Her Story": Elizabeth Murray and Artistic Subversion

Elizabeth Murray "My Manhattan, January" Oil on Canvas 1987

I love the artwork of the painter, Elizabeth Murray. In fact her paintings and prints are my favorite of all artists. So you can imagine how delighted I was to view the exhibition of her artwork at Stanford University's Cantor Art Center. Murray has won numerous accolades for her art, including a MacArthur genius award. Although Murray has been proclaimed as a "female" artist based on her gender and the domestic nature of the themes in her art, I would venture to say that Murray's work goes way beyond the essentialization of gender roles: she subverts conventional female gender roles in a deeper analysis of her art. The above photo from her exhibition at the Cantor Art Center is a surreal integration of a fish form with interior biomorphic images, suggesting a womb, growth, and the rosiness of gestation. A stunning juxtaposition of scarlet and teal. The exhibit also features the poetry of the experimental-Beat-Buddhist poet, Anne Waldemann, who collaborated with Murray in a chapbook/art creation, entitled, "Her Story". One of the poems by Waldemann is as follows:

I saw the

rhythms inside

They were stark

& joyous

& I painted them 

All to see

I think that Murray and Waldemann express interior moods, rhythms that transcend the external boundaries of form, such as that of Murray's Manhattan fish. My dear friend who herself transcends the arbitrary culture-bound gender division of labor forms--she's an engineer/scientist in Silicon Valley-- reminds me that gender and ethnic classifications are merely convenient simplifications that, if subscribed to, conveniently oppress. Reality is a continuum of interesting internal rhythms, rhythms that frustrate generalities, rhythms that add a zest to experience and a resonant path to mutual understanding.

The Mercurial Mediterranean Climate

 View of Wildcat Canyon  Berkeley, CA

In the San Francisco Bay area, we are longing for rain. We have had a scant 60 mm of rainfall this season and are on target for a record dessication. But we share with the Mediterranean a moody record of annual rainfall. Hills are dusty and gray; stream beds are dry. Perhaps the climate fluctuations from wet to dry are an organizing root metaphor for Mediterranean life--a stable instability, an unpredictable quality to survival. Water wars may have begun in the Eastern Mediterranean. Some have proposed that the repeated collapse of Mediterranean cosmopolitan cultures both at the beginning Middle Bronze Age around 2200 BCE and at the end of the Late Bronze Age at 1100 BCE may have resulted from random droughts and the consequent disruption of food and water supplies leading people to move into more fertile areas.
But drought alternating with drenching fosters in us an appreciation of change and flux and unpredictability. In the words of Archilochus, the archaic Greek poet from the island of Paros:

"But delight in things that are delightful and, in hard times, grieve
Not too much—appreciate the rhythm that controls men's lives."

(fragment 128, Douglas E. Gerber, Greek Iambic Poetry, Loeb (1999) pg 167)

In our culture, we have little appreciation of rhythm. We often try to contain it--witness the explosive increase in the diagnosis of mood disorders in American psychiatry and the market plethora of mood stabilizers aimed at constraining moodiness. Purportedly, unlike human emotions, we cannot constrain the vagaries of shifting weather; we can only influence the long term biases of climate. With global warming, we have destabilized the earth's climate. Most immediately, global warming leads to extreme and chaotic fluctuations in temperature and rainfall. A heightened appreciation of climatic rhythms would lead all of us to recognize how emotional and interpersonal rhythms also pervade our daily lives.

When A Flag is not a Flag: Jasper Johns and George Zimmerman

 

George Zimmerman eBay Flag 2013

        
                                     Jasper Johns White Flag 1955 Metropolitan Museum of Art


George Zimmerman, recently acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin in Florida, has taken up the life of an artist. His flag painting, posted for sale on eBay, is reported to be up for bid at $100,000. Both George Zimmerman and Jasper Johns grew up in the Southeast--George in Virginia and Jasper Johns in South Carolina--and both have painted representations of the American Flag. But as in  the prototypical final art history questions from college art classes where students are asked to compare and contrast two works of art, these two flags couldn't be further apart in form and nuanced content.

Zimmerman's flag is hard-edged, linear and conceptual. It broadcasts a literal visual re-interpretation of a text, the Pledge of Allegiance, begging us to conform to a standard of justice, ironically abrogated from some people's viewpoint, by the Zimmerman trial itself. Could Zimmerman's painting be a surreal parody of justice? Or does that give too much credit to Zimmerman's scope of understanding? Johns's, White Flag, is painterly and suggestive, compelling us to distance ourselves from its face content and immersing us in a field of color and vague form. White Flag is not a flag; it is a cornucopia of intimated symbols. It is more akin to poetry than to the prosaic art of Zimmerman.

Giorgio Vasari, the 16th century artist and biographer, sought to understand Renaissance art through his biographic treatment of the major artists of his time. Can we tell a bit from Zimmerman's and Jone's artwork how each might have viewed the world? Are the hard-edges of Zimmerman's painting a mirror into a reflexive and jarring violence than seems to be borne out both by his actions and an overly enthusiastic patriotism? Does Jasper John's flag hint at the avant garde and at a hope for an open, complex and welcoming society? Two flags, two radically different messages.

12 Years a Slave: Steve McQeen and the Avant Garde

Aristotle in his Poetics proposes that the goal of tragedy is to arouse feelings of fear and pity within the audience an then through a process of catharsis purge these emotions. I can think of no better exemplar of catharsis than Steve McQueen's film, 12 Years a Slave. It is not the dense and compelling narrative that purges fear and pity, a narrative that remains strikingly close to Solomon Northup's original 1853 autobiography; rather, McQueen's direction and cinematography fasten and rivet our emotions. A steamboat paddle wheel spins, churning a wake of eddies along a river; embers from a burning letter disappear into the night. Images of light and darkness, water and wood, long close-ups of anguished faces sustaining brutal rapes and floggings. McQueen in his post-minimalist cinematography creates a visual catharsis instead of the more typical purging of emotions through word.

Steve McQueen is an artist. Winner of the British Turner Prize in 1999, he is known for his experimental films. I had the pleasure of seeing a retrospective of his work last year at the Art Institute of Chicago and his short, highly abstract films were a feast for viewing. I do wonder, at the risk of oversimplification, whether McQueen arouses in us the emotion centers from the right hemisphere of the brain--the regions that process the vague, the fuzzy, the sustained emotional, facial and visual content of our perceptions. Perhaps empathy is necessary for Aristotelian catharsis. If so, McQueen is an aesthetic genius of empathy, having discovered a direct non-verbal route for all of us to feel the horrific incongruities of American slavery.

Pantheism: Bridging the Gulf between Humanism and God

I have always treasured walking in the woods. Like many, nature provides me an emotional and spiritual nourishment far beyond that which I receive from attending most formal religious services. Viewing nature is like seeing a painting or reading a poem; nature is a multilayered canvas whose unity demands from us an active sense of composition: Unity in Variety. Pantheism, the belief and experience that All is One, that Nature is the ultimate ground of being, begs for such a unifying vision. We worship in nature by communing in her presence; we can venerate the woods either in a solitary way, like Daoist philosophers, or communally, as the ancient Druids were said to have done.

The great divide in our Unitarian Universalist congregations has historically been between those who are theists, namely those who believe in some sort of personal God, and our humanists/atheists who believe that humankind is the ultimate measure of all things. A monotheistic God is a unifying principle, while humanity is a source of rich diversity. What if Pantheism were a middle path between monotheism and humanism, between the One and the Many?

In my role as an intern minister at a local Unitarian Universalist congregration, Starr King UU Church in Hayward CA, I had the great joy of leading an adult religious education/faith formation class on Nature-Based Religions. I've noticed that Pantheism furnishes a large theological field upon which naturalist/atheists, animists and theists can all play. Everyone in the class had reported transcendent experiences in nature--just their interpretations differ: you can celebrate physical/chemical/biological laws, view trees, rocks and streams as burgeoning with spirit and consciousness, or witness the presence of God(s) in the comforting woods. We all sang the beauty of Nature together, refracted through our individual lens. A Unity in Diversity.