The Beauty of the Unexpected

Karma and Lila and unexpected beauty

Karma –action, cause and effect, the idea that an action taken sets into motion a series of other actions, occurrences, or events

Lila – chance, unexpected beauty, play, that which cannot be planned, but only hoped for

Charles Ray - Untitled 2009

Charles Ray at the Whitney Biennial 1993 & 2010

I was speaking with my friend Jesse who had just gone to the opening of the Whitney Biennial on Wednesday. He said that it was the Charles Ray show – The artist who parked a sculpture of a fire truck outside of the Whitney for the duration of the 1993 Biennial, and frequent creator of shocking pieces. This time Charles Ray was represented by a room of tall gorgeous flower paintings that he previously made only for family and friends and didn’t generally exhibit. There was the surprise and delight of the flowers, and then the surprise and delight of the fact that they were made by a guy also known for a piece called Family Romance – a nude nuclear family, each member shrunk or expanded so that the children and parents were the same height – the nudity of all four holding hands gratingly uncomfortable to look at. But these flower paintings were…pretty…really outrageously pretty.

Charles Ray - Family Romance 1993

William Kentridge at the MoMA  2010

We shifted to a discussion of MoMA’s exhibition of the South African artist William Kentridge, who makes scratchy black and white drawings into animations of helplessness and alienation. I mentioned one particular moment in which a middle-aged man in a business suit looks down, watching as water rises up to engulf his pants legs. For whatever reason this image always makes me want to cry. My friend Jesse immediately responded – me too!  But how? The first time I saw it I felt that way and every time I’ve seen it since I have had the same reaction. 

Obviously Kentridge did the work, planned it carefully, applied his sensibility to it with care, but what is it about that moment that elicited such a specific reaction in both of us? That degree of emotional connection with an artwork goes beyond Karma, because you can plan forever to make an emotional piece and fall completely flat. Actually that is usually what happens if you begin with such an intention. But because the structure is there, the Karmic thing, the Lila might and in this case DID happen.

William Kentridge -from Stereoscope 1998-99

Bill T. Jones (Lois Greenfield photo)

Bill T. Jones – Still/Here at Brooklyn Academy of Music 1994

A couple of days later I was thinking about the introduction Bill T Jones gave at the premiere of his Still/Here, a groundbreaking piece addressing the crisis and loss of the AIDS epidemic. It was a while ago, but this is how I remember it: the ever-elegant BTJ walked up on stage in his tux to introduce the piece. He then brought up his mother, who was tiny in relation to his towering height and wide shoulders.  She was dressed very simply with a flowered dress and hat. Without musical accompaniment, she began to sing a gospel song. Her voice cracked a bit on the higher notes. BTJ began to make subtle rippling movements with his body while standing in place by his mother’s side, reacting to the rise and fall of her voice. She finished the song. The two took a bow, walked off stage, and STILL/HERE began.  I honestly could have walked out before the rest of the performance ever happened. I was already saturated with the intense beauty of the experience. It was elegant and raw, sentimental and disorienting. It drew together an unimagined combination of associations to move me in a weirdly specific way I hadn’t been moved before or since. It felt profoundly authentic.

Karma and Lila and art making

The play of Karma and Lila is a concept essential to art making. Lila isn’t just sweetness or happiness – it is the magic, the unexpected beauty popping up like a late winter crocus through the snow – or a 6½ foot man in a tux making snakily beautiful movement next to his elderly mother singing a church hymn onstage. Or the surprise of a famously shocking artist making pretty flower pictures for his family. Or the resignation of a crudely drawn animated figure watching but doing nothing as smudges of blue water slowly rise up past his knees. And beauty can be pretty or beauty can be gut-wrenching.

But you DO have to do the Karma – you have to have structure and discipline in your art making practice in order for anything to happen. No action = no result. But the idea is that you cannot anticipate a very particular action or a specific outcome. It trips you up and cuts off creativity. Part of what makes great art great is the magic of ‘how did they do that?’  And very few artists can entirely explain how a particular work came into being. We can talk, on one hand, about the materials and techniques used, and on the other hand about the ideas that inspire us - what we were experimenting with or pursuing philosophically. All that is the Karma. But there is a gap. On one side lives the day-to-day business of the matter and means. And on the other side lives the eventual outcome. In the gap is where Lila resides.

So I remind myself within my creative life to:

1. Be authentic to my personal vision and creativity

2. Do the Karma, the work, the action.

3. Embrace the unexpected and the unlikely.

3. Invite Lila without expectation. Stay open to possibility.

“When you’re hoping with expectation that’s Karma.

 Hope without specific expectation is Lila.” - Douglas Brooks

The Beauty of Practice

 “We practice for the practice” Douglas Brooks

The reason why some of us become artists is a persistent and overwhelming urge to create…something.  Something written, drawn, performed - whatever medium best connects with the impulse. The creative urge is generally wrapped up in the act of creating rather than in the result, but once the process begins to take form, the purity of the initial impulse is altered by public opinion, day-to-day practicalities, and the external life it takes on outside of ourselves.

So how can art making be a practice and not just a process moving toward a particular result? It is amazing how attached I am to work when I am in the act of making it. But once I am done, my fascination softens to a fondness or interest in what I have created - hardly the compulsion that propelled its creation forward. While I am working on something, it is like a love affair. I think about it all day, before I go to sleep; I dream about it. It alternately torments me and thrills me and creates a profound immersive feeling like a delicious meal that I am in the midst of savoring.

Most of my artist friends and I regularly joke around about our ongoing swing between – “I am so brilliant” and “I’m an idiot, a fraud – I have nothing to say.” It’s just part of the creative package and is determined by where we are in the process at the moment. But if we can see the act of art making as a practice rather than as a set of results (all economic concerns and the art market aside…), then the paradigm shifts. We are in the process and the process is in us. Actually there is no separation between the process and ourselves. We succeed because of the simple fact that we have engaged and are engaged.

This is what yoga has taught me on the most transformative and essential level. If you are IN it, you are doing it. The goal is often the process and if you can live fully in the process, mindful of where you came from and open to where you are going, then you have accessed the delight of simultaneity and are living in the heart of your creativity. This is not a rejection of aspirations and goals, but rather an embrace of the richness of all aspects of the creative experience.  It is a bigger picture than the linear pursuit of a solitary goal. In holding together the origin of an idea, its present incarnation, and its future prospects, the process becomes the past, present, and future woven together in a vibratory hum of creativity and possibility.

 Henri Matisse - The Red Studio 1911

In Matisse’s The Red Studio, the circle of numbers on the grandfather clock is visible, but no hands. Matisse’s work hangs on the walls, sits on the table and on sculpture stands, and rests on the floor. The materials and inspirations for art making are scattered throughout the room as well. There are unfinished canvases and empty frames. But time is indeterminate, suspended in a sensuous flood of red that seems to pour off the edges of the canvas. Past-present-future in a painting. A limitless self-portrait in which creativity envelops time.

In any creative pursuit we talk about being in the flow. In Anusara yoga we talk about stepping into the flow. We move toward the midline, our center, so that we can dive into the reservoir of our resources. We expand outward from there into the unknown. A pulsation between inner focus and outer expression. Process. Simultaneity. An intricate weave of then, is, and will be.

The Beauty of Words

Self Portrait as a Crow in Landscape

I had this thought today about the impulse to translate experiences into words. I was stretched out on my back while I was thinking about this, staring alternately at the ceiling, at the lower Manhattan skyline, or at the back of my eyelids as my brilliant bodyworker friend Zach manipulated the muscles of my right arm and shoulder. I realized that my mind was working at finding words for the experience I was having at that moment.  So there were actually two parallel experiences that I was having - or maybe only one made up of two parts. The first part of the experience I was having was the pure physical intensity of sensation. The second part was my constant translation of the physical sensation I was experiencing into words.

I can remember in grad school one surprisingly aggressive critique with a teacher in which he said to me, “ You really have all of the answers, don’t you?” I can remember feeling stunned by his condemnation of what I thought was my solid and well thought-out verbal description of an installation I has been working on all term. I had felt that it was my responsibility to be prepared with verbal equivalents for my visual work. After all, isn’t our ability to express things verbally at the core of what makes us human? What I had thought was my job ended up being, for him, perhaps too neatly tied up, or it had robbed the work of its essential nature as visual art, which was intended to offer communication through a non-verbal language. Today I understand his point, but only agree with him halfway.  Any successful artwork leaves space for the unspoken. Evoking something beyond words may differentiate one art form from another and there is a reason why both exist. But the urge to express is equally important and the trick is finding that balance – spoken and unspoken, delineated and open-ended.

Through years of being an artist and a yogini, I realize that I now have fewer answers but far more skillful questions. I still love the process of translating a feeling, an image, or an asana into words, a visual expression into a written or auditory one. At bottom, this is what drove me, as a student, to become an educator at the Museum of Modern Art: to assist others in that process of translation, offering them the skills and the familiarity to discover the beauty of an artwork for themselves. This led to my co-writing a book for MoMA on Matisse and Picasso for the exhibition in 2003. I believe that the book would not have happened had I not been an artist first, and a would-be art historian second. It was my access to both sides of the creative process that enabled me to put into words concepts that people in and outside of the art world could understand.

It was this same communicative desire that drew me toward becoming a yoga teacher as well. Immediately after 9-11, I was increasingly drawn toward my yoga practice. Watching the chaos unfold from Washington Square Park had left me uncharacteristically speechless. I felt no desire to go to my studio to work. I had no words and there was nothing I wanted to build or draw. The only urge I had was to practice. My teacher Amy reached out to me, encouraging me to join her training as a way of deepening my practice, and that was that – a new beginning that I had never consciously sought out, and the unfolding of a new chapter in my life.  I had been given an opportunity to infuse my words with meaning in a new way - to alleviate people’s pain, to draw them into a deeper, more satisfying experience of their bodies, and to invite a more profound connection between their bodies, their minds, and their hearts.

The best way to learn a thing is to teach it. Through the processes of practicing and teaching yoga, I find new means of self-expression on a daily basis. This translates from the yoga studio to my art studio. Every day, every class offers a deeper sense of who I am as an artist. The physicality and the meditative nature of asana connect to the sensation of moving a pencil across a drawing, both delineating a thought, an impulse. The philosophical inquiry within each practice is present whether I’m balancing in crow or rendering one on paper. Art and yoga: the two are inextricably linked in my mind and are in constant conversation.

The act of translating one form of expression to another offers us the experience of looking at something from more than one perspective. We have the chance to become more expansive as our means of expression diversify. This creates an opportunity to ask more meaningful questions about what we see, experience, and care about, and at best, to find and create more diverse forms of beauty.

YoGA at MoMA - The Beauty of Unexpected Juxtapositions

photo by Wayne Price

Two hundred people kicking off their shoes and squishing their bulky winter coats into their bags in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art. Suspended over us as people roll out their yoga mats is artist Gabriel Orozco’s giant whale skeleton, marked with spiraling graphite concentric circles. Sharon and I warm up for assisting Elena Brower in her 3^rd YoGA at MoMA session with a celebratory foot-to-foot Hanumanasana, our arms reaching exuberantly up into the space, loving the absolutely surreal experience of being barefoot and in yoga clothes at the MoMA. Elena, accompanied by Garth Stevenson on cello, proceeds to offer a beautiful class connecting the spaciousness of the atrium and the wild creativity of the work above us to the openness and spaciousness of our own hearts.

The class concludes with an echoing OM that rises up to engulf Orozco’s whale in sound. Namaste. Release my hands, open my eyes, pull on my sweater, socks and shoes, loop my MoMA ID over my head. I have a tour group waiting for me in the education wing of the museum. I lead my group through a discussion of body language - Giacometti, DuBuffet, Warhol, Lichtenstein - each work a window or door into a new way of thinking about bodies and communication, about innovation and style. Each work an opportunity to become more spacious simply because it is a new perspective offered to us.

There is always more. Shri. Our bodies in space. The space inside our hearts. The spaciousness of opportunity and of new modes of thought. What triggers our urge toward innovation and self-expression? Why take a yoga class out of the studio and into the streets? Into a museum? And how do we feed our self-expression by drawing the outside world more richly into our individual sensibilities? Welcome the beauty and wild creativity surrounding us into our own experience so that we become larger, more expansive?

 When we seek out and embrace unexpected juxtapositions, we activate our creativity. This reintroduces us to our rich inner resources, which, when touched upon, extend out once again. More creativity. More beauty. Shri.