About the space, where real life and true art flourish . text Frans Goetghebeur
Who is changing who, and in what way?
So here we all are then: friends, patrons of the arts, new acquaintances, and Ricardo Brey himself, who, after three years, is getting in touch with the public again, or … is it we who are getting in touch with him? Whatever the case may be, this is the first time I have met him. This evening all of us are entering his world and plunging into his “universe”. Soon it will be in our minds. For the time being, it is still just standing in this museum. The museum itself has its address somewhere in the middle of the Old Continent - as the Americans used to call the piece of ground under our feet. And we are all - the Americans included - living on a planet somewhere on the fringes of the galaxy…
Ricardo “writes with forms and objects in space”, or as he puts it himself: “Sometimes my work is on the borderline of Chaos; so I jump into this chaos with closed eyes and I can decide, while I’m working, to come back and create some poetry … It’s not a method I always follow; it depends.
But I like the idea of the jazz player. They know how to play the notes, they know how to play the instrument and so on, but their mind can be busy with something, and so the notes they play are sadder today, happier tomorrow, or more melancholic at another time. Or they think by themselves: ‘I have some money in my pocket’ and they realise things are not so bad, so all of a sudden they start to play more enthusiastically. I feel the same; I forget my name while I’m working.”
He doesn’t want to reveal any more about that particular subject.
Beyond that, what is left over from this, and other artistic creations, is what the inhabitants of those installations make of it, or experience through it.
In turn, onlookers can actually ask themselves how it has changed them.
In this way the images of “forms and objects” went their way through the subjects and the entire cinema of world history is written and experienced. The space-time continuum in which all this takes places will collect and “resolve” it.
Who made who into what he is now in the mind of the other - especially if the artist loses himself in his work? I think, it is a very poignant question.
Meditation as an art, and the art of meditating
The Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa left the Eastern world of ideas and arrived in the middle of the wild West, and was to contribute significantly to the acculturation of Buddhism in the West. He was sympathetic towards art, ikebana, calligraphy, dance and poetry - in other words any form of image construction that unfolds in space. He set up a group, called the Explorers of the Phenomenal World. Above all, these pioneers would study the territory of the arts, and discover what transformative powers might lie in wait for them there. Already aware of the upheavals that meditation can bring to a person’s world, now he wanted to see what the situation was like with art and culture - particularly because, in the West, these disciplines were separated from spirituality. He once defined meditation like this: “Meditation is not a question of ecstasy, spiritual bliss or calmness, nor is it an attempt to become a better person. It is the creation of a space within which we can expose and unravel our neurotic games, self-deceit and concealed hopes and fears. We create space through the simple discipline of doing nothing.”
In this sense you might describe meditation as an artistic activity: from an open and natural position there can be a breakthrough in terms of discernment, insight, and even unlimited well-being.
That much is apparent. Look: even if you haven’t learned to meditate, just pondering a statement like the following one, can take us off into a mild form of rapture: “In each atom of the realms of the universe, there exist vast oceans of world systems.” Avatamsaka Sutra.” (Silence)
The universe of Ricardo Brey
Back to square one. This universe in a thousand drawings belongs to nobody in particular. There is no conceited god behind its creation; instead, we have an attentive architect with a light-hearted humour who points out that insects look like planes, who sees restless oceans in carpets, and in an erudite, streamlined fashion supplies quiet explosions and penetratingly silent scenery.
In meditation you take any everyday object as a support for an exercise in concentration. You focus your mind, your attention, on this object and once the mind is able to settle, you embark on a steep descent on a search for the deeper meaning of reality: in this way all the fragmented pieces of Ricardo’s universe offer a thousand starting points for artistic contemplation of everything there is - which not only exists, but on top of that is of astounding beauty.
All these works represent reality a little like the event horizon on our planet: in cosmology, they speak of the back wall of the universe. Beyond this wall of light there is nothing more to be seen, no information to be obtained or expected. Nothing else, other than what is here, exists.
I know that Ricardo is averse to the “framing” and “explication” by the so-called specialists. And yet I feel that most of all he wants is to connect. That is the keyword for his activities: testing languages, species, materials and systems against each other: spots become texts, window frames earth crusts … in a permanent shuffling from transparency to opaqueness and back again.
This is why his work has a mildly spiritual feel about it.
Now that’s also the real show !
We, people …
“If you want to tell the truth, tell a story” is the message of Richard Rorty. But, of course, it must be a “true” story. Telling stories or bringing things into focus - that is exactly what artists do. These people have a sensitivity for symbolic language and are able to escape from the narrow corridors of “pensée unique”, from the one-way traffic of the unidimensional train of thought: they transport us to a multicoloured and opulent world.
But then … don’t we all know it. We are living in an age when traditional models of society are disappearing, just as quickly as animal species, languages and the diversity of our flora and fauna. That’s why artists, the defenders of opulence, should be cherished. Of course, artistic appreciation is something with which everyone is involved at some point in their lives - while some are even concerned with this on a more professional basis.
Which doesn’t detract from the fact that people are, nevertheless, strange sentient being: animals express their experiences, feelings and desires immediately and clearly. People have the medium of language at their disposal, but use it sometimes to conceal themselves or confound others. This is what makes their utterances so complicated, or extremely surprising.
They can tell us, for example, that the universe is an oscillation of the quantum field, which is steaming with energy and without matter. On the other hand, however, in the “Universe” of Ricardo everything is still … and is there to be viewed.
At the same time, it gives a sly wink to those looking for a playmaker.
And so we are living in a fascinating age - although people might not realise it. Yes, we forget things so easily. We have already forgotten that we were hit by a huge asteroid just sixty-five million years ago. We can’t even remember how many and what thoughts ran through our heads yesterday, between breakfast and lunch. And yet we go through life, some more than others, like know-it-alls, as if we were the only people here … And yet you have words like this: “It is unnatural in a large field to have only one shaft of wheat and in the infinite universe only one living world” as Metrodorus of Chios said as early as the fourth century BC. So let’s learn to get along with each other, because soon we might have to deal with outsiders really worthy of the name.
Long live joyful and adventurous art and science!
That’s why I find it so great that even science has become an impassioned, joyful and uncomplicated pursuit these days. After all, art has been playful since antiquity.
For example, if you read through the questions asked in the celebrated forum of The New Scientist, you want to hug the person who wants to know, for example, why people have eyebrows, or the one who wonders: “When a beautiful bathroom mirror mists up you can draw a picture on it. When the condensation evaporates, the drawing disappears too. But when it mists over again, the drawing returns. How does that come about?” Or who asks someone in the know: “If you take a compass into space how far do you have to go from the earth for the compass to stop pointing north?” Let us not forget that the insatiable curiosity of the Greeks as to the nature of things (a philosophical concern) lies at the root of our western science. In those times people like Xenophanes gave deep thought to the question of which was sweeter: honey or figs? Or to the question of whether anything such as space existed.
The artist too is a tireless traveller keen to know in whose magnetic field he or she has arrived on his/her travels.
Like so many philosophers, scientists and artists, Ricardo Brey asks in his turn how reality actually fits together. He turns his attention to everything. Is it God who created insects to crawl over the earth, like Man drives strange rovers over the surface of the moon and Mars? For him, that is not the question. They are there, the insects and the rovers… and amazement at their appearance teaches you more than questions about their maker or engineer.
This is why Buddhists assert too that the universe is a projection of the spiritual state of its inhabitants, just like a house reflects the expectations of its residents and what they have become accustomed to. Buddhists talk about the six realms of existence: that of the gods, the demigods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts and the worlds of hell; and what is called water in the human world tastes like nectar in the world of the gods, and blood in the world of the hellbeings.
So our senses are tuned to experience what they can, given the circumstances: it appears that there is so little red in the world under the sea that the crew of a submarine, after a few days under water, experience the world as unnaturally red when they resurface.
It is the role of artists and spiritually inspired investigators starting from the outside to look deeper into the extrasensory, … and that’s why they are often so eccentric!
Chemistry, imagination and perception
Buddhists know that there is a real difference between the way in which the world is observed, including our own existence, and the way things actually are. That’s why they strive to get down to the ultimate meaning of everything, the natural state of all phenomena. The quiet, modest universe of Ricardo Brey is a good launch pad for investigating precisely that.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that the more accurately we measure the position of an electron, the less certain we can be of its speed, and the more accurately we measure its speed, the less sure we can be of its position. So we have to choose: movement or perception? Or should artists and art lovers not have to choose, and is it just a question of emotiveness, the enthusiasm within the experience of the one as of the other?
Many cultural philosophers and science scholars have sought to place people in the role of Beckett characters.
- « Le silence éternel des espaces infinis m’effraie » [“The eternal silence of infinite space terrifies me”], Pascal.
- « L’homme est perdu dans l’immensité indifférente de l’univers où il a émergé par hasard » [“Man is lost in the cold immensity of the universe - where he has emerged by chance”], Monod.
- “The more we understand the universe, the more it seems pointless.” Steven Weinberg (American physicist)
It is my deepest held conviction that human activities as they are experienced in art, ethics or spirituality, or in the display of qualities such as gentleness, friendliness and beauty, cannot be reduced to mere chemical or neurological reactions or theoretical constructions. Man is much more than a biological machine, the product of pure chance or a coincidental combination of genes. He exists only for a fleeting moment. True. But - all the same - he does leave traces behind him: think of all those we admire or have admired, love or have loved. That is why the Buddha uses poetical language to refer to the transient but at the same time radiant nature of reality:
“As stars, a fault of vision, as a lamp, a mock show, dewdrops, or a bubble,
a dream, a lightning flash, or cloud, so we should view what is conditioned” is how he puts it.
a dream, a lightning flash, or cloud, so we should view what is conditioned” is how he puts it.
“The almighty sky does not hinder white clouds in their flight,” says an Eastern master, Sen nu Ryokan.
Every time we understand something, something incomprehensible happens.
That’s what it is all about, although we can’t exactly put our finger on it.
“Genuine art – dharma art – is simply the activity of nonaggression.
(…) The basic point is that this is nobody's world, since there is nobody as such. The energy that is constantly taking place does not belong to anybody but is a natural, organic process. Nevertheless, we function as if the world does belong to us, as if I have myself, as if I exist. (…) So each perception becomes sheer energy, (…) just simple perception” according to Chögyam Trungpa. This play, a kind of no-theatre, this light and sound show, that takes place in everyone’s consciousness, is the place where we will find ourselves soon, as we will walk around.
And it is to this pure perception that Ricardo Brey invites us, in the full realisation that you have to be on good terms with the relative reality if you want to get down, through its specific symbolism, to the ultimate meaning of things.
How can mankind, in God’s name, peek at God’s cards if it doesn’t dare to do what is exhibited here? Indeed, our Milky Way contains four hundred million stars of all kinds which spin gracefully but in complex movements. At the present time the inhabitants of the earth know only one of all those stars, and even then…
“Absolute symbolism is not a dream world at all, but realistic. As far as linguistics is concerned, absolute means “needing no reference point”. Otherwise, absolute would become relative, because it would have a relationship with something else. So absolute is free from reference point. It is wholesome, complete by itself, self-existing.” (Chögyam Trungpa).
Ricardo Brey guides us towards recognition of this absolute, but only on the strength of the highly anecdotal. “It is the ordinary objects that enlightens reality”, says Ricardo Brey.
The more light you bring in, the sharper the shadows.
But neither the world nor his universe have been made by hand, that much is clear.
It would, of course, be much more orderly, some tell us, if all clocks ticked at the same speed, and all lengths were just as long. If the present, the past and the future were universal. But that is not the case. Everyone knows that we are on a glorious merry-go-round in which the planets go around the stars, the stars form galaxies, and the galaxies are in giant, astonishing structures, while the sun for its part converts four million tonnes of matter to energy every second.
Let’s end by looking at that sun which, as Galileo said, “with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the Universe to do” .
Frans Goetghebeur
Tibetaans-Intituut. Belgium
