Category Archives: Artmonks

Adam Yauch, a.k.a. MCA, was an artmonk

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In honor of Adam Yauch, a.k.a. MCA (one of the founders of the Beastie Boys) who died of cancer this morning, here’s “Bodhisattva Vow”:

“In addition to his career with the Beastie Boys, Yauch was heavily involved in the movement to free Tibet. A founder of the Milarepa Fund, Yauch was instrumental in the first Tibetan Freedom Concert in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park 1996, which drew 100,000 people – the largest U.S. benefit concert since 1985′s Live Aid. After 9/11, Yauch and the Beastie Boys organized New Yorkers Against Violence, a concert benefit for some of the victims least likely to receive help from elsewhere. ”

As I develop the awakened mind
I praise the buddhas as they shine
I bow before you as I travel my path
To join your ranks, I make my full time task

For the sake of all beings I seek
The enlightened mind that I know I’ll reap
Respect to Shantideva and all the others
Who brought down the dharma for the sisters and brothers

I give thanks for this world as a place to learn
And for this human body that I know I’ve earned
And my deepest thanks to all sentient beings
For without them there would be no place to learn what I’m seeing

There’s nothing here thats not been said before
But I put it down now so that I’ll be sure
To solidify my own views
And I’ll be glad if it helps anyone else out too

If others disrespect me and give my flack
I’ll stop and think before I react
Knowing that they’re going through insecure stages
I’ll take the opportunity to exercise patience

I’ll see it as a chance to help the other person
Nip it in the bud before it can worsen
A chance for me to be strong and sure
As I think on the Buddhas who have come before

As I praise and respect the good they’ve done
Knowing only love can conquer hate in every situation
We need other people in order to create
The circumstances for the learning that we’re here to generate

Situations that bring up our deepest fears
So that we can work to release them until they’ve cleared
Therefore, it only make sense
To thank our enemies despite their intent

The Bodhisattva path is one of power and strength
A strength from within to go the length
Seeing others are as important as myself
I strive for a happiness of mental wealth

With the interconnectedness that we share as one
Every action that we take affects everyone
So in deciding for what a situation calls
There is a path for the good of all

I try to make my every action for that highest good
With the altruistic wish to achieve buddahood
So I pledge here before everyone who’s listening
To make my every action for the good of all beings

For the rest of my lifetimes and
Even beyond I vow to do my best to do no harm
And in times of doubt i can think on the dharma
And the enlightened ones who’ve graduated Samsara

Read more:http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/beastie-boys-co-founder-adam-yauch-dead-at-48-20120504#ixzz1txlXXHHG

Winner of Otherhood’s “The Artist’s Rule” Comment Contest: Cole Matson

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For his comment on Otherhood Podcast: Episode 1 with Christine Valters Paintner, Cole Matson is hereby awarded a copy of Paintner’s book, “The Artist’s Rule.” The comments were all great, and the decision was a hard one.

The passion and devotion Matson offers in his poetry really captured my attention, though. And I’m a sucker for the old mystics.

The winning comment:

Nathan and Christine,

Thank you for this wonderful podcast. It was good for me to hear the effect that being a Benedictine oblate has had on Christine’s artistic practice, as I am considering oblation myself.

In support of contemplation bearing fruit in artistic creation (as in a motto of the Dominican Order, “to contemplate and to share the fruits of contemplation”), I thought I’d share with you a couple of the poems that arose out of a recent Ignatian silent retreat, after I had been reading John of the Cross and Lady Julian of Norwich.

“For John of the Cross”

Lord, let me love You
with the flame of ten thousand fires.

Let me love You
with a flame that dries and crackles,

burns and blackens the crust of my soul,
hides deep down in the heart of things,

to warm and beat,
flickering forth with tongues of fire

to burst through the shell of my cindered soul,
and leap to dance as love again.

Lord, make me all flame.

“For Lady Julian”

Lord, teach me to love my weaknesses
as Lady Julian loved hers,
seeing that the soiled, torn stain of our sins
blackening the white cloth of our humanity
was such a little nothing
because that cloth was worn by Christ,
who picked us up out of the Pit
and sat us next to Him at table,
with His Father and His Spirit,
all of us dazzling white,
with the wounds we ripped into our flesh
shining scars praising God’s glory,
His merciful meaning: ‘Love’.

Blessings on your work.

Cole

Runners up

I loved this, from Greene Fyre, via facebook:

To oblate in clarity, nor obtuse. To endeavor obscurity: a recluse? Divining the divine: propinquity. A pursuit sublime from antiquity.

Thanks also to Donelda Seymore, Genora W. Powell, Jaqui du Rocher, Jann Durkin and many others for your thoughtful reflections.

Contact nathan@artmonastery.org if you’re interested in joining our Artmonk Reading Group, where we’re about to go through The Artist’s Rule together.

Laura Riding was an artmonk

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“The mercy of truth – it is to be truth.”

In reading Paul Auster’s fantastic collection of essays, The Art of Hunger, I came across Truth, Beauty, Silence, a stunning look at Laura Riding’s life and work. As the poets she influenced (Auden, Ashbery, etc.) are among my favorites, I have read a little of her work before, but Auster’s take has compelled me to look again at this enigmatic artmonk.

“The World And I”, by Laura (Riding) Jackson:

This is not exactly what I mean
Any more than the sun is the sun.
But how to mean more closely
If the sun shines but approximately?
What a world of awkwardness!
What hostile implements of sense!
Perhaps this is as close a meaning
As perhaps becomes such knowing.
Else I think the world and I
Must live together as strangers and die—
A sour love, each doubtful whether
Was ever a thing to love the other.
No, better for both to be nearly sure
Each of each—exactly where
Exactly I and exactly the world
Fail to meet by a moment, and a word.

Riding was prolific from the early 1920′s until 1938, at which point she reached, in her words, “a crisis point at which division between craft and creed reveals itself to be absolute.” She then abandoned poetry to pursue truth elsewise. A prose work published in 1967 called “The Telling” gives us an impression of what it was she had pursued in poetry that she felt she had to renounce poetry to attain.

There is something to be told about us for the telling of which we all wait. In our unwilling ignorance we hurry to listen to stories of old human life, new human life, fancied human life, avid of something to while away the time of unanswered curiosity. We know we are explainable, and not explained. Many of the lesser things concerning us have been told but the greater things have not been told; and nothing can fill their place. Whatever we learn of what is not ourselves, but ours to know, being of our universal world, will likewise leave the emptiness an emptiness. Until the missing story of ourselves is told, nothing besides told can suffice us: we shall go on quietly craving it.

Elsewhere she writes:

To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth…But only a problem of art is solved in poetry. Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth. Poetic art cheats truth to further and finer degrees than art of any other kind because the spoken word is its exclusive medium…

There might be a Laura Riding a the heart of every art monastery. Someone for whom the questions of art and truth are primary (e.g. “What is the value of art?”, “Is art perhaps not just a distraction from truth?”, “To make art, or not to make art? To make art or to wake up?”) would act as a necessary force of challenge to the art being made. Of course, also at the heart of every art monastery are artmonks for whom those questions are resolved already, as well as artmonks for whom there are no questions of art at all, for who there is only the making of art.

In order to make art that is art monastic art, and to make it better and better, each of these artmonk archetypes is important.

Read Auster’s essay (minus the first two pages!) here (he has another, short essay on her, “Itinerary”, if you can get your hands on it).

Read more about Riding here.

Read Marjorie Perloff’s critical essay on Riding’s language philosophy (“the Witch of Truth”) here.

Otherhood, the Podcast: Episode 1, Christine Valters Paintner and “The Artist’s Rule”

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Otherhood, the Podcast: Episode 1, Christine Valters Paintner & "The Artist's Rule" [ 27:05 | 17.43 MB ]

Meet Otherhood, the Podcast.

In this, the first episode, I interview Christine Valters Paintner about her new book (the Artist’s Rule: Nurturing Your Creative Soul With Monastic Wisdom), the oblate life, and what it means to be both an artist and a monk.

BTW, we’re giving away a free copy of the Artist’s Rule to whomever leaves the best comment on this post. Just sayin’.

Peter Zumthor is an artmonk (don’t tell him, though)

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Two things to notice in this Guardian profile of artmonkish architect Peter Zumthor: 1) what it takes to be called a monk by the architecture world, and 2) that it’s an insult, synonymous with “otherworldly” and “arrogant.”

You would be wise not to call Peter Zumthor a monk. He may be white-bearded and dark-clad and his office, in a secluded spot outside the Swiss town of Chur, may take the form of a cloister around a garden. His studio gathered there of young acolytes may have a superficial resemblance to a cult. He may be someone who talks with reverence about his craft and who inspires extreme reverence in other architects. He may carry with him a hushed aura, in his own speech, in the way others talk of him and in his buildings. He may sometimes rise at 4am to pursue his work. He may, in his oeuvre, have a certain number of chapels, memorials and other contemplative spaces, and he may like to talk of such things as the “mystery” of materials. But at the suggestion he might be otherwordly, he becomes vehement.

“There are these prejudices that have always been accompanying my whole career, which is first they said, ‘Yes he does these beautiful buildings, but they are up in the mountains and they are only possible in the mountains…’ Then they say, ‘You only build in wood’ or they’re saying you’re the monk or you’re arrogant.” He is, he insists, down to earth: “I design for the use of a building and the place and for the people who use it… the reputation for arrogance comes because when work is offered to me I look whether I can find a genuine interest in quality. If I only find an interest in using my name for economic reasons, or if I can see that this is a project that only deals with image and facade, of course I say no.”

The force of gravity

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A new job and a series of events more art than monk have kept me from posting much here lately. There will be time soon, I hope, for more of the interviews, reviews, articles, and other things that give modest life to this project.

For now, something from Jerzy Grotowski, whose work attracts me more and more, and whose artistic lineage lives on in a veritable art monastery in Pontedera, Italy 1:

The force of gravity in our work pushes the actor towards an interior ripening which expresses itself through a willingness to break through barriers, to search for a “summit”, for totality. The actor’s first duty is to grasp the fact that nobody here wants to give him anything; instead they plan to take a lot from him, to take away that to which he is usually very attached: his resistance, reticence, his inclination to hide behind masks, his half-heartedness, the obstacles his body places in the way of his creative act, his habits and even his usual “good manners”.

  1. As well as many other places. E.g. I marveled at Teatr Zar from Wroclaw a few weeks ago. ↩

5/5/11 in Berkeley: “Artmonk Sangha: the Bay Area’s Ritual Laboratory for Artmonks”

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Based on practices that we have been developing at the January 2010 & 2011 Artmonk Retreats in the Mojave Desert, these weekly (or semi-weekly) meetups will provide an opportunity for anyone in the Bay Area who is interested to explore the path of the artmonk.

DEFINITIONS:

  • “Artmonk”: someone who dwells (alone or in community) at the intersection of contemplation, creativity, and activism.
  • “Sangha”: the Pali/Sanskrit word for a Buddhist or Jain community, and refers either to a community of monks, or to a broader community of practicing individuals.
  • “Artmonk Sangha”: a practicing community of artmonks.

WHEN & WHERE

May 5th, 5:30-7:30pm

1798 Scenic Avenue

Doug Adams Gallery/Badè Museum, in Holbrook Hall,

Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley, CA

http://goo.gl/AR92d

Contact Nathan @ (510) 520-4747

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Immanence

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I’m heading off the grid for a week, but I really look forward to giving this more attention when I get back: ”artmonks: children of Thoreau & Whitehead,” a post by Adrian Ivakhiv.

If Thoreau’s quest to “live deliberately [...] and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” were cross-bred with A. N. Whitehead’s insight that creativity is the driving core of all things in the universe, the “universal of universals,” then today’s “artmonks” are children not of Marx and Coca-Cola (as Godard once labeled the activists of the 1960s and Xiaoping Lin more recently called the Chinese artistic avant-garde), but children of Thoreau and Whitehead.

The monastic ideal has always been about living deliberately. And in a world that is rapidly outgrowing the secular-religious divide — becoming simultaneously post-secular, for those outgrowing the constraints of secularism, and post-religious, or at least post-traditional, for those no longer in obeisance to inherited religion — monasticism today is reinventing itself in interesting and creative ways. “Artmonks” are those who bring a mindful deliberation and dedication to the creative process, following it wherever it leads them. They are the monks of immanence, post-traditional devotees synthesizing the vita contemplativa with the vita activa in an age of Burning Man and the internet.

Ivakhiv lists a handful of outstanding artmonks:

Some others who’ve pursued their creative visions down whatever spiritual rabbitholes they led them include Joseph Beuys, Yves Klein, Marina Abramović, Stan Brakhage, Genesis P. Orridge, David Tibet, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Andrei Tarkovsky, Derek Jarman, Carolee Schneemann, John Cage, Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, Richard Long, Betsy Damon, Mary Beth Edelson, Vito Acconci, outsider artists like Henry Darger and Ferdinand Cheval, and on and on and on.

Theophane the Monk was an artmonk

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Next week I’m heading to the Vedanta Society’s Olema retreat center in Marin County. One thing I’m definitely bringing is Theophane the Monk‘s Tales of a Magic Monastery.

Here’s one of his tales:

There’s a monk there who wears a red robe. I was wondering why, but it was my little son who dared to ask him why. “Mister, why are you wearing that red dress?”

“Sit down, sonny, and I’ll tell you. When I was your age I used to dream about becoming a monk. I knew that monks usually wore white robes, but in my dreams I was usually wearinggreen. When I got older I got my parents’ blessing and went off to become a monk. But I went searching all around for a monastery where the monks wore green. No one had ever heard of such a  place, but I thought surely there was some place that corresponded to my dream. Continue reading →