Everything is an Open Door
What draws us into this art? Our own desire to see past the surface appearance of things.
I visited the Chihuly Garden and Glass museum in Seattle. In room after room, sea creatures glowed and wriggled, strange flowers bloomed. I was mesmerized by the glass baskets that were inspired by the slumping forms of old Indian baskets.
The artist started with the shape of a basket and expanded it to beyond-basket, drawing vastness from apparent reality. Where is basket? Instead, there is a slumping, moving, transparent form that doesn’t seem solid at all.
Art opens us to emptiness.
In Buddhism, emptiness refers to the quality of all phenomena as not solid, not permanent, and empty of inherent meaning. Everything is interconnected, and dependent on causes and conditions for its existence. There is no such separate, unchanging thing as “basket.”
We filter the world through words, descriptions, concepts, expectations, what we like or don’t like, what we think doesn’t matter. Emptiness does not deny the existence of things, but simply that they are not what we think they are. Other words for emptiness are “vastness,” “spaciousness,” or “potential.” Nothing has a fixed, independent identity. Emptiness contains all possibilities.
After I got home from Seattle, I went to a Grace Hartigan exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Art.
Hartigan rose to prominence in the 1950s. Among her interests was the intersection of abstraction and representation, at the place where the work gelled to yield something deeper. She worked closely with poets to create paintings that sprang from language and that pointed beyond both visual art and words.
What draws us into this art? Our own desire to see past the surface appearance of things.
When the Buddha awoke from the dream we still dream, he saw the ultimate reality of things just as they are. There are shifting appearances and conventions, the manners and traditions of the vast and diverse world; and then there is the mystery of the sheer reality of things. And yet we cannot find this reality anywhere else but right here.1
Everything gestures toward a reality that exists just beyond our ability to describe it.
