Sex, Art, and American Culture by Camille Paglia

Author:Camille Paglia [Paglia, Camille]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76555-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-30T16:00:00+00:00

April 26. Sukiya, the Japanese word for teahouse, means “the abode of emptiness.” It uses rugged, hard, deliberately irregular wood, rubbed by hand. Irregularity of this kind is so un-Western. Paglia: Yes, sharp edges, steely surfaces, and mathematical perfection are Apollonian. Yeh says the mud walls of the teahouse are treated like a Rothko painting: every inch matters.

Oriental painters use silk, thin paper, water-based colors and ink, very fragile materials. Western painters prefer canvas, oil paints to assure permanence and lifelike accuracy in their images. Zen paintings were often executed in splash-ink style. Absorbent paper is used, so you must keep moving or the ink will turn into a big blob. There must be an urgency of expression. Speed and determination are crucial. The artist’s intention is to depict the spirit and not the form of the subject. D. T. Suzuki says, “Every stroke of his brush is the work of creation, and it cannot be retraced because it never permits a repetition.”

Yeh shows slides of contemporary art works by Duane Michals and compares them to Zen art: enigmatic, unexplainable, mysterious qualities. She juxtaposes a portrait of Andy Warhol by Michals, a blurry, silk-screened multiple photo, with a twelfth-century Japanese image of a monk’s face in apparent duplicate, splitting down the middle as a Bodhisattva bursts through. The two works are startling in their interpretation of human portraiture.

Yeh and Paglia agree: world art and world religion have eternal themes that appear again and again, separated by continents or centuries. Man’s nature has never changed. Positive and negative forces are at war within us. The distant past holds the key to the present and future. It is up to each person to seek knowledge, not just from books but from ordinary life, from common things. Enlightenment may never be fully achieved, but we must all journey toward it. It is the task of a lifetime.

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