D A N I E L
B A R B E R
____________________

N O T H I N G
I S
Y O U R
O W N

(TAT TVAM ASI)

1994 - 2000
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Note: The following is an excerpt from an essay written in 2001 and first presented in an altered form at The Art Institute of Chicago as part of the Metropolis: Art in Chicago program.

© 2001 Daniel Barber
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"The discovery by Pythagorus, that vibrating strings, under equal tension, sound together harmoniously if their lengths are in simple numerical ratios, established for the first time a profound connection between the intelligible and the beautiful. I think we may agree with Heisenberg that ‘this is one of the truly momentous discoveries in the history of mankind’". – S. Chandrasekhar[i]



"I believe a leaf of grass is no less
than the journeywork of the stars" – Walt Whitman[ii]



§ Tat Tvam Asi



There is a parable in the Chāndogya Upanişad wherein Uddalakā Āruni is trying to teach his son about the nature of Ātman (the self) and Brahman (the universal cosmic principle). After giving him such examples as seeds split into microscopically invisible bits (“What do you see?” “Nothing at all.” “That is Reality.”) and salt dissolved into water, he gestures to the space around him and says: “Tat tvam asi” – (“that thou art”, or, “this is you”). Ātman is Brahman. He suggests that, on the fundamental level, the object is indiscernible from the subject – “I” am inextricably bound up in the cosmos itself, in all things. A mystic’s metaphysics that seems to erase any notion of free will and autonomy of self, but taken in a poetic sense, the idea has profound resonance with both art and science.

~

When I was a child, the thing I wanted more than anything else was a telescope. I mowed lawns, raked leaves, shoveled snow and did anything else a kid could do to make a little money and, with help from my parents, I was able to purchase a Newtonian reflector – a beautiful machine four feet long with a six-inch mirror. From the day it arrived I spent nearly every clear night for years out in the yard staring at the sky, often until the paperboy arrived at dawn. I gazed at the moons and eddied clouds of Jupiter and the glorious rings of Saturn. I felt like I knew every crater on our Moon. I watched spots drift across the surface of the sun – electromagnetic storms that made the radio crackle and set ghostly pixels dancing on the TV screen. Then I looked deeper – at galaxies, and nebulae – thrilled as I strained the limits of my vision to make out the faint colors and intricate details in the gas. I was in awe. First – at the astonishing beauty of it all. Second – because I knew that as I stared at those distant objects I was looking back in time – sometimes billions of years – at the births and deaths of stars. I developed a hunger for scientific knowledge fueled by transcendent aesthetic experience. I still have that telescope and, despite the city lights, I carry its eighty pounds out onto the porch from time to time and I look again and I look deeply and I am moved. The stars are my kin.

~

My early intention was to go into astrophysics, but I drifted into philosophy and worked a while in broadcasting before finally discovering painting[iii]. (Drawing had always been for me like breathing.) I found that in front of great art I felt the same intensely trembling wonder that I experienced staring at the sky. I wanted to make paintings with that kind of presence[iv].

~

In 1054 ce a new light appeared in the sky. Brighter than the full moon, it was visible day and night for weeks before gradually fading away. People from China to New Mexico witnessed and recorded their observations of this phenomenon.[v] Centuries later it was discovered that what these people had seen was a supernova – an exploding star. The remnants of its destruction are visible now as the Crab Nebula – one of the first recorded nebula and one of the first objects I had sought – and seen – with my telescope.

~

Stars are the forges of the universe. Fusing hydrogen into helium, occasionally on to carbon with most matter locked forever inside. In supernovae, heavy elements are forced violently into existence then spewed into the void of space. Here and there planets form, and on at least one of them life has evolved. Much of the matter on earth, in its rocks and water, its plants and animals, its people and their paints, is the recycled residue of great cosmic deaths.

Tat tvam asi indeed.


§ Altar–Ego

In the Renaissance, particularly of the North, altarpieces were often made with doors that could be opened for particular holidays and closed on other days thus giving the viewer different images to contemplate. I am captivated by these works – not for their religious meaning per se (I am not, myself, religious)– but as metaphors of psychoanalytic investigation[vi] and spiritual struggle.

~

In my recent polyptych entitled, Nothing is Your Own (Tat Tvam Asi), 1994-2000, I have used the structure of the altarpiece as a field on which to play out my own concerns: aesthetic, conceptual, and personal. Closed, the painted doors represent the world out there – beautiful, vast, and distant. Open – an inner world is revealed.

Above a drawn forest on the outer panels is an intensely impastoed image of the Crab Nebula. A potent metaphor for the human interconnectedness with the cosmos, it serves further as a poetic symbol of universal cycles of birth and death. This contemplative and calm-seeming depiction of an inconceivably violent event is countered by the apparent chaos of the polyptych’s inner panels. In a sixteen-hour fugal state – looking at an oddly distorted Polaroid image I shot with a camera at arm’s length and a long mirror propped in a studio corner – a large head (mine) was slathered and scraped onto a text-ridden surface, pushed about with dripping knives and brushes, culminating finally in a liquid distortion of my face[vii]. Later I modified the head a bit and began a long process of coating the background with some thirty layers of thin, transparent blue glazes until the surface glowed – resonating dissonantly with the head. The face is flanked on adjoining panels by various representations of “myself” (an actor, in part: an Everyman) and others embedded in crusty abstract fields. The drawn and re-drawn lines of the figures cut in and out of the painted substance of the bodies both defining and contradicting them. Their flesh in some areas seems palpable and in others the underlying texture dominates, dissolving the figures into the surface. Evidence of conflict and self-exploration is everywhere, particularly in the symphonic tension between disegno and colore that is the essence of my working process. The tension between the expressive abstraction of the space – as in the red fields in the side panels – and the figures themselves fueled a long process of putting down images then destroying and re-creating them. At one impetuous point I even took a power sander to the panels in an archeologically destructive dig through the layers of making only to paint a new image in the resultant depression.

~

As I worked on Nothing is Your Own (Tat Tvam Asi) I met an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago. When I went into his office I saw a poster on the wall of the object he was studying (his muse, of sorts) – the Crab Nebula. We became fast friends. During the summers I often go with him into the desert to ‘help’ a little with his observations. There, in the arid silence, dramatic bursts of high-energy gamma rays peak noisily on his detectors like periodic warning shots from the pulsar spinning at the Crab’s core. One year we went on a long trek into Chaco Canyon. Through valley and stream, up over rocks and hills, we climbed until we finally came to a small reddish image painted on the underside of a cliff: – a human hand, a crescent moon, and a bright star. It’s a record of the very explosion we had both been captivated by – witnessed nearly a thousand years ago by an Anasazi painter.

~

I worked on that ‘altarpiece’ for six years – repeatedly altering the images. Often they spilled intuitively out from my unconscious but at other moments they were shaped by the vaguely universal theme of the hero’s journey into the darkness – into death – in the hope that he emerges a little wiser than when he began[viii]. The consciously referential imagery (to concerns historical, mythological, etc.) served to create a mental scaffold that sustained my focus and allowed the infiltration of unconscious, highly personal meanings that are seen and perhaps understood only over time and with increasing self-knowledge.

~

As I finished this piece I also traveled to Europe. There I saw, among other things, Grünewald’s great Isenheim Altarpiece (The pilgrimage to Colmar – for that’s really what it was – took five train-changes from Frankfurt and inspired my later journey into the desert to see that Anasazi pictograph). In Venice I looked long at the works of the sorcerers of color: Veronese, Tintoretto, and, above all, Titian. In the North, I looked at Rembrandt. I felt like an infant. They had accomplished things with color and texture – its harmonies, dissonance, and rhythms – that I hadn’t even thought possible. The psychological complexity of the works was astounding – as if they had discovered a bypass past conscious analysis and plunged straight into the psychic morass. This fertile humbling led me to deeper investigations and many new works. Among them were Self-Portrait with Telescope; Muse, Symposium[ix]; Hermeneutics; and Sensibility. There was a gradual growth and variance of representational images, a loosening-tightening-loosening of the paint, greater residue of making, and a deeper, more intuitive investigation of others through portraiture.

~

Muse, Symposium, Hermeneutics, and Sensibility all incorporate images of the sea. Like the night sky, the ocean has been enormously important to my sense of self and my connection to nature[x]. I’ve visited the Atlantic and Pacific many times in recent years, as well as frequently throughout my childhood. The sheer somatic joy and near-dissolution of self that I feel near the sea and – most potently – when swimming, is transcendent… yet fleeting.

~

Om Nāda Şanti [xi]













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[i] Chandrasekhar, S. (1987). Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, p. 53. Also very intriguing, regarding aesthetics in art and science, was a talk I attended that the late Chandra gave at The University of Chicago a number of years ago wherein he compared Monet’s series paintings to Einstein’s gravitational field equations describing the space-time geometry in the vicinity of collapsing stars.

[ii] Whitman, Walt. (1855). Song of Myself. From Leaves of Grass.

[iii] While I had little in the way of academic training in painting (Graduate school, my only ‘formal’ art education beyond a smattering of courses in high school and college, was more about ideas than about learning – physically – how to make art). I’ve spent my entire adult life studying art and aesthetics on my own. Everything from the physics of light and the chemistry of paint, to the biology and psychology of perception is important to the painter. A deep examination of materials and techniques is essential. I stress this not only in my studio practice but also in my teaching. Students need to know what this stuff is that they are pushing around – and develop competence in representational and expressionistic skills, etc. – in order to truly explore the possibilities of what to do with it. It should also be obvious that a thorough and ongoing effort at understanding art history and literature, world history, science, etc. – constructing a broad base of knowledge – is absolutely imperative. I conceive of art as the sort of ‘umbrella’ discipline that philosophy has traditionally been – an absorption in and examination of the human condition filtered through a particular individual and manifested as a visual experience. Art should engage the artist and the viewer aesthetically/emotionally – unconsciously – and provide fuel for deep thought.

[iv] “One becomes a painter when existing painted objects do not wholly satisfy one’s subjective unity of feeling, the sense of one’s own identity. Any modern painter’s work is a criticism of the whole culture of painting from the standpoint of his own identity.” – Robert Motherwell. Terenzio, S. (Ed.). (1992). The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell. Oxford. Also in this volume see Motherwell’s essay, What Abstract Art Means to Me (p.84) for his thoughts on abstract painting as a means to “re-wed” oneself to the universe in the light of social absurdity and emptiness.

I painted abstract pictures for years before figures and other representational objects re-emerged in my work. While deeply satisfying to me (though, ultimately, not as challenging or useful as grappling with representation – with its dauntingly loaded history and referential possibilities), the inherent privacy of abstract art and the unfortunate and insensitive public tendency of reducing it to decoration remains troubling. Still – the purity of abstraction (particularly as it relates to my desire for painting to embody experience) is compelling. I have found that, in my work, blurring the distinction between representation and abstraction seems the most authentic approach. Ideologies, as Gerhard Richter has frequently insisted, lead to demagoguery and totalitarianism – and blindness. (“The ability to believe is our outstanding quality, and only art adequately translates it into reality. But when we assuage our need for faith with an ideology, we court disaster.” – Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962-1993. p. 170.)

In retrospect, it seems clear to me that the changes in my own work – its imagery (or lack of it), paint handling, color usage, etc. was and remains a complex and largely unconscious response to changes in my life-circumstances and relationships and my own self-awareness and mental health. Art is an introspective and visceral tool through which my experience is not only embodied (as evidence) but through which change is effected. Clearly art, in and of itself, is not sufficient… but it is necessary. I hope, of course, that this isn’t an entirely hermetic situation. Ideally (perhaps too ideally), the physical evidence of these efforts (i.e. my paintings and drawings) will be interesting and useful (psychologically?) to others. The work of many other artists certainly has been to me.

[v] For information about the Chinese & Anasazi records of the supernova see: Brecher, K. & Feirtag, M. (Eds.). (1979). Astronomy of the Ancients. Boston: MIT Press. Also see Robert Burnham’s wonderful book, Burnham’s Celestial Handbook: An Observer’s Guide to the Universe Beyond the Solar System – volume three contains a highly informative essay on the Crab Nebula, both astrophysically and historically.

[vi] For lively and rigorous discussion of the role of psychoanalytic methods in art making and, especially, art criticism, see the work of Donald Kuspit. Particularly interesting is Signs of Psyche in Modern and Postmodern Art; Idiosyncratic Identities; Redeeming Art: Critical Reveries; The Rebirth of Painting in the Late Twentieth Century; and The Dialectic of Decadence: Between Advance and Decline in Art. (I also benefited from Mr. Kuspit’s challenging approach to contemporary art when he was a visiting professor when I was in graduate school.)

One application of this approach to my ‘altarpiece’ would be to consider the images and the format as analogous to my own psychic struggles. Painting, like psychoanalysis or psychotherapy (though without such a specifically directed purpose) can serve as an arena of self-exploration and revelation. Using Freud’s terms, my ego is sacrificed – annihilated – to quell the painful conflict between my id and my superego. It is subsequently resurrected (reborn, transformed) and momentarily transcends the conflict. The cycle is continued, in a kind of Hegelian dialectic (or Nietzsche’s samsara-like eternal recurrence), when in painting, as in life, this sublime state is revealed to be illusory and the illusion unsustainable. The ego is then re-embroiled in conflict between free-expression and self-censorship. Each death/rebirth is, however, unique because of the transformative nature of experience. Art serves both as evidence of this cycle and as catalyst. The artistic process is inseparable from this state of always becoming. The canvas is a physical battleground on which this largely unconscious cycle is evidenced.

I have experienced this process repeatedly in my own work. Paintings such as Intermezzo: Speakable and Unspeakable, Confession, Einstein Ring, Janus: Eta Carinae, and Turbulence have served as revelations of unconscious goings-on – reifications of my efforts to structure, articulate, express, and comprehend occurrences both internal and external. These paintings were all made during periods of intense artistic activity and frequent exhibiting while in the midst of complex personal conflict. It would be inaccurate and insufficient, however, to suggest that the paintings were about those conflicts. Rather, they are evidence of struggle and intrinsic to it. (As most artists are well aware, personal conflict, however threatening to one’s health and happiness, serves as rich fodder for one’s art.) I have – perhaps somewhat redundantly – tried to make this point clear in various ways throughout this essay.

[vii] “There is no excellent beauty that has not some strangeness in its proportions.” – Francis Bacon (the philosopher, not the painter – though his descendant may well have concurred)

[viii] For an enormously influential exploration of death and resurrection themes see Frazer, The Golden Bough – and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. For a curiously liberal early 20th century spin on Biblical metaphor see Peake’s Commentary on the Bible. (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1919)

[ix] The title, Symposium, is derived from Plato’s dialogue on love and friendship… the images owe something to Dante.

[x] For a beautiful meditation on the relationship of nature to aesthetics and consciousness see Paul Valéry’s Sea Shells. Also, of course, see works by Kant, Bachelard, Dufrenne, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Merleau-Ponty, Neruda, et al. And Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.

[xi] Om: Sanskrit (Aum) ≈ From the Māndūkya Upanişād. The four feet of the sacred syllable, om. (analogous to the various ‘states’ of the self): _A_u_m_

A = Vaisvānara (waking state): conscious, referential, conceptual

U = Taijasa (dream state): semi-conscious poetic reverie, symbolic (in Jungian sense)

M = Präjña (deep sleep): unconscious, instinctual, primordial self

__= Turīya (silence) the unutterable, ineffable, fourth state – blissful-peaceful, non-dual – The silence, in other words, that surrounds and permeates the other three parts of the sound Aum. This last (silent) part is the abiding essence of existence while the other three are fleeting and evanescent.

All said, Om is a manifestation of the Atman-Brahman as a syllable, and symbolic of the creation, manifestation, and dissolution of a universe and the eternal and omnipresent Silence.

I am indebted for much of this definition of Om to Heinrich Zimmer’s great book, Philosophies of India. (Campbell, J., Ed. Princeton: Bolligen Series, 1969.)

Nāda: Sanskrit nāda ≈ sound. In Hinduism, nada is the inchoate or elemental sound considered as the source of all sounds and a source of creation.

Spanish nada, from Latin res nata ≈ nothing; nothingness, non-existence.

‘Şanti’: Sanskrit (Shanti) "...a positive feeling of calm and confidence, joy and strength in the midst of outward pain and defeat, loss and frustration. The experience is felt as profoundly satisfying, where darkness is turned into light, sadness into joy, despair into assurance. The continuance of such an experience constitutes dwelling in heaven which is not a place where God lives, but a mode of being which is fully and completely real." - S. Radhakrishnan (Eliot uses the phrase, “Shantih Shantih Shantih at the close of The Waste Land)


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