31 March, 2022 drafts and duality
The work of today was reviewing. Rather than questioning myself what kind of works I want to create, I started question the idea of 'facing', a contrasting position of ego and objects. The idea of thinking without duality (Nagatomo, 2000), occurred to me. Regarding this, I stopped thinking about the staring eyes, and discarded the think of duality, but to take a position as both a creator of an artwork and an audience of this work. Thus, I started to question myself what I want to look at rather than what I want to show. In other words, the non-duality position for me is: audience = creator (artist)
As an audience:
1. I want to understand something that interests me. Something I have never known before. Something that opens my eyes or deepens my understanding.
2. If I don't know the Diamond Sutra (868), what do I want to explore?
a. Its content. How does the book look like?
b. Why such an ancient work still matters to the modern life?
c. Who created it? Why was it [be] made?
d. Why the creator/artist want to make something about it?
e. After viewing and understand[ing] the work, what can I gain?
f. I want to know through a story, rather than taught by the artist, I want to explore, to have a meditation of my own, [and to] rethink [about] my daily life.
This method was followed by the review of works done before. The questions from an audience as shown above quickly reveals the problems of the former works: even though the audience and the artist is the same person, they were not able to answer the questions above.
I also discarded the shift of the two positions, as non-duality refers to the 'neither-nor' pattern according to Nagatomo(2000). When practicing, this pattern is not to deny and demolish everything, but only to demolish the positions, there are no storyteller and listener, audience and creator, but rather the same one.
Based on the questions, I re-examined the aim of my works and try to answer them. For instance:
Beside the mind-map, I wrote: f. I want to know through a story, rather than taught by the artist, I want to explore, to have a meditation of my own, [and to] rethink [about] my daily life.
I thought about a very recent work Appropriate Response by artist Mario Klingemann, which he brilliantly and mildly 'forces' the audience to kneel down in front of a slip-flap display showing an ever-changing sentence within 125 letters. The position looking at the sentence is like believers do in a church. For me, it strengthens the religious atmosphere and wisely exaggerates the meaning of each sentence.
Coming back to my question as an audience: I want to have a meditation of my own, I then ask, how can I achieve this through the settings? What kind of work I can do to strengthen the atmosphere of meditation?
On storytelling, I turned to the Diamond Sutra (868) again and tried to understand it through a simple drawing of it.
1. Nagatomo, S. (2000). The logic of the Diamond Sutra: A is not A, therefore it is A. Asian Philosophy, 10(3), 213-244. https://doi.org/10.1080/09552360020011277
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