Art 7
Presented on: Saturday, May 19, 2007
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come through Art Seven today to appreciate triadic parfait of processes. The first process is always nature and the second process is experience, which because for us it involves language, spoken language and images and feelings, we call it myth and the process of myth is a mysterious deepening of the process of nature. The third process is of vision and vision is a magical process and the traditional name 'Magical' comes from the old term for 'Sage' in ancient Iran, 'Magi.' The most famous magi in Western perspective are the three Magi who visit the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. And those three Magi came from Iran, two of them from villages not far from where modern day Tehran is and the third came from the inner desert plateau of Iran, from Kashan. And those three Magi brought three gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh, because they were very valuable and because the Holy Family could be financed for the number of years for their journey to Egypt, to outlast the death threat from King Herod. So Iranians financed the Holy Family for five years in Egypt with these gifts. And out of this the whole Alexandrian, Hellenistic, wisdom tradition adopted the term 'Magic,' meaning that it was the key transformative trigger that allowed for nature in its mysterious deepening to go through a transformation that made it exceedingly creative for new things. So the magical realm is a realm of transformation. That transformation we will find in our learning has a deepening. Just like mythic experience deepens nature, the process of kaleidoscopic consciousness known as history, deepens the magical transforms of vision, of differential consciousness. And when we come to understand that the kaleidoscopic consciousness of history deepens magic, it deepens the transform and the traditional alchemical way to talk about this is that second transformation is a distillation. The first transformation is a fermentation, the water into wine. The second is a distillation, the wine into Cognac. So the alchemical term was always that one seeks to have a liqueur of the magical elements. The magical elements that are transformed are largely minerals and metals and plants and animals. Four things, with a fifth quintessential thing, man himself. So that with the natural realm deepened into mysteriousness of plants and animals, of minerals and metals, you begin to get then a sense in the alchemical lineages, East and West, both Chinese and Indian alchemy and Egyptian and Irani, therefore Mesopotamian, therefore Greek alchemy, are always pairs of pairs of these transforms. The Chinese alchemical tradition is that you will have in the mineral cinnabar the very excellent understanding of the paired components that go into preparing for a transformation. Cinnabar is made up of mercury and sulphur, two of the great, three great ingredients in world alchemy, salt, mercury and sulphur. And mercuric sulphide, cinnabar, is red and is carvable into bracelets, into necklaces, into earrings, into small jars. And the cinnabar was always brought from only one traditional mountain in China and this was the site like an alchemical volcano of the whole understanding that here we have the ability to really transform the mineral quality of magical nature and out of this one can make a deeper transform and that deeper transform is to develop an elixir. And that elixir deepens the transform into the magical realm, into the realm of eternal life, of immortality. So our learning, our phases, follow the classic wisdom traditions of the planet, East, West, the middle and the far ends. It is extraordinary to have all of this brought together like a series of colourful ribbons. Think of seven colourful ribbons of the rainbow and all of them are tied together into a bow of many colours. Joseph, the son, the prized son of the Patriarch Jacob, was given a coat of many colours. He wore a rainbow coat because he was a dream master in ancient times. He would have lived about 1600 BC. And that coat of many colours still survives in the ancient poetic tradition of the Celtic druids, who ranged all the way from the Balkans to Ireland and the coat of many colours, the rainbow coloured coat, was always a sign of the great bard, the great poet. In our time the great poet who would have worn the coat of many colours was W.B. Yeats, a poetic grandfather of mine. This quality of making a double transformation leads to an understanding that there are thrice greatest qualities: there's good, better, best. There is something which is real and then it is made even better and then it is raised through distillation to the best, it becomes superlative.
We're looking in Art at pairs of great planetary artists who bring out for us the most important registry and that is in-between the two transformations there is a realm of form. In-between visionary consciousness and the kaleidoscopic consciousness of history, are art forms. Art forms include the forms of the spiritual person, the spiritual person, the artist of their own lives. And these forms are not integral forms, they are differential forms. They are not the same kinds of forms as existential things, as mental things, they are prismatic transformers. But what they transform is not the forms of existence and the forms of symbolic thought, they transform the entire cycle of the integral through an introduction of vision, the field of visionary consciousness, into the entire cycle and tease out of that forms which traditionally are called in the wisdom 'Lineages.' East and West they are called 'Jewels,' they are called 'Prismatic forms,' that are able not only to show initially the rainbow that is tied as light, so that one could learn to tie a rainbow and make light for oneself out of one's work of art, out of one's spiritual person, who now creates light in the world where it was not before. It's an enlightenment by having created a light out of what was ordinary, existential stuff, our bodies, or out of the highly indexed and integrated symbolic mental structures. Both those are now transformed into prismatic forms. And so art introduces to the world for the very first time, every time it is made, a spark of light which can later on be shown in its full spectrum, so that art is the precursor of the sciences. The artist makes the rainbow bow of the prism and the prism, when it is used in an analytical way, opens up the full spectrum, which is then scientific forms. And so one has a very powerful interest in just how great artists matured themselves to be able to do this most fantastic function. They take the universe and make of it a cosmos. They project out into their works of art, into their persons as artists, the capability of others then to see through their works, to see through their lives in just this way. What opaques this is a mentality that refuses to let the symbols be transparent. And the time-honoured way of talking about this is just the colloquial way, that someone is 'Blocky,' their mentality is 'Blocky.' You can't...they can't see through it and because they can't see through it they suppose that no one can see through it, that no one's mind is transparent. Or as Sri Aurobindo once said, 'The mind of light,' that no one has this mind of light. And yet everywhere that you look in wisdom traditions around the planet, there have been men and women who have been able to make the entire mind, all of their symbolic thought structures, completely transparent and when one looks through this transparency, every looking is creative. And to extend the duration of that creativity is the whole point of refinement and of raising art to really great art, not only world-class art, but cosmic-class art.
We're looking at Georgia O'Keeffe and Ch'i Pai-Shih as exemplars in the twentieth century of artists who lived almost 100 years, a Western woman, an Eastern man, who understood each other's realm. Georgia O'Keeffe understood the East Asian aesthetic and Ch'i Pai-Shih understood the Western, European aesthetic perfectly well. But in their own lives...which we're intertwining here to show that there is a planetary culture that is available, so that the mysterious experience of myth now deepens and expands itself so that it becomes a planetary culture. And this allows for an alchemical fermentation to take place, so that one has now a planetary vision of the entire world being transparent and available. And out of that if one can position one's own prismatic form of person through art that one cherishes, through artists that one keeps alive in one's life, throughout life, what comes out of this then is the spectrum of something which is a distillation of that planetary culture and that is a star system civilisation. One of the most beautiful little phrases from Georgia O'Keeffe was in a letter that she wrote and this was oddly enough just a few days before the Pearl Harbor attack, January...December 7th 1941. She was flying from New Mexico to New York and she looked out the window and she wrote these words in a letter to a friend:
It is breathtaking as one rises up over the world one has been living in. It is very handsome, like marvellous rug patterns of baby abstract paintings. The world all simplified and beautiful and clear-cut in patterns like time and history, will simplify and straighten out these times of ours. What one sees from the air is so simple and so beautiful, I cannot help feeling that it would do something wonderful for the human race, rid it of much smallness and pettiness if more people flew.
The view from a plane in late 1941 became in the late 1950's the kaleidoscopic expansion of Sputnik going up October 4th 1957, just 16 years later. And very soon after that, Yuri Gagarin going up into orbit for the first time, the first human being not only to look out of a plane at the landscape without borders below, but to look at the entire planet as a single unity and to see the planet suspended in an infinite, velvety space that includes all the stars and these stars, one has to understand, are all various colours. They're like a sprinkling of rare jewels and the visage from space of the earth set in the Milky Way is of enormously evocative power and quality. It's not played up, but most of the astronauts who currently are on the International Space Station, have difficulty going to sleep at night, not because they're not tired and not because they could sleep, but because they have a few moments of relaxation from the over-burdened schedule of everything to just look out the windows and to behold the earth in its visionary wholeness and to let that penetrate, to be able to see that this earth in its visionary wholeness is suspended in heaven and that the heavens are full of jewels without end. From the earth at any one time the most stars that you could see with the naked eye is about 6,000, from orbit you can see about 6,000,000. And when you get beyond the range of the glow of the earth, further out, you can see more than 6,000,000,000 stars. It is a graphic jump in powers, it is an ordinal journey that men and women are now doing, are now taking and this is the kind of maturation that does not lead to having a job, a position, in some kind of mental structure called a political economy. To use that as a tool, but to not let yourself be commandeered by the tools into a machine quality of simply being the tool user, but to be the creative person in a much larger fermentation, in a much more cosmic distillation.
The interesting quality with someone like Georgia O'Keeffe is that she mixed together, very, very quickly, the artists that we're taking in our Art phase, especially Frank Lloyd Wright and herself and Max Ernst and the Interval artist Kandinsky. And with those Henry Moore is also brought into play and if we can braid as we are doing now, the East Asia great tradition of Hiroshige and Ch'i Pai-Shih, we get the sense for the first time that this is the kind of art of learning that makes a jewel complex enough, with enough facets, for us to be able to begin distilling our vision into a kaleidoscopic new history. One that has never been lived before, but is already in process, already in play. 50 years from now this will seem so much a matter of ABC's because it will be a part of everyone, not only on this planet, but wherever they happen to be exploring in the star system. By 2057, 100 years after Sputnik, there will be men and women ranging out at least as far as Jupiter and perhaps as far as Saturn. The moon will certainly be inhabited by groups of people. Our quality is that we are artists in a very particular kind of rare time, when all of the processes are aligned together and when they're aligned together they do not all flow in the same way. Experience flows with nature, but visionary consciousness weaves with nature and historical, kaleidoscopic consciousness open up the mythic process of experience. So that one's image base becomes literally kaleidoscopic, one's feeling toned range becomes cosmic.
There was a time just a little over 200 years ago when for the very first time a young man in Salzburg, Austria, named Mozart, wrote compositions that expressed a new range of human feeling that had never, ever been felt on the planet before. He called one of these compositions Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, music for a fantastic, jewel-like, twilight adventure into a new kaleidoscopic night-time, that one could really begin have to a range of mysteriousness in one's own life, that this was exploring something completely new. And out of this eventually came compositions as cosmic as The Magic Flute, which we use in our learning. It was only 100 years after that, that another Austrian, Viennese composer, Arnold Schoenberg, wrote a composition called Transfigured Night, where he took the Mozart and he deepened it and distilled it, so that for the very first time, right around 1900, the musical experience became not only mysteriously transformed by the magic of a great artist, but the play of that magical, musical form was shown to have an analytic spectrum that led to the development of a 12 tone system of composition. And the discovery that there are not just a couple of musical scales, but that there is an infinite number of musical scales. The cosmos literally has music without end. Any angels singing in a real heaven will have a repertoire that is endless. What nightingales.
Here is a couple of pages selected out from Full Bloom, this biography of Georgia O'Keeffe and it just gives you a sense for the first time I think of something at play at the way in which, just in a page or so, Georgia O'Keeffe touches upon not only herself and her deep distillation that was coming out, but on Frank Lloyd Wright and on Max Ernst and on the whole development of modern art. This is 1941 at the end and just at the beginning of 1942.
Shortly after O'Keeffe confessed to hopes for the human race, Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbor at sunrise on Sunday December 7th 1941. In less than two hours the Navy lost eight battleships, three cruisers, many other boats and 2400 men dead immediately. Ten hours later a similar attack surprised General Douglas MacArthur and destroyed half the US Air Force in the Philippines. America was jilted out of its isolationist resistance.
This is an important thing, not simply because it is an historical moment looking back and of interest to us now looking forward, but the blocky mentality that lards this world now with this kind of resistance. It is an isolationist resistance that grinds up human beings into believing that they are individuals in here, instead of being prismatic in a whole range of possibilities of their being, including not only auras and vibrations of resonance that go out every which way all the time. We are not simply in here. That in here is not cut off from the vast out there. If anything, we are like portable frames of reference showing that the focus here is able to flow through us and this is the refreshment of nature. The refreshment of nature is to let it blow through our lives, through our being and we are refreshed by this. The participation with nature is not a participation in nature, but a participation of letting nature be, let its naturality occur. Many human beings have discovered what Benjamin Franklin discovered as a mature man when he lived in England in the 1750's. When he would get up in the morning he would get up nude and sit quietly in a meditation to expose himself to the fresh air and the sunshine and this was how he greeted every day, to let himself be as natural as possible. And the insight for that fresh air, sunlight, nude bath, was that having crossed the Atlantic Ocean several times, starting when he was 19 years old, he was unafraid of the ocean as most people were and he used to dive off the ship and take his morning swim in the ocean alongside of the ship. And so he used the Atlantic Ocean as a swimming pool and in doing so he noticed that the water temperature was different in different parts of the Atlantic Ocean. He would take samples and measure the temperature and that's how he discovered the Gulf Stream. That there's an enormous river running through the Atlantic Ocean and he was the first person who had enough nature experience and visionary insight and kaleidoscopic, conscious development to be able to put that spectrum into an analytic and to put an art form of the person into an expansion where you would have a whole continent of people who were free to be in whatever way they could. One of the keys to this is that the Americas of that time, especially North America, was one of the last places on the planet where Palaeolithic human beings still lived. The indigenous American Indians, while many of the tribes had achieved a Neolithic status of culture, many of them were Palaeolithic. Especially the Indians of the eastern woodlands and of the northern forests of the Prairies, you found there the kind of men and women that you would have found anywhere in the species 50,000 years ago. Let's take a little break and we'll come back.
Let's come back and let's come back to a quality of realisation that goes further. The integral that the mind brings into form is a halfway place, but in the cycle of integral the mind is incapable of knowing this in itself. And so the classic way to speak about this is that you have to be woken up, not out of sleep so much, but out of a very high level of super-sleep and that super-sleep is like an anaesthetisation. And only by someone reaching in some way to you and you in some way meeting that reach, is there a connective resonance that is initiated, but then the flow of reiterating that, of encouraging the iteration of that, that it grows and the resonances will collect into sets and the sets will collect into a scalar of a harmonic. And it is true that it is self-organising. You do not have to know how to design the cosmos to be cosmic, but you do have to participate in a transform and then make yourself available for a refinement of that transform. And all of this is extremely difficult to do.
Let's come back to late 1941, early 1942. Georgia O'Keeffe was having an exhibit of her New Mexico paintings in New York City in February of 1942 and no one paid any attention to it whatsoever. 'Hardly any attention was paid to O'Keeffe's exhibition of timeless red hills and soaring white cliffs at An American Place in February 1942. To most people landscape painting seemed irrelevant in the worldwide struggle for democracy.' Much like our current situation where a yoga of civilisation as sophisticated as this has very little interest currently, not because it doesn't have interest, but that those who would be interested are anaesthetised. There is a great deal of difficulty in realising how complex the layering is for it. For one thing, the rituals are co-opted by an economic system. The myths are scrambled by various movements and the symbols are compacted into a kind of a cement by political ideologies. A very great book appeared in the 1930's, called The End of Ideology. A sociological look at the theory of ideas that had by the time of the Nazi takeover in Germany, the Imperial militant takeover in Japan, the Fascist takeover in Italy and the gloomy outlook for an impoverished United States in the middle of the Depression, it looked like the failure of civilisation that it was. Our concern here is to follow pairs of pairs, of pairs, that allow us to get back into a tunable quality of ourselves and comb through with this tunability in such a way as to unsnarl the tangles on all of the levels, all of the same time. The difficulty is that one has to have a facility with the entire double cycle of this learning, as if you had learned your ABC's, learned how to count and do it well enough that it no longer has to be consulted, it's just there as a facility. All great artists...and this is a work of art, this education. It's a very large work of art; its cycle is 14 times The Ring of the Nibelungen cycle of Wagner. It takes two years for a performance. The interesting thing is that as you go through and acclimate yourself patiently by learning your alphabet, by learning your counting, it facilitates an enormous development. There was a time in 1952 when only two human beings in the world were able to put a model of the double helix together, in Cambridge, England. And now there are 100,000,000 people dealing with the outcomes of being able to understand what the double helix structure and process means for our kind, for our life. The Molecular Biology of the Gene in its first edition in the early 1960's was a simple little paperback. Now in the sixth edition it's two big hardcover volumes. And the proliferation, the expansion, will be the same with this learning.
We're looking at someone like Georgia O'Keeffe and Ch'i Pai-Shih because the interplay of male and female, of East and West, of tunable contemporaries whose lives and art spanned almost 100 years and the connections that they had with themselves...for Georgia O'Keeffe the connections were that she was a focus of the art world because her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, was one of the central gallery operators in the world. He was one of the most conspicuous art gallery connoisseurs in New York City, in the world and it was a gift to world civilisation that he was also one of the greatest of all artists in terms of photography, the art of photography, one of the founders of it. Next week, when we come back for a reprise of Georgia O'Keeffe we'll see that her friendship and marriage over decades to Stieglitz, prepared her to be able to have a very special artistic relationship with the greatest artist in photography up to date, the American Ansel Adams, whose landscape photographs rival the greatest landscape art of all time across the planet. We're looking here at this Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O'Keeffe. Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, who was...she was kind enough to sign this copy, writes it this way: 'Here she is, sitting in New York at the top gallery in New York'...An American Place was Stieglitz's great bringing together of the focus of world culture and civilisation in New York City, on Fifth Avenue.
Peggy Guggenheim returned from Europe that year with her lover, the artist Max Ernst and opened The Art of This Century gallery on 57th Street. Designed by the architect William Kiesler, the gallery is outfitted with curved wooden walls and prongs for hanging paintings. Art of This Century soon became a sanctuary for the many surrealist and abstract artists who fled to New York from Europe.
It was as if the cream of the artists and the sciences of all Europe, suddenly fleeing from the tyrannies, collected on this spot where almost all of them initially came and most of them stayed...was New York City. So that you had a New York which was already dynamic, already an incredible focus and environment of excellence. It was as if the distillation of an entire generation of the planet's excellence was put in one city, one place, New York, New York. And the most conspicuous there was Stieglitz's gallery and the Guggenheim family, not just Peggy, but especially Solomon R. Guggenheim, whose museum Wright would build in New York and set the tone for something fantastic. Peggy Guggenheim's gallery, built by Kiesler, did not have perpendicular walls, but curved walls, so that the pictures would sort of hang, almost like swung out. And the first exhibition of the surrealists there, the gallery had no lights, they were all turned off, so it was completely dark and those who came through the art gallery were given little flashlights to go and shine these lights and while they did, these macabre jungle sounds, hoots and howls, were playing over loudspeakers in the darkness. And so this was the beginning of the smash hit and the star of that was Max Ernst. And once we get to Art Nine, Ten, 11 and 12, we'll take Max Ernst and Henry Moore, as our last, our third pair in the Art phase, to prepare us for the development through Interval Six, to go into the fantastic kaleidoscope of historical consciousness, which is not at all what most people would assume. It's far more grand. History is the bridging function between art and science. It is the way in which the artistic spirit person deepens through a civilisation into a cosmic harmonic. The person and the cosmos are related through a kaleidoscopic spectrum of consciousness. 'The Art of This Century soon became a sanctuary for many of the surrealist and abstract artists who fled to New York from Europe.' Andre Breton, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dali, Fernand Leger, Roberto Matta, Piet Mondrian, Yves Tanguy, on and on. Their influence on the development of American art, especially the abstract expressionist movement, would be profoundly felt for the next 20 years, even more. 'In May, O'Keeffe travelled from New York to Madison, Wisconsin' - the capital and where the University of Wisconsin is - 'To collect an honorary degree from the University of Wisconsin. As poignant as her triumphant return to Madison was, her visit to her octogenarian aunt, Ollie Totto, who had funded her degree from Teachers College'...she'd been largely cared for by this aunt, now in her eighties, who lived there in this part of Wisconsin and still lived in the neighbourhood where she attended high school. 'During the visit O'Keeffe also took up Frank Lloyd Wright's long-standing invitation to visit his architectural studio, Taliesin, Spring Green.' It's about half an hour's drive from Madison, west, just on the other side of the Wisconsin River, kind of a largish river. 'Although Wright was 20 years her senior, O'Keeffe sensed a kindred spirit and both artists came from the same district of Wisconsin.' She was born in Sun Prairie, he was born in Richland Center and you could almost hike between those two places.
Both were inspired by the symbolists, by William Morris' Arts and Crafts Movement and Japanese prints and both held consistently similar views about art and design. When Wright said that he had a vision of nature more natural than nature itself, he seemed to describe O'Keeffe's paintings. O'Keeffe spent a productive afternoon at Wright's home in Madison.
He also had heavy connections with Madison and it was during this time that he was designing a very special church that would be built, then on the outskirts of Madison, today it's well within the city limits of Madison. The First Unitarian Church was built like hands held together, not in a prayer of beseeching, but held together in a confirmation of blessing. And the great First Unitarian Church is built in this way, with huge glass atrium type shape that looks out towards...Madison is in-between two great lakes, Mendota and Monona. And the capital building is right in the centre and the University, with its big buildings, is nearby it. So the whole composition of Madison is rather startlingly architectural. I saw a performance in the late 1950's in that First Unitarian Church, of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken, one of the most esoteric, spiritual plays ever written. And that play was once described by someone, 'As if there were 100 wise men feeling the parts of enormous mystery and they were trying to find a way to talk with each other to find out what it really was.' And so the play When We Dead Awaken is extraordinary and in that setting you really got the vibration that works of art, within works of art in artistic lives, has a palpable quality to it. There is a kinaesthetic resonance literally in the ribcage, in the skeletal structure, as if now your skeleton is not just holding up your form, but is a condenser collecting the energies. And that the tissue now becomes radiated by a quality of luminescence, the body of light and the mind, the brain, the neural system, that indexes and integrates this, is suddenly flooded with something that forces open the mind into insight, into the openness of a visionary experience. And having come away from an artistic performance, having come away from really getting involved in a work of art, be it a painting, a sculpture, architecture, music, that quality now nourishes as a field the sourcing of the spiritual form of the person. And that person, as they emerge more and more in that quintessential, five-dimensional iteration, that fifth element, like the thumb, allows for the facility for the hand now to become expressive. It not only can cling and dig, or even just grasp, but now it becomes capable of mudras, capable of all kinds of expressions. And the quality now expressed in the ancient Taoist energy cycle, the five, the pentatonic cycle, Tao, Tê, Chi, with Jen and I in-between. The Tao as the beginning, the Tê as the emergence of existence, the Jen as the pairing of Tao and Tê together, the I as the symbolic integration and the Chi as the energy of visionary, differential consciousness that now comes into play. And the very first thing it does in its freedom, it flows back into the Tao and makes it magical. When there is a magical Tao, now everything that exists is transformable, all of it is alchemical. It is not limited to its physics, to its chemistry, to its biology that were there courtesy of its initial nature. All of that is there, but all of that is now open for transformation. The last great book on alchemy was written by the great Nobel Prize winner, Sir Ernest Rutherford. He wrote it in 1937, called A Newer Alchemy, right at the end of his life. Because he realised that the nuclear capacity for transforming elements was within reach of man; now one could literally turn lead into gold and many, many other more miraculous, magical things. When she was there with Wright, they talked about the experience of the American Southwest. Wright had taken the time to go back by 1936, '37, to try to touch something in the American Southwest and establish Taliesin West, outside of Phoenix, Arizona, whereas Georgia O'Keeffe, her quality was northern New Mexico. And there is a little bit of a difference between Arizona and New Mexico. Arizona has an impress that one must be conscious of a sliding scale. In the quality of northern Arizona you get Indian lands like the Hopi and the Navajo and as you go further south you get into the lands that have now cities like Phoenix, all the way down to Tucson and it is really easterners who have come and made a home for themselves, much based on the East Coast, ultimately European, model. Whereas in the north, Indian America is very much still there and the further south that you go in Arizona, the more that the swathe of East Coast European influence begins to play out until you get to the border with Mexico, with Sonora. And you get the quality where this is the end of that whole play; it fans out into the immensity of Mexico. Whereas in New Mexico the borders at the top are very mountainous: coming over the main highway through Raton, you rise and rise and rise from Colorado and generally the sense is that you're passing through a very high gate passageway, that has birds singing in the midst of thunderstorms that are looming, the Land of Enchantment. And as you go into New Mexico, the farther that you go the sense of enchantment begins to plunge from the high, mountainous north, down into the complexities of an Indian America centre and towards the south they begin to plunge and go underground. So that while you will enter in by say, the Raton Pass, by the time you get all the way through New Mexico, through the mysterious southern deserts, they plunge underground and you have the most complicated cave systems in the world. Carlsbad Caverns, the Lechuguilla Cave System, which have been shown now to be linked together and you get the sense that New Mexico plunges into the netherworld. Enormous mysteriousnesses. Whereas Arizona fans out and becomes something of an open, new place of romance and adventure and difficulties. Northern Mexico is very difficult to negotiate, especially 60 years ago. It was this quality that Wright loved. It was a New Mexico quality of the north that Georgia O'Keeffe loved. And their art showed a very interesting development. I showed last week one of the New York paintings. This one is the Radiator Building in New York, 1927, by Georgia O'Keeffe. And you can see that her New York skyscrapers are full of big city mystery. The challenge of completely new qualities of human adventure and human life. The two years later...this painting is called At the Rodeo in New Mexico and you can see that some enormous change has come over the artist. She now is painting the kaleidoscopic eye prismatic, by which she has seen and what she has seen, she has weathered through a period where more and more distance was accruing between her and Stieglitz. He became enamoured and involved with a young woman named Dorothy Thompson, who he was photographing and she was having a lot of difficulties. And finally by 1929 it was apparent to her that she had to refresh herself, to refine and refound herself and she found it in New Mexico. And the very next year, 1930, you begin to have a painting, sometimes it's called White, sometimes Light Iris, the Iris of Light. One of the great critics of the time, art critics of the time, said, 'At last we have a painting by a woman who paints as a woman.' She is not a woman who has been taught by men to paint, she has taught herself to paint out of her deep femininity and the Iris of Light is this kind of gorgeous fulfilment. Along with it is the sense that in this world, this gorgeousness has a challenge. The bones of fossilisation left over and yet if the artist is still spiritually intact, one can see the sky through the bones. When we get to Henry Moore in a couple of weeks, we'll see that the holes of Henry Moore, like the spaces of Georgia O'Keeffe, showing especially that two forms open up to the context of openness. The first form is the body of a woman, herself. Her body is open to live, it is open to the concourse of nature and natural cycles and her relationship with a child, mother and child, is again an interesting expansion of that capacity, of that body of opened experience.
When we come to someone like Ch'i Pai-Shih, he has a Far East civilised, masculine quality, but it was tempered by an enormous array of experiences. When he was born, January 1st 1864, China was still a...very much a peasant land, under a domination of a series of what were called treaty ports on the Pacific Ocean, run by the various European powers. Within 35 years of his birth would be the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 against the European powers, that was unsuccessful and began to breed a distrust in the time-honoured power structure of Dynastic China. And by 1911 that entire 2,200 year structure collapsed and the Republic of China was born and soon as it was born it was like a helpless youngster that the powers surrounding China wished, especially Japan and Europe, to come in and cut up the pie. When Ch'i Pai-Shih was ten, a girl was adopted into their family who was to be his wife. They weren't married for eight more years, but he literally grew up in the ancient peasant system in Asia, where your wife is the tuned friend of your entire life. That you are raised together, you are not just to meet, but that you together meet whatever circumstances there are in life. When he was only two, one of his grandfathers began taking a stick and drawing in the dirt the Chinese characters so that he could begin to learn to read. And by the time Ch'i Pai-Shih was able to start to read well enough, his maternal grandfather was the teacher in the school and he became exposed to the enormity of classical Chinese literature. The Chinese word for it is 'Wen,' the literary tradition. And as a youngster, by the time he was about eight or nine years old, he was already beginning to draw, to make paintings. And then he was apprenticed many, many times to various other artists, to craftsmen. He learned wood carving, so that one of the later stamps he used on his artworks was 'Woodman.' Or he learned to do a number of things through his aged grandfather, so one of his seals was 'Old man Baishi.' Now, 'Baishi' in Chinese means 'White stone' and 'Qi' of course is 'Energy,' so his name is 'White stone energy.' And as he matured and grew in this situation he was not allowed to stay in school so much - he could be taught by the grandfather in the home - one of the tasks he had was to look for a water buffalo grazing, the family water buffalo. And in the pages that I have put out for you, there are four pages on a series of paintings on the water buffalo. This one is just the water buffalo by some willow trees and later on you will find there is one of a little boy leading the water buffalo along and then pretty soon there is one of the little boy riding the water buffalo. And then the last one in the series there's no water buffalo and the complicated harnesses and traces are left empty. This is very much a presentation of the classical Zen sequence in Japan by Tak Wun, called The Ten Ox Herding Pictures, which is the quintessential sequence of Zen presented in paintings, ink paintings, and Ch'i Pai-Shih reiterates and brings this back together. As soon as he had this capacity, was married, began to realise that his painting was extraordinarily talented, he began in 1903, through 1909, to take a series of five long trips. Almost every summer he would take himself on great [1:10:11 swathes] of China, great soirees and keeping a sketchbook all the time and when he came back in 1910, he put together an enormous album. He developed all of his sketches from the five long travels into a volume called Borrowed Mountains. And Borrowed Mountain Scenes is one of the greatest Chinese works of art of all time. It is an incredible, impressive quality of taking the great landscape tradition of China and also working into it the quality of a portrait of the artist, without having to show the artist's features, by showing how the artist looks at mountains and streams without end. The portrait and the landscape are mediated by a membrane that in art is called the 'Nude.' You can be naturally in your existentiality naked, but in order to be nude, you must be aesthetically seen. It is a six-dimensional composition, instead of just the four dimensions of existence. And next week we will look deeper and deeper into the relationship between the portrait, the landscape and the mediating nude. And one of the most incredible figures in all this was Georgia O'Keeffe. More next week.