Symbols and the Containers for Symbols

by Peter Nagy

Art may always be about art, but the best is also about life and life seems to be about themes which take us in and out of ourselves, on travels far away and ultimately back home again. The circularity of living and the deja vu of life lead us to search for a model of this experience, which may also be its own doppleganger.  

Arlene Shechet has been drawn to the stupa, the primal form of Buddhist architecture, as both a model for the loaded signifier and for the richness it provides to the visual artist. The stupa originally began as a burial mound for relics relating directly to the Buddha. Later it acquired architectural features and even later began to accommodate some sort of interior spaces. Its dynamic is one of circumambulation. The devotee pays homage by walking around the stupa's base in a clockwise direction, conjuring knowledge through experience and serenity through meditation. The stupa is not only a symbol of the body of the Buddha but also a concrete manifestation of Mount Meru (the mythological mountain at the center of' the universe); a reliquary which verges on architecture; a cosmological diagram in three dimensions. The triad of Stupa/Buddha/Vase is also that of Architecture/ Figuration/Decoration, containing all the implications of function and pleasure, permanence and the ephemeral. Today, many of the world's more poignant stupas are little more than heaps of rubble, with a trace of articulation in their details remaining, perhaps with a circular path well-worn into the grass around them. Shechet has transferred this sense of archeological decay onto the body of her Buddhas so that they manifest the passage of time in their own startling of-the-moment guises. Her stupas may be materially absent but they are metaphorically present.  

If the stupa is the Cosmic Egg as well as the Void Form, this seems to be most sensuously realized in Arlene Shechet's sculptures that display objects on top of the vehicles of their making, a pairing of sculpture with pedestal indebted both to Brancusi as well as Judd, and conscious of the serial repetition in Allan McCollum's work. Shechet's objects are strangely ghost-like, in some way resembling the famous pair of Siamese twins from the beginning of the 20th Century, Cheng and Eng, in that short space of an hour or two when one of them had died and the other was still alive. The vases, cast from material which holds the images of their models, balance upon their molds in a Narcissistic pose and haughtily defy the reality of their inability to function. For these vessels, cast from paper, would not hold water but might absorb it temporarily, only to perspire and then secrete, and hence erase, the images of their own inspiration. Paper and pigment masquerade as porcelain and prowess which can easily topple into a vortex containing all Orientalisms, be they near or far Eastern, colonialist or contemporary, dreamed of or lived, all of creation perfectly realized in the exquisite simplicity of a Song Dynasty tea bowl.  

What I like about Shechet's work is how she has taken an architectural impetus and spun it into drawings and paintings which are then spun into sculptures and installations, always fearless to embrace the decorative with a capital B (for Beauty but also for Breton who railed that Beauty should be Convulsive or not at all!). This is all like pink cotton-candy, light and delirious and you can hear the hurdy-gurdy music melting into the screams of children on a hot, overwhelming summer afternoon. Her abstracted Buddhas may be as grotesque as Gothic gargoyles but they are also clowns and remind one of the Hindu concept of lila, (or divine play), for which the world was created as its theater.  

It may be surprising or it may not, but these Buddhas seem to happily accept their lumpen profiles, their unarticulated personas and the surface treatments of a very-late Modernism which Shechet bestows upon them. Like Tibetan monks who are able to create multiple, simultaneous tones during their chants, these lamas long to reside on a circling space station, one which makes moot distinctions of Orient and Occident. Just as her works participate in a dialogue between the fine and decorative arts which was instigated by artists in the 1980s, Shechet's brutalist Buddhas, swathed in skins of pure paint which are both optically aggressive and materially indeterminate, participate in the nascent dialogue of the New Asian Century.  

As this dialogue unfolds, I return to travel as the most useful of metaphors, for its profound effects on not only the creation of art but other endeavors as well, on cuisine, romance, friendship, and compassion. For the ennui of the continents is in the fact that once they were together but now they have been separated. I have not been to Pagan, the abandoned royal city in Northern Myanmar, famous for its stupas, but I can tell you the names of artists who have. But I do remember my visits to Leh, Kathmandu, Sarnath, and Sanchi and my impressions of the stupas I circumambulated there. They are impressions of circles, of one step after another, once completed to be begun again, and the step that most decidedly takes us farthest from our start can only be followed by that which begins to lead us back to our beginning.