Monica Reede worked as a professional artist for over 20 years. Her work as an artist has been recognized through grants and awards including three fellowships from the Minnesota State Arts Board.  She has exhibited throughout the Midwest as well as Arizona and California and is represented in numerous corporate and private collections including Boston Scientific, Princeton University, Sprint Corporation and the Mayo Clinic. Her work has been featured on Minnesota Public Television’s program MN Originals and in Art in America as well as various local and regional print publications. She has made numerous appearances as a guest lecturer at schools and universities and enjoys sharing her experience and practice with students.

Monica began studying and practicing zen in the early 1990’s at the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center in Minneapolis, MN and found art practice and Zen practice to be very complementary. She received Jukai in 2005 and is currently preparing for ordination under the guidance of Ben Connelly. In 2015 she relocated from Minneapolis to Ojai, CA and was fortunate to find her new Zen home with the Santa Barbara Zen Center.

Full Transcript

So, as I said, I want to talk this morning about the history of Zen and the arts. This is a very big topic. Well, two topics, two very big topics. And so I just want to approach this as kind of a start of a conversation. I'll be talking mostly about the visual arts, but what I have to say really can be applied to all the forms of art. And then when we open up for discussion, I want to invite all of you who I know are also many of you are also involved in the arts to share your experiences and your wisdom with the group.

But first I want to just give you a little bit of background of my story. I was one of those kids who always wanted to be an artist. I was raised by a mother who was a talented artist, and although she didn't pursue it as a profession until she retired, she was always drawing and painting around the house. So that's how I learned to draw and paint at a very early age. And I was lucky enough to be surrounded by art and lots of creative people who supported and encouraged me. I continued to draw throughout my middle and high school years. While mostly I kept this work to myself, my art practice became a really stabilizing force throughout the ups and downs of adolescence.

When I went off to college, I made a brief attempt to pursue a practical career in math and science, but by my junior year of college, I'd switched my major to fine art. And then, you know, I graduated with this degree that had little or no practical application. And within a year of my graduation, the art market crashed. So I found myself adrift, and I started working at an independent bookstore and found that filled with lots of people like me, artists, musicians, writers of every type, most of whom were overeducated and underpaid. It was really a great time. Lots of creative inspiration and lots of cross pollination between the different art forms.

And there I had the opportunity to start reading all the things I hadn't had time for in college. And I fell in love with poetry. And of course, I had lots of poets around me. So I was fed a constant stream of recommendations. I first fell in love with Rilke, and then I sought out writers who were influenced by him. But soon I noticed another pattern emerging, and I discovered that many of the poets that I was drawn to were also making some sort of reference to Buddha or Buddhism. I thought this was really interesting, and it led me to take a new look at the visual artists that I admired. And I found through digging through their own writings that many of them were also interested and inspired by Eastern thought. This of course was left out of the textbooks and the history books, so I never encountered it in my formal education.

Around the same time, some of my friends had started meditating and suggested that I take a look at the intro classes at the Minnesota Zen Center. And so I did, and I began to practice Zen. And I soon came to see why many of those involved in the arts have found such a complementary practice in Zen. And the more I learned about Zen, the more I found out that Zen has a special relationship to the arts that differs from other schools of Buddhism. As D.T. Suzuki said, the arts of Zen are not intended for utilitarian purposes or for purely aesthetic enjoyment, but are meant to train the mind, indeed, to bring it into contact with ultimate reality.

So here's my brief history of Zen and the arts. Art relating to the Buddha and the Dharma began to appear around 200 to 300 years after the Buddha's death. These works were primarily either depictions of the Buddha, documentations or illustrations of the sutras, or metaphorical representations of the journey to enlightenment or the enlightened state of mind. There were many forms of art and each culture that encountered Buddhism developed its own style.

When Buddhism entered China, it encountered Taoism with its great appreciation of nature and the arts. And after a few hundred years, the deeply metaphysical Indian Buddhist philosophy was transformed into a very direct and practical practice that we know of as Chan or Zen, which from its very beginning incorporated arts into practice. However, by the 10th century, a shift occurred in what was acceptable subject matter. John Dido-Laurie in his book, Zen and Creativity, describes this by saying, "By the Song dynasty in China, from 960 to 1279 CE, the Zen arts of painting and poetry reached their highest stage of development with the emergence of a novel phenomena. Painter priests and poet priests who produced art that broke with all forms of religious and secular art. This art was not representational or iconographic. It did not inspire faith or facilitate liturgy or contemplation. It did not function to deepen the devotee's experience of religion. Its only purpose was to point to the nature of reality. It suggested a new way of seeing, a new way of being that cut to the core of what it meant to be human and fully alive. Zen art as sacred art touched artists and audiences deeply, expressed the ineffable and helped to transform the way we see ourselves in the world."

So I want to show you a painting from this period. So let me see if I can share my screen here. Okay. Can you see that? So this is Mucci's Persimmons. And Mucci, you know, this is kind of like the highest painting of this period, you know. He's considered a master of this type of painting of thusness. And this is kind of his masterpiece. So I'm going to stop sharing. We can go back. I'll go through the illustrations again at the end, but I'm going to stop sharing right now. See if I can get back to my notes.

When Zen traveled to Japan, it took with it this emphasis on the arts as a form of practice and incorporated art practice into all aspects of Zen training. Most of what we now think of as Zen art comes from Japan and can be traced back to the 16th century tea master and Zen monk, Sen no Rikkyo. It was he who took the artistic philosophy brought from China and developed it into a full-blown aesthetic, which included the tea ceremony, haiku poetry, no drama, ceramics, flower arranging and calligraphy.

Shortly after Rikkyo died, Japan closed its borders because it feared the outside world would have a negative effect on its culture. This self-imposed isolation lasted for nearly 250 years. And as a result, the aesthetic practices that Rikkyo started were able to develop unimpeded to such an extent that they became highly refined and associated not only with Zen, but also with Japanese identity itself.

And so here's a painting. Let me show you a painting from that period of time, which you're probably also familiar with, but let's see if I can get this. So this is Sengai, circa 1800. He's also a master of Zen art, and you've probably seen many of his paintings or calligraphy.

In the 1840s to 1850s respectively, Japan and China began to trade with the West again. And artworks from these countries began to filter into the European market, along with the first translations of Buddhist texts. Just immediately, artists began to incorporate this influence into their work, and you can start to see references to Asian art in the works of the early Impressionists, and later in the works of Van Gogh and Gauguin. These artists were first influenced by the form of Asian art, and then were drawn to the philosophy.

To give some background about the environment in Europe at this time, during the 18th century with the rise of industrialism and the middle class, artists had already begun to shift their subject matter from royalty and religious iconography to everyday life and common people and events. So the pragmatic approach to the everyday that Zen presented seemed to fit nicely into what was already taking place.

Furthermore, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, artists and others in Europe were becoming increasingly disillusioned with the existing political, social, and artistic structures. Western philosophy and logic had proven useless in the face of the brutality of the First and Second World Wars, and had devastated European society. So artists looking for an alternative view turned to Eastern thought.

The Dada movement in particular was a direct response to what was seen as a failed Western system, and they embraced Buddhism and Buddhist ideas. They set out to create art that was anti-art, anti-craft, using common materials and intentionally making no statement or meaning. They even called themselves Western Buddhists, but as far as I can tell, theirs was more of a philosophical attraction and not one of practice.

After World War II, when the center of the art world shifted from Paris to New York, this separation from European standards was heightened, and there was a renewed sense of freedom and optimism both in art and society. Also many servicemen returned from having direct experience with Japanese culture, and the influence spread even more. By this time, some of the first Buddhist teachers had arrived in America, and so we began to see the artist practitioner emerge.

By the 1950s, many artists had begun to see this Eastern influence not only as a philosophy, but as a practice similar to and complementary to artistic practice. To quote Jerry de Pauly from her essay Meditations and Humor, Art as Koan, from the exhibition Transparent Thread, Asian Philosophy and Recent American Art. She says, "throughout the 1950s, the reasons for making art were reevaluated and the creative process analyzed. The notions of tradition and desire were redefined. No longer was art made as directed totally by Western traditions. No longer were works of art to have direct relationship with objects in the sense that they were substitutions for appearances in the visible world. No narrative or didactic process was planned or implemented. No absolute meaning was to be determined. Instead, artists described their preparations and procedures as yogic or meditative and trusted in chance and spontaneity. Many artists made the use of humor or paradox in the manner of a Zen slap, which the master would give to get the attention of the viewer. Artists saw their work as the Zen Buddhist direct pointing, as Suzuki and Watts related on many occasions. When the Zen master points at the moon, the student is warned not to mistake the finger for the moon."

So, as an illustration of work from this period, let me pull up another image. And this is the work of Franz Klein from 1956. Just one of many artists who were influenced at this time. And as a lot of you know, D.T. Suzuki was giving talks at Columbia during the 50s. I don't know exactly when he started, 40s, 50s. And famously John Cage was there, but a lot of artists went, a lot of artists dropped into those classes and have given credit to those talks for influencing their art. Let me see, is there another one? Agnes Martin is another one who attended those talks. This is her painting from 1960 called White Flower.

So, all this is to show that the progression in modern art and contemporary art has been from the representational image to abstraction to idea to experience, similar to the stages of development in Buddhist art. And so, when we approach this work, whether it's the traditional Zen art or contemporary and modern art, when we look at it with the intent to try to figure out what it means, we miss the point. As Marcel Duchamp once said, art is not the thing, art is the gap. In other words, art is what happens when one encounters the object. It's the experience of that encounter. That's what art is.

Some of the 20th century art movements influenced at least in part by Buddhism are Dada, abstract expressionism, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in the Black Mountain School, which also included Cunningham and Cage, pop art, conceptual art, fluxes, performance art and installation art.

And one of the reasons I wanted to share this history with you is to illustrate that we as Western Zen practitioners already have an artistic legacy that's unique to our own culture. And while the traditional arts of Japan and Chinese Zen are very beautiful and inspirational, but we don't have to look to another country or culture to find our practice embodied. We already have a hundred plus years of cultural history in which people have been contemplating and incorporating these ideas into our American way of life.

Another reason to talk about this is to show that one of the many paths that Buddhism took in its journey to the West was through the arts. And like me, many artists, many Americans first encountered Buddhism through their interest in the arts.

So some of the ways that we can bring this into our daily lives and practice, I just want to share some of my thoughts about whether you're an artist or whether you're not an artist. It's really about embodying the spirit. And here I'm just going to share some of my thoughts and then we can, I hope this will spur some of the discussion going forward.

Art like Zen has no practical or functional purpose. Art is about paying attention. Zen is about paying attention. If Zen practice is about realizing our true nature, art practice is about the expression of the experience of who we are and what it means to be human. In fact, art is really the only way we have to approximate a shared experience.

The focused concentration that artists engage in often enables them to fall into a sort of altered state of consciousness, akin to the dropping away of body and mind that Dogen speaks of. When the artist and the action become one, effortless effort.

Art is the practice of failure. Nothing ever turns out the way you envision it in your mind. And therefore engaging in our practice is helpful in training ourselves to let go of our fixed ideas about how we think things should be as opposed to how things are.

Art is a present moment activity. Imagination, as opposed to fantasy, requires that we look at the materials at hand to see what we can make of them.

Art can act as a bridge between our experience on the cushion and our daily lives. It is a way of playing with our experiences and chewing on ideas in a way that's not threatening to our lives or those around us. No one ever died from looking at a bad painting or from making one.

Art is a way to practice consciously creating our lives. As the artist Joseph Boyce famously said, everyone is an artist. And by that he didn't mean that everyone should quit their day job and try to make a living as an artist. It was a statement that recognized that we are all creative beings and that we create our lives and by extension our world in every moment with every action. There's no script for life. Our only choice is whether we're creating that life consciously or unconsciously. When we engage in the arts, we can train our minds to create consciously.

While this consciously conscious creating can occur with any activity, I would encourage to try to engage in some sort of pointless art. I say pointless because when there's no purpose to our activity, we're less likely to get caught up in the outcome and focus on process and not product. You don't have to show anyone, but you will learn something about yourself in the process. And I would also encourage you to take a fresh look at the work of others and engage in that experiential connection, that relationship. You might see something new and again learn something new about yourself.

I'm just going to finish with this quote from Norman Fisher. He says, "we need art as a form of recreation, of recreation of ourselves and our world. A freshening of what goes on day to day in our ordinary living. Victor Shlossky, the Russian formalist critic arguing for attention to formal detail in art said, to make a stone stony, this is why there is art. Art defamiliarizes the familiar and thereby makes it new. Artists know this, but not only artists. We all sense that in looking at the world outside our own personal interests and habits, we can feel something of the divine, of the whole. We can therefore approach our daily tasks with this heightened sense of things. Taking care of our homes, our relationships, our communities and ourselves with attentiveness and love. That is, as if we were artists grappling with our materials." And then he goes on to say that, "Zen probably saved me from myself. Poetry has probably saved me from Zen."

I just want to finish, I want to show you the other images that I have and then open it up for conversation. Here's the Agnes Martin. And then here's a piece by Vesia Salmons. This is from 2007, but she started drawing and painting in the 60s too.

And her early work was just of everyday objects, which kind of became famous for these water paintings and drawing in the night sky. So very simple patterns relating to our everyday life and experiences.

This is a 1955 painting by Jasper Johns, called "The Four Vases." I always think of Johns' targets as kind of an updated Enso.

This is Yoko Ono's installation "Sometimes an apple is just an apple" from 1966. To me, this makes a direct reference to Muqi and Jasper Johns. And of course, this is the exhibition where John Lennon took a bite out of the apple, which has a lot of other metaphorical meanings, but we won't get into that today.

And then to take it into the conceptual realm, this is one of Yoko Ono's instruction paintings: "Painting to see the sky." Drill two holes in a canvas. Hang it where you can see the sky. Change the place of the hanging. Try both front and rear windows. See if the skies are different.

And finally, a poem from Gary Snyder, bringing it full circle to Muqi's persimmons. This is from October 20th, 2008. And he starts with the Dogen quote: "There's no remedy for satisfying hunger other than a painted rice cake." November of 1242.

I know you guys can read it, but I'll read it out loud:

On a back wall down the hall, lit by a single glass door,

is the scroll of Muqi's great Fumi painting persimmons.

The wind waits hanging from the axle hold it still.

The best in the world, I say, the persimmons.

Perfect statement of emptiness, no other than form.

The tweak in the stock still on.

The way they sell them in the market even now.

The originals in Kyoto at a lovely Myoshinji temple,

where they show it once a year.

This one's a perfect copy from Benrido.

I chose the mounting elements myself, with the advice of the mounter.

I hang it every fall.

And now, to these overripe persimmons from Mike and Barbara's orchard,

napkin in hand, I bend over the sink.

Suck the sweet orange goop. That's how I like it.

Ripping a little twig.

It was painted persimmons. Cure cure hunger.

I just want to open it up to conversation and discussion and comments. Wisdom. I know many of you know more about a different thread of Zen art. So, come in and we'll see.