In the Present Moment

Buddhism’s surprising influences on the development of contemporary art.

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Ecological artist Oliver Kellhammer can recall the exact moment he realized he could make other beings suffer. He was about three, playing in a sandbox outside his family’s Ontario home, digging down with a little plastic shovel through the sand to the dirt where the worms lived. “Our favourite thing to do would be to pick up the earthworms, cut them in half with our shovels and watch them wiggle,” he recalls. “We did this every day, and it was kind of like a weird demonic child torture practice.”

One day, his father saw what was happening and pretended to sob like one of the worms, moaning that he hurt from being cut in two. This powerful lesson, which Kellhammer describes as an “empathetic moment,” seems to have set him on his creative path, making art that tries to reduce suffering and speak to the subjectivity of non-human beings.

Kellhammer recounts the story in a just-released book, In the Present Moment: Buddhism, Contemporary Art, and Social Practice, which delves into the influence Buddhist thought has had on the development of contemporary art in North America. One of Buddhism’s central themes, of course, is suffering. The Buddha, in gaining enlightenment, diagnosed its causes – often craving and attachment – and offered advice about how to cultivate equanimity.

In the book, Kellhammer, a professor at the Parsons School of Design in New York City who makes socially engaged art that has encompassed projects on the psychosocial effects of climate change and the decontamination of polluted soil, describes conversations with his wife, Ruth Ozeki, a novelist and Zen Buddhist priest, about the congruences between Buddhism, art theory and socially engaged art. Things like doing good in the world, the ephemerality of human endeavour and “not making art that is about something but is something.” 

The book, a project of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria’s former curator, Haema Sivanesan, now chief curator of Calgary’s Glenbow Museum, is tied to a Victoria exhibition of the same name, expected to open in 2023. The show will draw in part on the gallery’s holdings, which include the largest collection of historical Asian art in Western Canada, as well as work by contemporary artists, many from the West Coast. 

Sivanesan looks to art’s trajectory since the mid-1900s, arguing the influence of Buddhist thought has not been fully acknowledged. She makes a compelling case for its importance in several key strands of contemporary art, tracing linkages through seminal figures like Mark Tobey, Joseph Beuys and John Cage, and suggesting that Buddhism provided artists with “new meaning and a sense of purpose” in their work.

“I consider Buddhism as a methodology of art practice, recognizing the significant intertwining of art, life and Buddhist thought and practice for certain artists in the contemporary North American context,” she writes. Moreover, she says these artists are not simply illustrating Buddhist teachings as a form of representation. “Rather, they use their art practice as a site where they can test Buddhist concepts and teachings and verify their truth in an experiential way.”

It’s a remarkable premise given that religion is such a pariah in contemporary art. To see Christian art, you generally must head to historical exhibitions. If you spot crosses or churches elsewhere, it’s likely in the context of Indigenous art about the horrors of residential schools.

But Buddhism seems to get a pass, its influences evident in work by any number of Canadian artists active today, from visceral painting by David Khang and the embodied sound poems of Nobuo Kubota to meditative drawings by Tomoyo Ihaya, the cosmological imaginings of Howie Tsui or Haruko Okano’s fascinating mural of the compassionate deity Tara. 

The book’s title, In the Present Moment, reflects a key teaching in Buddhism – one popular with legions of stressed-out meditators in the West – to mentally dwell not in regrets over the past or anxieties about the future, but in the evanescent and ever-changing present, the only moment we can ever truly experience. It’s a teaching that has a natural alliance with the embodied experience of making and viewing art, which can take the mind to a calm and focused place where perceptions intensify and vision grows luminous. 

The book includes four essays. Along with Sivanesan’s lengthy historical overview, Lydia Kwa, a Vancouver author and psychologist, looks at three Vancouver artists who consider samsara – the cycle of life, death and rebirth – through a contemporary framework. Marcus Boon, an English professor at York University in Toronto, contributes an essay on art that invokes mandalas, those intricate visual representations of the spatial field of Buddhism’s doctrinal principles. Fascinating here is the work of Coast Salish artist Qwul’thilum (Dylan Thomas), a practising Buddhist who explores common ground between the sacred geometries of Buddhism and Coast Salish design. The final essay is a reflection on social practice by Louwrien Wijers, a Dutch Fluxus artist who connected avant-garde artists of the 1980s and 1990s to important Buddhist teachers. 

One of my favourite parts, however, is the discussion by three socially engaged artists who also work at academic institutions: Susan Stewart, a dean at Emily Carr University in Vancouver; Mali Wu, a professor of transdisciplinary art in Taiwan; and Kellhammer. The immediacy of this section’s conversational tone – it’s a transcript of a discussion at a three-day research event at the University of Victoria on Buddhism and socially engaged art – offers a more “in the moment” experience than the denser writing of the essays, a tendency the book’s ample imagery and interesting premise does not fully allay. After all, when one is dealing with religious philosophy, a parable – even one about tortured worms – can hold much wisdom. ■

In the Present Moment: Buddhism, Contemporary Art, and Social Practice by Haema Sivanesan, 2022. 

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