Dimensionally Barrett

From "The Demon in the Diagram" by Matthew Ritchie, Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University Over the past forty-plus years, I’ve watched conceptual art become increasingly multivalent and more accomplished, in terms of bring together multiple disciplines. If Duchamp’s “Large Glass” was the initial point of departure for modern/post-modern works, then installations like Matthew Ritchie’s “The Demon in the Diagram” is an example of one of the points of arrival. On view at Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts, Ritchie’s installation is an immersive experience of the shifting sands of interpreting, describing, and diagramming existence in the world and how reality will win out over our strategies to encapsulate it in words/images. Each strategy we devise to formulate some structure of reality is altered by successive interpretations. Ritchie begins with Hesiod and the adoption of mythology to construct a meaningful interpretation of human experience and c...

Wednesday presented another scintillating evening at the Baker Institute; the focus was on cultural diplomacy and celebrated with a panel discussion between moderator Alison Weaver, executive director of the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Ellen Susman former director of the U.S. Department of State’s Artists in Embassies program as an appointee of President Barak Obama’s and Haruka Fiji and Danny Mekonnen, percussionist and saxophonist, respectively, from the Silk Road Ensemble. The panel discussion and Q and A was bookended with performances from the five members of the Silk Road Ensemble currently in Houston as part of a three year residency at Rice University. Briefly, it was wonderful and a much needed light, particularly during these times. The central question was “what role does art and culture play in modern society, in this increasingly contentious world?”  The answers were thoughtful and inspiring. In a keynote, Eduardo Braniff, the Silk Road En...

Trying to get a perspective/John Barrett It’s not personal, unless we let it be: dealing with the political scene from a Buddhist perspective Today, the President took another step toward authoritarianism by declaring via Tweetthat he has absolute power to pardon himself . Let’s stop there for a minute. He followed this with additional words that rendered his whole tweet somewhat silly. What I want to examine, for the moment, is this idea that our President believes he has absolute power to do something. He does not, but this won’t stop him from saying he does and acting as if he does. What makes this pronouncement extremely problematic, if not outright dangerous, is that the assumption of any absolute in leadership capability paves a path to corruption and, well, dictatorship. I’m not going to weigh in right now on the administration in great detail; I’ll save that for later. What I do want to look at are the consequences of personalizing enmity against a person or pers...

I'm wrapping up a three-month-long project exploring a series of visual analogs/interpretations of the "completion stage"/rDzogs-Rim in Vajrayana practice. The images that follow point to the luminositythat is inherent in the process of dissolving a visualization and reposing in mind-as-such/mind-in-itself/sems-nyid. The completion stage follows the generation or creation stage/sKye-Rim, in which an image of a buddha, bodhisattva, yidam, or other figure is held in mind. The visualizations may be quite complex or quite simple. They may be generated in steps (first a lotus seat, then a seed syllable atop the seat, and so on) or they simply appear to the mind to be meditated on, in the nature of light and therefore, translucent. I've had it explained to me that this is the "shamatha" or single-pointed or calm abiding aspect of Vajrayana practice and indeed, there's much to be said of it and for it, but the completion stage is not often remarked on in...

There are huge blind spots in my knowledge. I’m perfectly willing to admit this. But when it involves events and artists contemporaneous to me, I am astounded at what I’ve missed. In 1977, Philip Glass came across my radar with North Star . My friends and I were in thrall and decided this was among the most horizon-expanding music we’d yet heard (in a year that boasted Bowie’s Low and “Heroes” , Elvis Costello’s My Aim is True and plenty more). In 1978, I got to see Glass perform the suite (it was marketed and packaged as a collection of pieces, but I tend to think of it as a suite) and I was hooked. It wasn’t long before the name Robert Wilson permeated our brains and Einstein on the Beach became a holy grail of sorts. We heard the “Knee Plays” over time and bits and pieces here and there. I confess that I’ve never seen it staged but I’ve seen much of it in different videos and have heard most of it (I’m not sure I’ve heard all five hours); but it’s a major work of...

I've been a little busy in Nepal, to be sure. But Myanmar hasn't been out of my view. With the latest evidence mounting of genocide against the Rohingya, I'm struck by the silence of world leaders to actually do much about it other than censure the Myanmar government. Buddhist leaders have been vocal about condemning the ongoing atrocities perpetrated with involvement and support from so-called Buddhists (seriously, any monk that aids in torture and killing needs to take the fucking robes off...NOW). Aung San Suu Kyi is likewise complicit in this and I'm not interested in discussing what a hard place she finds herself in. Tell the military to stuff it, resign her position in protest and condemn the execution and displacement of hundreds of thousands. These are people and they were citizens until 1982; the regime that changed that didn't have anyone's best interests at heart, by the way, including non-Rohyingya Burmese citizens. But back to the rest of the w...