rein raud: the artwork as mandala

As it is well known, the notion of art has in recent decades undergone a profound transformation. The definitions of art that have obtained in the European cultural context at least since the Renaissance and that already came to be rather stretched by the avant-garde movements at the change of the last century now seem to be no longer valid at all, whereas no such new definitions have emerged which would at the same time encompass the artistic practices of the traditional past and embrace the new forms of art characteristic of our times. This paper is motivated by this lack. Even if iconic representation still remains one of the basic elements of modern art, it has long since passed beyond the borders of the ‘pictorial’. In spite of this, the ‘picture’ still remains the grounding metaphor for works of visual art. My aim is to argue for an alternative to this notion from a rather theoretical point of view.
We live in a world which is always already structured for us by commonsensical logic. Instead of seeing it merely as a chaotic arrangement of shapes and shades, the majority of people perceive their surroundings as objects and processes, and feel comfortable in an environment where they know how to call most of the things they see. But this kind of seeing already contains more than plain perception. What we call ‘seeing a red ball’, for instance, entails seeing something and the reflection that this something is an object of the ‘ball’ variety and has the property of being ‘red’. These observations do not actually bring us closer to what we see, but rather the opposite. In fact, we can ‘see’ only reality; the very first effort to reflect on it distances us from reality itself and only enables us to operate with representations. Anything we can name ceases to be merely a brute fact of the outside world, but is also integrated into our internal system that contains all the languages that we can use for the purpose. William James has coined for our initial and unstructured contact with reality the term ‘pure experience’ (qv. James 1904/2000: 314-36), implying that our normal, structured perception is somehow ‘impure’ or contaminated by the cultural languages we use, but indeed it seems that this ‘pure’ experience is something not usually available to the perceiving mind, at least not for more than a brief flash, before the socio-cultural mechanisms for encoding and decoding our reality set in.
In this sense, art, too, is a continuation of seeing. Although the artist - for instance, a painter like Kandinsky - can claim to transmit to us a more or less ‘pure’ vision of reality, it is always the artist’s reality that gets transmitted, and the act of transmission necessarily presupposes encoding and decoding, that is, representation. The language that the artist uses may have been devised by him/her for his/her own exclusive use and may take great effort from our part to be interpreted, but it is nevertheless a language.
However, there is a crucial difference between the common view of orientating ourselves in the seen environment and artistic representation. In Western cultures it is normally supposed that non-artistic representational languages maintain a stance of objectivity. When we speak about things it is assumed that everybody sees or understands these things more or less in the same way and what we say is not supposed to be valid only ‘here and now’, at the given moment in time and space where we are. When we speak, we raise ourselves out of this world and look at it from the outside, from a place where we are not, and the gaze with which we see the world does not belong to us exclusively. When we learn to represent, we adopt a point of view that is not situated anywhere and therefore, in the ‘real’ world, does not actually exist.
In art, however, as opposed to the allegedly untainted common view of things, the gaze of the perceiver is explicitly inscribed already in the act of seeing. The structuring language is not one supposedly shared by all its users, but a particular, idiosyncratic one that may choose to suspend some rules and establish others. Moreover, a gaze is necessarily situated in the world, while the common view pretends to objectivity, a certain independence from the conditions that artistic ‘situatedness’ entails. The observer of an artwork cannot possibly escape this initial condition. The observation of an artwork thus necessarily depends on the gaze of the artist, also when the artist has made conscious efforts to minimise this effect. This can be done, for instance, by conforming to the mainstream languages that have already been learned by most potential perceivers who are then able without much effort to adjust their vision to the gaze of the artist. The sellers of kitsch views who offer their product around many sites of touristic interest everywhere in Europe are trying to do precisely this: to anticipate the gaze of the tourist and to offer the buyer his/her own, artistically encoded and corrected perception of the place.
All of this goes for all cultural languages, not only those used by visual arts. But all other channels of perception are more obviously dependent on encoding and decoding mechanisms than seeing, which is why iconic representation is more easily able to claim objectivity. There are, in fact, two extremes in the mode of iconic representation: the map and the picture. Both these terms are here used in a metaphoric sense, thus, for instance, both maps and pictures can be three-dimensional. The map is a representation of the relations between things as they supposedly are in reality, the distances between them and their relative significances. In order to give us a more exact rendering of reality, the map necessarily has to use symbols and simplifications. Note that the simplification of reality is necessary precisely for the exact transmission of the map’s content and is not a compromise: it is just that the content of the map is not reality as it is, but reality that has already been structured in a certain way, by a certain gaze that we sometimes call scale. Cities become small circles or points when seen from a sufficient distance, and intersections with streets one could normally walk by without noticing do not appear on city plans either. This is because the idea of the map is not to give us a precise picture of reality, but a structured one. An absolutely precise map would have to be as big or even bigger than reality itself - bigger, because in addition to reality itself it would also have to contain the structuring principles that have called it into being.
The observer of the map is independent of it because his/her view of the map depends on how s/he wants to use it. The map always has to be used: there is little sense in just looking at it, as one might look at a picture. Maps can be consulted, they do not have to be seen as themselves. One can use the map to find out how to move from point A to point B or to compare the area of one region to another. A map depicts the structure its author perceives in reality, not reality itself. It can therefore stay relevant also when cut into pieces. Even if we cannot use a piece of a map to find the hidden treasure, we can use it to move around on the area that is depicted on the piece that we have. A map is the representation of an idea. It can even distort reality if the distortion helps us to see the structure more clearly, for instance, by using a gaze that moves closer to the area that is of interest. For instance, there are maps that exist only in order to show us the concrete way of getting to point B. The closer we get to our destination, the more important each detail gets and suddenly short distances in reality get longer on the map. Such a map would not have an unambiguous scale, but neither does our gaze - it gets more attentive and notices more at the final stage of the voyage, and the distorted map depicts this relation, this predictable change in the user’s gaze more adequately than an exact and unequivocal map could do.
A map is repeatable in a different form. Since the content of the map is not the reality it refers to, but the structure imposed on reality through the act of representation on the map, any map that conveys the same structure is basically a variation of the same map, even if the shape of the used symbols, for instance, is different. Every physical map of Portugal is a physical map of Portugal in the same way as all other physical maps of Portugal are.
The picture, on the other hand, represents the thing itself. I am only speaking here about the picture as an iconic sign, not as a work of art, although it is true that until the invention of photography real pictures quite frequently had certain artistic ambitions, just as documental photography also often has artistic quality. The picture as a sign exists and can be observed only in its entirety, all its parts are simultaneous and equally relevant to the viewer’s gaze. In a certain sense, the picture creates what it depicts. For instance, in case of landscapes, the picture clearly establishes its object, it makes the landscape by lifting a certain segment out of reality and representing it. Every picture of St. Anthony is definitely not a picture of St. Anthony in the same way as all others are. This is where a picture differs most radically from a map. To repeat the picture we have to reproduce exactly the same picture.
Although some pictorial languages normally simplify reality in order to produce easily understandable likenesses of it, the observation of a picture is a process that goes on in time during which more and more is revealed to the viewer about the depicted object. This is where the picture radically differs from a symbol on the map. Such symbols are exhausted immediately when their referent is recognised, whereas in the observation of the picture the recognition of the object is only the start of the process. When we have identified Rome or Tokyo on the map we have normally no further interest for the coloured patches that represent these cities, but when we look at the passport photo of a friend then any interest this usually very unartistic picture might present to us appears only after we have recognised the depicted person.
The picture subjugates the viewer, similarly to novels and films. As long as we look at it, we are in its world, although we perceive it from the outside - but, as we have seen, that is the assumed position of the viewer of the ‘objective’ world as well. It is certainly possible to look at the picture and observe its condition, or fissures in the paint, but this would be looking at the object called ‘picture’ rather than the representation. We can also note the character of lines, or the treatment of light by the artist, but that also would place us in the position of the critic or art historian who is assessing the quality of the artefact instead of looking at the sign, or trying to decode it.
If we compare maps and pictures to linguistic signs it seems that they would more or less correspond to the language of scientific description and literary imagery respectively. It is therefore no wonder that the picture has persisted as the basic ideal type for the work of art even until our age, where a large part of outstanding art is, by its internal structure, very far from pictorial. The only alternative metaphor seems to be that of the map, the representation of an idea of reality, but a comparison with maps seems to rob the work of art from its artistic essence.
I would therefore now like to introduce a third concept, which lies between the map and the picture. It is the mandala. Mandalas are complicated iconic signs used in the Hindu and Buddhist religious traditions to depict certain symbolic encodings of reality, or the universe. Although most of the time they possess great artistic value, this is not what they are meant for. Mandalas are used for certain psychotechnical exercises, and adepts are supposed to gain a better understanding of the universe and of themselves by concentrating on the mandalas and following their code in a certain prescribed manner. Within the mandala, there is one certain route, or sometimes even several routes with different functions, which should be followed in observation in order to gain a certain understanding. For instance, the Vajradhatu (Kongôkai) or Diamond Sceptre mandala used by the Japanese Shingon school of esoteric Buddhism, may be followed both clockwise and counterclockwise. Clockwise, it follows the cosmic process of the dispersion of enlightenment from the Buddha Mahavairocana to his manifestations; counterclockwise it follows the spiritual progress of the observing adept. The observation of its complementary, the Garbhakosadhatu (Taizôkai) or Womb mandala begins in the centre and disperses toward the margins. There is also a certain erotic symbolism at work here: the interaction with the Diamond Sceptre mandala, which has certain phallic connotations, implies the movement of the imaginable channel of contact from the mandala in and out of the adepts mind, until it ejaculates the substance of perfect realization into it, whereas the Womb mandala accepts the seed of the adept’s intrinsic Buddha-nature and lets it mature into enlightenment.
Mandalas are the point at which the reality and its religious encoding converge: the Shingon school holds, for example, that the entire universe is also a mandala and there are practices where the adept follows this mandala simply by walking along a prescribed route in physical space. This is similar to the principles manifest in certain samples of Hindu architecture, such as the Angkor Wat in Cambodia, where the physical proportions of the building correspond to mystical numbers that define the inner structures of time and the universe and thus by walking through the building we simultaneously enact the principles that hold the world together (qv.Mannikka 1996).
In the terms of contemporary art theory, Angkor Wat is something like an interactive installation. But the same principles that are at work in its structures also govern the build-up of iconic mandalas. The representational mechanism of a mandala can be located between two extremes. On the one hand, Manabe Shunshô has described the mandala as a total network of significant elements, something akin to the models constructed in modern systems engineering (1984: 12-14) and takes as his departure point the thesis that the universe as such is a mandala; on the other hand, Mori Masahide compares the logic of a mandala to that of children’s drawings, where the forces of gravity have been suspended, the proportions of bodies distorted according to their significance and all figures resemble each other in their basic features, being distinguished by characterising tokens only (1997: 113-15). In a certain sense, both these viewpoints are adequate. Mandala is simultaneously a co-ordinated system of signs and a representation created by a situated and regulated gaze. What Mori stresses is the gaze while Manabe emphasizes the systematization.
A mandala is thus a map and a picture at the same time. As maps, mandalas contain time (of movement from point A to point B), as pictures, they exist only in their entirety. A detail of a mandala is not a small mandala, just as the image of a nose is not a small portrait. Unlike the viewer of the map, the observer of a mandala is not independent of what s/he is looking at, because the mandala prescribes certain trajectories of movement/observation - if these are not followed, then the mandala is not properly seen. But the observer is also not totally subjugated as the viewer of the picture, because the observation of a mandala must be carried out consciously. The procedure of its observation has to be accepted before the proper observation can begin. We have to know how to read a certain map in order to be able to use it, whereas the picture - if, indeed it is a picture, and not a symbolic sign - only presupposes average cultural competence, or the ability of recognising pictures on the viewer’s part.
One of the essential features of the mandala is its multiple codification. Each symbol on a mandala is necessarily ambiguous. At each point of the mandala, the significance of all the other symbols is defined anew. This is because a mandala, on the one hand, purports to transcend the map and reach beyond reality, and on the other hand, it tries to erase the picture, integrating the gaze of the viewer directly into its own structure. From the space between the two limits of iconic representation, it challenges both of them.
In a sense, a work of art is always a mandala. It contains time and the trajectories of its correct observation as mandalas do. It also presupposes that the procedure of its observation is accepted. We have to believe that something - African sculpture or a readymade by Duchamp - is art in order to see it as art. A work of art also represents the relations of its parts to each other, but fully exists only in its own entirety. A detail of an artwork does not convey a part of the sense of the artwork, it only hints at what we are to expect or focuses our attention to something we might have let pass while looking at it. The observer of a work of art is obviously also not independent of it. Similarly as during the observation of a mandala, the observer is in intimate contact with the work of art, which captures his/her mind for the time being. However, the content of the work of art is neither simply the represented thing nor only the conceptual structure imposed on it. A work of art is a picture that transcends the map and, simultaneously, a map that erases the picture.