MY ENEMY

I have word of a traveling art project that I hope readers across the county will support and look out for on its travels.  “My Enemy” is the dream-child of the painter Yisrael K. Feldsott, who describes it as an “interactive pop-up art installation, seeking to soften and repair divisions between friend and foe.”  In collaboration with his wife, Dee O’Neal, the artist plans a return cross-country trip—a northerly trip west to east, and a southern extension on the return—in November-December this year.

Feldsott is something of a rarity, as an artist of deep social and humanitarian conscience, whose commitment spills over into his richly textured and profoundly moving paintings.  Central to the exhibit he envisions are cut-out silhouettes of two iconic kneeling figures, one derived from the self-immolating Buddhist monk, protesting the then current war in Vietnam; the other, from that well-known, searing journalistic photograph of a prisoner on his knees before a Vietnamese general who is about to blow his brains out with a pistol.  Installed behind a row of these silhouettes are six-foot metal plates inscribed in multiple languages with the words, Father, Lover, Brother, Sister, Mother, Daughter, Friend…

Primary stopping places are locations associated with mindless violence against perceived enemies: California’s Pelican Bay State Prison, Laramie, Wyoming, near the site of Matthew Shepard’s murder; Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, sit of the Battle of Wounded Knee, Sanford, Florida, where Trayvon Martin died.  The artist also plans a video documenting the pop-up shows.

I hope this project will meet with the attention it deserves, and that it will help to generate a much-needed discussion about the hostilities that too often divide us and provoke senseless violence.  It’s a hard lesson, but if we can recognize some part of our own selves—or of our friends and family—in the enemy we project, we may learn that to commit an act of violence is to violate not only our victim, but ourselves.  If George Zimmerman had seen Trayvon Martin not as “the enemy” but as his brother, he would surely not have fired the bullet that took the young man’s life.  If the three men who brutally attacked James Byrd Jr. and dragged him to his death behind their pickup truck had seen in him a father, lover, brother instead of an unknown, irrationally hated black man, they would have been unable to commit their crime.  These, and so many other tragic stories speak too eloquently of contemporary America.

Feldsott’s project is intended to change hearts and minds with the reminder that those we perceive as our enemies are not very much different from ourselves, and are entitled to the respect and kindness we expect to receive from others.  The visual drama of his installations makes this insight simple and inarguable.  Few, I think, could witness this exhibition and not be moved by it call for understanding and compassion.  To stay up to date with itineraries and further information, there is a website available at MyEnemy.org. 

PLEASE NOTE: in New York City, "My Enemy" will be on view at The Tibet House on October 20th, 2013, from 2 - 4 PM.  For updates on other locations, itineraries and further information, the relevant website is MyEnemy.org.

Here We Are...

... nearly a week after I mentioned that an unexpected deadline put The Buddha Diaries on temporary hold. The assignment is now completed and approved. It's a catalogue text about the artist Yisrael K. Feldsott, whose work I wrote about in these pages a couple of months ago. It was a challenging project, devouring a good part of my time over the past few days, only shortly before our departure for the Northwest later this morning. I'm sure that I'll be posting the Feldsott text once it has been published, because the work deserves to be known more widely. This image...

... is just a snapshot taken at the LA Art Fair, but it gives you some idea of the power and passion of the work.

Now our bags are packed and we leave, initially for Portland, Oregon in a couple of hours, and on to Seattle on Thursday. If you're in either city, it would be a great pleasure to meet you. Aside from a conference workshop in Seattle, I have two public events on the schedule: I'll be speaking at the Portland Art Museum at 6PM on Wednesday, and at the Greg Kucera Gallery (212 Third Avenue S) in Seattle on Saturday morning at 11AM.

As usual, when we're traveling, I'm unsure what time I'll get for The Buddha Diaries. I'm feeling a bit cut off from my daily writing practice at the moment--I'm so addicted to the blog that I experience a kind of persistent malaise when I'm not making the regular entries. Ah, well. I'll keep you "posted." Meantime, if you do get to one of those events up north, please be sure to introduce yourself.

At the 16th Annual Los Angeles Art Show

Here I go, I interrupting myself again, taking a break this morning from my Costa Rica/Panama travel log--now nearly finished, just one day to go--to report on last night's gala opening of the 16th Annual Los Angeles Art Show at the downtown Convention Center.

Over the past quarter century, international art fairs like this one have become a significant driving force in the engine of the contemporary art world economy. They have proved a boon to many of the participating dealers in terms of the sales they generate and the opportunity to expand their clientele, introducing their artists (or their wares) to an international community of collectors; and sometimes to prowl the aisles to survey the competition. They are unabashedly about commerce rather than aesthetics, and for this reason are anathema to many artists and critics. A crowded convention center floor, clearly, is not place to display or look at art works, mixed higgledy-piggledy with thousands of others, all of wildly divergent quality which ranges from the schlockiest of schlock to the occasional surprising new discovery or the familiar masterpiece.

The 2011 Los Angeles Art Show is no exception. A vast affair, it features 144 galleries from all over the world showing more than 10,000 art works. There was plenty to scoff at--unfairly, perhaps, because who really stops and take time to look at anything with great care or attention? I confess to being one of those who--last night, at least--strolled up and down the aisles with plenty of snap judgments (mostly negative) and little in the way of thoughtful appraisal. Still, it was fun to take a snapshot of the international art scene, with ample representation from China--the new powerhouse in this, as in so many other economic fields--and other Asian countries. (Europe, however, was only patchily represented.) In my scant perusal, I have to say, I was not overly impressed with the Chinese participants, with certain notable exceptions like this wonderful wall painting which seeks to impress us with the identity between the intricate structure of our bodies and that of vegetative life, the great Oneness of being:

In all this, we did pause for long enough to take a good look at the work of an artist with whom Ellie has worked as a consultant in the past, Yisrael K (Kenny) Feldsott...

... who shows with San Francisco's Paul Mahder Gallery. We were also fortunate to have a few minutes to talk with the artist; based in Northern California, he is from a Russian Jewish immigrant family and, aside from being a painter of great skill and passion, is a devotee and sometime guardian of Arctic wolves. A world traveler, he has devoted considerable time to the study of Central and South American culture, lore and ecology, and has received shamanic training in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

The results, as you might expect, are paintings of great depth and humanity. This artist thinks of his work in much the same way I would like to think of my writing: each painting is a personal foray into the depths of consciousness and the heart of the human psyche--a journey on which he asks his viewer to accompany him. Archetypes abound as powerful images in the work--wolf, bird (light or dark, dove or crow), boat, river, man and woman, sun and moon--with associations that speak with deep resonance to some ancient place in the soul of each of us...

(I apologize to the artist for not having images that more faithfully represent his work. What I have are simply the snapshots I took to serve me as aides-memoires.) This one records his response to the death of his father...

Surfaces, dense with material in places, are worked and reworked, revealing as many layers as an archeological dig and requiring the eye to pursue the artist's arduous journey in the creation of the painting.

Scratch the surface of any of the religions our species has created, from Judaism to Tibetan Buddhism and the rites of the South American shaman, and you'll find a common need to account for the great mysteries of living and dying and to provide solace in the face of suffering and loss. It's in this area that Feldsott works: confronted by his paintings, we are invited to encounter the darkness and the ecstasy of our own inner life.

So yes, it's worth pausing once in a while along the way at events of this kind. There is always much to be seen and much to be learned, if one simply pays attention.