Perfect Abstraction - Softcover
'There is God-art, there is ego-art, and there is Reality-art.'
The essays in this book present a wide range of commentary by Adi Da on his image-art and the process he engages to create images. The title of this booklet points to the unique method whereby Adi Da creates images that are a means to the Reality that is prior to even to perception. Altogether, these essays describe the kind of 'dance' Adi Da engages to develop free images that transcend, rather than merely play upon, the apparent 'subject-and-object' context of visual art.
Through his analysis of the historical development of visual art, and through further description of the purpose and means of his own art, the writings in this booklet can deepen anyone s appreciation of and participation in Adi Da's image-art. This book is published in conjunction with the exhibition in of his art in Florence, at the Cenacolo di Ognissanti as part of the Winter in Florence arts festival. The spatial juxtaposition in the same room of Adi Da's monumental aperspectival geometric art and Domenico Ghirlandaio's large perspectival fresco of The Last Supper, provides an occasion for considering the nature, meaning and experience of Adi Da's work within the framework of the history of Western consciousness, culture and art.
Adi Da Samraj writes:
When people go to a museum or gallery of visual art, they generally do not demonstrate the body-language of full feeling-participation that they otherwise manifest in a concert hall. Instead, people in a museum or gallery of visual art are, generally, merely thinking--checking the nameplates, thinking and talking about explanations. They presume that they cannot quite understand what is in front of their eyes, and that, therefore, their viewing of the artistic images must be mediated (and they themselves must be defended from their vulnerability to the images) by explanations (and even by emotionally reactive utterances). In contrast, when people go to a musical performance, they 'get with it', readily entering into the space of whole bodily feeling-participation.
Why is it not the case that people go into a museum or gallery of visual art and start swooning in the image-art? Why are visitors to a museum or gallery of visual art characteristically unable to 'get with it'?
'Getting with I' is, primarily and fundamentally, what image-art is about. Instead of treating image-art as some kind of an 'opponent' (or even a 'deceiver') that requires a mediator in-between to protect the viewer from it, to give the viewer an 'angle', an advantage on it, a power over it, people should dare to 'get with it', and, thus, freely enter into the ecstasy of participation.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Review:
From his birth (on Long Island, New York, in 1939), Adi Da Samraj has always manifested unique signs of spiritual illumination and of artistic and literary inspiration. Nevertheless, from his birth, and until his spiritual restoration at thirty years of age, Adi Da Samraj submitted himself to an ordeal of 'self-identification'; with all the limitations and sufferings of the human condition. Adi Da Samraj describes his early years as being focused in two fundamental activities: investigating how (in the scale of human 'ordinariness') to perfectly realize the Truth of Reality Itself, and achieving the ability to communicate the Truth of Reality Itself through artistic means (both visual and literary).
Adi Da Samraj graduated from Columbia University in 1961, with a BA in philosophy, and from Stanford University in 1966, with an MA in English literature. His master's thesis, a study of core issues in modernism, focused on the literary experiments of Gertrude Stein and on the modernist painters of the same period.
In 1964, Adi Da Samraj began a period of intensive practice under a succession of spiritual masters in the United States and India. Eventually, in 1970, after a final period of intense spiritual endeavor, Adi Da Samraj spontaneously became re-established in the continuous state of illumination that was his unique condition at birth--and that re-awakening signaled the end of his thirty years of spiritual quest.
In 1972, Adi Da Samraj began to teach, creating a vast repository of wisdom, in living dialogue with those who approached him. To date, his literary, philosophical, and practical writings consist of over sixty published books.
Since 1998, Adi Da Samraj has created a massive body of artwork using the media of photography, videography, and digital technology. He states that his intention as an artist is to offer a visual communication of the Truth of Reality Itself--by 'allowing Reality to manifest Itself' in and as the 'space' of his image-art.
'It is a rare artist who can convey, convincingly, the sense of being face to face with the source of being. Adi Da can clearly live in the depths without succumbing to their pressure, bringing back pearls of art to prove it.' --Donald Kuspit
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherThe Dawn Horse Press
- Publication date2008
- ISBN 10 1570972508
- ISBN 13 9781570972508
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages48
(No Available Copies)
Search Books: Create a WantIf you know the book but cannot find it on AbeBooks, we can automatically search for it on your behalf as new inventory is added. If it is added to AbeBooks by one of our member booksellers, we will notify you!
Create a Want