The World As Light: An Introduction to the Art of Adi Da Samraj - Softcover

Mei-Ling Israel; Adi Da Samraj

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1570972303 ISBN 13: 9781570972300

Publisher: The Dawn Horse Press, 2007

Synopsis

Adi Da Samraj's collateral exhibition at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia (2007), 'Transcendental Realism', marks the first time his work is being shown to the public. The purpose of The World As Light is to provide an overview of his entire artistic oeuvre of the past forty years accompanied by key statements he has made on his own art and on the artistic process in general.

Adi Da has created a massive body of highly distinctive and diverse artistic work. He has masterfully used the medium of photography and videography and made it into a form of art that blows the mind and delights the heart. Most recently, he has begun to make remarkable images in the digital medium.

Adi Da regards his art as building upon the modernist tradition. He greatly values the radical aesthetic freedom and the profundity of meaning characteristic of modernism at its best. And he intends his own art to convey the deepest of meanings relative to the human situation, and the nature of reality altogether.

His art can be understood as an intensive investigation of the human condition the condition of presumed existence as a 'self' in the midst of a world that is 'not-self'. Adi Da's art is meant to call into question the most basic presumptions of ordinary human life: the fact of existing as an independent 'self' , the 'fact' of every 'self' being separate from every other 'self', the 'fact' of the 'self' being separate from the world of 'everything else'. Indeed, Adi Da intends his art to communicate the profundity that is known when all presumptions of separateness are relinquished.

The condition of 'non-separateness' as the true nature of the human situation, and the true nature of reality altogether is the core of Adi Da's communication in his art. He offers his art to the world as his communication of reality and truth and, also, as an address to the 'human necessity' for the aesthetic experience of real and true 'beauty' .

About this title

About the Author

About the Author:

Mei-Ling Israel holds a degree in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. Her research essay, Seeking the Phoenix: Artistic Consciousness in the Nuclear Age, is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art library in New York City. She is a working glass artist and a published poet and playwright. From 2001 2004, she witnessed Adi Da's artistic process as an assistant and sometimes photographic subject

About Adi Da Samraj:

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.

Adi Da Samraj's collateral exhibition at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia (2007), Transcendental Realism, marks the first time his work is being shown to the public at large. Other publications on Adi Da's art include:

Transcendental Realism: The Art of Adi Da Samraj (catalog of collateral exhibition),

Transcendental Realism: The Image-Art of egoless Coincidence with Reality Itself (a collection of thirteen essays by Adi Da Samraj),

The Spectra Suites (selected images from all ten of Adi Da's Spectra Suites),

The Quandra Loka Suite: 52 Views (catalogue of Adi Da's 2003 exhibition at Louis Stern Gallery, Los Angeles),

The Bright Field (selected images from Adi Da's black and white photographic suites of 2000-2001).

Edition details

• Publisher: The Dawn Horse Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1570972303
• ISBN 13: 9781570972300
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128