INTERVIEW WITH MARY JANE JACOB FROM BUDDHA MIND IN CONTEMPORARY ART
MARY JANE JACOB: When did you become interested in Buddhism? Was it when you first went to Japan?
SANFORD BIGGERS: I went to Japan in 1992 directly out of college. I was studying abroad in Florence, Italy, when a friend of mine from college called me from Tokyo. He convinced me that I should come to Japan after graduation, so I looked into several ways to get there and applied to the JET (Japanese Exchange in Teaching) program. I was accepted and moved to Nagoya to teach English and study Japanese for two years. During this time I became very interested in Zen Buddhism. I started reading from the Tao Te Ching. It seemed to make a lot of sense to me. But when I shared it with friends, they thought they were riddles; I thought it was a way of saying more with less.
MJJ: And do you meditate now?
SB: I think I’ve always meditated, but I meditate in a more idiosyncratic way. For me, listening to jazz is like meditation. Of course sound, particularly om and chanting, bring on a meditative state, but jazz often is the product of a musician or group of musicians losing themselves in the music. I can find that same state of “emptiness” listening to the music very closely with headphones—to the point where I’m nonexistent. I can really feel myself going in between the notes, the harmonies, the vibrations, existing in the sonic space where the musicians also lost their selves. For me, that’s meditation.
MJJ: When you joined us for an Awake consortium meeting, you said jazz was like Zen.
SB: It’s the improvisation. With improvisation the great jazz musicians were just sort of. . .in the moment. They had no idea where they were necessarily going next, sonically. But something that another person in the band did could send them on a trajectory. I think these guys were on to it. Like Coltrane, he was “going into the void.” I get the impression from John Coltrane that there was a point where it was not just about sonics for him—it was about the practice, the discipline, the meditation of blowing that horn because, as his biographers have said, that’s all he did. After he kicked drugs, he’d be practicing after a gig, practicing before the gig, at the gig playing. That for him was where it all went—playing was his love supreme. And the deeper he got into it as a practice, the more it benefited or affected him, and it just got further and further out, where most people couldn’t hold on anymore. It became a philosophical as well as a spiritual quest. For me, that’s Coltrane being “in the void.”
MJJ: If we take the creative mind in the process of artmaking, the “mind of don’t know,” as the mind open to unknown possibilities, then maybe these great jazz musicians—who were open to where improvisation could take them—share a kind of practice with visual artists today. In the creative process each is open to what they can discover, rather than predetermining form.
SB: I think this is how I work as an artist and how it works for many other artists today. It is all grounded in intent. Your hands, mind, and eyes are not necessarily relaying coherent thoughts and signals to each other, saying: Do that in red, do this in blue, make that a straight line, make that a circle. It is no longer being “inside” your mind, but having a visceral, preconscious notion of how to work. When my mind is not on what I’m visually creating: that is being in the void for me. I think for Coltrane, it wasn’t about what it was going to sound like; it wasn’t about the outcome; it was about the unanswerable question. And it wasn’t about the audience. That’s the difference between being in the void and being an entertainer, where it’s all about the audience, though I guess the greatest performers have a way of doing both.
MJJ: But you allow the audience into your work. You give them permission to interact and experience the work even in a museum setting. They do the improvising.
SB: To me experience is so magical that it becomes what my work is about. In my break-dance pieces, I provide the floor but the viewer/dancer provides the action, and that’s when the artwork begins to come to life. That’s where the magic comes from, the unknowns. It’s like the jazz composer creating the introductory sixteen or thirty-two bars of a song, and then after that thirty-second bar, everyone goes free until around sixty-four bars later when they come back together. That’s the only structure. It’s really about what can happen within those parameters—that’s where the magic is.
I think I’ve been dealing with this formally in my work for many years. My first sculptures were related to African and Asian worship. I took the idea of ritual and made interactive pieces that people could use. And as they used them, I wanted these sculptures to become power objects. This brought me to making artworks that are themselves experiential, where viewers can interact, but are also devoid of personal and egoistic intentionality.
MJJ: Can you speak about how you bridge or fuse different cultures or traditions, how your art is, we might say, a cross-cultural practice?
SB: Today, culture seems to be becoming more organic and malleable. This is due partly to a shifting of the world’s impression of itself and partly because of communication technology. People are not only gaining access, they are searching for ideas, change, community, hope, respect. These considerations are important when doing projects that introduce my notions of culture—as a hyphenated African-American male—into that of another culture. It’s about communicating to receptive individuals from any background via available and somehow familiar signifiers. American pop culture, generally, and Black American pop culture, specifically, is instantly digested by global youth culture and has become a common language by which ideas can fluidly be exchanged. When I find a syncretic link between my own culture and another, I want to bring them together and see what their offspring will be: What can we do that will not just talk about connection, but actually be it? I think there is a “universal vibe” that connects us even if we never have the chance to meet. We often think, feel, and work on the same level as many others despite our physical separation. I think some of my projects are basically experiments around this idea, experiments to see: How will this work? How will people in Hungary look at break dancers (or how will I find break dancers there)? How will people there take on this idea? How will people in Japan relate to an African American taking them through a “Buddhist” ceremony? Will they relate?
MJJ: So let’s talk about your recent residency in Japan at the ARCUS Project and the work you did there.
SB: When I went back to Japan in 2003 and was connected with the Joanin Soto Zen temple, I wanted to create a bell choir. The temple master, Ebata, was excited about the project and allowed us to use the temple and the bells that were kept there; some were humongous and were 150 to 200 years old! But this work actually started before Japan, back at the “Awake” meeting at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center.
I was inspired by the hand bells that Ann Carlson used to choreograph the performance in the zendo with all the consortium members. While I was there I spent a lot of time with Yvonne Rand talking about this. So when I finally got to Japan I melted down silver hip-hop jewelry (necklaces, bracelets, chains) to construct Buddhist/Shinto ceremonial bells (oren) like those used in family altars. Melting down these objects was a way of distilling the “bling – bling” materialism out of contemporary hip-hop and youth culture. The ceremony is actually a eulogy of sorts. To create these bells, the melted down silver had to be pressed, cut, and formed by a team of small shops in Tokyo. The videos that I made are merely records of this, but not the experience. The experience is over.
Yet what remains are the bells which outlive the experience and, more than likely, will outlive all of us. The bells hold the story and experience inside themselves. They are initiated. They have become power objects. These bells were made and used in Japan, and rung by the temple master and other participants. This experience makes these bells memory capsules. So the bells are not just tools or evidence of the experience, they are somehow transformed by it. There have been such objects throughout humankind. I think intention has a large part to do with this: intent is inside the work and then made visible or audible through use. I think when you can sense intention in work, it can transcend the even the optical experience. And, it’s that magic, that ineffable quality that keeps most of us going.
MJJ: Can you describe how this work, Bell Chorus, was performed in the temple in Japan?
SB: We had all of these bells, those of the temple plus the few we had made--sixteen bells in all of different tones. And we did a bell chorus among sixteen people in four circles. Each had a bell: when the first person in the first circle would strike their bell that signaled the next, but each member could strike the bell when and how they deemed fit. Then each other circle followed, and so it continued. This work followed a loose enough structure so that, at the same time, people who were not tonally inclined could follow the pattern. What was most powerful was the spontaneous invention of it! Most people thought improvisation was so abstract that they couldn’t do it themselves. The Japanese participants would say “we could never improvise”; they are often so strict and methodical. But this improvisational project worked and they were all improvising effortlessly.
Because we were performing this bell chorus in the temple, we started with fifteen minutes of zazen led by Ebata so everybody was in a very open state by the time we went into the bells. When you look at the video footage you can barely tell from the facial expressions which part is zazen and which is the performance. Everyone is so relaxed, just listening. I had explained to them beforehand: “You’ll know when it’s your turn by seeing the person on your right strike their bell, but it’s your decision when you feel that your tone should fall into place.” So they were really listening, eyes closed, to find out when their tone needed to sound. But this was not about blocking out, but about letting things in. It wasn’t about absence. It wasn’t about being alone but being with a group of people; each person was not stuck in their own space in any egoistic sense. And as an experience, I think it achieved a meditative state among sixteen people all together. The only thing connecting everyone was, literally, the sound…It was a Saturday and, other than the bells, the only sound was the rain outside. It was pretty incredible. Later, none of the participants talked about it in terms of art.
MJJ: Most people think of meditation as quiet, silence, being alone and removed from the experience of the outside world. But you talk about it as something that can be slow or active, quiet and noisy.
SB: I think the purpose of meditation is not so much to be “removed,” but actually to be so “in it” that one loses one’s sense of self. This is what "being in the zone" means. So the nature of our engagement with the world is fundamental. Look at the virtual world we live in—hyper-mediated, virtual reality. People are far more resigned and happy to do everything electronically. Yes it’s faster, but at the same time it’s so detached that you can sort of do it without investing yourself. We treat communication like a video game: clicking, typing, cutting, pasting, switching back and forth. . .instant messages, e-mailing, cell phones, all these digital means. . . it’s detachment. Whereas experience is more of an analog form. It takes on a different pace and a different resonance. You have to find a balance between the virtual and real realms.
MJJ: Are you able to reflect at this point on what the bell chorus meant for you and how might it contribute to where you are going with your work?
SB: During the process I thought: now everything is falling in place chronologically the way it probably should. You know, I’m sitting here talking to this monk, and I’m speaking Japanese, and there’s a lot that I can’t understand in his responses, but I felt certain ideas guiding me. So I was sitting there thinking: Why am I here? How did this all end up happening: that I’m sitting with this guy, he’s taking an interest, and this thing is happening so fluidly? At that point I was thinking, maybe I am a Buddhist, which is something that I never really talked about or felt comfortable dealing with before. This was probably the first time I ever thought about it like that.
Now I am really dealing with the notion of format: Why should a work be sound or music or sculpture or drawing or painting? I’m trying to be in a space where my output ends up being a bit more ineffable, not resting in one or two categories, but sort of and/both: What is that experiential form that is experiential for the producer and the audience as well, not catering to one over the other, one person over another, but that frequency which brings everybody together similarly? I don’t know how to categorize it, but it is something that is a larger experience—a larger experiential moment. I don’t know what that would be. Just as I’m limited in my way of speaking about it right now, I’m so far limited in my knowledge of how to produce it.
—February 2004
