Sometimes—and they are the best times—you venture into a project without knowing the outcome, but sense that going along a certain path is important; it is honoring a need, a hunch, a curiosity. We are familiar with the path of research, but I have something else in mind: an exploration not directed at substantiating a thesis or proposition, or locating an answer, but just going deeper and then . . . seeing where it goes. The methodology of research takes on an increasingly narrow focus as the process advances, whereas this other exploration has a wide-angle focus: unfolding, revealing, constantly opening up, expanding and connecting at once.

For Awake, we sought foundation support for an “exploratory, open-ended nature of discussion, allowing structure and product to grow out of process.” In seeking funding for Awake, we would try to explain that the projects were organic—they would evolve, and their development was dependent on a sequence that could not be forecast step-by-step, especially since it often involved other professionals, communities, and audiences. Our aim was to foster a process that would enable multiple partners to equally impact the outcome, while creating a project that mirrored a quintessentially Buddhist model of openness and interdependence. Not an easy task; thankfully, some significant partners emerged.

Artmaking is perhaps the ultimate manifestation of this open-ended process, and in artists we found our greatest allies in moving along this path. The presence of artists at the quarterly Awake meetings proved crucial. Their part in these meetings embodied and often were art experiences.  Their presence resonated with us in our work, and continues to touch others through their interviews and writings in the book that emerged from the project, Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art.

Today it is clear that Awake was organized around the implicit involvement of artists, as an inquiry into the affinity between the artist’s consciousness and the consciousness reflected in buddhamind. This was not so clear at the beginning. In the planning process, with a need to have the relationship between meditation and creation taken seriously, we invited authorities in Buddhism, art history, and aligned fields like psychology and philosophy. At the first session only one artist was part of the program: Zen teacher, translator, and calligraphy master Kazuaki Tanahashi gave us a lesson in ink painting.  We quickly realized that only direct experience with artists could offer the integration we were seeking.

With each successive session the artists became more central, more necessary.  There were presentations by Sanford Biggers, Hirokazu Kosaka, Rick Lowe, Lee Mingwei, Arlene Shechet, and Bill Viola, all deeply moving in their own ways, and the after-effects hung in the air through the weekend’s proceedings. By the time Ann Hamilton came to address us, we were a seasoned group with a more cultivated and collective mind. Even though Hamilton, a non-Buddhist, was a hesitant attendee, she was one of the most powerful conveyors of the essence of our enterprise. In the end, even she could read the Buddhist implications of her ideas, and a most intense discussion ensued.  Later in the program, when Kimsooja presented her work (see the articles by Elizabeth Brown and David Morgan in this issue), the group achieved an equally compelling meeting of minds.

An art-in-the-moment experience was offered by Allan Kaprow. His gift: a happening that had all of us on our hands and knees, crowded together on the floor, attempting to blow crumpled yellow post-it notes bearing the words “I love you” toward our secret intended.

By the end of our two-year series, the artists were the program. The final session had artists as all four presenters. It included a white paper by Laurie Anderson who, like Suzanne Lacy, served as an artist-author; their efforts led to essays in the Buddha Mind book. For the finale of this final weekend, a performance featured all of us ringing hand bells, guided by artist Ann Carlson.  We had become the artwork.

The artists gave of themselves in extraordinary ways. It was a reciprocal exchange in an uncommon, open, space of meeting.  Their willingness to be vulnerable was dependent on our crafting of a safe space for all of us to be together in our thoughts. Awake gave them a chance to talk in a way they usually cannot in professional arenas and, in doing so, to experience what one Awake member and artist, Jim Melchert, conveyed when he said: “Conversation allows you to hear for the first time a thought you had.” And we had great conversations!

In the end, everyone took with them what they could, using it, returning to it in the future as a source of inspiration and clarity. Buddha Mind exists as a way to widen the circle, and the 12 interviews with artists that it contains are among the lasting outcomes. For my own part, I have seen how meaningful these interviews are to art students—invaluable in giving them permission to acknowledge their own feelings and acquire an understanding of their artistic practices. Most of all, they are profound expressions of the process of artmaking as a meditative practice.

The lesson of Awake was the cultivation of awareness for the mutual benefit of the audience, the artist, and the arts professional. This reaffirmed the critical role museums can play as places for the cultivation of that awareness. I do not mean by educational and other didactic means, though I support and employ those strategies.  I am alluding to a subtler middle-ground and to multiple paths that can exist simultaneously: programmatic and unstructured, in and out of the walls of art institutions, calming (like the Zen Verandah) and noisy (such as the mandala-shaped break-dancing floors made of urban detritus by Sanford Biggers). Such awareness is more about a way to be with art, a relationship that allows for the workings of the imagination.

The art experience provided by Awake for the curators assembled reminded them that this art often can evaporate in the atmosphere of the museum today.  Two principles arose for us which have value for curatorial practice.

The first principle: the relationship or exchange between the artwork and its audience must be an open and generous one.  As a corollary, the public for contemporary can be broad and diverse, and is not defined by educational, economic, or social status.  Museums often act as gatekeepers setting up codes of access and conduct, defining acceptable or professional relationships with art.  The hierarchy implied, one which amounts to an exertion of power, correspondingly disempowers the visiting public, disabling them from being active agents of their own experience.  Thus, museums often make persons feel deficient in their knowledge of and inadequate in their ability to relate to works of art.  The second: the creative potential in the artmaking process finds a corollary in the art viewing experience of the visitor.  In both instances, it needs to be nurtured and sustained.

Visitors draw their meanings from their lives in the real world, and art has a powerful outcome when these connections are made. Thus, at the core of the museum visit is its capacity to be evocative in memorable ways by connecting to people’s lives.  In galleries, before works of art, we can be transported elsewhere and to experiences we have had; at other times we can recollect an experience we had in museums and the works of art that triggered it, and it is those works that can return to mind, their image triggered by a life experience.  My association with the “Awake “ program, as a co-conceiver and co-organizer, was in part a personal effort to reconnect with art museums, to reinvest in the potential of art museums as engines of art experience—experience that I personally believe is lacking and needed in daily life today.  And the energy on which these engines run—art—is an inexhaustible resource!

Creating a space for the art experience is not just physical, but temporal.  Like artists in the process of artmaking, viewers need time. Artist Bill Viola spoke of this space of time in an interview with this author published in Buddha Mind: “In the zendo—fifty minutes of quiet stillness in a room of solitary individuals—time opens up in an unbelievable way. . . . When time and space open up, all of a sudden there’s a lot of room for you. In quiet moments you get an idea, or a thought, or a revelation that you wouldn’t have had if you were in a hurry to get somewhere. Our lives require quiet innocent moments like these, so we absolutely have to make spaces—particularly in our world of compressed time—or else our spirits will get choked off . . . . We have to reclaim time itself, wrenching it from the ‘time is money,’ maximum-efficiency mentality, and make room for it to flow the other way . . . towards us . . . . This is what art can do and what museums can be in today’s world.” Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p. 254.

Taking time was the gift of “Awake” to those who participated. It gave them permission to take time. As Jacquelyn Baas has pointed out in her essay, initially the participants in Awake felt guilty about taking time without obligation or expectation, using time without knowing what would be the outcome. Visitors, like artists, need to settle into taking time so that they can cultivate for themselves the ability to sustain the anxiety and uncertainty of waiting for an experience to arise, for art to tell them something. They need to be able to dwell in what Buddhists call “the mind of don’t know”—a creative space that allows for a sense of unknowing and the unsure moments of creative chaos within a process that can be convoluted and long. When we get to this place, time seems wide and open and we have the feeling of space without necessarily its greater physical dimensions: it is the space of time.