Art
Zen Volcano “Emanation 2”
Among the greatest hits of childhood quasi-science experiments—alongside chemistry sets, chick incubators and ant farms—plaster of Paris volcanoes surely hold an honored place. If the intervening years of debauchery have obscured your memory of simpler times, here’s how they work: you shape a bunch of plaster into a conical form, make a pit in its top, fill the hole with baking soda, then pour in vinegar. The resulting chemical reaction creates a fizzy foam that runs over the sides of the volcano. (For enhanced realism, add food coloring to the vinegar.) It’s not clear what this project teaches children about volcanism—real volcanoes don’t exactly work this way—but it gives kids an excuse to think about the physical world.
Adults don’t outgrow the pull of this sort of real world magic that produces something completely unexpected out of unremarkable household stuff. Which is why it’s delightful to hear that artist Julie Püttgen has included some plaster volcanoes in her show at Ruby Green, along with the materials to play junior scientist.
The models serve as an interactive counterpoint to paintings and drawings of volcanoes that the artist has produced over the last year. Püttgen is now based in Atlanta, where she has been teaching, publishing and making art, but in the fall she joins the art faculty at the University of the South in Sewanee. As she explains, “The show was set up long before I got the job at Sewanee, so the timing has been a nice coincidence.”
The earliest of Püttgen’s volcano pieces started as landscape paintings of a stream in New Hampshire. In “High Water,” you see large rocks in a cool, dark-green stream bed, white streaks of eddying water enveloping them, viewed from above. But she has disrupted the base image by inserting little drawings of volcanoes on top of the rocks. The volcanoes have cartoon-like thought balloons in place of the steam and ash that you might expect to see coming from their cones. These graffiti shift the perspective, turning the rocks into representations of underground geological structures, moving from a medium to a long distance, and shifting the point of view 90 degrees, from overhead to the side.
Püttgen’s volcanoes express themselves with their thought balloons, “farting, sighing and churning up truth,” as she explains in her artist’s statement. But the balloons are empty, like the natural world whose expressiveness remains mute. According to Püttgen, her volcanoes express “the Zen idea of no-thought, always manifesting known-unknown things.” It’s a matter of “being alive without worrying about yourself all the time, without always feeling the need to consolidate your safety structures. The volcanoes have no thought: they just are, and so their emanations are both empty and full of revelation.”
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Later works, like “Emanation 2,” keep the volcanoes and their thought balloons but replace the New Hampshire stream bed with a substratum of abstract rocks suspended in a twisted, yellow band. The show also includes volcanoes outlined in red and pink tape on the gallery’s walls. The wall drawings are arranged so that, if you stand at the proper angle, lines on corner walls align with lines on the walls behind them, creating another perspective shift: the eye produces the illusion of a single flat plane by combining lines from disparate surfaces.
Science Class Redux Plaster volcanoes
Volcanoes provide inherently rich geological imagery. We know that the Earth is a changing, dynamic thing, but much of that work happens over geologic time frames that humans cannot see. Volcanoes do their work before our eyes, often in cataclysms like the explosion of Mount St. Helen’s or in the gentle flows through which Surtsey emerged from the sea off Iceland in the 1960s. Starting at least in the Romantic era, artists have seized on volcanoes to represent powerful natural and spiritual forces. Volcanoes fascinated 19th century painters Frederic Church and Thomas Cole. In closer temporal and geographic proximity, they figure heavily in the drawings of Jack Dingo Ryan, who is finishing up a one-year appointment at Sewanee. Among other things, Ryan sees volcanoes as a vehicle for the sublime in nature, the aspect of beauty which causes awe and even fear.
Many artists draw on Buddhism, but Püttgen comes to it with unusual authority, having spent three years living as a Buddhist nun in England between college and graduate school. Although it was a break from active participation in the art world, Püttgen found that “you are never more in the world than when you are in a monastic setting. Everything about that life is designed to strip away your hiding places from yourself and other people. It’s an aggressively ordinary sort of life, made graceful by the overall generosity of the setup and the sense that being stripped bare to pay attention to the detail of your predicament is somehow liberating.”
While she says she does not deliberately think about how to bring Buddhist practice and art practice together, her art does reflect questions she asks about the world that derive from her monastic experience. For one thing, Buddhism teaches that the material world is transient, and that spiritual progress requires letting go of physical things. This philosophy stands in marked contrast to that of the art world, which is all about creating cherished objects you cling to and venerate. In the Ruby Green show, you see Püttgen struggling with the conflict between Buddhist concepts and her role as a painter who makes cherished objects. Her ambivalence starts with the act of altering her own landscape paintings, messing up pristine images. Püttgen also points out her reluctance to give the paintings expensive commercial gallery frames, instead mounting some of them unframed.
Püttgen also attributes her ambivalence about painting to “wanting a really active, engaged role in society for my work.” This desire leads her to put significant energy into public installations and interactive pieces. One of her Atlanta efforts was the 100 Names Project. Its first phase consisted of making 60 small shrines and installing them in public places in downtown Atlanta—shops, restaurants, galleries and parks. Each shrine honored “different names of That Which Is, or aspects of being.” She distributed maps showing the locations of the shrines, enabling people to go on a pilgrimage to sites they might not have noticed and experience the diversity of people and activities occurring downtown. In the second phase, she installed 40 more shrines in a gallery. The floor was covered by a sand painting of the names of 100 people who had died or been born in the last year in Atlanta. For the first week, viewers could look into but not enter the gallery. For the exhibit’s opening, people were invited to bring along an object of personal significance to them. They went into the gallery and could trade that object for one of the shrines, taking the shrine with them and leaving in its place the offering they brought. In the process they destroyed the sand painting, as one would a Buddhist sand mandala, and emptied the gallery of Püttgen’s work, leaving behind the accumulation of their offerings. The project involved a process of erasing the artistic ego by allowing the creations of Püttgen’s own hands to disappear or become a focal point for viewers’ experiences of the physical and social context where they found the shrines.
This idea of paying attention to what is nearby comes out even in the name of Püttgen’s website, turtlenosedsnake.com, which she took from a Chinese Zen teaching story in which a young monk who’s returned from a pilgrimage tries to impress everyone by telling of a turtle-nosed snake he has seen on a faraway mountain. An older monk points out that all snakes have turtle-like noses; the monk had no need of a long journey to see one. In the art world, there is pressure for artists in “provincial” places like Atlanta—and even more so Nashville—to look for insight in a cultural capital like New York. Püttgen wants to challenge that compulsion to travel someplace else for aesthetic satisfaction.
Ruby Green gives a nice introduction to Julie Püttgen’s work and ideas. In this exhibit she acts more as the solitary creator of paintings, not the community activist, but the show has engaged people nonetheless: kids at the May 20 opening ran through half a gallon of vinegar as they made the volcanoes erupt again and again. Once Püttgen starts her new teaching assignment down the road, she expects new work to emerge. As she realizes, “I’ll get up to Sewanee and start interacting with Nashville, and my work will evolve from that context.”