Asian Philosophy: New Dimensions for Art, 1945-1975

Jacquelynn Baas

For us, expression directly linked to life and the actualization of a life-filled
universe are a return to our native way, but for Europeans and Americans, this
represents the creation of a new dimension of art.
-Shiryū Morita, Bokubi, 19551

The whole modern era is marked, in painting as in poetry, by a shift of interest

from sentiment, from the self as actor, to the self as theatre of action; and the real
message is a transformation of reality by a transformation of our awareness.
-Jacqueline Johnson, Dynaton 19512

It is, indeed, a remarkable circumstance that when Western civilization discovers

Relativity it applies it to the manufacture of atom-bombs, whereas Oriental
civilization applies it to the development of new states of consciousness.
-Alan W. Watts, 19623

This essay surveys South Asian, Himalayan, and East Asian philosophical resources
drawn upon by American and European artists during the three decades bracketed by the
end of World War II and the departure of United States forces from Vietnam in 1975—a
year when two major American museums each presented major exhibitions illustrating
the impact of Japanese art on the art of the West.4 Following this robust 1975 focus on
the influence of Japanese woodblock prints on European and American artists after the
opening of Japan by Commodore Perry in 1854, the influence of Asian art within the art
of the West was widely documented.5
Contact with Asia expanded again after 1945—a year that witnessed the end of
the Second World War, deployment of the atomic bomb against Japan by the United
States, and the Allied Occupation of Japan and Korea. American and European artists
spent formative years in Asia in service to their countries, while Asian artists sought
education and other opportunities in Europe and the United States. By 1945 the influence
of Asia had become more broadly cultural, extending well beyond artistic styles to
philosophical perspectives and life views.
European and American artists have been attracted to Asian philosophies of mind
since at least the eighteenth century.6 An alert, aware mind without preconceptions is
essential to creativity in any realm. The process of achieving this mind-state is a
programmatic teaching of Buddhism, and is fundamental to philosophical Taoism and
Hindu Vedanta.7 It should be kept in mind, however, that the art-historical game of
sources has no beginning and no end. It can be argued that Western art has been
influencing Asian art for as long as Asian culture has been influencing culture in the
Baas, 1945-1975 2

West. The most commonly cited example of West-to-East influence is Gandhara art:
stylistic elements from Greek art adapted to Indian Buddhist iconography in visual art
produced between the first century BCE and the seventh century CE in what is now
northwestern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan.
Early philosophical influence seems to have gone in the other direction. Elements
from early forms of Buddhism originating in Northwestern India and Central Asia
infiltrated the teachings of the Greek philosopher Pyrrho (360-270 BCE), and influenced
the development of early Hinduism and Taoism.8 Buddhism was in turn affected by
ascetic Hindu practices.9 After Buddhist missionaries reached China in the in the first
century CE, Taoism developed hybrid practices that incorporated Buddhist elements,
while Chinese Buddhism gradually incorporated key Taoist concepts such as meditational
“sitting in oblivion.”10 One result was Ch’an (Japanese: Zen) Buddhism.
Thanks to these hybrid characteristics, as well as the abstract, experiential nature
of the various practices, Asian philosophies as resources for western artists are more
difficult to detect than stylistic influences. Perhaps the best-known Asian stylistic
influence during the postwar era is expressive Zen calligraphy, which helped shift
European artists like Hans Hartung, Karl Otto Götz, Pierre Soulanges, and Pierre
Alechinsky; and American artists like Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell, from the
concept of line as two-dimensional boundary, to line as energy.
This shift had philosophical aspects as well, but whether stylistic or spiritual,
artists tend to resist identifying their sources. The American abstract painter Franz Kline,
for example, repeatedly denied that his black-on-white gestural abstractions were
influenced by Asian calligraphy, despite evidence to the contrary.11 And when it comes
to philosophical perspectives, which are not only personal but also in constant
development, artists can be even more resistant. This is partly for reasons of privacy, but
also because artists want viewers to see their work through eyes unclouded by
preconceptions.
There is one more reason: all too often, western authors characterize Asian and
Asian-influenced artistic expression as “mystical” or “spiritual”—words associated with
religion at best, and at worst with Theosophical or New Age homogenization of Asian
mental practices. As suggested above, every “-ism” needs to be understood as a temporal
construct encompassing wide-ranging geographical and historical cultural practices. It is
important, therefore, to define as carefully as possible the terms I shall be using. This
organization in terms of Asian philosophical practice rather than chronology foregrounds
the multifaceted influence of these philosophies and practices within western culture after
World War II. It is also intended to equip readers with information to help them identify
artists for whom these philosophies served as resources to meet both personal and artistic
needs.
Baas, 1945-1975 3

Buddhism was described early on in terms of four “noble truths” attributed to the first
discourse of the Buddha—Siddhartha Gautama, who lived in India sometime between the
sixth and fourth century BCE. The first three truths can be summarized as, first,
recognition of suffering; second, the origin of suffering in attraction and aversion; and
third, the potential to dispel suffering through practicing the fourth truth: “the noble
eight-fold path.” Buddhism’s eight-fold path is both descriptive and prescriptive
regarding how one lives and behaves if one is “awake” (buddha means: “one who is
awake”). Its elements are: right view, which is cultivated through right thought, right
speech, and right conduct, which in turn constitute right living, pursued with right effort
and right mindfulness generated by right contemplation. These are eight interrelated
attitudes and behaviors, just as the four noble truths imply four interconnected mental
events capable of generating liberation of mind: nirvana, freedom from suffering.
In Buddhist meditation the mind is trained to dismantle habitual patterns of
thought until the self is experienced as continuous with the world and thus empty of
inherent (self) existence. The Buddha’s realization of the interdependent nature of
existence emerged as an insight that was complete but hardly sudden. His “middle way”
between austerity and indulgence was preceded by years of rigorous mental and physical
discipline. It was an insight so simple that it seemed to him obvious, though not easy to
convey in words. The Buddha’s teachings were conveyed orally for generations, and did
not begin to be systematically written down until the fifth century CE, in texts that were
translated into European languages only fourteen centuries later.
Over the centuries, Buddhism has evolved from Siddhartha Gautama’s hard-
earned awakening into various systematized sets of observations and behaviors, an
evolution that is still going on. In the places where it has developed, including the
Buddha’s own India, Buddhism took forms that incorporated pre-existing beliefs and
practices. Its manifestations range from the visual and aural complexity of Tibetan
Buddhism to the austerity of Japanese Zen Buddhism.
“Zen” is Japanese for Chinese Ch’an, a school of Buddhism that developed in
sixth-century China and was exported to Japan in the twelfth century. (“Ch’an” is the
Chinese rendering of the Sanskrit word dhyana, meaning a mind absorbed in meditation.)
In Japan, Zen is just one of many Buddhist traditions that include six Nara schools, two
Esoteric schools (Shingon and Tendai), four Amida or “Pure Land” schools, four Zen
schools, plus Nichiren Buddhism, whose many denominations share a focus on the
chanting of the Lotus Sutra.
In the West, Buddhism spread through texts, teachings, travel and, last but not
least, immigration (including on the part of artists). Its various forms adapted themselves
to local cultural and spiritual phenomena ranging from Judeo-Christian traditions to
psychology. Following World War II, Japanese Zen became by far the best-known form
of Buddhism in the West. Thanks in part to the publications and teaching of Daisetz
Teitaro Suzuki (1870-1966), the term “Zen” came to designate a form of access to “pure
Baas, 1945-1975 4

experience” that transcends language and thought. Artists immediately made the
connection with access to non-intellectual experience available through art. The true
artist, according to Suzuki, is an artist of life:

Man is a thinking reed but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking.
“Childlikeness” has to be restored with long years of training in the art of self-forgetfulness.
… When a man reaches this stage of “spiritual” development, he is a Zen artist of life. … His
hands and feet are the brushes and the whole universe is the canvas on which he depicts his
life for seventy, eighty, or even ninety years. This picture is called “history.”12

This was written during the years Suzuki was teaching at Columbia University (1952-57),
where his classes were popular with artists such as John Cage (1912-92), Phillip Guston
(1913-80), and Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967).13
The spread of Himalayan Buddhism to the West was initiated by the first Tibetan
diaspora of 1959. Particularly important for artists and writers was the influential Tibetan
scholar, teacher, poet, and artist Chögyam Trungpa (1939-87), who emigrated to England
in 1963, Scotland in 1967, and then the U.S. in 1969. In 1974 Trungpa founded the
influential Naropa Institute for the study of Buddhism, psychology, and the arts in
Boulder, Colorado. Another important teacher has been the socially engaged Buddhist
Thích Nhất Hạnh (born 1926), who for decades has been traveling internationally to
speak and lead retreats. A Vietnamese Buddhist monk, teacher, author, poet and peace
activist, Nhất Hạnh today lives in Plum Village in the Dordogne region in the south of
France.
Philosophy—Buddhist or otherwise—should never be construed as the only factor
in the creation of art. Works of art are complex products of complex minds; the search
for sources of inspiration that lie behind them is cumulative and endless. This is
particularly true for the period after World War II, when the work of Asian artists like
Yayoi Kusama, Nam June Paik, and Yoko Ono became a vital part of European and
American culture. However great their influence (and it was considerable), there is not
the space here to discuss Asian artists working in the United States and Europe between
1945 and 1975.
Similarly, there are simply too many post-war European and American artists for
whom Buddhism served as a resource to discuss or even list them all. A selective list
might include: sculptors Isamu Noguchi, Ibram Lassaw, Richard Lippold, Richard Serra,
Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Walter De Maria, Anne Truitt, and Richard Tuttle; painters
Mark Tobey, Joan Miró, André Masson, Rupprecht Geiger, Jean Degottex, Yves Klein,
Antoni Tàpies, Ad Reinhardt, Agnes Martin, John McLaughlin, John McCracken, Jasper
Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Sam Francis, Phillip Guston, James Rosenquist, William T.
Wiley, and Günther Uecker; space-and-light artists Robert Irwin, Dan Flavin, Doug
Wheeler, and James Turrell; conceptual artists Joseph Beuys, Gordon Matta-Clark, John
Baldessari, Tom Marioni, Paul Kos, David Ireland, and Bruce Nauman; artists engaged
Baas, 1945-1975 5

with Performance and/or Happenings, such as Allan Kaprow, James Lee Byars, Carolee
Schneemann and, last but not least, artists associated with the international Fluxus
movement, discussed below.
Jasper Johns (born 1930) became an art-world sensation at the age of twenty-
seven when Target with Plaster Casts (1955, figure 1) was shown at Leo Castelli gallery
in January 1958 alongside other unconventional works, such as Flag (1954-55). Flag
was the exact shape and color of an American flag; yet it was a painting. Not just any
painting: it was painted in encaustic—pigmented wax laid on with lots of texture but
thinly enough in spots so that the newsprint layer underneath shows through. Flag
exudes intense physical presence as a painting. At the same time, it conveys an
immediately recognizable, emotion-laden “design,” to use a Johns word. Flag has
become an icon of post-war American art, and thus lost the shock of the new that Johns
was aiming for: was it a painting or was it a flag? The answer (it seems obvious, now) is
not either/or, but both/and—not unlike the logic of Buddhist Madhyamaka or “middle
way” philosophy, which encompasses “both-and” and “neither-nor” along with “true-
false.”
Target with Plaster Casts must have been even more shocking than Flag, for its
content—concentric circles topped by a row of cast body fragments including a mouth, a
nipple, an ear, and a penis—is frankly sexual. Disturbingly so, for not only have the casts
obviously been made from real bodies, they are also evocative of love and loss (the back
of a hand, the front and back of a foot, and an empty box with ragged edges from which
something appears to have been torn). Each body part resides in its own box with a
hinged lid, implying hiddenness. The question presented by Flag—is it a flag or is it a
painting?—multiplies into mind-boggling complexity here. Is Target with Plaster Casts
painting, sculpture, or both? Who is the target and who is the shooter? Viewers may feel
implicated in a mysterious, troubling process that they don’t quite understand.
Neither, perhaps, did Johns. But there seems more than a possibility that the
process had something to do with Zen in the Art of Archery by the German Eugen
Herrigel. Published in German in 1936 and in English in 1953, it was close to required
reading for artists in the fifties. (The Suzuki quote above is from the introduction.)
“Fundamentally,” Herrigel wrote, “the marksman aims at himself and may even succeed
in hitting himself.”14 (For “marksman,” read “artist.”) “It is necessary for the archer to
become, in spite of himself, an unmoved center. Then comes the supreme and ultimate
miracle: art becomes ‘artless,’ shooting becomes not-shooting.”15
The target, in other words, is both the self and the place of transformation. For
something to be transformed, it must, on some hidden level, be destroyed, taken apart,
dismantled. Just as Johns’s flag was both object and symbol, the fragmented body parts
in Target with Plaster Casts are both objects and symbols for fragmented feelings, the
fragmented self. Art as a spiritual practice appealed to a number of artists trying to make
their way in a fragmented, postwar world.
Baas, 1945-1975 6

The lids or doors of the boxes may likewise be connected with the archer-artist’s
quest. According to Herrigel,

The demand that the door of the senses be closed is not met by turning energetically away
from the sensible world, but rather by a readiness to yield without resistance. In order that
this actionless activity may be accomplished instinctively, the soul needs an inner hold, and it
wins it by concentrating on breathing.16

The prescription of breathing meditation for developing an “inner hold” would seem to
relate even more directly to Target with Four Faces (1955), a work made around the
same time as Target with Plaster Casts. Here, the target is surmounted by four boxes
with a single door. Each box contains a cast of the same object: a nose and closed mouth.
The mouth is, of course, another kind of target—the potential target of a kiss. The erotic
feels like the focus of Target with Four Faces, but the repetition of the nose and closed
mouth has a soothing, rhythmic quality, like breathing. Johns presents us here with a
problem containing its own solution: the Zen antidote to sensual confusion is centering
the mind, coming back to the present by “concentrating on breathing.”17
Jasper Johns’s interest in Asian philosophy was sparked by the composer John
Cage and Cage’s mentor Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), each of whom, in different ways,
had been inspired by Asian philosophy to eliminate the boundary between art and life.18
Duchamp transformed Asian perspectives on reality into an aesthetic theory that defined
the role of the artist as a “mediumistic being” who distills experience into forms fully
realized only in the mind of the viewer. The revolutionary art practice Duchamp initiated
in 1913 with his readymades, shifted attention from artistic product to process, and
shifted responsibility for that process to the perceiver. Duchamp helped us to see that
everything in this world is worthy of our attention, and to understand that this—our
attention—is the creative act.19
John Cage put it another way: “Art is everywhere; it’s only seeing which stops
now and then.”20 Cage’s “Experimental Composition” classes at New York’s New
School for Social Research in the late 1950s were formative for future Fluxus artists
George Brecht, Al Hansen, Dick Higgens, and Jackson Mac Low, and for performance
art pioneer Allan Kaprow. From the mid-1950s to the early 1960s a number of artists
involved with avant-garde art, music, and performance including John Cale and Ray
Johnson worked at Orientalia, bookstore in NewYork City specializing in Asian
philosophies and religions.21
Fluxus, Happenings, and Performance were international art movements, not just
because they surfaced in more than one place at a time, but because the people involved
tended to travel a lot—thanks in part to the development of commercial air travel in the
period following the Korean War. It is no coincidence that Fluxus organizer George
Maciunas (1931-78) pursued postgraduate studies at New York University on the topic of
the “European and Siberian Art of Migrations,”22 or that Nam June Paik described
Baas, 1945-1975 7

himself as a “Mongolian-Manchurian-Korean nomad.”23 Things were happening

simultaneously in the United States, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and Japan. The
cultural dichotomy between East and West had all but disappeared, and Buddhism was as
likely to inform the art of a Western artist like Laurie Anderson (whose brother is a
dharma teacher at San Francisco Zen Center) as artists with Asian backgrounds, like Nam
June Paik and Yoko Ono.
George Maciunas’s obsession with migration and change is reflected in the name
he chose in 1962 for his loosely organized group of performers. The first “Fluxus”
Festival took place in Wiesbaden, Germany, where Maciunas was working as a designer
for the U.S. Air Force. There were also performances in Copenhagen and Paris that year;
the performers included, in addition to Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles,
Benjamin Patterson, Wolf Vostell, Nam June Paik, Emmett Williams, Tomas Schmit,
Addi Kopcke, and Eric Andersen. The following year, Ben Vautier, Daniel Spoerri,
Robert Filliou, Joseph Beuys, and Willem de Ridder joined the group in the presentation
of Fluxus Festivals in Dusseldorf, Amsterdam, The Hague, and Nice.
A Lithuanian who had immigrated to the United States in 1948 at the age of
seventeen, Maciunas was trained as an architect and a graphic artist. He was also
intensely interested in avant-garde music, and the people he invited to join Fluxus were a
remarkably interdisciplinary group. A maniacal organizer, Maciunas’s Marxist goal was
the “gradual elimination of fine arts…motivated by desire to stop the waste of material
and human resources…and divert it to socially constructive ends.” During this process,
Fluxus art “could temporarily have the pedagogical function of teaching people the
needlessness of art including the eventual needlessness of itself.”24
Fluxus performances tended toward the anarchical, while Fluxus editions
and multiples produced by Maciunas tended to be didactic in both content and
presentation. Somewhat surprising, in such an overtly didactic enterprise, was the
considerable humor with which Fluxus products were leavened. Fluxus artist and writer
Ken Friedman dubbed this aspect “Zen Vaudeville,”25 while Maciunas himself
characterized Fluxus’s humorous one-liners as, “Neo Haiku Events.”26 A number of
artists associated with Fluxus have acknowledged the importance of Zen at this time.
Ben Patterson, for example, said: “I, and my generation of Fluxus artists, were all more
or less twelve to fourteen years old when the first atomic bomb exploded... Perhaps only
Zen or existentialism could begin to deal with such finality.”27 Humor, which can help
process the fact of “finality,” is characteristic of Zen. Irony is more typical of
existentialism.
Maciunas’s packaging and design provided a distinctive, to say the least, identity
for Fluxus editions like George Brecht’s Games and Puzzles entitled Name Kit (1965,
figure 2), containing an assortment of small objects along with the injunction to “spell
your name.” Maciunas blithely adapted Brecht’s concept for his own Gift Box for John
Cage (about 1972, figure 3). Cage could, in fact, have spelled his name with the first
Baas, 1945-1975 8

letters of the things in Maciunas’s box, which contains items such as a pine-cone, acorn,
glass bottle stopper, and egg. Brecht was less literal-minded, or perhaps more Buddhist:
he left open the relationship between your name (and by implication you) and the things
in the box, thus challenging the reductive process of categorization and naming.
“Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?” asked Jackson Mac Low (1922-
2004) in the second number of the Fluxus newspaper V TRE (1964). His answer: “To get
to the other side.” Mac Low, who was co-publisher with La Monte Young of the seminal
proto-Fluxus collection, An Anthology (1963), later wrote more directly about the
Buddhist inspiration behind his own shift in consciousness:

From Zen I gathered the conviction that giving one's complete attention to any dharma
(perception, form, feeling, etc.) may lead to a direct insight into reality, and that such
insight can free us from suffering, which, as Buddhism teaches, pervades all sentient
existence. … Being “choicelessly aware” is perceiving phenomena - as far as possible -
without attachment and without bias. Artworks may facilitate this kind of perception by
presenting phenomena that are not chosen according to the tastes and predilections of the
artists who make them.28

Fluxus artists attempted to turn viewers into collaborators; to stimulate the state of open,
non-reactive, non-judgmental attention that Mac Low described.

Taoism, the primary indigenous religion of China, is a mostly esoteric complex of

traditions that developed over several millennia. In the Taoist worldview, when the
Universe began there was only the Tao, the “One”—a void pregnant with possibility.
Tao generated swirling patterns of cloudlike chi energy, which developed two
complementary aspects: yin, which is dark, heavy, and “feminine,” and yang, which is
light, airy, and “masculine.” Yin energy sank to form the earth, yang energy rose to form
the heavens, and when their energies harmonized, human beings were born. Thus, the
human body holds within it the energies of both the earth and the heavens.
Taoism’s primary text is the Tao-te ching, a collection of verses traditionally
attributed to Lao-tzu. While the legendary Lao-tzu is said to have lived around the sixth
century BCE, making him a contemporary of Confucius and of the Buddha, the actual
Lao-tzu probably lived during the Warring States period of the fifth or fourth century
BCE. One of the world’s great poems, Tao-te ching translates literally as, “The Classic
of the Way’s Virtues.” The title also can be translated as, “The Classic of This Focus and
Its Field,” emphasizing the holographic nature of reality experienced by recognizing the
unifying chi that flows to us from the world and back into it. Once realized, this skill is
put into service for humanity in an effective yet inconspicuous manner, in keeping with
the Taoist principles of action through non-action, simplicity, and spontaneity.29
In contrast with the poetic Tao-te ching, the more humorous and irreverent
writings of Chuang-tzu (fourth century BCE) and his followers are laced with emphatic
anti-authoritarianism. Chuang-tzu’s anecdotes came to stand for the opposite of
Baas, 1945-1975 9

Confucianism’s ethos of self-sacrifice: specifically, escape from societal pressure to an

individual path of freedom, often through the liberating power of humor. This was an
appealing attitude for western artists, beginning with Dada artists around the time of the
First World War,30 and surfacing again after the Second World War with Fluxus.
Taoist philosophy was a fundamental part of the intellectual arsenal for just about
every postwar artist mentioned above in connection with Zen Buddhism. American
abstract painter Agnes Martin (1912-2004), for example, emphasized both Taoism and
Buddhism in response to a scholar’s query about which spiritual texts had been most
important to her: “My greatest spiritual inspiration came from the Chinese spiritual
teachers, especially Lao Tzu. ... My next strongest influence is the Sixth [Ch’an
Buddhist] Patriarch Hui Neng. ... I have also read and been inspired by the sutras of the
other ... Buddhist masters, and Chuang Tzu ... who was very wise and very amusing.”31
As a lesbian, Martin would have identified with Chuang Tzu’s rejection of social
conventions and definitions. As a lover of nature, she would have responded to Lao-tzu’s
metaphors intended to aid humans doing their best to exist “in-between” heaven and earth,
in harmony with each other and with natural forces. Martin seems to have painted This
Rain (1958, figure 4) as a Tao-infused version of Aristophanes’s myth of the origin of the
sexes. Her gloss on the painting, entitled “Parable of the Equal Hearts,” concludes:

There’s one thing that God is not able to endure —

a suffering heart.
He felt one half in the sky and one half in the sea.
God thought what to do.
So the one in the sky fell down into the sea
and immediately both turned to sea water.
Ever since that time when the water is drawn up from the sea
and it rains this is not an ordinary rain. It’s the rain that affects
people and softens them. I painted a painting called This Rain.32

In Martin’s art, as in her life, the self-balancing force that is the Tao served as a metaphor
for both intrapersonal and interpersonal equilibrium.
The Taoist focus on change and chance became a foundational compositional
device for John Cage, born in the same year as Agnes Martin (1912). Taoism developed
its cosmological notions from the ancient school of yin yang—opposite but interrelated
forces that give rise to each other. Its philosophical perspective was based on the ancient
divination text, I Ching, or “Book of Changes,” which deploys a system of symbols to
represent ultimate reality and extract significance and direction from chance events. A
question is posed to the cosmos, and then three yarrow sticks (or coins) are tossed six
times. The six combinations yield two trigrams of three lines each, with the second
trigram placed above the first to form a hexagram. Some of the lines may be “changing”
lines, generating a second hexagram. Together, the two hexagrams indicate current
conditions and the direction things are heading, along with lessons to be heeded.33
Baas, 1945-1975 10

In early 1951 Cage’s composition student Christian Wolff gave him a copy of the
I Ching. “I saw immediately that that chart was better than the Magic Square,” Cage said.
“So I began writing the Music of Changes”:

Normally a musician writes in measures, and then assigns to the unit of those measures a
metronomic figure. ... In a piece called the Music of Changes, which I composed using the
Book of Changes, all the things I could discern in a piece of music were subjected to chance
operations. Among the things I noticed and subjected to chance operation was tempo. ...
What I did was to develop rhythmic structure from a fixed tempo to changes of tempo. I had
34
not yet moved to a renunciation of absolutely all structure.

Music of Changes was the second work Cage composed to be fully indeterminate, but it
was the first instrumental work. (The first was Imaginary Landscape No. 4, which uses
radios.)
After 1951, Cage regularly used the I-Ching as a device to create compositions
determined by chance: he would “ask” questions about various aspects of a composition,
and then integrate the answers. His compositional process was mind-bogglingly
mathematical. (He eventually began utilizing computers.) “Some people think that I’m
enslaved by it,” Cage commented about the I-Ching, “but I feel that I am liberated by
it.”35 More than a device, the I-Ching served Cage as an artistic method for bringing his
work and himself into accord with the ever-changing Tao.
Among the many younger artists influenced by John Cage was the American
Intermedia artist, musician, and sculptor Walter De Maria (1935-2003), who told an
interviewer:

Cage was studying Zen with Suzuki; ... I think that in a sense his ideas about chance were
very well tailored to being another way of reading the litany of abstract expressionist dogma.
You go to the painting with the idea of chance, of seeing how it will fall. And then he was
saying you go to the composition, to the keyboard, with the idea of chance. Later when I was
to start reflecting the ideas of chance, I became less and less interested in Cage and less and
less interested in his music. I never did like his music actually. But the ideas were always
well stated.36

De Maria, who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, created two sculptural puns in
tribute to Cage—Cage, and Cage II (1965), this last now in the collection of the Museum
of Modern Art, New York. Also in MoMA’s collection is a colored pencil drawing
evocative of Taoism’s emphasis on the mingling yin yang energies of earth and heaven:
Nine Mountains and the Sun (1964, figure 5). De Maria is perhaps best known for his
nature-interactive The Lightning Field, designed to induce the mingling of yin yang
energy between earth and heaven (1977, figure 6). Among his more mature works is
360° I Ching : 64 sculptures (1981), consisting 576 lacquered hexagonal wooden rods
Baas, 1945-1975 11

arranged in the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching. This work may suggest the lingering
influence of John Cage, but it also reveals De Maria’s ongoing artistic interest in
representing the infinite, ever-changing reality that is the Tao.
Walter De Maria was involved with Fluxus during the early 1960s. What is now
known as the “Fluxus Manifesto” (though no other Fluxus artist recalls endorsing it)
appeared around 1963. George Maciunas incorporated dictionary definitions of “flux” in
The Fluxus Manifesto, including: “2. Act of flowing: a continuous moving on or passing
by, as of a flowing stream; a continuing succession of changes. 3. A stream; copious
flow; flood; outflow . . .”37 The earliest appearance of the word tao in the ancient
Chinese Book of Documents has to do with cutting a channel to prevent the overflowing
of riverbanks;38 Chuang-tzu described the life of a sage as “a smooth flow.”39
Maciunas’s “Act of flowing” and “A stream,” suggest the ancient Chinese Taoist tactic of
accepting and working with change—“going with the flow,” as the popular version has it.
Maciunas’s mentor as an art history graduate student at the Institute of Fine Arts,
New York University, was Professor of Chinese Art Alfred Salmony (1890-1958), who
had been personally involved with artists in the Dada movement that emerged in British-
occupied Cologne when he was in his late twenties.40 Maciunas began studying with
Salmony in 1955 (Ad Reinhardt had studied with him in 1944). He produced his Atlas of
Prehistoric Chinese Art (whereabouts unknown) under Salmony’s tutelage.
At the first Fluxus concert, “Après John Cage,” in Wuppertal, West Germany, in
June 1962, Maciunas read aloud (in German) a statement entitled “Neo-Dada in Music,
Theater, Poetry, Art.” After a discussion of “concretism” in various art forms, Maciunas
addressed the nature of reality in Taoist terms:

Anti-art is life, is nature, is true reality—it is one and all. Rainfall is anti-art, a babble of a
crowd is anti-art, a sneeze is anti-art, a flight of a butterfly, or movements of microbes are
anti-art. They are as beautiful and as worthy to be aware of as art itself. If man could
experience the world, the concrete world surrounding him (from mathematical ideas to
physical matter) in the same way he experiences art, there would be no need for art, artists,
and similar “nonproductive” elements.41

The title of Maciunas’s essay—“Neo-Dada in Music, Theater, Poetry, Art”—is

significant, for as Salmony and thus Maciunas would have known, Dada claimed a Taoist
lineage. Both aspects of Taoism— Lao-tzu’s vision of the extraordinary available within
the ordinary, and Chuang-tzu’s anarchism and humor—manifested in Fluxus.

Hindu Vedanta, one of six orthodox schools of Hindu philosophy, is the aspect of
Hinduism best known in the West. Vedanta is based on the philosophy of the
Upanishads, the final collection of teachings within the Vedic canon. (Veda means
“knowledge”; anta, “end.”) In a deeper sense, however, Vedanta comprises the end of
knowledge in terms of both the goal of knowledge, and its transcendence. The concepts
Baas, 1945-1975 12

Brahman (Absolute Reality) and Ātman (Soul, Self) are central ideas in the Upanishads.
Their thematic focus is Ātman and Brahman and as one and the same: the absolute is the
self.
A core text of Vedanta is the Bhagavad Gita, part of the Hindu epic Mahabharata
(fifth to second century BCE). The Bhagavad Gita was the first Asian religious text to be
translated into English (1785) and, along with the rest of the Upanishads, it has been
influencing western artists from William Blake (1757-1827) to today.42 About Vedanta,
contemporary American conceptual and performance artist and philosopher Adrian Piper
(born 1948) writes as follows:

Whereas Western ethics treats altruism and its concomitant character dispositions - disinterest,
impartiality, compassion, sympathy, selflessness - as a moral ideal to be achieved through
rational deliberation, habituation, and self-scrutiny, Vedanta treats all of these as means to the
attainment of a higher state of consciousness characterized by insight into the true nature of
the self and union with ultimate metaphysical reality. Whereas Western ethics values altruism
as an intrinsic good, Vedanta views it as a by-product and manifestation of this higher state of
consciousness. … So Vedanta implicitly critiques Western ethical and social values as
deluded, superficial, and misguided.43

After World War II it was manifestly obvious that western values had failed. Vedanta’s
perception of absolute reality as contiguous with the self, and its emphasis on changing
the world by changing the self, offered another way.
Vedantic cosmology and meditation practices are described in a number of texts,
including the Bhagavad Gita, the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, as well as more modern texts
such as Vivekananda’s Raja-Yoga: Conquering the Internal Nature (1896 and many later
editions).44 A popular speaker in both Europe and the United States, Vivekananda (1863-
1902) established the Vedanta Society in New York in 1894. The Vedanta Society of
Northern California was founded in 1900, and the Vedanta Society of Southern
California in 1930. Founded as western branches of the Ramakrishna Order in India, all
are still going concerns.
Travel was also a factor: India was one of the primary destinations in tours of
Asia undertaken by western artists including Ad Reinhardt, Agnes Martin, Robert
Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and John Cage, who first become interested in Asian
philosophy through his friendship with comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell (1904-
87). Cage lived with Campbell and his wife for a few months in 1942, when Campbell
was working with Indologist Heinrich Zimmer. After Zimmer died in 1943, Campbell
edited his posthumous book, Myths and symbols in Indian Art and Civilization (1946).
Advising Campbell on this project was Boston Museum of Fine Arts Curator Ananda
Kentish Coomaraswamy (1887-1947), author of The Transformation of Nature in Art
(1934)—an important source for Cage’s developing philosophy of aesthetics.45
Baas, 1945-1975 13

Another significant friendship for Cage was with Indian musician Gita Sarabhai
(1922-2011), to whom Cage attributed the origin of his oft-repeated statement that the
purpose of art is “to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens.”46
Her influence shows up in Cage’s India-inflected musical accompaniment for the short
film Marcel Duchamp created as part of Hans Richter’s experimental film anthology,
Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947).47
Film was a natural medium for artists interested in attempting to portray the
Vedantic experience of Absolute Reality. San Francisco-Based filmmaker Jordan Belson
(1926-2011) created abstract color films that convey and, given the right viewer, are
capable of inducing a state of Samadhi: the final stage in the meditative practice of
mental union with the Absolute.48 For Belson, Hindu Vedanta, specifically the practice
of yoga, was a means to perfect his art by perfecting himself:

Yoga was the key to it all. Hatha yoga gives you a system and a very clear, precise technique
for developing the spiritual side to your consciousness. … My theory was that if I could
refine and perfect myself, I would become a better artist.49

Belson’s first abstract film was Transmutation (1947), now lost. Later films include
Mandala (1953), Raga (1958), Samadhi (1967, figure 7), and Chakra (1972). From 1957
through 1959 Belson collaborated with sound artist Henry Jacobs (1924-2015) to produce
a series of electronic music concerts at San Francisco’s Morrison Planetarium: the Vortex
Concerts—forerunners of the sound and light shows of the 1960s.
Other artists took up the challenge of conveying meditative states through the
traditional art medium of painting. Once again, the San Francisco Bay Area, with its
proximity to Asia and its stunning natural setting, provided the impetus. The San
Francisco Museum of Art (now San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) had been
founded and was directed by Grace McCann Morley (1900-85), who would move to
India in 1960. In 1951 Morley presented the exhibition Dynaton 1951, featuring the
work of Lee Mullican (American, 1919-98, figure 8), Gordon Onslow-Ford (English,
1912-2003, figure 9), and Wolfgang Paalen (Austrian-Mexican, 1905-59). “Three artists,”
Morley wrote in the catalogue, “from very different parts of the world … have joined
together. They have found a vision in common, associate it with this Far Western region
where they now all live.”50
As mentioned above, San Francisco’s Vedanta Society had been founded in 1900.
In 1941, the German-born scholar of Asian religions Frederic Spiegelberg (1897-1994)
joined the faculty of Stanford University. In 1950, Spiegelberg invited Bengali
philosopher Haridas Chaudhuri (1913-75) to join the faculty of his American Academy of
Asian Studies, then being developed in San Francisco. Chaudhuri had written his
dissertation on the Integral Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), whose concept of
Integral Yoga was based on the concept of “involution”—a process of inner, spiritual
Baas, 1945-1975 14

evolution.51 Soon after his arrival in San Francisco, Chaudhuri established the Cultural
Integration Fellowship, later to become the California Institute of Integral Studies.
Dynaton member Gordon Onslow Ford attended Chaudhuri’s lectures series on
Vedanta. While walking in Muir Woods one day, Onslow Ford “had a sudden revelation
that, in painting, the ‘line, circle, dot’ are at the root of art” as painterly expressions of
“the idea of expansion of consciousness from surface to depth, the oneness of universal
mind, and the union with the ground of existence.”52 Following this Vedanta-inspired
insight, Onslow Ford studied Buddhism with Alan Watts (1915-73), and pursued a five-
year course of study of Chinese and Japanese calligraphy with Japanese Zen master Hodo
Tobase.
“Gordon Onslow Ford, Lee Mullican and myself,” Wolfgang Paalen wrote in the
San Francisco Museum’s Dynaton 51 catalogue,

Have come to express the manifold expanse of transdimensional potentiality. Our points of
departure are not any aspects of reality, but awareness of the formative powers which make
and unmake reality. … Our images are not meant to shock nor to relax; they are neither
objects for mere aesthetic satisfaction nor for visual experimentation. Our pictures are
objects for that active meditation which does not mean detachment from human purpose, but
a state of self-transcending awareness, which is not an escape from reality, because it is an
intuitive participation in the formative potentialities of reality.

In 1951, while the Korean War was ongoing, Paalen described what many western artists
have observed since: art can “provide an equivalent for what in the East is called
meditation; and there is perhaps, nothing we need more urgently at [this] time, when
aimless perfection of technical means has become self-destructive.”53 What Gordon
Onslow Ford called “Inner Realism” helped these artists come to terms with a modern
reality characterized by nuclear weapons and endless warfare.

Tantra transforms erotic energy into mental and spiritual liberation in a process
involving acute awareness of integration within a system of micro- and macrocosmic
relationships. Like the older body energetics of Taoist internal alchemy (nei-tan), which
involve gathering, circulating, nourishing, refining, and ultimately transforming the
energies of the human body, Hindu tantra, which surfaced in India beginning in the fifth
century CE, understands the cosmos as the product of an ongoing, generative interplay
between two opposites: a powerful, purposeful “male” principle, identified with
consciousness; and a dynamic, creative “female” principle, identified with energy. The
motivating force behind their interaction and the prime motivating force of the universe is
the power of attraction.
Hindu tantra as practiced in India, and Buddhist tantra as practiced in Tibet and
the greater Himalayan region, have evolved into countless forms and ritual practices that
include mantras (vocalization or chanting), mudras (body or hand-gestures), and colorful
Baas, 1945-1975 15

mental visualizations ranging from to individual Sanskrit letters to colorful abstractions

to multidimensional cosmic mandalas. In Buddhist tantra, also known as “deity-yoga,”
enlightenment is achieved through identification with a deity or deities. These are not
worshiped or “believed in,” as in Judeo-Christian traditions, but are manifestations of
qualities to be realized that are intrinsic to the tantric practitioner's own nature.
Buddhist tantra migrated to Japan via China early in the ninth century,
manifesting as the spectacularly visual Shingon and Tendai Esoteric traditions.54 Ad
Reinhardt taught Japanese art history, and in the late 1950s and early 1960s, traveled to
Japan during his many trips to Asia. In 1962 Reinhardt wrote:

The one standard in art is oneness and fineness, rightness and purity, abstractness and
evanescence. The one thing to say about art is its breathlesssness, lifelessness, deathlessness,
contentlessness, formlessness, spacelessness, and timelessness. This is always the end of
art.55

In his late, “dark” paintings from the 1960s, Reinhardt aimed to reduce painting to its
absolute, its “end” (figure 10). The subtle, symmetrical cross designs of these works may
well have been based on the identical design of Japanese Shingon “Diamond World”
mandala paintings representing the real, the unconditioned, the absolute.56
Popular with western artists from Georgia O’Keeffe onward was a Taoist nei-tan
meditation text entitled The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life (1931,
1955). Translated by Richard Wilhelm with foreword and commentary by C. G. Jung,
authorship of Secret of the Golden Flower is attributed to Lü Dongbin of the late Tang
dynasty (618-684; in fact, it originated hundreds of years later, and was not published
until 1668-92). Among the postwar artists known to have read it were Ad Reinhardt,
John McCracken (1934-2011), Irene Rice Pereira (1902-71), and Charmion Von
Wiegand (1896-1983), who went on to practice Tibetan tantric Buddhism.57
The form of tantra that interested John Cage and his cohort—which by the early
fifties included the artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg—seems to have been
westernized tantra yoga.58 The first westerner to translate Indian tantric texts into English
was Arthur Avalon (1865-1936, pseudonym for Sir John George Woodroffe), author of
The Serpent Power (1919), describing Kundalini practices. Vivekananda included in
Raja Yoga a more generalized description of Kundalini energy practice. Cage spent the
year 1946-47 reading the “gospel” of Vivekananda’s teacher, the nineteenth-century
tantric master Sri Ramakrishna.59 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna is an English
translation of a Bengali record of conversations between Ramakrishna and his followers.
The first edition was published in 1942; among its editors was Cage’s friend Joseph
Campbell.
That same year, 1942, Cage got to know Marcel Duchamp when they were fellow
houseguests of Peggy Guggenheim, who had agreed to pay Cage’s expenses in
connection with a concert at the opening of her Art of This Century Gallery. When she
Baas, 1945-1975 16

learned that Cage had also promised to give a concert at the Museum of Modern Art,
Guggenheim canceled the concert and refused to pay the shipping expense to get Cage’s
instruments to New York. Some thirty-five years later, he recalled,

I burst into tears. In the room next to mine at the back of the house Marcel Duchamp was
sitting in a rocking chair smoking a cigar. He asked why I was crying and I told him. He
said virtually nothing, but his presence was such that I felt calmer. … He had calmness in the
face of disaster.60

Clearly, Duchamp knew a few things about how “to sober and quiet the mind so that it is
in accord with what happens.”
Duchamp probably learned about tantra yoga In Paris around 1910-11, possibly
from Mirra Alfassa (1878-1973), later to become “The Mother” for the same Sri
Aurobindo whose Integral Yoga played such an important role for artists and writers in
the San Francisco Bay Area. Duchamp’s interest in tantra yoga may have inspired Cage
to create an “Indian” accompaniment for Duchamp’s film contribution to Dreams that
Money Can Buy, mentioned above, which includes shots of mandala-like rotating discs
interspersed with a nude woman repeatedly descending a staircase. Tantra also helps
helps explain Duchamp’s Couple of Laundress’s Aprons (1959, figure 16), a quirky
collaborative effort created for the Boîte Alerte compiled by Duchamp and Canadian
artist Mimi Parent for the deluxe edition of the catalogue to the Exposition
inteRnatiOnale du Surréalism that Duchamp co-organized with André Breton in 1959.
The capitalizations in the title signaled this Paris exhibition’s dedication to EROS.
Laundress’s Aprons consists of two red plaid potholders: one ‘male,’ with a red-
tipped penis popping out from a fly at the center, the other ‘female,’ with a flap at the
‘crotch’ that lifts to reveal a patch of fur. In Indian maithuna (ritual sexual union) the
male practitioner theoretically seeks out a ‘forbidden’ partner such as a low-caste Dombi,
or “Laundress.” The identification of Duchamp’s potholders as laundresses’ aprons
“alerts” us to their tantric context, while the potholders’ gendered identities indicate that
the “holding” action implied is that of erotic union. “Laundresses” points to the
cleansing power of water, while potholders suggest the transformative power of fire—
both important metaphors in tantric ritual. Even the plaid is significant. “Tantra” means
“continuum: tan in Sanskrit signifies “to stretch out” or “weave,” as in a pattern.
In this same 1959 exhibition devoted to eroticism Duchamp included Jasper
Johns’s Target with Plaster Casts (figure 1, discussed above), which suggests that
Johns’s Targets might be considered within a tantric as well as a Zen framework. Johns
would entitle three later paintings Tantric Detail I (1980), Tantric Detail II (1981) and
Tantric Detail III (1981). A yantra is a tantric concentric design that serves as a sort of
target for mediation. “Yantra” derives from the Sanskrit root yan- meaning “hold or
support,” plus the suffix –tra, which means “mechanism.” Thus, yantras are mechanisms
Baas, 1945-1975 17

for holding attention. This tantric read reinforces the implication that Johns’s target
signifies both the self and the place of transformation.
Also included in Duchamp’s 1959 Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalism was
Bed (1955) by Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008). This painted, unmade “bed” emerged
from the same philosophical territory as Johns’s Flag—in this case, asking the question:
“Is this a bed or a painting?” Earlier, Rauschenberg had produced a work that, while not
explicitly erotic, does appear to have been inspired by Hindu tantra. Mother of God
(about 1950, figure 12) is a collage painting on Masonite that combines sections of
eighteen city maps from Rand McNally road atlases surrounding an open circle at the
center that Rauschenberg painted white. The white circle hovers above a white band
painted across the bottom of the painting. In the bottom right corner, a pasted newspaper
fragment reads: “‘An invaluable spiritual road map . . . As simple and fundamental as life
itself’—Catholic Review.” To its right, a second printed fragment reads: “anxiety over /
Besides, no oth[er] / has produced / of the Repub[lic] /‘trampling.”
Born in Port Arthur, Texas, Rauschenberg was reared in the fundamentalist
Church of Christ, which forswears all forms of worship not explicitly described in the
New Testament; it is the diametric opposite of Catholicism. Rauschenberg’s title,
therefore—Mother of God—probably refers not to the Virgin Mary, but to some other
spiritual entity. The maps may reference a spiritual journey, Rauschenberg’s (extensive)
travels, or both. Tantric Geography was the title Rauschenberg gave his 1977 set design
for choreographer Merce Cunningham’s Travalogue. This suggests that Mother of God
might also be read as tantric geography, and that the painting as a whole may have been
intended to serve as “an invaluable spiritual road map.”
Rauschenberg served as a Conscientious Objector during the latter part of World
War II in Southern California, home to the Vedanta Society of Southern California, with
headquarters in Hollywood and sub-centers in Pasadena, Santa Barbara, San Diego, and
Trabuco Canyon. The Ramakrishna Monastery, founded in Trabuco Canyon in 1949,
runs a service project called Holy Mother Mission, which provides service to the needy.
Ramakrishna considered himself a child of Goddess Kāli, the “Divine Mother” of the
Universe. Traditionally a fierce black goddess, Kāli has more recently been devotionally
re-imagined as a benevolent mother. The large white circle or womb-like void at the
center of Mother of God likely references this tantric “Mother.”
In Shākta Tantra, Kāli signifies the energy (shakti) of the Absolute. She “beheads”
ego as the illusory self-centered view of reality, and liberates spirit from the cycle of birth
and death: Samsara, “journeying.” Kali can be portrayed in sexual union with, dancing
on, or “trampling” (to quote Rauschenberg’s clipping) her consort: the Hindu god Shiva,
who signifies pure, absolute consciousness (figure 13). The horizontal white band
beneath the hovering white circle in Mother of God suggests an abstract representation of
Shiva, lying prostrate beneath the equally abstract, liberating “Mother of God.” Together,
they form a complete image of Brahman: Absolute Reality.
Baas, 1945-1975 18

Mother of God makes for an interesting visual comparison with Los Angeles artist
John Baldessari’s little painting, A Dab a Day Keeps the Gray Away (1961, figure 14),
which similarly features a white blob hovering above a horizontal band. Baldessari’s
inscription refers to the therapeutic benefits of the act of painting, but it also caries a
more esoteric meaning having to do with the transformation of erotic energy into mental
liberation. In other words, like Mother of God, A Dab a Day could be interpreted as a
tantric image.
As a mandala, or microcosm of the universe, Rauschenberg’s Mother of God is
not a mystical work; in fact, it could not be more real. The reality it portrays is the
fecund connection between inner and outer reality that Wolfgang Paalen described as
“intuitive participation in the formative potentialities of reality”—reality as ongoing
process in the mind of every sentient being. This process is dependent on quality of mind,
which (as Baldessari implies) can itself be created, or at least modified. Rauschenberg
portrayed this dimension of reality in Mother of God: reality transformed by
transformation of awareness. Asian philosophies and practices, newly relevant to artists
seeking ways of understanding an increasingly complex world, were primary generators
of this profound transformation.

Selected Bibliography

Baas, Jacquelynn. Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to
Today. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

_____. “No Boundary,” in Gwangju Biennale 2006: Fever Variations. Gwangju, Korea: Gwangju
Biennale, 2006: 162-208.

_____. Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life. Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, in
association with University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Batchelor, Stephen. The Awakening of the West: The Encounter of Buddhism and Western
Culture. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1994.

Clarke, David J. The Influence of Oriental Thought on Postwar American Painting and Sculpture.
New York: Garland, 1988.

Clarke, J. J. Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter Between Asian and Western Thought.
London and New York: Routledge, 1997.

_____. The Tao of the West. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

Fields, Rick. How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America.
Boston: Shambhala, 1981.
Baas, 1945-1975 19

Gelburd, Gail and Geri De Paoli. The Transparent Thread: Asian Philosophy in Recent American
Art. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, with Hofstra University and Bard College,
1990.

Levy, Mark. Void In Art. Putney, VT: Bramble Books, 2005.

Munroe, Alexandra, ed. The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989. New
York: Guggenheim Museum, 2009.

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. + 1961: Founding the Expanded Arts. Madrid: 2013.

Pearlman, Ellen. Nothing & Everything: The Influence of Buddhism on the American Avant-
Garde 1942-1962. Berkeley: Evolver Editions, 2012.

Prebish, Charles S. and Martin Baumann, editors. Westward Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Asia.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.

Sullivan, Michael. The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1989.

Tuchman, Maurice, ed. The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985. Los Angeles County
Museum of Art with New York: Abbeville Press, 1986.

Westgeest, Helen. Zen in the Fifties: Interaction in Art Between East and West. Zwolle:
Waanders; Amstelveen: Cobra museum voor moderne kunst, 1996.

Some Sources for Artists

Avalon, Arthur. The Serpent Power: Being The Ṣaṭ-Chakra-Nirūpaṇa And Pādukā-Panchaka:
Two Works On Tantrik Yoga / Translated From The Sanskrit, With Introduction And
Commentary By Arthur Avalon. London: Luzac, 1919; Ganesh: Madras, 1924, 1950, 1953, 1958,
1964; New York: Dover, 1974.

Blofeld, John, tr. and intr. The Zen Teaching of Huang Po: On the Transmission of Mind. New
York: Grove Press, [1947] 1958.

_____. The Way of Power: A Practical Guide to the Tantric Mysticism of Tibet. London: Allen &
Unwin, 1970.

_____. The Secret and Sublime: Taoist Mysteries and Magic. London, Allen & Unwin, 1973.

Bynner, Witter. The Way of Life According to Laotzu; An American Version. New York; John
Day, 1944.

Coomaraswamy, Ananda. The Dance of Śiva. New York: Noonday Press, [1918] 1957.

_____. The Transformation of Nature in Art. New York: Dover Publications, [1934] 1956.

Eliade, Mircea. Le yoga; immortalité et liberté. Paris, Payot, 1954. Yoga; Immortality and
Freedom, transl. Willard R. Trask. New York: Pantheon Books, 1958.
Baas, 1945-1975 20

Ghose, Aurobindo. The Life Divine. Calcutta: Arya Publishing House, 1939-40.

Gopi Krishna. Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man, introduction Frederic Spiegelberg,
commentary James Hillman. Berkeley: Shambala, 1971.

Govinda, Lama Anagarika. Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism. New York: Dutton, [1959] 1960.

Herrigel, Eugen. Zen in the Art of Archery, introduction by D. T. Suzuki, translated R. R. C. Hull.
New York: Pantheon, 1953.

The I Ching; Or, Book of Changes, Richard Wilhelm translation rendered into English by Cary F.
Baynes; foreword by C.G. Jung. New York: Pantheon, 1950; Princeton University Press, 1967.

Lü, Dongbin. Secret of the Golden Flower, A Chinese Book of Life, trans. Richard Wilhelm,
foreword and commentary C.G. Jung. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World 1931; New York:
Wehman, 1955.

Merton, Thomas. The Way of Chuang Tzu. New York: New Directions, 1965.

_____. Mystics and Zen Masters. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967.

Mookerjee, Ajit. Tantra Art: Its Philosophy & Physics. Paris and New Delhi: Ravi Kumar, 1966.

Needham, Joseph. Science and Civilisation in China. Cambridge University Press, 1954-

Nhá̂ t Hạnh, Thích. Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire, foreword Thomas Merton. New York: Hill
and Wang, 1967.

Ramakrishna: Prophet of New India, Abridged from The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, transl.
Swami Nikhilananda, forward Aldous Huxley. New York & London: Harper, [1942] 1948.

Spiegelberg, Frederic. The Religion of No-Religion. Stanford, CA: James Ladd Delkin, 1948.

_____. Living Religions of the World. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1956.

_____. Spiritual Practices of India, intro. Alan W. Watts. New York: Citadel Press, 1962.

Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro. Manual of Zen Buddhism. Kyoto: Eastern Buddhist Society, 1935.
London: Rider, 1957. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1960.

_____. An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, foreword by C. G. Jung. New York: Philosophical

Library, 1949. New York: Grove Press, 1964.

_____, intro. The Texts of Taoism, translated James Legge. New York: Julian Press, 1959.

Suzuki, Shunryū. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice.
Weatherhill: New York, 1970.

Trungpa, Chögyam. Meditation in Action. Berkeley: Shambhala, [1969] 1970.

Waley, Arthur. Zen Buddhism and Its Relation to Art. London: Luzac, 1922.
Baas, 1945-1975 21

_____. The Way and Its Power; A study of the Tao tê ching and its Place in Chinese Thought.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935; London: Allen and Unwin, 1949; New York: Grove, 1958.

Watts, Alan W. The Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work and Art in the Far East. London: John
Murray [1936], 1948.

_____. The Way of Zen. New York: Pantheon, 1957.

_____. Nature, Man and Woman. New York: Pantheon, 1958.

Zimmer, Heinrich. Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, ed. Joseph Campbell.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1946] 1972.
Baas, 1945-1975 22

NOTES
1
From Bokubi (“Beauty of Ink”), 48 (September-October 1955): 33; cited Winther-Tamaki 2009: 157.
2
From “Taking a Sight 1951” in, Dynaton 1951 (San Francisco Museum of Art, 1951): 39.
3
Introduction to Spiegelberg 1962: xiii-xiv.
4
Colta F. Ives, The Great Wave: The Influence of Japanese Woodcuts on French Prints (New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1974); Gabriel P. Weisberg et al., Japonisme: Japanese Influence on French
Art, 1854-1910 (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1975).
5
The most recent, as of this writing: Dennis Carr, et al. Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers
Asia (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2015).
6
See Baas, 2005. Not discussed there is William Blake, who incorporated Vedanta into his idiosyncratic
political/spiritual ideology, and who appears to have practiced a form of tantra. See David Weir, Brahma
in the West: William Blake and the Oriental Renaissance (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2003), especially 10-12 and 90-104; and Marsha Keith Schuchard, William Blake’s Sexual Path to Spiritual
Vision (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2008).
7
Especially true of Advaita (“not-two”) Vedanta, a philosophical aspect of Hinduism discussed more fully
below.
8
See Christopher I. Beckwith, Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia
(Princeton University Press, 2015).
9
Johannes Bronkhorst, The Two Traditions of Meditation in Ancient India (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag
Wiesbaden, 1986): 124.
10
See Livia Kohn, Sitting in Oblivion: The Heart of Daoist Meditation (Dunedin, FL: Three Pines Press,
2010).
11
Westgeest 1996: 64.
12
Herrigel 1953: ix.
13
For more on Suzuki, see Arthur C. Danto, “Upper West Side Buddhism” in, Buddha Mind in
Contemporary Art, ed. Jacquelynn Baas and Mary Jane Jacob (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2004): 48-59. See the bibliography for more sources available to postwar western artists.

14
Herrigel 1953: 18.
15
Herrigel 1953: 20.
16
Herrigel 1953: 56.
17
For more on Johns, see Baas 2005: 144-157.
18
See Baas 2005: especially 78-95 and 164-177. On Cage, see Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats: John
Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists (New York: Penguin, 2012).
19
See Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” delivered as an address at the convention of the American
Federation of Arts in Houston, Texas in April 1957. “The Creative Act” was first published in essay form
in Art News 56 (summer 1957): 28-29; it has been republished often, and is widely available on the Internet.
Baas, 1945-1975 23

20
Constance Lewallen, “Cage and the Structure of Chance” in, David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch,
editors, Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2001): 234.
21
Gerard Forde, “Plus or Minus 1961—A Chronology 1959-1963” in, + 1961: Founding the Expanded
Arts (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2013), 250.
22
Jon Henricks, Fluxus Codex (New York: Abrams, 1988): 21.
23
From a 1991 letter to Kate Millett quoted in Kate Millett, “Bonyari” in, Nam June Paik: Video Time—
Video Space, ed. Toni Stooss and Thomas Kellien (New York: Abrams, 1993): 112.
24
From a 1963 letter to Tomas Schmit excerpted in Clive Phillpot and and Jon Hendricks, Fluxus:
Selections from the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988): 24.
25
Ken Friedman, “Fluxus Performance” in, Gregory Battcock and Robert Nickas, editors, The Art of
Performance: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1984): 59.
26
From a 1973 Maciunas fold-out diagram, a reproduction of which is inserted inside the front cover of
Charles Dreyfus, Happenings & Fluxus (Paris: Galerie 1900-2000, 1989).
.
27
From a 1992 interview with David T. Doris entitled “Zen Vaudeville: A Medi(t)ation in the Margins of
Fluxus” in, The Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman (West Sussex: Academy Editions, 1998): 114.
28
“Buddhism, Art, Practice, Polity” in, Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American
Poetry, ed. Ken Johnson and Craig Paulenich (Boston and London: Shambhala, 1991): 177.
29
Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall, Daodejing “Making This Life Significant”: A Philosophical
Translation (New York: Ballantine, 2003): 13, 60, 18; and Thomas Cleary, The Taoist Classics, volume 1
(Boston: Shambhala, 1999): 3–4.
30
See Jacquelynn Baas, “Before Zen: The Nothing of American Dada” in, East-West Interchanges in
American Art: A Long and Tumultuous Relationship, ed. Cynthia Mills, Lee Glazer, Amelia A. Goerlitz
(Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2009): 52-65.
31
David J. Clarke 1988: 231.
32
Agnes Martin, Writings/Schriften, ed. Dieter Schwarz (Winterthur: Kunstmuseum Winterthur, 1991): 59.
33
See I Ching: The Book of Change, transl. David Hinton (New York: Farrar, Staus and Giroux, 2015.
34
Richard Kostelanetz, editor, Conversing with Cage (New York and London: Routledge, [1987] 2003): 68.
35
Kostelanetz Conversing with Cage: 233-234. For a description of Cage’s compositional process, see
John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, [1961] 1973): 57ff.
36
http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-walter-de-maria-12362 (accessed 15
February 2016).
37
Reproduced Baas 2011: 22.
38
Ames and Hall, Daodejing: 57.
Baas, 1945-1975 24

39
Chuang-tzu, chapter fifteen; see Livia Kohn, Chuang-tzu: The Tao of Perfect Happiness (Woodstock,
VT: Skylight Paths, 2011): 137.
40
Gustave Ecke, “In Memorium: Alfred Salmony” in, Ars Orientalis 4 (1961): 453. A veteran of World
War I, Salmony was close to Max Ernst and wrote on both Ernst and Otto Dix.

41
Phillpot and Hendricks, Fluxus: 27.

42
Ad Reinhardt and Agnes Martin’s friend Thomas Merton wrote his Master’s Thesis at Columbia on
Blake. According to Merton, “We know that Blake knew the Bhagavad Gita, because he did a picture of
Sir Charles Wilkins translating it” (Thomas Merton, “Nature and Art in William Blake: An Essay in
Interpretation” [1939 Master’s Thesis, Columbia University], Appendix I in The Literary Essays of Thomas
Merton, ed. Patrick Hart [New York: New Directions, 1981]: 415).
43
http://www.adrianpiper.com/yoga/karma.shtml (accessed 15 February 2016). For more on Piper and
Vedanta, see: Munroe 2009: 333-334.
44
At the end of the nineteenth century Swami Vivekananda taught a western-influenced neo-vedantan
(nondualist) form of yoga in the United States, England, and Europe, followed after World War II by B. K.
S. Iyengar’s postural yoga.
45
David W. Patterson, “Cage and Asia: History and Sources” in, The Cambridge Companion to John Cage,
ed. David Nicholls (Oxford: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 44-45.
46
From Kathan Brown, John Cage Visual Art: To Sober and Quiet the Mind, San Francisco: Crown Point
Press, 2000, 45. See also Cage, Silence: 158; and Patterson, “Cage and Asia”: 48-49.
47
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFY4qrZs_MM (accessed 29 February 2016).
48
A short trailer for Belson’s Samadhi can be viewed at: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/35876 (accessed 16
February 2016).
49
Quoted Kerry Brougher, “Visual-Music Culture” in, Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since
1900 (London: Thames & Hudson; Washington, DC: Hirshhorn Museum, 2005): 148. Around the same
time, the Los Angeles-based brothers John and James Whitney created cinematic mandalas that would
influence Hollywood special effects; see Brougher: 125ff.
50
San Francisco Museum of Art, Dynaton 1951: preceding title page.
51
See Ann Gleig and Charles I. Flores, “Remembering Sri Aurobindo and the Mother: The Forgotten
Lineage of Integral Yoga” in, Gurus of Modern Yoga, ed. Mark Singleton and Ellen Goldberg (Oxford
University Press, 2014): esp. 49-50.
52
Fariba Bogzaran, “Exploring the Open Mind” in, Gordon Onslow ford, Exploring the Open Mind:
Paintings from the 1950’s and 1960’s (San Francisco: Weinstein Gallery, 2003): 6.
53
This and preceding quote: San Francisco Museum of Art, Dynaton 1951: 26, 11. Spiegelberg’s influence
on Grace McCann Morley and the Dynaton group seems fairly clear. In 1948, Spiegelberg’s The Religion
of No-Religion was printed at Greenwood Press, San Francisco, as was Dynaton 1951.
54
See Cynthea J. Bogel, With a Single Glance: Buddhist Icon and Early Mikkyō Vision (Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 2009).
Baas, 1945-1975 25

55
Art-As-Art: The Selected Writings Of Ad Reinhardt, ed. Barbara Rose (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1991): 56.
56
See Levy 2005: 144-145.
57
Clarke 1988: 68-69.
58
I use the term “tantra yoga” to designate meditative body energetics originating in India as practiced in
the West in order to distinguish it from “neotantra”—western adaptations of tantric sexual practices that
appeared in the 1960s as part of the New Age movement. Although there may be a physical component if
two people are involved, tantra yoga is a mostly mental practice designed to achieve realization of nondual
reality by channeling, uniting, and transforming powerful, purposeful ‘male’ and dynamic, creative ‘female’
energies present in both women and men.
59
Patterson, “Cage and Asia”: 49.
60
From a 1976 interview with Jeff Goldberg, excerpted in Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage: 12.

1. Jasper Johns (American, born 1930), Target with Plaster Casts, 1955. Encaustic
and collage on canvas with plaster casts in hinged wooden boxes, 51 x 44 x 3 ½
in., Private Collection/Bridgeman Art Library (BBC196585). Artist © Jasper
Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Baas, 1945-1975 26

2. George Brecht (American, 1926–2008), Games and Puzzles, Fluxus CL (Name Kit), 1965.
Plastic box containing dice, scrabble letter, clear blue plastic cube and blue paper printed:
“NAME KIT / Spell your name,” 9.2 x 12.1 x 2.3 cm. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth
College, George Maciunas Memorial Collection, Gift of Dr. Abraham M. Friedman;
GM.986.80.24.
Baas, 1945-1975 27

3. George Maciunas (American, 1931-78), Gift Box for John Cage: Spell Your Name with
These Objects, about 1972. Leather-covered, red velvet-lined box containing 15 objects
(acorn, egg, glass stopper, plastic boxes of seeds, etc.), 5.4 x 23.8 x 10.5 cm. Hood
Museum, Dartmouth College, George Maciunas Memorial Collection, Gift of John Cage;
GM.978.204.2.
Baas, 1945-1975 28

4. Agnes Martin (American, 1912–2004), This Rain, 1958. Oil on canvas, 178.1 × 178.1 ×
3.2 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; promised gift of the Fisher
Landau Center for Art P.2010.325 © 2015 Estate of Agnes Martin/Artist Rights Society
(ARS), New York.
Baas, 1945-1975 29

5. Walter De Maria (American 1935-2013), Nine Mountains and the Sun, 1964.
Pencil and colored pencil on paper, 58.4 x 88.9 cm. Museum of Modern Art,
New York.

6. Walter de Maria, Lightning Field, 1971-77. Earth work, 1 mile x 1 kilometer.

Collection Dia Art Foundation
[https://www.usc.edu/schools/annenberg/asc/projects/comm544/library/images/79
7.html].
Baas, 1945-1975 30

7. Jordan Belson (American, 1926-2011), still from Samadhi, 1967. 16mm color
film with sound by Jordan Belson, six minutes. Courtesy Center for Visual Music,
Los Angeles.
Baas, 1945-1975 31

8. Lee Mullican (American 1919-98), The Ninnekah, 1951. Oil on linen, 50 x 25

inches. Collection Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University.
Marie Eccles Caine Foundation Gift. © Estate of Lee Mullican.
Baas, 1945-1975 32

9. Gordon Onslow Ford (English, 1912-2003), Seeing Seen, 1951. Gouache on paper.
Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive, Promised gift from the collection of
Harold and Gertrud Parker.

10. Ad Reinhardt (American, 1913-67), Abstract Painting, 1960. Oil on canvas, 60 x

60 ¼ inches. University of California Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive,
Gift of the artist, 1966.62.
Baas, 1945-1975 33

11. Marcel Duchamp (French/American, 1887-1968), Couple of Laundress’ Aprons,

1959. Two multiples composed of cloth and fur, male 22.8 x 17.7 x 3.2 cm.,
female 24.8 x 19.8 x 2.3 cm. Publisher: Galerie Daniel Cordier, fabricator: Mimi
Parent, Paris. Museum of Modern Art, Gift of Arthur A. Goldberg (51.1977).
Baas, 1945-1975 34

12. Robert Rauschenberg (American, 1925-2008), Mother of God, around 1950. Oil,
enamel, printed maps, newspaper, and metallic paint on Masonite, 121.92 cm. x
81.6 cm. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Fractional purchase through a
gift of Phyllis Wattis and promised gift of an anonymous donor. © Robert
Rauschenberg Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Baas, 1945-1975 35

13. Tantric Form of the Hindu Goddess Kali, Folio from a Book of Iconography,
Nepal, 17th century. Ink and opaque watercolor on paper, 23.5 x 21.6 cm. Los
Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Robert S. Coles
(M.81.206.9).
Baas, 1945-1975 36

14. John Baldessari (American, born 1931), A Dab a Day Keeps the Gray Away, 1961.
Acrylic on canvas, 12 x 12 inches. Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film
Archive, Museum Purchase, 1991.5.