It's a Sunday morning in mid-August.
I'm seated in a wooden pew in the Hondo at a Buddhist temple in west LA. There is no air conditioning, and I'm wearing long pants out of (I think) reverence for the space and a black coat (I know) to keep my tattoos hidden, a practice drilled into me while living in Tokyo, now brought to my new home. The heat seems unbearable.
I am chanting the Nembutsu, "Namu Amida Butsu," an affirmation of gratitude, which is repeated six times, I've learned. This is Jōdo bukkyō Buddhism, less nihilistic than the Zen of my beloved Ikkyū Sōjun. I am fascinated by both but actually a practitioner of neither. Today, although I'm chanting with the others inside the Hondo, my mind is elsewhere, and my gaze is fixed on the sliding doors on either side of the inner sanctum, two sets of brilliant gold panels, which, thanks to the light raking in through the windows, I've just realized are meticulously enrobed in a perfect grid of gold leaf.
When I'm in the studio gilding pages torn from vintage Hustler back issues, and Hentai picked off the newsstand at the 7-eleven in Ikebukuro, my mind goes back to that raking light, and I can't help but laugh a little at this personal joke I've been telling myself for the last few years, a little jab of irony that so much of my work is yarn-balled around.
As I'm writing this now, I keep thinking about these two words, "sacred" and "profane," and what they mean within my work. We use gold to define things and spaces as "sacred," certainly within the world of religion. And many people, I think, would agree that pornography fits nicely within the realm of the "profane." But stripped of their social implications, they feel slightly different. Things sacred are things we approach with reverence and transcend the mundanity of daily life. Profane things, on the other hand, are commonplace things, dirty things, and broken things. The interplay of these concepts delivered in this way reminds me of wabi-sabi, a notoriously difficult concept to articulate fully (like Potter Stewart, you'll know it when you see it) that is essentially an appreciation of imperfection and idiosyncrasy.
If I have a point, it’s this: the nature of art is to change, to be unpredictable, and to move forward. This duality of sacred and profane, golden surfaces redolent of Buddhist temples, scraps of detritus that would be more at home in the gutter than on a gallery wall- this is where my art lives now and, to some extent, always has. I’m constantly amazed that it continues to surprise me, even when I think I know where it is leading. There is always an opportunity to be struck by that raking light making its way through the windows of the temple.
Until next time.
