R E S P I R O

Primal Views: Root-Shape and Root-Color by Mei-Ling Israel From The World As Light: An Introduction to the Art of Adi Da Samraj (Da Plastique, 2007), CHAPTER ELEVEN A Summary Moment Over the next two years, Adi Da’s artistic process underwent a deep transformative cycle, only to re-emerge in an entirely new form. It was a critical moment in his relationship to his entire—now staggeringly huge—opus of 60,000 works. He reviewed his colossal body of images, along with the entire history of his artistic approach, the progression of his working methods, and every technical means: still cameras, video, sets with projections, and chips for configurations. Once he had surveyed the sum total of his artistry to date, in March of 2006, Adi Da turned to an entirely new medium for his image-making: the tools of digital technology. This same two-year period in Adi Da’s artistic process paralleled a dramatic shift in the field of photography itself, from film to digital cameras. A new level of technology was now available for the first time. Central to Adi Da’s interest in the digital medium was his ability to access an unlimited number of images at once. By moving into the digital realm, his oeuvre could be dissolved into one giant resource for the next revolution in his work. Adi Da compared this turning point in his visual art to the massive burning of all his writings and art in 1965. Suddenly, he was freed from the necessity—and, at this point, the impossibility—of handling the vast quantities of images in physical form. As with the burning of his work forty years before, the dissolution of a massive effort created an internalization of his creative work. Naming the new instantly accessible database his “virtual paintbox”, Adi Da had a fresh start for his image-making. Now he had the means to develop “an unlimited visual dictionary” from which to make pictures. Adi Da’s aim, as always, was to reveal reality itself—via abstractions using non-naturalistic colors. For his unique purposes, he found the digital medium could offer him a single method of working. Adi Da envisioned the potential of using digital means to make images that would be even more aesthetically complex than his past work, and that would, in fact, be the fulfillment of the deeply philosophical approach he had been developing since his youth. “Responsive Paintbrushes” Adi Da saw in the digital medium a capacity to “introduce shape, pattern, content, and color into any zone” of an image. He planned to use digital composition like painting, making an entirely original image, rather than replicating imagery from other sources. His one concern, however, was that the demands of the technology would get between him and the subject and obstruct the speed and directness of his working. The challenge was to find a way to work digitally as fluidly as he had worked in the past, just as he had picked up a pen or camera. So, he trained a small group of technicians to handle the software operations while he composed, freeing him from touching the computer. He wanted the technicians to be able to function as extensions of his hands, like “responsive paintbrushes”. Speaking of his digital paintings, Adi Da referred again to his unique understanding of brain processes as a parallel to the aesthetic structures of his images. Cézanne and the Impressionists characteristically used short little brushstrokes. My so-called “brushstrokes” are very, very small. They are bytes, pixels—analogous to how the brain organizes and generates visual perception. But the interest I have in the digital process is not merely technical. When I work, I am always standing outside the “seat” of the technology. The interest I have in the technology is strictly in terms of visual or perceptual phenomena, so that I am still working with the fundamentals of perception, rather than getting involved in “techie” business. My intention is to be fully involved in the perceptual process and in the generating of images that perfectly manifest the characteristic of reality itself. The Spectra Suites When Adi Da launched into his digital image-making, the first suite to emerge was his magnificent Spectra One: The Pastimes of Narcissus, a highly complex collage with three figures in the “room” of life, showing birth, life, and death. Adi Da began his composition by using video stills from suites he had made in 2001, morphing and fusing the images into hundreds of layers. He was now using images as “virtual chips”, without fixed sizes or borders. He compared Spectra One to an intricate painting, the entire surface “worked all over”, as if in precise layers of oils. As the name of the Spectra suites implies, his communication was about the nature of color, or “manifest light”, and also “white light”, beyond the prismatic domain. The Spectra suites established a new pattern of artistic work for Adi Da—taking a “root-image” and carrying the viewer through a continuum of color values, as the original image is multiplied, mirrored, and magnified. As a culmination of his working principles, Spectra brought Adi Da to an aesthetic refinement in alignment with the deepest meanings of his work. By the end of Spectra, “pure” geometry, as well as “pure” color—terms he came to speak and write about at length—had emerged as his main approach to image-making. Color, in addition to form, holds great meaning for Adi Da. With the digital tools, he developed a highly precise level of color choices. Colors in Adi Da’s images are intentionally chosen for their purity and emotional force. The colors should be pure colors, not colors that are the product of mixing a particular color with colors other than itself. A pure color is a vibration. It can be measured on a spectral graph. Each color has a certain zone of vibration. I do not merely mix colors on a palette and come up with some different color by mixing yellow and red and green and coming up with something. No, I use only pure colors, a piece of the spectrum of visible light. That is the idea of Spectra. Color is not arbitrary. It must be exactly right for each image in particular. Color has emotional force. Colors in relation to one another generate, by that relatedness, different modes, or tones, of emotional force. Color has meaning in the nervous system, in the folds of the brain. That meaning is not something that can altogether be stated verbally, but meaning is inherent in color. The Geome Suites The Geome suites premiered Adi Da’s virtuoso work with squares, circles, and triangles in the radiant colors of his new palette. The structure of this work was a kind of “epitome” of all his development to this point, the digital means now providing the capacity for precision in depicting what Adi Da identified as the primary form of the universe, geometry itself. Geometry had been of great importance to Adi Da’s artistic development since he was a child. Growing up in a small town in the 1940s, Adi Da credits an early television show, “Learning to Draw with Jon Gnagy”, as his first course in the principles of modern art. Gnagy was popularizing the principles of Cézanne by showing how any picture can be made up of basic shapes. Adi Da took this discussion of geometry to another level, via his interest in the “structures of perception”. Adi Da summarizes this idea as “the natural world of primary shape”, saying that it is possible to become aware of the manifest universe as being actually constructed of these primary geometric forms, if one is available to the deepest levels of awareness. Geome Four: The Subject In Question. 354 Images. The force of primary geometric forms is everywhere in the world. It is simply that there are so many intersections of primary geometric form in ordinary perceived reality that it feels as if you cannot see the primary form. It is not that perceived reality is made out of “four circles” and “three rectangles” and “two triangles”—you cannot see the world that simplistically. But, once you begin to “get” the sense of “shape”, then you can see that the world of perception is actually made of primary geometries. It is just that there are so many of them all at once that the natural world seems to have “feathered edges”. The natural world does not seem to be hard-edged, in terms of geometry. In fact, the natural world is not visibly hard-edged—when the multiples are in the billions, trillions, countless numbers all at once. Then the world of perception has the kind of “feathered edges” you apparently see in the natural world. Thus, the basis of the natural world’s construction is primary shape, primary geometry, elemental shape—circular, linear, angular. Everything is one of those three—curved, strictly linear, or angled. The intersection of these three modes of geometry makes virtually every shape. If you take enough triangles, squares, and circles, any form will appear. You put them together in certain conjunctions, and they will make absolutely every form. The image-art I create takes as its “starting point” the world as it seems to be—which is multiples of primary geometries, intersecting with each other many, many times, such that the perceptible form seems to be soft-edged. A New Working Process In the making of the Geome suites, Adi Da came to a new system of working, in keeping with his principle of relationship to the subject—this time, using the digital medium’s capacity for unlimited abstraction and razor-like precision. Once again, he used photography to create a source-image. But often, rather than work “on top of” the photograph, he would gaze upon it as a kind of recorded inspiration, likening it to a sketchpad. The photograph might sit to his side as he, in response to it, placed precise lines, circles, and colors on the digital screen, abstracting the subject into geometries on the spot. This first-generation image still retains recognizable references to the original “natural” subject. What happens next in Adi Da’s current creation of images is quite intriguing. Once he completes the first abstraction from the photograph into geometries, this image itself becomes the new subject for his response. As Adi Da explained, “The images I have made will become the subject, rather than the natural, perceived events with which the process began.” Thus, every subsequent image is a further abstraction. Nevertheless, he always maintains a “continuing association” with the perceptual events and places that are his subjects. As Adi Da pointed out, this kind of progressive abstraction has been a characteristic of his aesthetic process all along. What he found now, however, was a “level of resolution and complexity” that afforded him the ability to respond to the subject and then “modify freely” in response to the abstractions themselves. The Beginning of Oculus In the Oculus suites, still in progress at the time of this writing, Adi Da returns to his work with the female form, now in his language of geometric abstraction and intense, vibratory colors. The oculus—meaning “an eyelike or round window, often appearing at the height of a dome”—appears as a white sphere in the top of the imagery. Like the ceiling hole, the “midnight sun”, and the “hole in the universe” in his earlier work, Adi Da’s oculus is the opening to spiritual revelation, to the light beyond the “room” of the apparent world. The subtitle of Oculus One—The Reduction Of The Beloved—is a direct reference to Adi Da’s thesis on modernism from his graduate studies (The Reduction Of The Beloved To Shape Alone). And, indeed, in Oculus, he restores abstraction to its original, liberating purpose. Adi Da said of this suite: The female figure in Oculus One can be seen to be the beloved—in a progress from lover to bride to wife to widow—who is being “reduced” by that process, and also reduced to love itself, or to loving while being alone. It also can be understood that “the beloved” is not that figure, but that the female figure is relating to one beloved to her. There is nothing necessarily negative implied in the title The Reduction Of The Beloved To Love Alone. There is a kind of realization in that, rather than loss—though there is also a suggestion of loss, being alone. All such meanings are intended, and are there to be felt. The forms of the lover, the bride, the wife, and the widow show the same attitude—the same ecstatic, contemplative head and figure altogether. The same posture is the sign of all the figures, but each has unique iconographic attributes. There are differences in the breast forms, in the hair, in the color of the chairs. For instance, the wife figure has a combined black and white chair. One foot in bed and one foot in the grave. In other words, the wife form is in between life and death, participating in both. The breasts are down-pointing—suggesting perhaps the nursing of a child, without having a child in the image. There is no wild hair—the hair is pulled back. Hair suggests the characteristic of orientation to sexuality and life-energy. So the wife shows more maturity, more age, and so forth. And yet, it is still the same attitude and state as the other female figures. In the widow form, the background is a kind of collision between all the previous ones. It is a shattered structure. The widow is a kind of shattered structure in the black form. Yet the widow form has the same attitude, the same disposition, the same contemplative and surrendered disposition that is characteristic of all the forms of the figure in this suite. So the differences are in the mode of how the life-characteristics are shown outwardly. The disposition otherwise shows steadiness—a continuously ecstatic, contemplative, and surrendered disposition, surrendered to what is above and what is beyond. This feminine figure is not affected by life-changes. It is always in the same disposition and surrendered in the context of life-changes. These are not ironic images, nor mere conventional realism in showing the changing female form. There is perhaps something comic about them, but only in the sense that there is something comic about the human process itself. They are a reflection of how the natural process happens and how life-stages happen, and a communication of unaffectedness and surrender, serenity, contemplation. Complex Works of Unity With Spectra, Geome, and Oculus, Adi Da has come to a profoundly wrought artistic process, the summation of decades of arduous effort. Like his first “encoded artifacts”, the many levels of meaning in each image, in the suites, and in his body of work as a whole are held in the structure of the aesthetics. Like the weaver of an infinite and never-ending tapestry, Adi Da works the whole while constantly refining the threads, with the work becoming ever more expansive and opulent. Key to this process are the components of the suites. In his newest work, Adi Da uses small compositional units of color and form. Like his mosaic-like “complex configurations”, his current suites evolve from “root-images”, multiplied to infinite combinations. In his Geome suites, for example, Adi Da drove his ability to make intricately massive macro-micro relationships within an oeuvre to a new level. Like a galaxy-sized microscope, progressively zooming from a DNA helix out to the Milky Way, Adi Da uses his suites to expand the viewer beyond “point of view” with systematic variations of scale. The incremental variations are the true meaning of the work: to show the “room” as if from every possible “point of view”. In his essay on Adi Da’s work for the catalog of the 52nd Biennale di Venezia, Achille Bonito Oliva wrote: Adi Da Samraj has established a new use of geometry, as a fertile field of unconventional aesthetic communication that takes delight in developing its principles asymmetrically, through surprise and feeling. However, there is no contradiction between these two elements and the principles of design. Rather, surprise and feeling strengthen those principles, through a pragmatic and un-preconceived use of “representational” geometry. . . . The final form—whether two-dimensional or three-dimensional—suggests a tangible rather than an abstract reality, which pulsates before the thrilled analytical gaze of the beholder. The Solitary Room This is the circumstance in which Adi Da’s newest opus arises: In a small thatched building on his island-retreat in Fiji, Adi Da devotes himself to his image-work in his digital studio. Spending many hours a day in front of a large screen, Adi Da gives instructions to the nearby computer assistants, using a laser to pinpoint the locations of lines, colors, and forms as he speaks. As Adi Da’s work continues, his room is increasingly silent, hours going by as he makes the subtlest changes in an image. In this pristine and highly refined environment, Adi Da focuses on his artistic work day in and day out, and on the most minute of details. In this manner, the color and shape of the images are more and more finely aligned. The movements of the laser pointer become smaller, his voice, softer. Adi Da is deep in his work. ADI DA SAMRAJ: DIGITALLY-CONSTRUCTED SUITES April–November 2006 SPECTRA SUITES Spectra One: The Pastimes of Narcissus. 103 Images. Spectra Two: A Horse Appears In The Wild Is Always Already The Case. 475 Images. Spectra Three: Quandra Contemplating the Fruits of Perfect Knowledge. 107 Images. Spectra Four: The Room Itself Is The Only Witness To The Three Common States. 189 Images. Spectra Five: Not-Two Is Peace. 48 Images. Spectra Six: Not-Two Is Not Two. 24 Images. Spectra Seven: The Self-Portrait. 24 Images. Spectra Eight: Life Is The Perfect Reflection Of Its Source. 37 Images. Spectra Nine: The Autobiography Of Everybody. 75 Images. Spectra Ten: The “First Room” Trilogy. 126 Images. THE PERFECT MIRROR SUITES The Perfect Mirror One: The Voyage. 87 Images. The Perfect Mirror Two: This Is Not-An-Object. 69 Images. The Perfect Mirror Three: Portrait Of The Artist As Not-An-Object. 11 Images. GEOME SUITES Geome One: Alberti’s Window. 1,416 Images. Geome Two: 2001. 1,101 Images. Geome Three: The Scale Of Perfection. 5,454 Images. Geome Four: The Subject In Question. 354 Images. Geome Five: Ciqomi (Acception). 833 Images. OCULUS SUITES Oculus One: The Reduction Of The Beloved. 2,644 Images. Further Oculus Suites are in progress as of the publication of this book. Copyright © 2007 ASA. All rights reserved. Perpetual copyright claimed.