The Necessity of Meaning and the Viewer's Participation

by Adi Da Samraj

Meaning breaks through the walls. And meaning is ultimately something that transcends mind. So it is not merely conventional meaning or conventional reality I am talking about.

The practice of image-making I engage is a practice in which meaning is fundamental. The inherent meaningfulness of the reflection of perceived reality that is captured in the photograph, however abstractly I may use it, is fundamental. It is not literalistic. It is not conventional.

I certainly have no interest in just playing on “point of view” but rather of transcending it—including, in the camera-based work I have done, transcending the “point-of-view” machine that is the camera, and, therefore, transcending the “point of view” of the perceiver.

Right participation in the images I make requires the perceiver to yield the “point of view” and mind in which he or she is otherwise bound or fixed. To merely analyze, without having entered into that participatory process of going beyond “self”, is to be fixed in “point of view” , to be defensive.

I am not suggesting that it is inappropriate or of no merit to engage in discriminative consideration of images. That is, of course, a worthy activity, if rightly done. But mere analysis without participation is a fault. It is a fundamental aspect of un-enlightenment, or bondage, or egoity.

“Point of view” is egoity. And “point of view” is also an action, not merely a fact. Going beyond that bondage, that limitation, is what the process of enlightenment is about, and it is what the process of participating in the images I make is about. “Point of view” does not—and cannot—comprehend reality. All its figurings are fundamentally false—or, at most, local, private, and ordinary.

There is a kind of comprehension of the image-art I make which is not at all about figuring it out, comprehending it in some grasping, confining, holding, analyzing, dissecting sense. That right process of comprehension is about going beyond conceptual mind, through participation.

In that process, there are all kinds of content on the way. All kinds of meaning are passed through. But ultimately, everything is passed beyond. That is not to say that the art becomes meaningless, like dead-end wallpaper. My image-art, when fully participated in, exceeds all “meaningfulness”—in a manner that ultimately cannot even be described.

Unpublished commentary by Adi Da Samraj.

Copyright © 2007 ASA. All rights reserved. Perpetual copyright claimed.