Contemplative Art

This month's Utne Reader reviewed a German artist whose work really intrigues me. His name is Wolfgang Laib, and the article shows a close-up of this image of him squatting on the floor, sifting pollen he has gathered near his home in the Black Forest over several seasons. When he's finished, the pile will be a brilliant yellow shimmering square of pollen, 8 foot square and 3 inches thick, that makes the whole room smell like the forest.

He executes every piece of this meticulous work himself (including collecting all the pollen), and happily spends hours, weeks, years in doing so; however long it takes. A big part of my interest in his work is my own contemplation of the conscious awareness he must bring to each moment of creation, and what that means. In this way, I see his work as I would a Buddhist tankha, or Christian icon, or any other sacred art that is imbued with the consciously applied sacred energy of the artist/s for the express purpose of evoking that same experience in the viewer.

That isn't his stated purpose; in fact Laib's art isn't overtly religious at all in the sense of outwardly identifying with any one tradition or symbology, but there is a definite sense of spirituality imbued and conveyed in what I've seen of his work, and a deep communion with the natural world, which is what caught my eye in the first place.

The article in Utne is taken from a piece in Image magazine on Laib (Image is a Journal of Arts & Religion).