Took my Secularism class to the Rubin Musem of Art this morning. It's the nearest museum to school (17th and Seventh Ave) but also well suited for our discussions, which this week have come to the relationship of the religious and aesthetic spheres. I'd have come in any case, as this new museum carefully calls itself a Museum of Himalayan Art, although almost all of its collection is Tibetan Buddhist art. But this season offers a special treat - their first exhibition of objects still in ritual use. The exhibition is called "The Dragon's Gift: Sacred Arts of Bhutan," and arrives with two monks, whose job it is to take care of the objects - not let them get secularized by being hung in an art museum far from their homes, where ignorant strangers regard them as mere aesthetic or ethnographic objects. (They made news when, on arrival, they performed pujas - ceremonies - throughout the city to dispel demons.)We got to see part of the morning puja, which was fascinating. After sutra chanting in a makeshift shrine, one monk chanted on, beating a drum, while the other made a serpentining dancelike movement through the exhibition, purifying each image. This was done by pouring consecrated saffron water from an elegant metal decanter into a large glass bowl, but the way it worked was this: in the same hand as the bowl, the monk held a hand-mirror. The images were purified as they passed through the stream of saffron water to the mirror and back.
Cool, huh! I'm hoping it will change the students' experience of (their experience of) other "religious art" in museums. What is it the monk's saffron libation restored in these statues and tangkas? What would be the analog in Christian or Jewish art? Why don't we bother? On the other hand, is there a power in art for art's sake like that the monk's ritual preserved, which needs only to be washed by our devoted gaze?
(UPDATE, 18/10: We had a terrific discussion of just what was going on as the monks did their thing before us museum visitors - they might have done it behind closed doors before the museum opened. Did they become objects in the exhibition, despite themselves or by design? Or did they manage to change the museum into something else?)
