In "Religion and Ecology," we're making our way through James Miller's China's Green Religion.To help the students understand the profoundly different cosmology of Daoism, where "liquid vitality" streams and flows, pervades and condenses, sometimes into solids (like human bones or mountains), sometimes into liquids (like organs or spittle or waterfalls), sometimes into liquids that then congeal (like ink), and always in specific locales, I'm taking the class to the Met to spend time with Chinese ink landscape paintings.
But at MoMA today (a friend is visiting from Japan, so I had an excuse to go again) I found a lovely evocation of the "porous" selves Miller recommends we accept we are: Louise Bourgeois's "Articulated Lair" (1986), a circular enclosure of folding screens (with two small doorways for passing through), with mysterious pendants swaying almost imperceptibly as air is pushed by the bodies of passing viewers. Wow!
