Had the pleasure today of seeing a fab exhibition at the Rubin Museum of Art with a friend who hasn't been to a museum - or to New York City - in a year! Since the exhibition, "Awaken: A Tibetan Buddhist Journey Toward Enlightenment," is about expanding one's perception, it was especially trippy. The exhibition begins with this fantastic (and wall-filling) work by Tsherin Sherpa, "Luxation 1" (2016), painted in response to the 2015 Nepal earthquake but here an invitation to recognize how jumbled our consciousness is. The exhibition, originally from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, was designed before the pandemic but for its Rubin iteration someone's put together, facing Sherpa's work, a wall of pad- and phone-sized screens busily flashing a sequence of images from the past year, in case we needed reminding!
The deity here, Vajrabhairava, a wrathful manifestation of Mañjushri, is the star of this show, which we discover is patterned after the meditation journey to which a 300 century old Mandala of Vajrabhairava (above) invites you. Of course what a mandala invites you to do is to visualize in three dimensions what it presents in two (and eventually to visualize yourself as the deities you've three-dimensionally visualized: nonduality realized). The exhibition manages to make this real in quite astounding ways you need to experience yourself. (It's open through early next year.) Ritual implements made from human skulls reinforce the reality of what Vajrabhairava is doing with two of his 34 hands: grinding up someone's brains in a bowl made of the top of (someone else's?) skull. Behold: a 15th century Tibetan "flaying knife-chopper" and 19th century Mongolian "skull cup":
(You can see the hands at work in the 3rd row, 2nd column of the Sherpa painting at the top.) It would flatten the exhibition's achievement back to two dimensions for me to show you pictures of its discoveries, not to mention undo the necessary work of journeying. But I have to say that it really was a double-taking and brain-scrambling experience - and not just for my friend who's been in two-dimensional zoom world for a year... It's like discovering the three-dimensional world - and your own three-dimensional body moving through it - for the first time. So no photos for our screen world of "Awaken"'s culminating 3D show-stoppers. But I guess I can share another painting of Sherpa's from the mid-point of the journey, the two-panel 2013 "Multiple Protector (Peach)." This controlled generative whirl is what is happening to your senses as you move through the plays of light and darkness, the straight and curved walls - maybe the edges of Vajrabhairava's flaying knife-chopper in our own brains! - of this expertly mandalically-designed exhibition!
