Page 46 - Studio International - December 1968

They climb up step by step the ladders of their own conceptual by the female creative. At the centre of the Tantra mandala we are
structure to the highest rung; and then a last step must be taken. It supposed to reach this point.
can never be a further concept, another rung, but only a sudden In the exhibition is a group of the most potent images made by man
intuition of the whole, which embraces and recognizes the limitations for this all-embracing nucleus, where all possible forms of change are
of the conceptualizing man, and the conditioned nature of his con- subsumed. These are old ovoid lingams of natural granite and basalt,
ceptual ladders. Nor is it enough to reach an abstract grandeur; for which come from a lake in Gujerat. They are marked with purplish
abstraction leaves reality behind without containing it—as Ortega y chemical flashes, whose shapes are subtly brought out in the graded
Gasset pointed out. The genuine intuitive whole must also include the curves of the surface, and interpreted symbolically. In them Brancusi
reality of time, change, and the virtual infinity of individuals with and Gottlieb seem together to be anticipated and transcended. Al-
their complete and interwoven histories, which Tantra symbolizes though phallic emblems in the Indian tradition, they have no base
or root; rounded both at top and bottom, they do not seem to spring
from a separate male body, but to be self-originated. The 'male' from
which they project is not in the same space and time as the female
penetrated. They symbolize that which enters from beyond and
within. As seedlingams embodied in a matrix of the hardest of
boulders (believed to be meteoric), they symbolize both the primor-
dial stage of creative impulse and the ultimate stage of meditative
intuition (for all cosmogonies are really acts of meditative ascent and
intuition, written in reverse). To see and understand these things is
to be changed.
There is another important side to this art. For the mandala
diagrams, especially some of the smaller ones, are actually two-
dimensional presentations not of three-dimensional but of four-
dimensional structures. They are more general and perhaps more
completely realized versions of the kind of diagram-images with
which Klee was much occupied (see the 'weather' and 'fountain'
diagrams in his 'Pedagogical Sketchbook'). The Trilikya Chitram—
Universe, space and time illustrated here, is a good example, in which
snakes, symbolic of eternity, swallow back to the waters of nothing
the temple-mountain of the psycho-physical cosmos, which is shown
in plan elevation and in 'exploded view'. This aspect of art, the dia-
gram of process which does not lose itself in the sands of kinetic
system, is one of the avenues which may well be a most fruitful
avenue for future twentieth-century painting to explore. Some of the
Axiom Gallery's own painters are headed that way. So anyone in-
terested in this aspect of art should look carefully at these diagrams,
and try to read them.
The spiritual techniques with which these works are intimately
connected would be classed as different kinds of yoga, meant to focus
the attention and promote the intuition beyond concepts. There is
a huge body of literary Tantra dealing with how to get back through
the maze of phenomena to the place where the Primal Sound or
creative vibration can be heard. (The mantras employed include the
famous and misunderstood Om.) The Tantra pictures are used to
reach that place by visual track. The sexual and graveyard parapher-
nalia of the lower grades of figurative Tantra art, like the Tibetan
Yab-Yum figures and the less familiar Bengali images of the coupling
Shiva and Kali, refer at bottom to the facts of ritual and meditative
sexual intercourse without orgasm. This was used by followers of the
Tantra to break down their social personae, to heighten their con-
centration and stimulate their energies. All of which rests on a further
thought. One uses one's body to understand the Tantra, not just
one's brain. For the body has faculties that know aspects of the truth
which the brain with its cool abstractions does not know. The yoga
of the whole body, Hatha yoga with its intensive version of Laya
yoga, is illustrated in the exhibition by diagrams of the energies within
the body and by images of the body seen in elevation as a kind of
hologram of the cosmos. And the fact is that the mandalas are as it
were plan-views of the same concept. For the Meru mountain-peak
at the centre of many of the mandalas is expressly identified by the
inscription on the magnificent no. 18 as the subtle nerve in the human
spinal column by which the body's serpentine energies climb to the
summit of intuition. Thus the continents, rivers and seas of the man-
dala circuits illustrate the concentric circuits of identity which build
the phenomenal cosmos into the self.