Thailand Journal X:The Julian Schnabel of Chiang Rai

                                                                      Photo: JJ Harrison

There are a number of reasons travelers visit Chiang Rai province in Northern Thailand, chief among them being the proximity to the Golden Triangle. But there are two other major attractions: the spectacularly delicious small pineapples and The White Temple or Wat Rong Khun a work of art by the Thai artist Chalermchai Kositpipat. The whiteness of the temple is part of its subversion since many temples in Thailand use gold especially for their Buddhas.  The Whiteness of the Temple calls to mind Chapter 42 of Moby Dick “The Whiteness of the Whale,” in its enormous ambition. The temple is really an essay in demonology containing as it does modern anti-Christs as varied as Osama Bin Laden and George Bush. Kositpipat is an expansive figure, who was eager to chat with strangers waiting to depart for a flight to Bangkok at the Chiang Rai airport. Modestly dressed in blue denim and sandals, he looked more like a mid-Twentieth Century revolutionary figure than a 21^st Century artist and provocateur in the style Julian Schnabel or Ai Weiwei, as he talked openly about his wealth and the ll0 assistants who work with him on the temple. Naturally Buddhist themes infuse his work, though the kind of worshippers who come to his temple might more likely be found in Chelsea. "I intend to remain a painter for the cause of Buddhism until the last day of my life," he has commented.  "Nothing can ever change me or divert me from this course...."

The Disgusting Sublime

There are artists who everyone loves to hate. They seem to get an undeserved bang for their buck, garnering maximum attention for little effort which is usually performed by fleets of assistants who execute the works in question. Julian Schnabel was the nominee for most hated of the commercially successful fine artists back in the 80’s but he became a filmmaker whose successes though not as great are also reviled by those who feel that both his commercial and artistic renown is unmerited. In today’s art world Damien Hirst is the most vilified amongst the cognoscenti who sneer at the huge sums commanded, for instance, by his recent spot paintings. Who are the conspicuous consumers who pay top dollar for his work at Larry Gagosian’s international network of galleries which do for the marketing of paintings what Brown Harris Stevens was able to do when they commanded 88 million dollars for the sale of Sandy Weill’s penthouse at 15 Central Park West to Ekaternina Rybolovlev the daughter of the Russian potash billionaire? Surely Brown Harris is one provider of the excessively priced apartments on which high priced art can be shown. But wait a minute? Are we being too hasty? In a review of Hirst’s current show at the Tate, in the April 20^th edition of the TLS, running under the title “The Disgusting Sublime,” Gerard Woodward brilliantly takes up Hirst’s defense. ("The Physical Impossibility of the Idea of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” was the title of Hirst’s famed l991 shark sculpture. And come to think of it, isn’t that title alone worth millions?) “In an essay in the catalogue accompanying this exhibition, Brian Dillon directs us towards Kant’s Critique of Judgement to help us deal with a particular property of the work of Damien Hirst, namely disgust,” Woodward begins. And later talking about Hirst’s sometimes horrifying palette (“corpses of thousands of flies preserved in resin,” for example) he remarks, “the ideational notion of disgust is useful as a way of thinking about the critical recepton of Hirst’s work in recent years, for it is often obscured or even contaminated by associations with a cynical art plutocracy and its excessive interest in wealth, and a perception of Hirst himself as someone tainted with such unsavoury qualities as arrogance, laddishness, exploitativeness and cruelty.” Another million dollar idea, which will undoubtedly fatten both Hirst and Larry Gogosian’s pockets, but which also makes us think. Whoever said art or life were fair?

The Prisoner

Locked-in Syndrome is the subject of the Julien Schnabel film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on the book of the same name by French journalist and author, Jean-Dominique Bauby. In the current New York Review of Books, the brilliant NYU political philosopher Tony Judt reveals his struggle with a form of ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Judt describes becoming a prisoner of his own body, to the extent that he is no longer able to attend to any of his own needs. Pleasure becomes secondary when a minor itch can be a source of torment. Nighttime and sleep can feel like abandonment, the anxiety only assuaged by the presence of the baby monitor. The miracle, and the nightmare, is the brain’s ability to function even when it is the very element that has caused the body to stop functioning. This dualism is only part of the incongruity described in the horror story that Bauby and Judt tell with disconcerting vividness.

   

How can prose soar when the body is tethered to the ball and chain of neuro-muscular collapse? Compensation is certainly part of the story. Oliver Sacks has spent a good deal of his career detailing how the loss of one or another faculty can result in the creation of new talents and capacities. V.S. Ramachandran’s phantom limb hypothesis also comes to mind. The mind’s ability to project an alternate reality as a means of coping with trauma is bewildering.  The massive neurological failure described by Judt goes beyond the loss of hearing or sight.  Helen Keller was at least able to get up and walk. She could swallow, feel, and scratch that itch. For Judt, the very act of writing the article is a testament to the richness of his inner life, and a challenge to the descriptive power of predictable words like aspiration and hope. Why live when there is nothing to live for? Judt does not undergo a transcendent, white light experience, but neither does he appear to be the victim of what we would normally define as despair. For starters, he is graced with the will to dictate his thoughts.