Art History Meets Ecology: The Buddha Tree Story

By Sarah Roy
Staff Writer

On April 11th, accomplished art historian Gregory Levine visited campus to deliver his lecture “Silenced by Aesthetics”? A Tentative Poetics of Art History and Ecology.” Levine is a very active member of his field, currently serving as associate professor of the art and architecture of Japan and Buddhist visual cultures in the Department of the History of Art at U.C. Berkeley. He has published a wide variety of writing with a focus on Zen Buddhism, visual Buddhist modernism, art and architecture in Japan, forgery and authenticity, as well as Japanese painting culture and calligraphy. Following his Buddhist interests, Levine’s talk curved towards the environmental, namely raising the question “What does art history have to do with ecology?” The answer: artists’ products are intrinsically wound from and into the world, spun from the natural materials and patterns humans are drawn to and from. Despite the obviousness of this statement, Levine criticized that proper attention wasn’t being paid to the ecological factors of art making, and art historians tended to avoid addressing the impact creativity has on the organic landscape we rely upon.

Levine discussed the divide between humanists and scientists and how this dissected modern perspectives of our dependence upon the biological world and inability to escape this dependence. He named several ideas as current “solutions,” but questioned their ability to solve anything – what should art historians do to be aware of eco-art history and incorporate this responsible worldview into their assessments and histories? There exists the disturbing mindset that art and art history is so much about humans that we need no justification to care about only humans while studying it. Problematic, but before we presume too much superiority, Levine reminds us “that Earth’s ecologies do not need us to function,” a far cry from our own species’ successes.

Levine trusted in the truth that “visual form […] has unique capacities to be ecologically engaged.” For examples, Levine brought up Ines Doujak’s “Siegesgärten” and Theodore Rousseau’s landscape paintings as interesting histories of variant perceptions on human planetary impact. Doujak’s indoor victory garden was an installation of living plants that required 80 gallons of water every two to three days and had to be mown on the fourth day. Motifs of violence and protests were plastered over the seed packets, challenging bio-genetic capitalism and the neo-liberal governments behind it. Rousseau’s rampant romanticism in his idealized landscapes harkened back to a post-Industralized response to “correct organic messiness;” yet Rousseau’s paintings were enabled by the invention of the railroad.

The most compelling example which dominated the majority of the discussion revolved around the Buddha head in a tree at the monastery of Wat Mahathat, Ayutthaya, Thailand. Levine described the object as “strange” and “uncanny” – with a “mesmeric allure due to entanglement.” The head was said to have once been part of a 14th century seated statue, but was stolen and dropped by a thief on the wall, and the tree rose up to embrace it. The tree at once clings to and threatens to overtake the famous Buddha gaze, and here we have the classic crisis of the transformation of art into commodities. The tree – or head – where the focus is most appropriate is ambivalent – has become a national icon for Thailand itself, a touristy spot where both authentic and posed rituals are performed and the tree is sidestepped in favor of the head as devotional practitioners anoint the face with gold leaf and surround the area with altars. The Buddha tree is a compelling contradiction because there is not altogether agreement on whether or not it is an art object; if art and art history are so human, can we consider nature in this sense an artist? Or was the sculptor, or even the thief, the artist, and not the tree?

According to Levine, the activity of the tree gives evidence to the concept of “plants having the potentiality of awakening,” and may help solve the gap of the “lack of relationship between growing plants and human fabricated material.” There is no self-containedness here – there is an undeniable dependence between the tree which needs the head and the head which needs the tree, to avoid being cut down or lost. They immortalize one another. Tension arises from the symbiosis in the knowledge that the tree is not obligated to the head but rather to natural patterns, yet is still responsive to it. The culminated mysteries of wildness, human culture, and ritual arise from the “organic energy of the tree on the head and the stone’s cellular resistance to the energy.” Levine warns us that “the tree’s embrace is not unconditional,” and neither is our history.