Written for a socially engaged Buddhist publication, March 2002 (currently unpublished)

Beverly Naidus

My journey into Buddhist thought and practice started when a book by Joanna Macy fell off a book shelf and hit me in the head. It was the fall of 1983. I was attending a six-week artists' and writers' retreat at the Blue Mountain Center in upstate New York.

It was my first time out of the city in many years. I was exhausted, and despite several years of being passionately committed to the activist art movement, I felt pretty grim about the state of the world. I was reworking a site-specific installation about nuclear nightmares,"THIS IS NOT A TEST," for a show called The End of the World: Artists' Visions of the Apocalypse at the New Museum in New York City. Focusing on this theme in the midst of the fall splendor was quite a challenge. I wanted to reconnect with my work, but the landscape kept calling me outside. My first impulse every morning was to draw and paint the gorgeous trees outside my window. Above my bed was a startling graphite drawing of a majestic tree by the famous social satirist, Georg Grosz. He created this image after escaping Hitler’s brutality in the late 1930's and finding refuge in the States. As days passed, I began to think that Grosz’s gift to me was to learn to paint beauty despite my horrific nightmares.

In the midst of this aesthetic dilemma, I went browsing in the library. From a quiet spot on a top shelf Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age seemed to launch itself onto my head and slid down gently into my arms. Even though I had no prescribed spiritual practice at the time, I took this moment of serendipity seriously. I read the book with what must have been a constant expression of amazement. I had found a community of like-minded souls. I wrote to Joanna Macy and she responded enthusiastically to my questions. I wanted to know how to talk about despair in my art without becoming part of the psychic numbing process. In other words, how could I tell the story of my deepest fears about nuclear holocaust without making people turn off? How could my art empower people to feel connected and become activists? Joanna recommended that I attend a "Despair and Empowerment" workshop that was being facilitated by some colleagues in western Massachusetts.

I went. The weekend was intense. Grown men were weeping openly about the possibility of nuclear holocaust. People were imagining a world without bombs, and giving substance to their dreams. Participating in this workshop and sharing my work there gave me the strength to shift the direction of my art.

"THIS IS NOT A TEST" was first conceived in 1977. The original installation took place in a dirt floor basement in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The audience was presented with a surrealistic vision of a dwelling, recently vacated by the last survivor of a nuclear holocaust. Inside the space, the audience heard the soundtrack of that survivor's inner thoughts. There were two voices, one cynical and one despairing, having a dialogue about what wasn't done to avoid this result (nuclear holocaust). The voices were interrupted by a radio announcer and a teacher giving emergency instructions. Chanting moans, sirens, and very disturbing sound effects echoed in the background of the audio loop. The dwelling contained a makeshift bed upon which a desolate landscape was made from the sheets. In the middle of this bed landscape, slides were projected of lush, blue-green landscapes (memories of what was once on the surface of the planet) on a tiny screen. After each scenic photo there was a blank slide of white light that created the illusion of the flash of the bomb.

In response to the challenge of Macy's words (and those of her collaborators in the international anti-nuclear group Interhelp) I did two things to change the original version of this installation. First off, instead of displaying an artwork that was mostly full of despair, cynicism and ironic asides, I reworked the audio tape to include a voice that suggested a transformation of the nightmare into something more positive. The audio loop ended with the following two lines, "We never realized that we had had a choice" and "You don't give up do you?"

Secondly, I decided to formally invite people to contribute their own nuclear nightmares and positive dreams for the future by placing a story collecting box next to the installation. People had left stories in my installations in the past. Most notably, during the second version of "THIS IS NOT A TEST" in the New York Coliseum in 1980, people had left me notes under the bed. They said things like, "thank you for saying this. I feel less alone." I had not formally solicited these notes and I was amazed to receive them. So, at the New Museum, I built a make shift box out of the same scavenged material with which I constructed the shack of the last survivor. On the surface of the box I asked people to write down their nightmare and dreams and invited them to return for a public reading of their messages. Over the next month over a thousand messages were left in the box. On the night of a blizzard, almost a hundred people came to the museum to read out loud the stories in that box. I was stunned and reassured by the public's need to share this deep pain about the world. Through breathing in despair and breathing it out, in the company of others, my journey into art informed by socially engaged Buddhist thought had begun.

After moving to southern California in the mid-eighties, I was surrounded with a continuous stream of disturbing subject matter that inspired new art pieces. The week I arrived in L.A., I remember driving across the bridges on Terminal Island, in Los Angeles Harbor, looking out at the refinery smokestacks and garbage incinerators, and sedimentary layers of sooty air. I said to my companion, "here we are, in one of the biggest bellies of the Beast, and very few people see it, even though most of them are suffering every day. I know what my job is here."

In the years that followed, I created a series of audience participatory installations dealing with environmental disaster and illness, the numbing effects of consumer culture, the self-destructive obsession with appearance, and the racism caused by fear of difference. The public reaction to these pieces was mixed. Troubling responses to my first installation became the titles of future exhibitions: "You're Such a Complainer," "You're so negative," and "Will you stop depressing me?" Despite these reactions, thousands of people were moved to share stories about their own experiences, feeling that their own burden was somehow lightened and that they were less alone.

One of my favorite projects of this time was "Please Take a Numb-er, " a large, spiral game board designed for shopping malls. As people walked on painted wooden squares that displayed grim headlines and photos, they read eye-level signs that represented inner thoughts: "I need a new pair of shoes" and "Let's go to the movies." When they arrived in the center of the spiral, the audience was invited to write down on a numbered card something that they wanted in their life or community that could not be bought with money. They could place their card on an "altar" that was made out of recycled materials and covered with papier-machéd, mail order catalogs and advertisements. As people left the altar at the center of the spiral, they encountered signs that discussed strategies to leave their apathy and numbness behind, and move to a place of action and hope. By the end of each exhibition, the anti-consumerist altar was filled with peoples' concerns and stories about AIDs, the homeless, domestic abuse, and the environment.

When "Please Take a Numb-er" was exhibited at the Central Coast Plaza in San Luis Obispo, CA in 1991, an art writer was so moved by the piece that he wrote a front page headline story for the local newspaper. He said that he had never seen an art work talk about and question contemporary life in this way. He saw that the process of sharing of stories had the potential to shift consciousness, and was thrilled that I had made work for the shopping mall context.

Overcoming numbness, looking squarely at suffering, and reaching for the positive potential in life are themes in my art that have been reinforced by the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh. I had the privilege to do several retreats with Thay during the nine years I lived in southern California. The first was with a group of activist artists at the Ojai Foundation, the second was at Plum Village in France, and the third was with Vietnam Vets and peace activists in Malibu, CA. Each time I sat with Thay and the sangha I came away with a new understanding of how the path of mindfulness and compassion could inform my vision as an artist and activist. But it was a life and death encounter with breath that took me to a new place in my art.

In the mid-nineties my immune system began to suffer from the wear and tear of breathing smog. I developed chronic and disabling asthmatic bronchitis that caused a major roadblock in my active life. As a result of this disease, I left my tenured teaching job at a state university, my art community, and much more, to move with my husband and newborn son to the hills of western Massachusetts. Of course, my illness became a profound metaphor for my art, and I started making images of the "canaries," people who were becoming ill due to environmental pollution. I no longer had the energy to build large installations, so my medium became more portable and self-contained. I worked digitally, painting the faces of people I was meeting in clinics and in the offices of alternative healers. I found advertisements for pesticides from the post WWII era and scanned them, juxtaposing the stories of people getting sick into the copy of each ad. I found statistics about the effect of unapproved and questionable chemicals on public health and superimposed those figures on the scanned images of anatomical parts. I told my story and the stories of others in CANARY NOTES: The Personal Politics of Environmental Illness.

My intention with CANARY NOTES was to educate the uninformed and to support those who felt invisible and misunderstood. I lectured on the work, exhibited it and put in on the Web. But, it was my son, Sam, who took the project to its more profound level. One day, I was drawing a portrait on the computer when Sam (then 5 years old) asked "Are you drawing another picture of a sick person?" I realized then, that I had been focussing on the problem, without giving attention to the healing. My boddhisatva son had reminded me to breathe out my despair. That day I drew my first healing Buddha, and since that time I have made it my practice to do healing images to accompany whatever social problem I am facing in my art. I have been making an ongoing series of healing deities that include a zaftig Kuan Yin, a Buddha with green and flowering lungs, and a sensual Green Man.

The teachings of mindfulness have also influenced my work as a teacher of art for social change. Whether I am teaching at traditional academic institutions, with innovative programs like the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College, or at the radical and inspiring Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont, I offer students an opportunity to find their artistic voices within a social context. This is an alternative to the standard art education focus that trains young artists to concentrate on form, craft, and aesthetic issues, without examining the various social meanings of art with regards to gender, class, ethnicity, nationality, age, and a whole range of other issues.

My students learn a process of deeply listening and collaborating with each other in preparation for working in community. We discuss the intentions of the work, the context in which it will be seen, and the needs of the audience. We talk about art as a tool for consciousness raising, creating dialog and reconciliation between polarized groups, developing awareness and compassion about the suffering of others, exploring a positive identity in relation to a society that diminishes and oppresses "the other," and celebrating aspects of life that are not promoted by consumer culture.

Students have made profound work using their own experiences and those of the community to discuss, for example, the effect of the media on their daily lives and ways to recover from body hate, the alienation of modern life and how to reconnect with a sense of social responsibility, and all manner of work that looks at suffering and ways to heal from it.

Activist art, informed by a socially engaged Buddhist perspective, can play a crucial role in this time of world crisis. It can create safe spaces for people to feel and acknowledge the pain and suffering going on around the world. It can pierce the bubble of consumerist culture that wants us lulled to sleep on our daily diet of denial. It can provide an opportunity for diverse groups to share stories about the kind of world we would like to live in.