Objectif nul (Borshcembschlôôschlumm)

In “Bonjour Monsieur Indigo,” I have continued to empty out crowded scenes, where more is more,  leaving the composition elemental and with few “human” elements.  This is something that I had begun to do since my last show, “Paysages de conjecture.”  

Even though emptiness is the effect sought after, the paintings are not in themselves empty or devoid of elements.  In one of the larger pieces in the show, a monk, Borshcembschlôôschlumm, flies far below a full moon as he skirts barely over a desert temple ruin. 

Objectif nul (Borshcembschlôôschlumm)

2010 - 2017

Oil on linen

100 x 81 cm

Flying Tibetan monks are a recurring subject of mine.  Ever since I saw a flying Tibetan monk in a painting (probably over 12 years ago) at the Rubin Museum in New York City, he has returned time and again to inhabit different pieces of mine.  He comes and goes, flying over riot scenes, inhabiting wave-like clouds, hovering above the raft of Louis-Philippe, the king of the French.  

Borshcembschlôôschlumm, however, is in particular the “figurant,” that the flying Tibetan monk from the Rubin Museum has decided to embody this time round.  In Antoine Volodine’s novel Bardo or not Bardo, there is a story that includes a play requiring the participation of four actors called “Objectif nul.”  Borshcembschlôôschlumm, or Borschem, one of the four characters of the play, is an elite monk who has been training to go into the Bardo through a dark sealed underground furnace door, as a scientific observer.  This voluntary deep dive into the Bardo is not supposed to last longer than 49 days.  The intrigue comes at the end of the play.  

The problem is that Borschem loses all sense of time after the hermetically sealed furnace door to the Bardo is closed behind him.  In fact, upon entering the Bardo, he seems to immediately hear the faint recitation of the monks on the outside, chanting the passage of the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, that is read on the 49th day after death.  On the verge of suffocation, he is unable to activate his distress signal, his robe is in tatters, he is running out of time to return to the world of the living, and he has no options before him, not even that of re-incarnation.  The play ends with Borschem in a desperate sort of monologue:  

“What gardens? . . . What delightful gardens? . . . Everything is black and silent . . . They have forgotten me. There is no one . . . What am I going to do now? . . . What majestic dwellings? . . . What interior paths? . . .                                                                                 (My translation of the original French text)

If one were to take the play as a matter of fact, then the utter existential desolation that is described is overwhelmingly bleak.  But as all of us know, excerpts of any sort taken out of context are suspect.  In fact, “Objectif nul” is, in Volodine’s novel, one of three plays that is embedded within one of the seven stories in Bardo or not Bardo.  

Bogdan Schlumm, a resident of an asylum called the Zenfl Pavillion, plans to singlehandedly perform a piece called “The Bardo of the Medusa,” also known as “Seven Plays of the Bardo.” He plans to perform the plays deep in a forest of birch trees adjacent to his residence.  He is an artist of the highest ideals, he hates the “Star System” and wishes only to perform his theatrical production without any compromise, “far from the snobbery and the prejudices of urban centers, of zoo parks, and of concentration camps.”  Thus his choice, though he really did not have much to choose from, is the natural setting of a forest.

The story is beguilingly comedic.  Schlumm performs three plays on three successive days.  Despite his attempts to publicize his performance (throwing hand-written flyers outside of his room, forgetting to note location and time), he finds himself alone in his chosen performance site without an audience.  The first piece, “Objectif nul,” is performed the first day, a Tuesday, with the silent trunks of the birch trees witnessing the monk’s fatal deep dive into the Bardo.  The next day, while performing a piece called “The Coal Company,” which is supposed to take place in the dark confines of a collapsed coal mine, a flock of starling joins him in the trees above and releases without any hesitation a deluge of their avian droppings overhead.  He, of course, is completely covered in their splatterings, even choking during the recitation of the text.  Finally, on Thursday, the third and last day, consecrated to a piece called “Micmac at the Morgue,” despite some interruptions from a family of magpies, Schlumm has an excellent production, it was by all aesthetic standards, a success, even though there were no witnesses.

One can only relate and sympathize to Bogdan Schlumm and his completely unfortunate circumstances.  What is most riveting about the story, and the plays within the story, is this extreme dissonance between the actors’ interior aspirations, and the real circumstances in which those aspirations are carried out.  Bogdan Schlumm has high aesthetic ideals for his theater, but it is seen only by forest birds, and the only reward he receives is their defecation.  Borschem, the monk, despite his trepidations, goes into the Bardo, seeking beautiful gardens and majestic dwellings, only to find nothing, not even death.

Does that not sum up the journey of life, in general, and of art, in particular?

In my painting, I wanted to paint that aspiration, not the bleak reality.  I wanted to paint Borshcembschlôôschlumm‘s hopes in going on his deep dive into the Bardo, not the final suffocating blackness in which he languishes.

He is thus a flying Tibetan monk, skirting over an exotic desert temple ruin, trailing behind him, inscribed in stone the phrase in Wardwesân: “ek wagax ebaen ernax weman erkan” (and flee the walls, feel the light breeze).