From Crispin Sartwell, "Six Names of Beauty" (Routledge 2004)
The art of Wolfgang Laib often seems displaced in the institutions in which it is installed. But to me there is no more beautiful body of work in contemporary art. Laib's simplicity is achieved in an arduous process of devotion; he works through immense complexities to arrive close to emptiness, to serenity. Laib's family lived both in Germany and India as he was growing up, and though Laib started out to be a doctor, he was also pursuing a unique approach to art that made use of his split heritage and proclivity for asceticism.
His first works consisted of stones, either pebbles or boulders, which he painstakingly smoothed into ovals in an imitation of the natural processes by which stones are worn in rivers. Laib has always studied world religions, and in the early seventies he immersed himself in Sufism, a variety of Islam that teaches ecstatic union with God through music, poetry, dance, and even sexuality. The poems of Jalaludin Rumi, the thirteenth-century leader of the Mevlevi order of whirling dervishes, express that ecstasy elaborately and also simply. On the 700th anniversary of Rumi's death, in 1973, Laib placed a large, smooth red marble stone outside his tomb. A sort of cult has grown up around this stone, and women come to touch it in the belief that it will make them fertile.
Then Laib developed his milkstones. These square slabs of white marble are worked so that the upper surface is slightly indented. Then Laib pours milk onto the stone to achieve a smooth white surface in which the liquid cannot be distinguished from the stone. These appear to be minimalist sculptures, and have a certain glossy artworld elegance. But they are evanescent and must be continually renewed: repoured each day, lest the milk curdle and stink. The identity of the enduring marble with the ephemeral milk is the theme of the object, though the work is also formally beautiful as a simple white square.
Laib also uses pollen as a medium, and spends the springs at his house in Germany collecting it from flowers and trees. Though all the pollens are yellow, they range from almost white to almost orange, and thus create different effects. Laib sifts the pollen into squares on the floor, often choosing worn stone surfaces for the installation. But he also displays pollen in mounds, jars, or shallow dishes. Laib's later works include rooms and enclosures made of beeswax, which like the pollen installations are fragrant. And where the pollen tends to disperse in the slightest breeze, the beeswax tends to sag in heat.
Laib's work is monkish: it is a discipline both of renunciation and of affirmation. It is reductive in the sense that it always strips to essence as a meditative practice. It is ecstatic in the sense that it expresses the merging of the artist with the material, and the essentiality of the material to the world, so that finally a yellow square with dissolving edges and the faint scent of spring is a synecdoche of all things.
In one way, nothing could be more common than pollen: the stuff is released in clouds by spring plants and pervades the atmosphere. In another way it is a rare substance: Laib's labor to gather a jarful of hazelnut pollen verges on the absurd; it takes weeks of work. Where shibusa moves toward the essential through simplicity, wabi-sabi emphasizes that the essential is also the typical, that the purity we find inherent in the world is not an abstraction from it.
Pollen is a substance, though an ethereal one, and it is an essence of life by which life is reproduced. It is made by and eventuates in the flower, which is a kind of slow explosion or abundance of life. So pollen is as much a process as a substance. To gather and display it, especially in loose piles or flat surfaces, is a participation in and disruption of the process as well as a celebration of it. In Laib, the sabi element is profound: Laib's art has a pervasive atmosphere of solitude. But it is shibui in its simplicity and chastity. And it is wabi because its materials are typical and the use of them initially underwhelming; there is no display of skill for its own sake, no fireworks of virtuosity, pretension, or ego. There is only a discipline of making that is conceived as a part of the universal making.
This immersion is no doubt passionate, full-fledged. But it also eventuates in stillness, in poise and peace. At the point of complete immersion, making is intuitive, spontaneous, actually easy. The discipline is engaged in for the sake of the moment when the discipline dissipates and one finds ease. Laib's mounds of pollen, which he calls mountains, are made with great care but seem effortless. Both the care and the effortlessness are essential to the effect on the viewer; they lead to what we might call naturalness, a participation of the artist in the materials and processes which he is employing. This is a variety of beauty: one feels eased, brought to stillness and simplicity, brought to awareness, in the work. The question is no longer about what the artist is saying or expressing - in fact there is no question any longer - but only a sense of the object as a site where one's awareness is centered.
