A Sense of Essence

Antony Arcari
July, 2005

John Reeves' sculpture brings to mind Keats' famous aphorism "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," an ideal which today seems a quaint, romantic relic, dismantled by our postmodern purge of all graven images from an outdated Age of Enlightenment. In art, as in our world, beauty seems rarely truthful, and truths are rarely beautiful. What motivates art today, is the desire for novelty, the "shock of the new." But the assault on our numbed and jaded senses waged by most postmodern art has, in turn, become it own numbing experience. Yes, Postmodernism was a necessary antidote to the archaic assumptions and myths of modernism, a cultural enzyme breaking down the absolute "truths" of a one-eyed age of reason. But after this deconstructive deluge, what next?

Artists are no longer the antennae of their race. Rarely do they, as James Joyce once claimed, forge the consciousness of their race in the smithy of their soul. With education in Art and Humanities being decimated by funding cuts across the country, how do artists recover their relevance within a system that devalues and marginalizes their voice and vision? Reeve's art is not yet another reactive regression to some familiar ground of old romantic certainties. He integrates those truths of earlier epochs, a totemic resonance with nature, an innate grasp of the mythic power of symbols, an intellectual knowledge of the Euclidian geometries of form, and an alchemist's skill in transmuting natural materials into something…sublime, all transcended by what might be termed a "transmodern" or integral perspective, where paradoxes play in the "groundless ground" of an ever-present Being.

John Reeves also has his own story in-the-world, his own dreams, desires, influences and abilities, refined over twenty years of work, study, and reflection. A notable influence on his art is Contantin Brancusi who said, "What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things . . . it is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface." Reeve's "Little White Nut" may remind art aficionados of Brancusi's egg-shaped "Newborn" from 1915; and his limestone pillar, "Take 5," echoes the famous "Endless Column." Like Brancusi, Reeves uses limestone, marble, and wood, taking the same care to fully integrate the supporting bases with his work. He also understands the importance of space and the environment, like Isamu Noguchi (who briefly worked as Brancusi's assistant). And he watched Carl Andre respond to industrial "found objects,” spontaneously arranging wood, metal or stone within a given environmental space to create his minimalist installations. (Andre also claims Brancusi as a major influence).

Concurrent with his art, Reeves has maintained an active interest in the field of consciousness studies. He once sought out the physicist, David Bohm, to debate the 'New Physics' and Bohm's theory of "wholeness and the implicate order." Unlike many modern artists (and most critics) Reeves has explored the territory which philosophies of non-dual consciousness point to — a primordial, unconditioned awareness beyond all subject-object dualities, including our personal concepts and maps. Reeve's dual paths into non-duality allow his art to reveal the implicate order of Reality via the explicate form of his works. As Brancusi once put it, "Whoever does not detach himself from the ego, never attains the Absolute and never deciphers life."

Reeves’ art influences are translated into something beyond mere homage or imitation. He has absorbed the mystic primitivism of Brancusi, the austere minimalism of Andre, and the master craftsman's skills from Chinese sculptor Chi Man Lai, and created works that defy their own time and history. His art refuses any simple categorization or lazy-minded branding such as 'Taoist' or 'Zen' or 'Post-minimalist'. His works are neither machine-made products for the marketplace nor decorative objets d'art for casual consumption. They are silent portals to primordial truths that cannot be reduced to words or categories.

In works such as "Oh" the hard granite seems to morph before us as we shift our perspective. It becomes more fluid, more transparent to our attention, as if revealing some hidden sound or frequency that gives it life. His 'Watertree" and "Flake" seem to carry us into a soundless sound that permeates the space around us. The eye, ear, and mind become fused and fall through the edges and spaces of these hard masses into a timeless present, a brimming emptiness that cannot be defined by the senses alone. As one's gaze oscillates between the seductive lines of these works, and the dancing stillness of Being that they generously present, a certain realization may arise... that Keat's words about Beauty and Truth are no longer mere myth, but an essential fact to be directly experienced in Reeves’ sculpture.

Perhaps the words of a poet may best conclude this impossible task of translating Reeves’ art into words:

"[Sculpture] had to distinguish itself somehow from other things, the ordinary things which everyone could touch. It had to become unimpeachable, sacrosanct, separated from chance and time through which it rose isolated and miraculous, like the face of a seer. It had to be given its own certain place, in which no arbitrariness had placed it, and must be intercalated in the silent continuance of space and its great laws. It had to be fitted into the space that surrounded it, as into a niche; its certainty, steadiness and loftiness did not spring from its significance but from its harmonious adjustment to the environment."
R.M. Rilke, (1903)

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