Mustang

A documentation and exhibition project for the Rubin Museum of Art now regularly brings me to Mustang. Consequently, I have begun to work on some of the painted caves of Mustang as well as the documented objects. Concerning the caves, there is much more to say than has been published so far, and many of the objects have remained virtually unknown. The documentation project will cover as many transportable objects as I can get access to.

> Mustang

Rubin Museum of Art

Since my employment as curator at the Rubin Museum of Art the museum's objects determine a good part of my recent research. There is a great range of questions to be answered, common threads being issues of style, donorship, cultural interrelationship, and religious usage.

 

Infinite Variety. Form and Appearance in Tibetan Buddhist Art

This introductory text explores the basic concepts on which Tibetan Buddhist art is based in their historical relationship. It thus begins with the three bodies of the Buddha and multiple Buddha representations and ends with the Tibetan contribution to earlier Indian Buddhist concepts that are reflected in the arts. Finally it considers if the variety found within Tibetan Buddhist art is indeed infinite.

English variant of: Unendliche Vielfalt. Gestalt und Erscheinungsform im Buddhismus. In: Wulf Köpke and Schmelz Bernd (eds.), Die Welt des Tibetischen Buddhismus. Hamburg: Museum für Völkerkunde, Hamburg (2005) 43–77.

• In Lotus Leaves 7, no. 2 (2005): 1–9 (Part I) and Lotus Leaves 8, no. 1 (2005): 7–14 (Part II).

Western Himalayas

Undertaking privately-financed research trips since 1990 and participating in all major field research undertaken within the framework of Klimburg-Salter’s research project from 1991 to 2001 my academic career has from the start focused on in situ documentation and research. Consequently, I have contributed more than 20.000 slides and negatives to the Western Himalayan Archives Vienna (WHAV), now housed at the Institute of Art History at the University of Vienna.

The projects I have participated in concentrated on the earliest Buddhist art in the western Himalayas, attributable to the period from the 10th to the 13th centuries. This art can basically be read in two ways: on the one hand it is evidence for the latest phase of Buddhism in Northwest India, a stage of development otherwise almost completely lost, on the other hand it documents the main phase of the Tibetan adoption and adaptation of Indian Buddhism. The artistic heritage of this art is undoubtedly Indian, be it Kashmiri or representative of other schools of north Indian art (clay sculptures of a technique described in Indian Ś́ilpaśāstra literature, painted textile patterns best related to contemporary Gujarati textiles (Tabo), unusual iconographic types, both Buddhist and Hindu that appear to be specific to northwest India and at least partly derive from a Kashmiri context. In addition, certain artistic elements can be traced beyond the Indian heritage, e.g. to Central Asia or even the whole area surrounding the western Himalayas (especially evident in the textile patterns of the Alchi group of monuments).

My research on early Buddhist art in the western Himalayas has been generously funded for more than ten years by the Austrian 'Fonds zur Förderung wissenschaftlicher Forschung' (FWF). The extent of this support is well documented in my CV. September 2000 to August 2003 I received a three-year research grant by the Austrian Program for Advanced Research and Technology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (> APART project).

I am extremely grateful to all the teachers who have supported my research over the years, most important among them being: Deborah E. Klimburg-Salter, Ernst Steinkellner, and the late Maurizio Taddei, and to the numerous kind and helpful people during my research travels, particularly the monks and caretakers of the monasteries and village temples I surveyed and documented.

Early Tibetan Clay Sculpture

Few people will consider clay an important artistic medium in Tibetan art. Nevertheless, in Tibet clay has always been the sculptural material par excellence. Besides the mass-produced votive objects, the so-called tsha tsha found all over Tibet, many of the large-scale sculptures in Tibetan Buddhist monasteries are actually made of the same material. The main substance of these sculptures is dried clay (and not, as is often claimed, stucco, which would be far more resistant), a material that has been used employing varying techniques throughout the history of Tibetan art.

Large-scale clay sculptures of the highest quality are particularly characteristic for the earliest Tibetan monuments preserved. This fact can quite easily be explained by the abundance of clay sculpture in almost all neighbouring regions during the time when Tibet was absorbing Buddhism from India as well as – albeit to a far lesser degree – China and Central Asia. During the second half of the first millennium of our era major sculptures were being made of clay in all these regions, those preserved in the famous cave of Dunhuang in the Gansu corridor in China being the most well known.

This article summarizes how frequently clay was used as sculptural material throughout Tibetan history and the techniques employed. The brief survey certainly does not do justice to the importance of clay as a sculptural medium in Tibet, but the highlights introduced may be sufficient to prove that these sculptures are an important aspect of Tibetan art that deserves attention. This is particularly true as the sculptures often represent the main topic of a temple’s decoration and the monument thus can only be understood by taking them into account.

• In Aziatische Kunst 33 (2) 2003: p. 2-15.