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$39.95 HB with dustjacket 112 pages Over 50 color illustrations
Art / Asian Art / Religion ISBN 978-0-9799562-7-0
A singular collection of rare Tantric paintings with an
uncanny affinity to twentieth century art, Tantra Song is a
revelatory book in which East and West, the spiritual and
the aesthetic, the ancient and the modern converge.
This collection of rare, abstract Tantric painting originates in French poet Franck André Jamme’s journey to India twenty-five years ago when he first searched in vain for the source of these intensely beautiful and concise works. On the road to Jaipur, he survived a deadly bus accident, returning to Paris with wounds that took two years to heal. Back in India just a few years later, he met a soothsayer who proclaimed that Jamme, in his suffering, had paid sufficient tribute to the goddess Shakti and—so long as he vowed to visit the tantrikas alone or with someone he truly loves—he could enter the very private communities of adepts who make and use these paintings for their spiritual practice.
While they invoke the highly symbolic cosmology of Hindu Tantra, these contemporary, anonymous drawings from Rajasthan are unlike the more familiar strands of Tantric art. The progeny of hand-written, illustrated religious treatises from the 17th century, copied across many generations, these drawings have evolved into a distinct visual lexicon used to awaken heightened states of consciousness. Like musicians playing ragas of classical Indian music, tantrikas draw in a concentrated state of mental rapture, repeating and subtly reinterpreting melodic structures of line and color. When complete, the drawings—made in tempera, gouache, and watercolor on salvaged paper—are pinned to the wall to use in private meditation.
Possessing an uncanny affinity with a range of 20th century abstract art, the paintings also have a magnetic, vibratory beauty that inspires acute attention even in the uninitiated. Jamme has written brief, luminous texts that further open readers to their subtle magic and enrich the space for boundless contemplation. Drawing on a unique body of knowledge accumulated over two decades, Jamme has assembled a singular and revelatory collection, in which East and West, the spiritual and the aesthetic, the ancient and the modern converge.
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FRANCK ANDRÉ JAMME is one France’s leading contemporary poets and the author of more than a dozen books. His publications in English (translated by John Ashbery, Charles Borkhuis, David Kelley, and Michael Tweed) include New Exercises, Another Silent Attack, Moon Wood, The Recitation of Forgetting, and Extracts of the Life of a Beetle. Described by Henri Michaux as “a writer of rare quality,” Jamme has also collaborated with a number of artists including Phillippe Favier, Suzan Frecon, Acharya Vyakul, and Hanns Schimansky, as well as translated the works of John Ashbery and Lokenath Bhattacharya. A specialist in art brut, Tantric and tribal art of India, he has curated and contributed to exhibitions at The Drawing Center, Centre Pompidou, and Beaux-Arts de Paris, among others.
TANTRA SONG also includes contributions by writer and Berkeley Art Museum Director Lawrence Rinder, poet and art critic Bill Berkson, and scholar André Padoux.
I have noticed in the Tantric works how the simplicity of their conventional, geometric forms is complemented by the infinite complexity of their particular execution: water stains, flaws in the handmade paper, fragments of unrelated text combine to make each work not only unique but somehow perfect. . . . It’s not just a desire for the antique or a nostalgic patina that makes the incidental marks so important, it’s precisely that ideal forms—forms plumbed from the depths of the mind, of the soul—need to co-exist with randomness and the emptiness of chance. How is it that a symbol of god alone is so dull, but when juxtaposed with a smudge or a smear it comes alive?
Well, I think its main particularity is that it is first of all a practice. First for the “artist” himself when he paints a piece, and then for the people who are later going to work on seeing this image, to meditate on it and its meaning—and what is more, through this meditation, finally to make the divinity herself appear. I don’t know if there are many other arts that have those qualities. And, on the other hand, this has not killed the aesthetics, the grace of these things. Tantrism is too free, too open for one not to see, to accept, to appreciate, even to revere the beauty of these paintings.
TANTRA SONG limited edition is an authentic, original Tantric painting in the motif “Pure Consciousness,” included with the hardback edition of the book. Numbered edition of 30. More info here.
