PHENOMENAL MUSEUM

Phenomenal Museum is an ongoing series of public workshops and ritual engagements led by Gong Jie Xi/Jessica Kung to recover the museum as a site of spiritual and creative activation. In these happenings, participants engage with objects of art and culture in the museum using practices of attention, breathing, and energy work drawn from Buddhist traditions, as well as forms of collective creative engagement designed to bring one’s own experience, imagination, and sense of play to the work. These rituals hold space for the collective practice of what we’ve come to call a practical phenomenology.

What is practical phenomenology? Typically, we use the word “phenomenology” to refer to a tradition in Western thought that makes a study of the way things appear to us in lived experience—as opposed, say, to the study of things as they might appear from some more objective or impersonal perspective. This tradition breaks away from another lineage of thought, descending from René Descartes, that focuses attention on that which can be known objectively and with certainty through empirical methods of research. For thinkers in the phenomenological tradition, it is important to describe the world not according to what it is “objectively” but according to how it acts on and appears to us.

When it comes to art objects, a phenomenological approach puts emphasis on how a work of art affects us with its energies and presence. But suppose you wanted to do more than describe the way the world appears—suppose you wanted to change the way it appears, to transform your experience of it. What if you want something more out of your experience than you currently find in it?

 Practical phenomenology involves going beyond description and interpretation of experience to the building of thick relations with the world in an embodied way. It involves not just description of how the world appears to us but a transformation of our relation to that world—as takes place, for instance, when the practice of deep breathing allows you to perceive the being of a person or a tree with greater depth, or when hours of practice with a paintbrush or guitar makes the instrument come to seem like a part of your own body, or when you listen to a place and encounter it as consciousness, as a being who can offer gifts and suffer wounds and speak to you, as the “genius loci” spoke to the ancient Greeks, and the mountains and rivers speak to Kogi elders, and an archaic torso of Apollo spoke to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

What does practical phenomenology look like in practice?

It looks like meditating on a creative project that you yourself have brought to completion to discover the seeds of its inception. It looks like attending to your own feelings of attachment towards the beautiful objects you encounter in the museum or the gift shop and consciously reframing that relation as one of devotional tending. It involves cultivating a relationship with the spirit of an artist you admire the way you would cultivate a relation to an ancestral spirit, and looking at the materials used in a painting or sculpture as points of access towards the spirit of the land from which that art emerged. It involves playing with modes of relating to an art object—for instance, by treating a painting of a goddess as a goddess—and discovering what happens next.

These are some of the practices participants explore collectively when attending a Phenomenal Museum session, and which one can explore on one’s own as a reader or listener to the meditations collected in The Muse and the Mountain. These meditations are at once reflective, like those of a philosopher or cultural critic, and guided, like those you might receive while practicing with a yoga teacher or Buddhist master, involving breathing exercises and embodied practices of attention. One of the arguments implicit in this work is that these two meanings of “meditation,” the reflective and the embodied, should go together if we wish to anchor transformations or insights achieved through meditation or reflection in such a way that they enter our daily lives as ways of being.