Smile of Buddha

-Other dimensions-

By the end of the 19th century the empirical, "scientific" understanding of the material world was driving a significant number of artists toward an exploration of noumenal reality, accessible to intution rather than the sense or the intellect.
"Art became the creation of reality"

Kandinsky's book, On the spiritual in art.

For a Kandinsky, a "true" work of art leads a full inner life-good art has soul. Klang, spiritual reverberation.

Like Kandinsky, Duchamp set out to liberate both art and its audience.
For Duchamp art was emptiness, a space wherein the viewer "brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act."
The degree to which the artist fails to fully convey his intention creates a "gap" that is energized by the potential of this encounter. "What art is in reality is this missing link, not the links which exist. It's not what you see that is art, art is the gap." In other words, art, like everything else, is empty of inherent self-existence.

Duchamp's viewer-response theory of art:rasa.
Rasa resides not in the artist or the object, but in the mind of viewer-just as the taste of wine exists not in the vintner or in its bottle, but in the mouth of the one who drinks it.

Duchamp and Brancusi-Mahayana Buddhism known as Tantrayana or Vajrayana
Mahayana Buddhism recongnized two main paths to awakening: the Sutra Way, in which the practitioner patiently explores and works on the afflictions of his or her mindstream by engaging in prescribed practice as meditation, and the Tantra Way, in which practitioners cultivate a vision of the world as a mandala and themselves as buddhas or bodhisattvas-"enlightement beings", who vow to retain human from untill everyone achieves enlightenment.

The goal of Tantric contemplative exercises is to experience samsara(journeying, the cycle of existence) and nirvana(release) as one and the same.
Tantra's assumption of nonduality implies the collapse of all concepts, including those of purity and impurity.

John Dewey resolved Descarte's mind/body dualism by understanding the mind as a product of natural processes and the web of interactive relationships between human beings and world. As far as humans are concerned, the world is not comprised of things, or objects, but of happenings, or experience.

His book, art as Experience, he wrote, "in common conception, the work of art is often idenrified with the building, book, painting, or statue in its existence apart from human experience. Since the actual work of art is what the product does with and in experience, the result[of this misconception] is not favorable to understanding."
What Dewey said is that the "work" of art does not reside in the art object, but in what the object "does" within the mind of viewer. This view is very close to the Duchamp;'s concept of art as the gap in which experience occurs.

Duchamp's life goal as obtaining a "moderately clear and distinct idea of what the problems are that underlie the difficulties and evils which we experience."