September 26, 2009—January 17, 2010, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Wolfgang Laib’s Without Place–Without Time–Without Body (2007) is an installation of hundreds of mounds of rice, with five mounds of luminous yellow pollen at the heart of the work. The title evokes a spiritual realm, unfettered by limitations of place, time and body. Without Place–Without Time–Without Body is a metaphor for transcendence. Laib is internationally known for his Pollen Fields, Milkstones, Rice Houses, and beeswax ziggurats and chambers.

Laib lives and works in seclusion in his native Germany and in southern India, which he considers his spiritual home. He has studied philosophy and religion and finds the spiritual traditions of India most relevant for his work. He is especially drawn to Hindu ritual offerings of flowers, foods and other substances placed on altars, and to milk poured as a form of libation.

Without Place–Without Time–Without Body was inspired by an earlier work, The Five Mountains Not to Climb On, which consisted of five mounds of pollen three inches high. While visiting China in 1997, Laib climbed the revered Five Sacred Mountains. The allegorical mountains of Without Place–Without Time–Without Body are viewed as if seen from a great height, altering perspective and relationships of scale. Like peaks emerging from a sea of mist, the mounds appear as a mythical mountain landscape of infinite proportions.

The repetition of rice and pollen mounds conveys expansion and implies infinity. Here, Laib repeats the same form in a single sculpture. Elsewhere, he has worked in series, repeating a form in many separate works. For instance, he has made numerous Milkstones since 1975 and Pollen Fields since 1977. Laib says that repetition “is the most beautiful thing that exists.” It has to do with ritual, timelessness and the eternal recurrence of the same, a Hindu and Buddhist notion that accounts for vast cycles of the cosmos. Laib states “There is no beginning and no end.”

Laib’s natural materials of pollen and rice inherently symbolize regeneration and nature’s infinite cycles. He says that pollen is “a detail of … infinity.” While each flower yields only a particle, its accumulation, even in a small mound, magnifies its radiance and beauty. Rice is seed and sustenance, and its symbolic, cultural and religious significance is well-known. As sculpture, Laib’s organic, living materials represent a field of energy. They awaken viewers’ sensibilities and convey immediacy and presence.

Laib’s art-making process is ritualistic and intensely focused. Without Place–Without Time–Without Body, he collected hazelnut pollen. In the gallery, each mound of pollen and rice is carefully distributed by hand. Slight irregularities in the placement of some mounds of rice and scattered grains reveal the artist’s hand at work.

Rice and flowers are ritual offerings in India, and pollen grains are Laib’s flowers, in the abstract. Like offerings made on altars in India, the act of creating this work is a form of ceremonial offering. The magnitude of the installation transforms the gallery into a secular shrine.

The central location of the pollen mounds is important. With their simple shapes and glowing hue, they exude vigorous potency at the heart of the sculpture. To borrow T.S. Eliot’s phrase, they are the “still point at the center of the world.” If the sculpture is construed as an abstract mandala (a cosmic diagram), they refer to the center of the universe. We also can compare them to Buddha’s “immovable spot” which, though it may describe a place at the foot of the bodhi tree, also serves as a metaphor for a state of mind wherein one communes with the absolute.

Laib says all his work is “concerned with the search for an entrance or a passage to another world.”

His mountains are seen with the inner eye and ascended with the mind.

This exhibition is supported by the Campbell-Calvin Fund and Ellizabeth C. Bonner Charitable Trust for exhibitions. Midwest Airlines is the official airline sponsor.