This sculpture was made with rock, robotics and time. Its beauty stuns.
Barry X Ball’s “Buddha” took years to make with the help of a studio team and a robot. It’s timeless.
This Buddha — its head and shoulders the color of translucent flames, its torso pockmarked by wounds, its robes a rich burgundy — is the manifestation of an idea of art that’s both dazzlingly new and profoundly ancient. If you’ve not seen anything quite like it — well, neither have I. (It’s on show at the Mario Diacono Gallery in Boston until July 5.)
“Buddha,” by Barry X Ball, is familiar only to the extent that it follows a type recognizable from Mahayana Buddhism. It’s modeled after a 15th- or 16th-century seated Buddha from Japan, in lacquer and gilt wood. The Amitābha, as this type is called, expresses “measureless life” (a function of infinite compassion), bliss and a harmonizing force that radiates throughout the cosmos.
Ball’s version is the result of years of intricate, painstaking hands-on processes and sophisticated new ones, among them digital modeling, 3D printing and robot milling.
What makes it so distinctive — so deliriously beautiful — are the materials. The figure of the Buddha is made from three types of stone. The lower section is rouge du roi, a marble found in France. The middle section is an onyx from El Marmol in Baja California, Mexico; cut away this stone’s golden and cakey skin and you’re left with a smooth, swirling expanse of white marble with pink striations, pockmarked by cavities, or “wounds,” the color of chocolate. The resplendent top section is golden honeycomb calcite, mined from a quarry in the mountains east of Park City, Utah.
The sculpture’s lotus-shaped base is no less seductive. It’s carved from a translucent pink onyx from Iran, purchased at Carrara in Italy, where Michelangelo got his marble and where today, up and down the coast road, markets display both locally quarried marble and stone transported from around the world.
Ball has been at the technological forefront of stone sculpture for decades. He has a big studio in Brooklyn and employs a team of assistants.
To make “Buddha,” they created a digital scan of the original Japanese Buddha, modeled it using a computer program, then used a 3D printer to make a full-size copy. Although the form of the lotus base was more freely invented, it was rendered and printed by a similar process.
Once sourced, the slabs of stone were assembled, cut in profile, then carved into its present shape by a robot, milling under a stream of cooling water. The “rough” milling produced a sculpture divided horizontally in three separate segments.
What followed was countless hours of handcrafted finessing, using an array of tools and trompe l’oeil techniques, with the aim of making the three different stones seem to blend organically into one. To create this semblance of “continuity,” chocolate-colored cavities and swirls of pink and brown were created in stone where they don’t naturally occur. A similar process was used for the pink lotus base. A natural-looking but, in fact, artificial ring of “wounds” was introduced to its upper echelon, rhyming with the cavities in the Buddha’s body.
Once the sculpture’s two parts — base and body — were assembled, the stone was smoothed and polished, then impregnated with resin. At the end of this multiyear process, voilà! — the extraordinarily vivid creation you see reproduced here.
Ball’s use of technology interests and impresses me, as does his studio system and the illusionistic, handcrafted detailing. Neither artists nor Buddhists, you’re reminded, are obliged to cut themselves off from technology. (I would love one day to see Ball’s “Buddha” placed in the same room as Nam June Paik’s “TV Buddha.”) Sculptors, as Ball likes to point out, have long competed to use the very latest technologies and to that extent, he’s merely following tradition.
But all these are talking points. This Buddha is so uncannily familiar and yet so strikingly original that it transcends “issues” and silences skeptics. To me, it suggests deep paradoxes at the heart of existence — paradoxes that feel as germane today as in the Buddha’s lifetime: Stasis and unstoppable change. Reality and illusion. Desire and nothingness.
