The World Mandala: Neil Tetkowski's Common Ground World Project

by: Robert C. Morgan

The Common Ground World Project by Neil Tetkowski is a 40 page color book which includes the following essay.

Walking into Neil Tetkowski's studio on West 19th Street in New York City one morning in January (2000), I saw packages of clay from places like Afghanistan, Barbados, Gambia, Madagascar, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Bhutan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Zambia, and various island nations in the Caribbean. Of course, the list goes on. Just seeing the shapes of these packages of clay, with their colorful stamps, all in one place was a kind of thrill. The enormous undertaking of bringing all of this clay together became a kind of conceptual act. How did he do it? The evidence was there: the real physical stuff, earthly matter pulled from various geographies, various terrain, and various climates. I reflected on my experience after leaving the studio. The implications were tremendous. Yet I kept asking myself, "Why is he building this World Mandala? What is the motivation?"

Clay from Iran was shipped in this package, 1999.

The mandala is a universal symbol that pervades human culture. It has been known in many forms and variations throughout the history of humankind. The mandala has appeared in the form of a spiral vortex weaving through constellations, a sun disk etched in rock by the Mesopotamians, an Hellenic labyrinth, a Buddhist Thangka (pronounced TONG-ka). The mandala has evolved as a symbol of spiritual growth. It has been read over eons of time as a symbol of timelessness, as a representation of individual human desire to secure a sense of wholeness in relation to the world at large.

The mandala is a fusion of nature and culture, an overlay of the past, present, and future, a sign of transcendent value, and spiritual vision in the material world. It is a phenomenon that is both ancient and contemporary, a conjugation of mind and body. According to Neil Tetkowski, "the mandala is a human creation of regeneration, healing and reconciliation, a visual construction for contemplation that may lead to a heightened state of awareness."

Study for the World Mandala 1998.

Tetkowski believes that the mandala functions as a symbol of world harmony. As a vehicle of spiritual meaning, the mandala is a symbol with the potential to bring us into an ever-evolving cosmos of intersubjective thinking and feeling. Put more simply, human beings need symbols of well-being in order to bring them into a heightened sense of kinship with one another. This is essentially the notion that brought Tetkowski into an awareness that something could be done with this concept in relation to art. Something could be done to create a large-scale work on a cooperative scale as a functional symbol in today's world.

Many of the artist's earlier clay disks, constructed in the 1980s and 1990s, were mandalas - flattened vessels inscribed with marks, such as hand prints, Hebrew letters, and machine parts, or pierced with spikes, nuts, bolts, bullets, or other metal artifacts that he would often leave in the clay. These lowlying vessels, as well as occasional "smoke stack" vessels, were all made in reference to the mandala. As a departure from the clay vessel, Tetkowski did a performance work in 1991, entitled "Ground War". This public performance had a temporal aspect in which he projected his own physical presence into the work. His direct involvement with the clay process became equally as significant as the finished art object. This crossover relationship between performance and object became a key notion for Tetkowski as he started to embark on the Common Ground World Project several years later.

Common Ground World Project began as a concept - an experiment on how the peoples of the world understand the earth, the planet that we all share. Tetkowski wanted to take the mandala concept that he had been using in his private works and to transform this concept into something more public - to share an awareness about what it means to be a citizen living on this planet. In order to give his concept credibility, he approached the United Nations with a proposal to build a sculpture entitled "The Wheel of Life: Common Ground World Mandala." After much persistence, Tetkowski was directed to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Upon explaining his intentions, both aesthetic and pragmatic, he finally received a letter of endorsement from the UN Under Secretary General Nitin Desai. It was at this point that Tetkowski began making contacts with representatives from 188 countries (the full membership of the United Nations) in order to obtain samples of clay. Through the private donations of 15 individuals and sponsorship from The New York Foundation for the Arts, Tetkowski was able to activate the project.

The performative aspect of Common Ground is multifold: first, there was the "selling" of the concept to the UN and to potential benefactors; secondly, the soliciting and the gathering of "world clay" from 188 countries - a monumental task in itself; thirdly, the mixing of the clay by Standard Ceramics of Pittsburgh; and fourth, the celebration of the World Mandala at the UN in April 2000 in which Tetkowski, the Under Secretary General, and representatives from 188 countries will convene to launch the construction of the World Mandala by placing samples of the fired clay into the soft disk. The actual finished presentation of the physical object will not occur until the year 2002.

Creation Event Drawing. 1998

What is lacking in the world today is a real sense of our physicality. We are constantly bombarded by information; digital images galore, advertising, and mindless spectacles. The images appear as quickly as they disappear. We no longer have a sense that anything stays around for very long. There is an absence of stability in the world - not just political or economic stability, but a stability of mind, heart, community, and finally a sense of culture, a transculture that we share, in which we are all participants. This is the point that I believe Neil Tetkowski is striving to make; we need stability. We need to recognize the stability of the Earth, that we are all members of this tiny planet in the infinite spiral nebulae.

Metaphorically and spiritually, we are all a part of the great mandala - a lesson gleaned from the Diamond Sutra in Mahayana Buddhism. Yet at the same time we are all a part of this material world. We all belong together, yet we are constantly trying to separate, to pull apart from one another. The physical act of gathering together, and sending the clay, the real - not the virtual - dissemination of clay, the building of the Mandala, the placing of the fired pieces into the soft clay, all of these physical acts are important. They are important and necessary to reinforce the sense that we are alive. We are not just digitized images, we are alive in the world, and part of the world, part of the physical substance of the earth; the World Mandala.

Robert C. Morgan is an art critic, artist, art historian, curator and lecturer. He is a Professor of the History and Theory of Art at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York.

Copyright 2000, Common Ground World Project, All rights reserved.

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