Empty Throne
Offset lithography in silver and black ink on gray paper
64 pages
15.5 cm by 25.5 cm
Hand sewn and case bound
Edition of 90
2022
About fifteen years ago, a friend of mine wrote to ask me why I didn’t make books with purely visual narratives. I think they were suggesting that my use of writing was a crutch, a way to avoid the difficult task of making a compelling visual narrative. The letter came during the time when I was almost finished working on a long project about the Derge Parkhang, a sutra printing temple located on the eastern border of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, and I had a great many pictures from that project for which I did not have a use. I immediately started working on a sequence of those images that I thought told a story of a trip into the high mountains of Eastern Tibet, leading a viewer into a visually allegorical journey of revelation.
When I finished designing the sequence, I knew that it did not do what I had hoped. I felt like it was missing some major element, something that would propel the narrative in a compelling way. Photographs record detail and texture with astonishing fidelity, but photographs present abstract ideas very poorly. My visual narrative was supposed to be largely allegorical, and the work I produced seemed merely confusing.
I put the sequence aside, returning to it many times over the intervening years, trying to understand how I might make something that told the story without using written English. I tried several very different approaches to the problem, including one version that was an imageless, entirely written translation of the visual sequence. As a companion piece to the visual narrative, I think it was my attempt to locate the narrative in my mind somewhere. None of these efforts seem to accomplish the goal of presenting a visual, allegorical narrative.
One day, about two years ago, I was rereading an article about the transmission of Buddhism to Tibet, and I was reminded about termas. A terma, in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, is a hidden teaching that is discovered or revealed by a person who is then called a tertön. Termas can be located in physical objects or in the minds of people, and they are often encoded in a nonhuman writing system, only legible to the Tertön, called Dakini script. Padmasambhava, who is supposed to have brought Buddhism to Tibet during the eighth century CE, had some teachings that he knew the people were not ready to hear yet. He hid these teachings in physical objects and in the minds of people in the future. These teachings have been discovered by various masters over the years, in a process of continuing revelation.
I thought about how I had been struggling to make photographs readable in a certain way, and it occurred to me that the photographs themselves might become the source of a writing system. I went through the photographs, found tonal highlight sections of the images that could be isolated, rotated and duplicated, and thus translated into glyphs. They form a text that is not immediately legible and that accumulates page by page through the work. Of course, for the right person this text will become readable.
To produce Empty Throne, I took a physical copy of the visual narrative book I had been struggling with for years, and I photographed each page spread as I held it in my hand while walking up the hill beside my studio. I designed the book so that most page spreads have the original image printed on one side, and an image of the book with the same image on the other side. The silver glyphs accumulate on each page spread, new glyphs being introduced on the pages with the images from which they are derived. The image on the last page spread in Empty Throne is of the field next to my studio, with the first glyph of the text floating in the sky. I printed the book in two and three colors of black on gray paper in order to totally suppress the highlights of the photographs. The glyphs are all generated from the hidden highlights in the images, and they are meant to be the light in this work.
In early Christian art, as well as in early Buddhist art, an empty throne was a way to portray someone who couldn’t be represented: Christ and the Buddha were both represented as empty thrones in early representations, as a way of pointing at something amazing that could not or should not be directly portrayed. This book is full of people lost in the night, empty thrones, empty saddles, struggling frogs, and a text that can’t be read.
A related project, Preparation Throne, was printed before I started printing Empty Throne. I printed many of the glyphs in silver ink on black paper, and I think of it as the pure, unreadable version of the text revealed in Empty Throne.