Phenomenal Museum is a series of teachings and ritual engagements led by Jessica Kung to recover the museum as a site of spiritual and creative activation. In these happenings, participants engage with objects of art and culture in the museum using practices of attention, breathing, and energy work drawn from Yogic and Buddhist traditions, as well as forms of collective creative engagement designed to bring one’s own experience, imagination, and sense of play to the work. These rituals hold space for the collective practice of what we’ve come to call a practical phenomenology.
What is a practical phenomenology?
The term “phenomenology” emerges from a tradition in Western thought where the viewer assesses the way “things” appear to us in lived experience— in place of a perception that gazes at “things” through an objective or impersonal framework. This tradition diverges from another lineage of thought, from the lineage of René Descartes, that focuses attention on that which can be known objectively and with certainty through empirical methods of research. For thinkers in the phenomenological tradition, it is important to describe the world not according to what it is “objectively” but according to how it acts on and appears to us.
In consideration to art objects, a phenomenological approach emphasizes how a work of art affects us with its energies and presence. But suppose you wanted to do more than describe the way the world appears—suppose you wanted to change the way it appears, to transform your experience of it. What if you want something more out of your experience than you currently find in it?
Practical phenomenology transmutes our experiences from a cluster of perceptions into lives of completely embodied interdependence. When the practice of deep breathing shifts our knowing of a person or tree from objects of our seeing into beings we hold in relationship, when hours of practice with a paintbrush or guitar renders the instrument inseparable from your own body like a limb, or when soil and rain are remembered as sites of listening, we can encounter them as consciousness, as being(s) who offer teachings, hold reservoirs of memory, who speak to you. As the “genius loci” spoke to the ancient Greeks, the mountains and rivers speak to Kogi elders, and an archaic stone torso of Apollo spoke to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, the phenomenal world asks us all to listen.
Expressions of practical phenomenology: meditating on a creative project you have brought to completion, discovering the seeds of its inception, attuning to your emotional geo-scape, the awareness of your attachment towards beautiful “objects” housed in a museum or gift shop. Through your encounters you consciously reimagine your relation as one of devotional tending. By engaging in practical phenomenology you can cultivate a relationship with the spirit of an artist the way you would cultivate a relation to an ancestral spirit. In deeper engagement, the materials in a painting or sculpture become points of access towards the spirit of the land from which that art emerged. It involves playing with modes of relating to an art object—for instance, by treating a painting of a goddess as a goddess—and discovering what happens next.