add to consciousness: tomb raiding, climate warnings, and the phenomenal museum
Our Phenomenal group posed in front of Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro’s 1889 Round plate with lobster (photo courtesy Jessica Kung)
On the Sunday of Memorial Day Weekend, my wife and I had a unique, extraordinary experience at the phenomenal Metropolitan Museum of Art, an institution I’ve been visiting my entire life.
Appropriately enough, it’s called Phenomenal Museum, a participatory program developed by Manhattan native Jessica Kung for her arts collective, Make Conscious. We met Jessica through a mutual friend, Lisa Weinert, whose Narrative Healing: Awaken the Power of Your Story book and newsletter served as a muse for transforming my Substack writing.
“I cannot remember ever not knowing the Met,” Jessica told me recently from Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband, Stéphane Dreyfus, and their six-year-old son, Hieronymus. “It’s part of my psyche as much as the city is, as much as being born in NYC. No other museums come close; MoMA feels like an interloper comparatively. I think part of being born in NYC is growing up with the Met. I went to Little Dalton on Ninety-First St. starting when I was six years old, so the Met was just in my neighborhood. Our high school graduation was at the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. My mother has a ritual of sketching in museums. She was an avid student at the Art Students League. Weekends were sketching the museums of NYC with Mom.”
Phenomenal Museum explores how museums — the word itself comes from the Greek “mouseion,” which translates as “seat of the muses” — have strayed from their original intentions.
The next iteration, taking place September 21–25, is “The Tree, the Serpent, the Equinox,” concentrating on the special exhibit “Tree & Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BCE–400 CE.” Phenomenal Museum tickets are $60 or $90 (the latter comes with a souvenir). When you order online, instead of “Add to Cart” it says, “Add to Consciousness.”
But our Zoom discussion began with the weather. While there were lightning and thunderstorms in New York, Los Angeles was recovering from a hurricane. I mentioned how the historic San Clemente, California, landmark cultural center where my nephew and his fiancée were planning on getting married in November had suffered an awful landslide in April, part of a series of crumbling cliffs that has caused tens of millions of dollars in damage.
“Have you seen From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brothers’ Warning?” Jessica asked. “It’s a message from the mamos of Colombia. They escaped the conquistadors and went up into the mountains; they’re one of the few unconquered tribes that still maintain their ancestral practices. I’ve been working with Ana Maria Velasco, who works with them directly. There’s like twenty thousand of them left. And about thirty years ago, they got the BBC to film their message to us about climate change. It’s an absolute must watch. I tell everyone they have to watch it. They call us younger brother and they’re elder brother.”
“It sounds like if we listened to them, we wouldn’t be in this mess,” I said.
“Correct,” Jessica replied. “They gave very clear instructions about what we have to stop doing, which includes obvious things like extraction of resources. And then they said, stop tomb robbing, which is what all museums are. That’s where I intersect with them in terms of desecrating ancestral remains, which is one of the things that they say causes climate change. And they list the things that it causes, including mudslides and landslides. They literally say in their message that towns falling off the map is one of the things that will happen if you desecrate tombs and extract resources and other things that the mother doesn’t want you to do.”
“After all these years, Greece is still fighting with the British Museum over the Elgin Marbles,” I offered.
“It’s appalling,” Kung responded. “When I look at our progressive movement and all of the progress we’ve made with DEI and other things, I look at how little has actually changed around the return of objects to their homes. And that’s kind of what brought on Phenomenal Museum — just seeing a moai head at the Forest Lawn Museum in Los Angeles that someone bought off of a fisherman, swindled off of a fisherman. And I went to see it in this cemetery in LA and I was just horrified. I was just like, this poor thing. What is it doing here? It’s a vestige of colonization that wants to go home.”
I told Jessica that when Ellen and I were in Turkey in 2000, we were aghast to see how many artifacts were actually replications, since other countries owned the real objects. There were archaeological digs going on all over the place, but few if any were Turkish.
Jessica wasn’t surprised. “It ties in with the weather because, according to the mamos, part of our horrific weather is the desecration of sacred objects, the disturbance of the harmonic matrix of cosmos. And of course colonization is inextricable from deforestation and extraction of resources. The same consciousness that will take that will also mine your land for gold.”
Attendees got their own Phenomenal Museum kits at our visit (kit © 2023 by Jessica Kung; photo by twi-ny/mdr)
About a dozen people joined our Phenomenal Museum group, including a pair of foreign tourists who were passing by and just wanted to know what we were doing. We each received a Phenomenal Museum kit, a small clipboard consisting of maps, symbols, and architectural grids, with plenty of space for us to draw and make notes.
One page featured the ten levels that comprise the Structures of Consciousness (cosmos, environment, resources, aura, body, breath, energy, thoughts, emotions, seed). Another told us to Listen, Transform, Activate, while a third divided a circle into such concepts as “fathomable / unfathomable,” “visible / invisible,” “audible / inaudible,” and “tangible / intangible.”
Jessica asked us to look within ourselves and create a random drawing based on what we were feeling. We went inside the museum and, one by one, each participant tried to find the object that matched what they had drawn. We then took a deep dive into the object, with everyone sharing ideas about the work and Jessica supplying prompts. Several people were shocked when they found their piece, which they had never seen before but were now connected to as if by magic.
“Is it magic?” I asked over Zoom, a question from my wife.
“What is magic?” Jessica immediately answered, then explained that those connections are formed at each Phenomenal Museum event. “Every time, someone asks me, Is it always magical? And I say, That’s the work. Is it magic? That’s such a good question. It’s not a yes or no question, right? It lends to the question What is magic and what is magical? And I think that for me, that gets to the heart of the work, which is sitting with the muse; being in the presence of the muse is beyond magic. She is inspiration. Magic is one of the things we try to describe her as.”
“Who is the muse? The museum?” I inquired.
“It’s individual for each person,” Jessica said. “I would say it’s the creative inspiration that is behind art, that is behind culture, that drives humanity. The museum originally is to frame and house these seats of divine inspiration and creativity. So the work is really about stripping away all the things that keep us from the muse.”
I pointed out that I can’t draw, but Jessica insisted it’s not about that.
“There’s any number of ways to have drawing not be part of the equation at all,” Jessica explained. “You happened to go to the one where we used pencils. The next one we use glue sticks. . . . In our limited two hours, we only have so much time to use whatever tool it is. And I wouldn’t say it doesn’t matter that you can’t draw. I would say that what you’ve mentioned is a hang-up that people have about art in general and what creativity and genius is, which is specifically what Phenomenal Museum is dismantling. The minute you say you can’t, you’ve made it impossible to draw and you’ve missed the point.” In fact, Jessica is no longer using that kit, which developed from a 2013 box called Through Silence Emerges the Voice of the Artist; the program evolves with each gathering.
“For me, drawing is breathing,” she stated. “It’s not something you can or cannot do. And I think that’s an Asian paradigm actually. The connection with Qi and the mark making. That’s a very Asian thing.”
Jessica has trained as a meditation teacher, so breathing and focus play key roles in Phenomenal Museum. She studied formal Buddhist sitting for more than ten years in preparation for a three-year silent retreat.
Jessica, Stéphane, and Hieronymus have some phenomenal fun (photo courtesy Jessica Kung)
“I went to grad school after I completed four hundred and fifty days of silence,” she explained. “Even then, I didn’t miss a day until I became a mom; then postpartum was rough and sleepless. Becoming a mom made me relax the rigorous discipline and began the process of merging practices that were formerly separate. Art, sketching, meditation, museums, etc. — everything all joined together.”
She added, “Art and meditation have become so pretentious and elitist that you have to know so much to even gain entry. Something about combining them in this way makes both processes accessible to a general audience in a way that alone they were inaccessible. The more open your mind, the better. It is really a process of engaging with ‘objects’ that can change how we know art, culture, and even ‘practice.’ My medium is attention, and I work with people’s focus. That’s what I work with. It’s not the graphite. It’s not the paper. It’s not the kit.”
Although I still don’t feel able to draw or meditate, Phenomenal Museum made a big impact on me and how I approach not only art in museums and galleries but also random objects on the streets of the city, which is essentially one huge living, breathing museum. It gave me a different relationship with what I was looking at, where I was, what was around me, a one-on-one connection with items and elements that I have seen and hustled past dozens, hundreds, or thousands of times without giving them a second thought.
“It’s a gateway drug,” Jessica said.
When it was my wife’s turn to try to locate the object that she had drawn, she walked as if she was on a mission until she found it, as if magnetically pulled to it. It was an Etruscan bronze chariot inlaid with ivory, from the second quarter of the sixth century BCE, depicting scenes from the life of Achilles. She was not thinking about this piece specifically when she made her sketch, but it’s a work that she had wanted me to see from a previous visit.
We’ve since gone back to the Met a few times, and the works that we investigated as a group now feel like old friends, especially Portuguese artist Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro’s 1889 Round plate with lobster, in front of which we all posed for a photo. Just hearing the word “lobster” now makes me think of the artwork just as much as the crustacean delicacy.
Phenomenal Dragon takes place at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (photo courtesy Jessica Kung)
Phenomenal Museum is not exclusive to the Met. Jessica also leads Phenomenal Dragon at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which begins at Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals / Zodiac Heads, which was on display at the Pulitzer Fountain in Grand Army Plaza by Central Park in 2011.
“Phenomenal Dragon alludes to the decapitated dragon that’s at the entrance of LACMA, which I think is one of Ai Weiwei’s most potent works, and it relates to colonization and the theft of objects,” Jessica said. “When the British destroyed the Chinese Imperial Garden [in 1860, under the leadership of Lord Elgin, whose father had procured the Elgin Marbles], they decapitated the twelve bronze heads of the Chinese zodiac. And so Ai Weiwei has these heads cut off and they’re gushing water. They used to be fountains. One of the heads is still in Yves Saint Laurent’s collection; his partner [Pierre Bergé] refuses to return it to China. And this is three years ago. We’re not talking about twenty years ago. There’s no question as to the provenance of how this decapitated head ended up in France because it was looted and stolen and murderously obtained.”
Jessica continued, “So when I think about artists and works that have paved the way for Phenomenal Museum, Ai Weiwei is definitely one of them. Everyone I’ve talked to at LACMA has no idea that these heads are about a British French army atrocity against China. And Ai Weiwei is putting it in your face and people still can’t talk about it. So when I do Phenomenal Museum LACMA, I literally just have the participants talk to the heads.”
The stealing and destruction of art is personal to Jessica, who is Asian American.
“I have to send you the LACMA Instagram feed where they talk about it and all they say is Ai Weiwei is talking about the complex dynamics between European and Chinese culture. And I’m like, what is wrong with you? As a Chinese person, the pain of a million priceless artifacts being destroyed is, for me, part of the trauma of being Asian. Because when I look at China right now and all they do is LV [Louis Vuitton] ripoffs, I’m like, it’s because you destroyed their culture systematically. So immigrants like myself are like, what’s Chinese? Well, because you erased it, you’ve systematically blown it apart.”
Jessica Kung has had a close relationship with the Met since she was a child (photo courtesy Jessica Kung)
There will also be a Phenomenal Museum event this December in Rome, where Jessica lived for seven months, talking to the stones, reading and understanding the Latin plaques, and becoming activated by the city.
The conversation soon returns organically to the climate crisis and From the Heart of the World.
“I think, for me, how Phenomenal Museum enters the conversation is their warning,” Jessica says of the mamos. “Half of it is obvious, like stop drilling. But then the other half, which people can’t hear, is our destruction of cultural resources. When we look at colonization, we look at mining and all those things, but we don’t look at the desecration of cultural resources and how, from an indigenous elder’s point of view, that’s tied to the destruction of the planet. You can’t have one without the other.
“The consciousness that enables you to strip-mine is the same consciousness that will let you rob that tomb and take those marbles. You can’t have one without the other. And healing one helps heal the other. So for me, Phenomenal Museum is a response to that call of protecting the planet and waking up people to the process of this deep healing or cultural justice that needs to be seen and heard and felt. And not in a way that’s heavy-handed. If you sit with the objects, they will tell you their story. We don’t have to picket. It’s just taking the time to listen. Well, and then some. . . .”