Southwest Zen Garden & Tequila Bar
The Southwest Zen Garden & Tequila Bar is an experimental art installation and performance by artist John Robert Craft. The installation is a serious but playful exploration of an idea about Japanese Zen practice re-imagined in the Southwestern United States. The artist has had a long interest in Japanese culture and Zen Buddhism. His interest runs along the paths of philosophy and culture rather than a religious inquiry. As a cattleman and cowboy, he has long believed that working ranch cowboys are the American Samurai: cowboys preform taxing physical feats in a way that appears easy. This ease of motion can only happen when long practice allows the subconscious to take over and perform astoundingly complex calculations that enable a perfection of timing to execute impossible seeming physical feats to occur.
As an artist Craft employs the use of repeated forms to create cast iron objects. The making of these forms are done in sessions of meditative, repetitive motion, acts that are at once mindless and mindful. The work is mundane but attention must be present at all times to be aware of the whole, so that the end result is a complete piece of work and appears intentional not happenstance.
Eric Simpson approached Craft to invite him to show his work in Eric’s studio in the CASP artist’s residency gallery in 2017. After a number of discussions between the two, Craft arrived with the concept of creating a southwest flavored Zen Garden where tequila would be served in the artist’s idea of a Japanese Tea Ceremony translated to the geography of the southwestern U.S. and interpreted by a cowboy who has heard of but never participated in a tea ceremony, or ever visited a Zen Garden.
While Craft and Simpson were discussing ideas another project came their way: EXTRACTION a multi-venue multi-artist project started by legendary letterpress book maker, Peter Koch from Montana by way of Berkley California. Koch alarmed by and outraged at the compliancy of the public in the face of environmental degradation, made a call to artists to pick an issue and rise up in unity to shake people into action. Because Craft and Simpson are mutually rooted to the land through their agricultural backgrounds, Simpson cotton farming, Craft cattle ranching, they quickly agreed to work on a project addressing the depletion of the Oglala Aquifer that lies below both of their family’s lands.
The origin of the Japanese Zen Gardens was to emulate water, which was and still is believed to have calming effects on the viewer. The earliest Japanese gardens are believed to date back prior to 800 C.E. By creating a light hearted Zen Garden, Craft will, through talks with visitors raise an awareness of water use and its importance to life on top of the Oglala, and encourage them to write one Haiku poem using the word water. These will be collected and later used as part of another water use related project. Water is constantly on Craft’s mind because the animals he cares for, that provide his livelihood, can go three weeks without food, but only five days without water, so the most important task in his daily work is to ensure that his cattle have water.