Creative Adventure and Collaboration with Jay Markel
On May 5th, 2024, I volunteered some of my time to help reassemble “Fudo Myo-o” at Peregrine Honig’s studio at Studio’s Inc. It was a great experience learning Jay’s system and process of how the piece went together while trying to decipher the old faded letters and numbers that originally marked each part of the massive 3D puzzle.
Dr. Mark Allen, patron and dear friend of Jay’s, commissioned the bed in 1988. Jay originally assembled ‘Fudo Myo-o’ on his own in one afternoon. Jay said “My graduate school work was done at Nova Scotia School of Art and Design. It was the most highly regarded MFA program at that time. Conceptual art was popular in 1976-78, when I was there. I favored old school physical work with a … broad conceptual basis. This bed is an example. It has a strong presence, but there’s some, “theoretical” ideas from physics/metaphysics behind it.”
After many years in attic storage at Dr. Allen’s home in St. Joseph, MO, it was coated in dust. The coded system had faded so that it was difficult to decipher and some of the markings were gone all together. Peregrine and her patron Bill Wenzel were up to the adventure; they got a trailer and went to retrieve it. The pieces were brought down 3 flights of stairs, loaded onto a trailer, and relocated to Kansas City. Each piece was lovingly cleaned and dried by many volunteers and arranged by corner pieces, shape and if codes were visible or not. Letters and numbers referred to the levels from the base up to top level; some vertical pieces had multiple letters and numbers as they spanned many levels. It was a bit confusing at first, but Jay knew where they went and how they fit together. It took many assistants and a couple of days to put the piece together, but the task was accomplished and is such a triumph of collaboration.
The name “Fudo Myo-o” is from Japanese Buddhism and means “the unmovable or unshakable one”. He is one of five myo-o, or lords of light, whose threatening appearance guards the law of Buddhism. He is equipped to guide the spiritual traveler past temptation on the path of enlightenment. Jay began making gardens with a monk from a Japanese Zen Buddhist lineage in ‘93, and has continued to design and build gardens in Boulder. “I was very interested in how this would affect sleep, dreams, and health. Fudo was made to be slept under over time. What that’s about, how it may, or may not affect the person under it, is an open question. It was/is an experiment.”