Organizer: Cynthea J. Bogel, University of Oregon
Chair: Quitman E. Phillips, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Discussant: Jonathan M. Reynolds, University of Michigan
Teaching and research in the field of Japanese art history require that we consider, among other issues, the history, appearance, meaning, and relative value of objects. We utilize—and perpetuate—certain paradigms in the course of our investigations that define and structure the discipline. Genre boundaries and artistic schools, taxonomies for materials and styles, divisions according to religious and secular content, value judgments and hierarchies, and numerous other such normative categories effectively function as paradigms for the field. Some are engendered by the objects, others are comparatively external to the work. Some are useful to our understanding, some ultimately deleterious. Neither the source nor the motivation for our models and means of inquiry is constant. Nonetheless, this panel attempts to recognize and isolate certain paradigms for the field, probe their origins and sustaining contexts, and critically examine the relative value and expediency of classifications and modes of analysis. Both the paradigm and its affective structure will be examined through studies of specific objects, sites, categories, or phenomena. Panelists’ papers will be made available prior to the conference. The conference panel will comprise summaries of these papers, brief comments from a discussant, and a full hour of moderated discussion between audience members and panelists.
Allen Hockley, Dartmouth College
In our efforts to situate ukiyo-e into its broader social and cultural milieu we tend to privilege the content of a print, taking it as the primary representative of floating world culture. Even our consideration of artists rarely sees them as anything but as mediators between the ukiyo and the images they create—yet another layer of the contextualization process. But if context is so important to current ukiyo-e scholarship, how is it that we have never addressed the consumers of ukiyo-e on anything but the most superficial level? Writing on this subject is purely speculative, and again, based entirely on our studies of iconography. Moreover, it assumes that the primary motivation for consumption was inextricably tied to the images carried by the prints.
This study examines the reasons why the social art historical approach to ukiyo-e has been so limited in its scope. It addresses the fallacies and inadequacies of the content-context paradigm. Using theoretical models, it suggests ways of approaching and understanding consumers and the consumption of ukiyo-e.
Matthew P. McKelway, Columbia University
"Genre" painting, and genres of painting, are recurrent themes in the study of Japanese art history, and yet remain highly problematic and insufficiently defined concepts. Genre painting (J: fuzokuga) as a category itself was invented in the late 19th century with the introduction of western art historical terminology. Devoid of the specific cultural context which gave the European idea of genre meaning, fuzokuga in Japan required the formation of a separate discourse, which generally encompasses the representations of everyday life, landscape, and special events such as religious festivals. Fuzokuga has been assigned a period of efflorescence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries roughly synchronous with the genre painting in northern Europe.
The present paper seeks to deconstruct the paradigm of genre in Japanese art through an examination of a selection of works that have been subsumed in the rubric of fuzokuga. In each case I shall demonstrate the arbitrariness of genre classification by showing connections among seemingly unrelated representations, and by revealing hidden historically specific content beneath the generic surface. Examples for discussion will include panoramic landscape screens and paintings of shrine festivals, both of which couch layers of meaning beneath their seemingly neutral surface representation. By looking at these paintings in light of their often implicit biases, it will be possible to question accepted classification and restore something of their original meaning and function.
Quitman E. Phillips, University of Wisconsin, Madison
The traditional paradigm for the study of art and society is that of "artist and art in historical context." In some applications, introductory essays offer brief descriptions of social classes among other planks in a stable structure of historical knowledge. The works of art at the hearts of the studies remain only tenuously connected, the knowledge structures serving more as viewing platforms than as tools for understanding. Other applications better integrate concepts of class and art through a communicative model, in which art works express or reflect the ideals and values of those who commission and produce them. However, even those studies all too often treat class and status as givens rather than as problems, and as stable rather than dynamic. Discussions of painting in late-fifteenth-century Japan, for example, are dominated by the labels, "monk," "courtier," and "warrior." Instead, I would suggest that we approach the production and consumption of art, not as acts of reflection or expression by such groups, but as vital social practices. Those involved did not simply rest comfortably in identities granted by historical circumstances but endeavored to affirm, defend, modify, expand, or deny them in a dynamic of struggle for social distinction. Even gender, usually taken entirely for granted in studies of Muromachi society, cannot be treated as a simple given, but as an area of contestation.