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Patterns of Inattention: Taxonomic & Lexical Forces in Japanese Art History
Organizer: Miriam Wattles, University of California, Santa Barbara
Chair and Discussant: Allen Hockley, Dartmouth College
Do conventional artistic divisions thrust us into dreary default? That is, do categories such as school, genre, and medium prevent thought? Artistic expertise includes the ability to classify in predictable ways, yet recognition and expectations of specific groupings are both historically fluid and situationally contingent. Objects are never categorically pure and terms are never entirely definable. Precisely because they obscure ideological binaries, since they stand in for systems of taste and value, and for all of the ways they disguise incommensurability in translation, families of like "kind" are vague in shape and resistant to probing analyses. Going beyond etymology, our papers seek new historically based interpretations of various art classifications that emerged during the early modern and modern eras. Clark considers the construction of the school "Maruyama-Shijô" as perceived through shifts in nomenclature. Wattles argues how the humorous genre "giga" went from a performative mode to a commodity vis-å-vis print culture. Winther-Tamaki theorizes on the medium of "Yôga" as a "contact zone" of intercultural mediation. Levine explores situationally diverse claims of "authenticity" within the term "Zen Art." After the discussant introduces some key issues (10 min.), presenters will summarize the central points of their papers (10 min. each), which will have been announced and made available on the JAHF website beforehand. The discussant will then open the second hour to general discussion, for which six colleagues (graduate student to senior level; intra- and inter-field) will have been invited to prepare responses (4 mins. each).
What was the Shijô school called from 1811-1859, and what does this tell us?
Timothy T. Clark, Dept. of Asia, British Museum, United Kingdom
The notion of a Maruyama-Shijô school, describing a linked lineage between painters Maruyama Ôkyo (1733-95) and Matsumura Gekkei (Go Shun, 1752-1811), coalesced about 1910-15. The idea of a Maruyama school that centered on successive generations of the Maruyama family existed more or less continuously since Ôkyo’s death. What about the Shijô “school”? The first reference to a “Shijô style” was apparently in 1859. So how were the followers of Go Shun described in the half-century following Go Shun's death in 1811? The Kyoto painting world at this time was dominated by the studios (or, “academies,” juku) of Go Shun's two main pupils: the Sankadô of Matsumura Keibun (1779-1843, Go Shun's younger half-brother) and the Joshinsha of Okamoto Toyohiko (1773-1845). Modern Japanese publications tend to visualize painting lineages as a “family tree”—artists neatly linked by single lines representing master-pupil relationships. These neat family trees obscure a complex reality. A crucial aspect of Keibun's and Toyohiko's studios is that rather than being dominated by family lineage, they were open to talented all-comers. What we see here is a family-based system being surplanted by a talent-based system—perhaps the beginnings of the painting societies that have dominated the art scene in Japan ever since. We will probably continue to use “Maruyama-Shijô school,” a name used for almost a century now that seems to have stuck. But unpicking its origins gives important new perspectives on how the Kyoto art world was constituted in the early 1800s, and how it has subsequently evolved.
The Coining of the Comic Genre “Giga” within Edo Print Culture
Miriam Wattles, University of California, Santa Barbara
My paper traces “giga” from its adverbial use as a signature to paintings (“playfully painted”)—designating a mode of performance—to its nominal use as a category in the text of books (“playful picture”)—circumscribing a kind of visual commodity. I argue “giga” became a genre only as it was reproduced and circulated in print. Treatises debating genre within Japanese art are absent during the Edo period, but from the titles, chapter titles, and brief discussions in prefaces to "gafu" (art albums) and other visual compendiums, a lexicon emerges. The morphological tracking of “giga” from Hanabusa Itchô’s late seventeenth century heterodox paintings to Suzuki Rinshô’s art album "[Giga bassui] Itchô gafu" (1770), to the preface of Santô Kyôden’s parodic illustrated dictionary "Kimyô zui" (1804), and, finally, to the titles, signatures, and critiques of Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s 1830s-40s humorous prints reveal the evolution of a low, comic genre. Following Tynyanov, Bakhtin, Colie, and Derrida, I view genre categories as the attempt for a systematic, fixed orthodoxy where there is actually fluid historical dynamism. Further, I view commodification as a decisive historical shift that necessitated names for categories, if only for the fashionable moment. The lack of fixity in the “giga” term only reflects the velocity of the market. Competing synonyms, namely “kyôga” (“crazy pictures”), reveal one facet of this dynamism. Similarly, the narrowing of the usage of “giga” during the Meiji era shows how particularly amorphous this comic genre was on encountering a socio-politically induced paradigm shift.
Theorizing Yôga, the “Western painting” of Japan
Bert Winther-Tamaki, University of California, Irvine
The term “Yôga,” literally “Western painting,” designates what was one of the most prestigious and influential movements in modern Japanese art during the early and middle decades of the twentieth century. Since this movement did indeed develop through ongoing transfers of techniques, iconographies, and styles from Europe, the westernization of the vast discourse and practice of painting that is performed by the term Yôga is by no means a misrepresentation of the art historical phenomena so described. Yet, this westernization of the movement, combined with the subjection of Japanese culture to the regulatory power of the East/West binary, has contributed to the deterritorialization of Yôga, rendering it an aberration on the surface of an assumed bedrock of Japanese artistic identity. This paper pursues three approaches opposing this historiographical tradition, which continues to marginalize Yôga from histories of modern art and Japanese art. First, the Yôga movement is situated in a genealogy of Japanese engagements with various permutations of European painting of greater historical depth than such icons of Japanese aesthetic identity as ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Second, the very presumption of Yôga’s foreignness is appreciated for its provocation of an extraordinary range of strategies for inventing Japanese sensibility and content within Yôga. Third, Yôga is seen as having served modern Japanese society as an intercultural medium, providing a "contact zone" between Japanese subjectivities and a global range of cultural others much broader than the Euroamerican tradition typically referenced by the term, “the West” (Seiyô).
What a Long, Strange Journey: “Zen Art” in the Modern Imagination
Gregory P. Levine, University of California, Berkeley
In 1921, Arthur Waley began a lecture titled “Zen Buddhism and its Relation to Art” with a warning: Zen was an extra-ordinary sort of Buddhism but its impact upon the arts obscure. In the decades since, countless books and articles have discussed Zen and the arts. Although many are leavened with what Marilyn Ivy calls “epistemological snags” and “historical confusions,” they form a hefty corpus of cultural interpretation. And while “Zen Art” may not be as familiar as Da Vinci, Warhol, or Hokusai, it has circulated in the modern/late modern world as a cherished “keyword” and has established itself in art circles, pop culture, publishing, retail, and scholarship. In this paper, I’m not interested in getting a fix on Zen’s influence upon the arts or debunking a tired cliché. As a partisan of a historiographical sort and outsider to Zen practice, I take as a given that objects, following Nicolas Thomas, “are not only what they were made to be but what they become.” I am curious about how we think about “Zen Art,” especially in the West and its different sorts of “authenticity” (visual and otherwise). I reconsider “Zen Art” not as the closed circuit of gesture, minimalism, Emptiness, and spiritual/cultural essence it has become but as a live wire. I am also interested in why the term, like others related to Japan, “stops us thinking,” as Maki Morinaga might say. Put differently, I map several routes of inquiry into “Zen Art” and pause at certain points of arrival.