Monday, April 16, 2007
To talk about Japanese art in from the perspective of a traditional Western education, it is imperative to take the necessary precautions to avoid as much misappropriation as possible. Likewise, it is equally as important to the take similar necessary steps before talking about Western culture from the perspective of a traditional Japanese education.
In art, the East and West offer very distinct approaches, and yet, over a period of hundreds of years, the distinction has become a bit blurred. You have art that resembles abstract expressionism, ink drawings that resemble impressionist sketches, and even performance art that offers a spectacle not so short of our very own happenings in the late 1950s through the 1960s and 70s. History has its way of overlapping and even blending cultures that is especially evident through the advent of modern art.
Two specific examples of Japanese movements that formed out of the modern age were Gu-Tai, and Mono-ha artists. Both with similar beliefs at root, but very different results through their art practices.
The term Gu-Tai itself is reference to the body as a tool which in itself as an object is a notion take from modernist aesthetics. Although, through this name, the body as a tool I simply a intermediary between a relationship of material and the immaterial self, or rather, selfhood (being more globally and socially committed). Gu is more oriented towards the spirit of material, and Tai as the artists body. Their dialectical relationship acts as an entry point into understanding the truth of the concrete world. Although Gu-Tai is fundamentally Eastern in origin, it has its traces of influence from the Western spirit of interest in materiality and the tangible.
One of the major thrusts of Gu-Tai is to create something that is absolutely new. This act of creation is not so much for the product to be revealed (as in the west) as much as it is about the allowing of one’s self to experience the new as a liberating force between material and the body. This may sound similar to Western modernist movements, however there is a distinction to be made.
It is very easy to misinterpret Gu-Tai like abstract expressionism, (this sort of going back to the material), but in a sense, it is something very different. It is a global connection, a sort of priest-like attitude of the artist involved with this sort of work, whereas the abstract expressionist is moving towards the individual in the processes of going back the material, and understanding the self. There is a fundamental disconnect between humans with material and also with human relationships and the relationships to the natural world. Gu-Tai is interested in regaining that lost relationship with the material.
Unlike Pollock, or Rothko however, Gu-Tai functions as more of the priest or priestess to the material world who has lost that relationship with the material. Artists in the west are more accustom to be made as objects of veneration themselves where their work is a sort of product of the celebrity. They do not teach as much as they simply spearhead a movement towards a new form of creating which cycles back into the materiality of the Western art world.
One of the forerunners of the movement would be Jiro Yoshihara. As a painter he was known for his circle paintings that he did during the mid 60s. With a reference to Zen Buddhism, these paintings would embody both infinite and potentiality while simultaneously defining the concrete and complete nature of material. These paintings are a great illustration of the philosophy of Gu-Tia. It as an object can be looked upon, but never quite definitive. Seemingly concrete in nature, its function is a marrying of material with the viewer as body. In pointing towards the infinite, the viewer is confronted with his relationship towards the object, but the object is only a means to the experience of liberation. The paintings act as stepping stones to a transcendent experience with the material.
Looking at Gu-Tai and how they have trickled in and out of the modernist movement, it is also fruitful to look at the Mono-ha movement that was going on around the same time.
Mono-ha which roughly translates as “thing school” is seen as an inaccurate label upon what the school of thought was about. The movement was driven by reclamation of Japanese thought and practice, specifically that of Zen Buddhism. They were interested in the natural materials and a balance of kinetic energies. They were focused on the recovery of that lost relationship with participation of material through the activating of a moment in space.
Although their initial intent was opposite that of the modernist movement, it is ironic that the outcome was nearly indistinguishable from what was going on in the west. In the format of the gallery space, these Mono-ha installations would resemble much of what was happening in the New York art scene.
“cut off hang” by Yoshida Katsuro in 1969 was an installation involving a large wooden pillar that is tied to a rock which is holding its weight so to prevent the pillar from falling on top of it. Using natural materials and this sort of kinetic tension to bring the viewer into a third party relationship was a very common gesture throughout modernism. (insert example in the museum with the metal cylinder and metal pole leaning against the wall). Despite Mono-ha’s disdain for the western capitalist mind, the work that came out of the movement was strikingly similar.
The distinguishing element between materiality of Gu-Tai and Mono-ha and Western thought is the function, or spirit of materiality. In the West, material is equated with concrete and identified as a complete autonomous object. To speak of material from an Eastern standpoint, it is a constant interaction with its surroundings. It is physically in constant flux from moment to moment and therefore, to talk of an object as concrete would be to contradict its spirit. This train of thought begins to overlap the western philosophy and aesthetics, but they never quite meet due to their very opposite foundations.
Western modernism has a strict relationship to body as material. Through the enlightenment and consequently the industrial revolution, the age of mechanical reproduction has brought about a Western fascination with the socio-economic repercussions of the object form. How we relate to material and how material relates back can be observed simply by looking at technology and science, if not psychology, philosophy and not to mention, economics. I’m not blaming capitalism as a form that has driven our society to relate to the world in objects, but it is most definitely a symptom. Traces of object forms can be traced back to the history of religion and the venerated statues. However, once the ritualized object form separated itself from religion it turned into a mirror that points back to society. Arguably it points back to society as an object as a whole through its mastering of ideology through the veneration of the human form.
In looking at both Gu-Tai, and Mono-ha in retrospect, they both have their similarities as well as their major distinctions from the modernist movement in the west. Gu-Tai resonates with Shinto and what has been through. The term Zen isn’t was it was before the 1900s through the influences of D.T. Suziki and Nishida Kitaro. And it is the separation from history, tradition and culture that these movements are looking to overcome.
Mono-ha, however succumbs to the very nature in which it sets out to rise above. Mono-ha is claiming that everything is independent and that all is simply in relation to everything else. But they also claim that these ideas are strictly Japanese. In doing so, they disallow the practice to be an interdependent relationship. It is through the distinction of East from west that succumbs to the nature of objectification, which Mono-ha tries so diligently to break down. This is the beginning stages of self-orientalizing. To encapsulate an identity that cannot be encapsulated, they contradict the liberating practice that they historically cling to.
Here, it is important to consider is not just the west’s precautions to talking about eastern art, or the east talking about western art, but also the east and west talking about their own culture through the language, or ideas of their neighbor’s beliefs. This not only perpetuates as sort of ‘self-orientalizing’ but a re-embedded misappropriation by the spectator who is trying to observe such culture from the outside. It is a vicious cycle of misappropriation that calls for a distinction between terms and ideas before even entering into conversations anymore. We have to spend more time defining the terms we use while neglecting the issue at hand. Perhaps this is a drawn out, seemingly arbitrary act, but due to the state of affairs that our world is in, it is utterly imperative that we make these distinctions so that we as well as future generations will not be left in a dust of confusion.
(c) Michael Frederick Langhoff