Eastern Aesthetics and the Reassertion of the Female Principle
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This lecture was held at a conference in the University of Texas
Jan Krikke
China, Japan and the Birth of Modernism:
Eastern Aesthetics and the Reassertion of the Female Principle
This paper is an attempt to place the development of modern art and
technology into a female-principle-vs-male-principle and feminist
perspective. It is based on my own study on the influence of
Chinese-Japanese aesthetics on the Modernist Revolution in the West (between
the 1860s and the 1920s), and on the work of Shulamith Firestone and
Lawrence Taub. I will try to show that while the West developed its "natural
science", the Far East developed what we may call its "natural aesthetic".
Both created the Modernist Revolution, but the refusal of Western scholars,
art historians, critics and theorists to acknowledge the equal role of the
East in the modernist revolution process is another example of the
repression of the female principle.
Art and technology are the reverse sides of the same coin. In "The Dialectic
of Sex", Shulamith Firestone defines creation of culture as a dialectic
between the Aesthetic Mode and the Technological Mode. Firestone associates
the aesthetic response with the female principle: subjective, intuitive,
introverted, wishful, concerned with the subconscious (the id), etc., and
the technological response with the male principle: objective, logical,
extroverted, concerned with the conscious mind (the ego), etc.
Lawrence Taub, in his book "The Spiritual Imperative: Sex, Age, and the Last
Caste," applies similar terms to describe what he calls the sexo-cultural
division of the world as described in his Sex Model. Humanity first
developed yin-like female-principle oriented societies, and reached the next
stage of development through the yang-like, male-principle oriented phase.
The latter would predominate in Western culture, while the East retained
more of its female-principle-like qualities. This led to what Taub calls the
sexo-cultural division of the world into the "yinner East" and the "yanger
West." (Note that the line of Taub's sexo-cultural division of the world
runs roughly between Hinduist India and the Moslem Near East; I focus on the
Far East, the "Confucian" part of Asia, primarily China, Korea and Japan,
the region Taub associates with the worker caste in his Caste Model.)
Firestone's definition of the male-like Technological Mode and the
female-like Aesthetic Mode, together with Taub's division of the world into
the yinner East and the yanger West, provide a framework for a new look at
the history of modern art and science. First of all, history shows that the
West, taking the Technological Mode to its extreme, developed the scientific
revolution. The Far East, by not carrying the empirical method far enough,
failed to develop a natural science. But it retained more of its yinner
qualities, and hence continued to rely more on the Aesthetic Mode. This
affected both its cultural development and its world view. In the words of
sinologist George Rowley, "The Chinese way of looking at life was not
primarily through religion, or philosophy, or science, but through art."
China's "artistic" culture played a key role in the development of the
Modernist Revolution. With Japan as the intermediary, China provided the
Modernist Revolution with fundamental principles in art and architecture. I
will briefly describe the careers of two modernists who played a pivotal
role in this development: Vincent van Gogh and Frank Lloyd Wright.
In the 1850s, several modern-minded artists in France discovered the
Japanese woodblock print. The prints arrived in the West after Japan had
ended her national isolation and joined the family of nations. The woodblock
prints, unpretentious "snapshots" from daily life in pre-modern Japan,
became part of a fad in Europe that came to be known as "Japonism." By the
1860s, nearly all the French artists who developed Impressionism were
collecting Japanese prints. The prints provided France's modern-minded
painters with an alternative to the conventional "pictorial grammar" of
European painting, and would revolutionize European aesthetic sensibilities.
Traditionally, European art was based on optical representation. This
pictorial technique originated in Greece, where the science of optics was
invented. In the early days of the Renaissance, artists-cum-architects
further developed this optical tradition by inventing linear or "scientific"
perspective. This wedding of optics and geometry enabled artists to create
coherent pictorial space. Renaissance artists also perfected the technique
of depicting the effects of light and shadow, or clair-obscure. Up to the
end of the 19th century, linear perspective and clair-obscure governed the
pictorial grammar of the European painting.
The Japanese print (like its Chinese prototype), was based on a very
different pictorial grammar. Optics played no part in the pictorial
tradition of the Far East (nor, for that matter, in any other culture).
Being non-optical, the Japanese woodblock print had no light source, and
hence no shadows. Instead, the prints were composed of flat, unmodulated
colors, delineated by the calligraphic brushstrokes. And rather than using
linear perspective, the Japanese used a projection method invented by
Chinese artists some 2000 years ago. In the West, this projection came to be
known as axonometry (or "parallel perspective").
The first modernist to incorporate elements of the the Japanese pictorial
grammar was Edouard Manet. Shocking the French cultural establishment, Manet
created several paintings in flat, unmodulated colors, paying only
lipservice to the rules of "modeling" objects in clair-obscure, (i.e "The
Fifer"). Critics ridiculed Manet, calling him "a painter of playing cards."
But Manet became the hero of modern-minded artists like Monet, Renoir and
Pissaro, who likewise were inspired by the Japanese aesthetics.
One of the first critics to articulate the Japanese role in the
modernization of European painting was Edmond de Goncourt, who wrote: "When
I said that Japonism was in the process of revolutionizing the vision of the
European people, I meant that Japonism brought to Europe a new sense of
color, a new decorative system, and, if you will, a poetic imagination in
the invention of the objet d'art, which never existed even in the most
perfect medieval or Renaissance pieces."
Of the early modernists, it was Vincent van Gogh who best understood the
deeper implications of Japan's role in the birth of modernism. Van Gogh
arrived in Paris from his native Holland when Impressionism was well into
its second decade. Earlier in his career, Van Gogh had been inspired by
Francois Millet of the Barbizon school, the group of social-minded artists
that first rebelled against the French art establishment in the 1850s. Like
the Barbizon artists, Van Gogh had depicted the harsh living conditions of
peasants and sweatshop workers in Holland, culminating in his famous "Potato
Eaters". Before coming to Paris, Van Gogh believed the Barbizon school
represented the avant-garde in European art.
While not conventional in the "Salon" style of the art establishment, Van
Gogh's "social realism" relied on the conventional pictorial grammar of
European art -- linear perspective and clair-obscure. Once in Paris, he
realized that the avant garde had taken an entirely new, "aesthetic"
dimension. And it was clear to him that the Japanese print had been the
catalyst for this new pictorial style. "You will understand the change in
painting," he wrote to his sister in Holland, "when you think of the
colorful Japanese pictures one sees everywhere."
Van Gogh, perhaps alone among his contemporaries, realized that the Japanese
print had liberated European art from its optical straitjacket. He spent
nearly two years adjusting his painterly technique, discarding his old palet
and learning to use flat, pure (rather than "naturalistic") colors. This
involved the study of new color phenomena like "simultaneous contrast" and
"complimentary contrast". What happens when yellow is juxtaposed with blue?
How is green affected when juxtaposed by red? As if to internalize the
pictorial language of the Japanese artists, obviously masters of color
combinations, Van Gogh copied several Japanese woodblock prints in oil and
canvas.
After two years in Paris he moved to the south of France, where he painted
the images that would make him a legend. The Sunflowers, Bridge at Arles,
and the Harvest at La Crau, all these paintings have something in common
with the Japanese print: they convey a visual [italics] rather than an
optical [italics] effect.
What is the difference between the former and the latter? As we noted
earlier, the effect of clair-obscure is the result of light. In optical art,
shadows are the result of a light source. Van Gogh was the first modernist
who completely eliminated all traces of optical effects from his paintings.
The Sunflowers, for instance, has neither light source nor shadows. As in
the "shadowless" Japanese prints, the light in the Sunflowers is "internal".
The painting is no longer an optical facsimile of optical reality, it has
become a reality in its own right.
The realization that a painting is an artificial, two-dimensional medium,
(and visually more expressive when treated as such), became a hallmark of
modern art. While Van Gogh never articulated his thoughts on the subject, he
no doubt realized that he had played a key role in liberating European art
from its optical straitjacket. But he alluded to his Japanese source of
inspiration in several self-portraits. In one such painting he portrayed
himself as a Buddhist monk, with his head shaven. And shortly after cutting
a part of his earlobe, he painted a self-portrait with the bandaged ear.
Behind him, hanging on the wall, was a Japanese print.
Impressionism would lead to a host of other artistic movements in Europe,
but by the turn of the century, the role of Japanese art in the birth of the
modernist idiom was largely forgotten. However, Japonism was not confined to
Europe. It also reached American shores. In 1892, Chicago was the site of
the World Expo, and Japan was one of the participants. It was here that the
young Frank Lloyd Wright discovered the art and architecture of Japan, and
it would determine his career as an architect. Because he had such a strong
impact on the development of modern architecture, Wright is sometimes called
"the first architect".
Wright was the first architect to develop an architectural style for the
emerging industrial revolution. 19th Century architects, trained in the
classical ("anthropological") canons of European architecture, lacked an
artistic vocabulary for industrially produced building materials like
reinforced concrete and structural steel. It was Wright who pioneered the
first style for these new, rectangular building components. His
revolutionary designs came to be known as the Prairie Houses. Wright
graciously acknowledged his debt to Japan. He told an audience: "If Japanese
prints were deducted from my education, I don't know what direction the
whole might have taken."
Japanese architecture, like its pictorial arts, was based on the Chinese
prototype. Its principle building material was wood, and it was "structural"
in nature. Wood lends itself to structural treatment. (This in contrast to
European architecture, traditionally based on stone, and "sculptural" in
nature.) Whereas European architecture was typically designed from the
outside inward, Japanese architecture was designed from the inside outward.
Wright referred to Japanese architecture as "organic", and likewise designed
his buildings from the inside outward. He started with the floorplan rather
than the facade, an approach that became one of the canons of modern
architecture. (The Prairie Houses were, in fact, a synthesis of various
sources: the "down-sized" Victorian Mansion of Norman Shaw (the Queen Ann
style), the American Shingle Style, and Japanese architecture.
Interestingly, Wright transformed the grand "stair-and-living hall" of the
Victorian mansion into what we call today the "living room.")
Like Van Gogh, Wright believed that Japanese culture held an important
lesson for the West. To comprehend this lesson, he explained, "we must take
a viewpoint unfamiliar to us as a people, and in particular to our artists
-- the purely aesthetic viewpoint." Wright's Prairie House had a powerful
impact on the modernist movement in Europe, especially on the modernist
architects who developed the so-called "international style" in the 1920s.
Wright himself was not impressed by modernist experiments in Europe. He
blamed the European modernists for failing to acknowledge the debt they owed
to Japan. "The lessons of the Japanese print came home to me as it did to
the European painters who developed Cubism and Futurism. It [the Japanese
print] lies intrinsically at the root of all this so-called modernism.
Strangely unnoticed, uncredited." It was strange indeed. Was it the (rather
male-like) concern with "originality" that blinded the European modernists
to the Japanese role in the development of modernism? Europe's
male-dominated cultural elite, or so it seems, could not fathom the idea
that the seemingly effeminate culture of Japan could have developed a higher
level of aesthetic consciousness than Europe.
If Wright was correct in identifying Japan as the source of modernism, he
overlooked the importance of the discovery by the European modernists of
axonometry, that ancient "parallel perspective" invented in ancient China.
Axonometry perfectly suited the rectilinear, spatial nature of his Prairie
House. Axonometry, popularized by the art movement De Stijl, was so crucial
to the development of modern architecture in the 1920s that it was nearly
synonymous with the modern architectural idiom. Today, architects the world
over rely on axonometry to render the architectural structures of our modern
material environment. Moreover, axonometry and the pictorial grammar that
goes with it have come to play an important role in modern visual
communications.
According to Shulamith Firestone, the distinction between the Technological
Mode and the Aesthetic Mode will disappear. She explains that it will lead
to the merger of art and reality, and ultimately to the disappearance of
"culture". (This process, now underway, will include the wedding of
aesthetics and cybernetics.) Lawrence Taub sees the "yinner East" becoming
the world's leading region in the near future, (if only for a relatively
short time), but he arrives at a similar conclusion -- the merger of the
female and male principle into an androgynous future. Art will be life and
life will be art.
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