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Utagawa Kunisada/Toyokuni III (1786-1865) Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan, 1831. |
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Peter Pan and Wendy, illustrated by Marjorie Torrey |
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Shigeharu, 1830 - (note the ghostly flames from the skull). |
In early examples of print in Japan, pictures were primarily illustrations of ideas… the act of drawing was inclined to represent ideas - ideas found in books and stories. There was no tradition amongst print artists of representing the uniqueness of the visible world and perhaps the conventions of rendering foundered at the first attempt. The gradual development of woodblock printing embraced lavish scenes of elegant females on boats and in nature, and whilst extraordinary efforts were made by artists such as Shuncho and Eishi to render trees, interiors, buildings, lakes and flowers with extreme delicacy, none of their attempts contained shadows or light and shade as used habitually in western conventions.
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Yoshikazu, 1861 - Teahouse Interior, without shadows. |
So what were these exceptionally skilled Japanese draftsmen thinking when not rendering light and shade in their woodblock art? One might say that rendering shadows in woodblocks is very difficult but a glance at the woodblock prints of German Expressionist artists like Max Beckmann shows this not to be the case.
In nineteenth century Japanese woodblocks I think it is probably necessary to get behind the image and try to deconstruct what exactly is being represented… these complex images will prove much more subtle than they first appear. Looking at the print above by Kunisada from 1831, we can see a night scene, a large crescent moon - definitely enough light to see by, and cast a shadow - and three protagonists. Of course, a glance at the title tells us this is not the case - all is not as it seems. The print is a depiction of three actors; (left to right) Onoe Kikugoro IV, Bando Mitzugoro and Ichikawa Danzo on the stage in the kabuki drama, Tôkaidô Yotsuya Kaidan (The Ghost Story of Yotsuya). The drama is a tale of murder, betrayal and revenge. It has some roots in the events of two real life murders but its popularity was due to the inclusion of a ghost story that touched the lives of real townsfolk… a transition from fantasy similar to movies like Halloween in the 1970’s which took the supernatural and firmly embedded the potential of realism (threat) in the minds of a wider audience. The essentials of the plot concern a townsman who murders and disfigures his loving wife through greed and is later haunted by her ghost.
Already we have competing layers of meaning and ambiguities in representation building across the print. We are as viewers complicit in the belief that the moon shown here is a representation of the the moon and yet we know that it is not, (it is a painted theatre flat). We believe that we are looking at the murderers and their servants… at the drawn swords and the start of a fight and yet we know that we are not, (these are actors on a stage). Kunisada is clear (in his portrayal of the shallow space) that we are looking at the apron of a stage with painted sets parallel to the auditorium, and yet as viewers we are persuaded that this is an arena of the mind… of the imagination. We ‘know’ that we are looking at a picture of a play that itself depicts a story, that is itself a concoction of several sources… ideas of ideas if you like. This space that we see and the players upon it become metaphors for something much greater - shared knowledge.
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Hirosada, 1840's. Two actors. "The space that we see and the players upon it become metaphors..." |
Not only is all the work one work, but as in dreams, all the things in the works are one, in the sense that they each are ciphers of the self. The floor one walks upon, the carpets, the grass in the fields, the roads one traverses, all these are metaphors for aspects of the psyche….
…For within the sacred quadrangle of the painting or video or photograph, or indeed gallery space; within this temenos, all the objects, images, actions and materials are paradigmatic of the moral self of the maker, his or her actual self, or ideal self, and with it is carried a proposal for the constituency of all individuals within society, and beyond that the nature of ideal society itself. ("The Lens Within The Heart", from Bacon and the Mind, The Estate of Francis Bacon Publishing supported by Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation Monaco, in association with Thames & Hudson.)
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Francis Bacon Triptych. 1976 |
This description also applies I think to the typical arrangement and psychological space of a kabuki print such as this one. I would extend that to include pretty well all genres of Japanese woodblock print of the nineteenth century. Bucklow’s key identification of the ground as a paradigm of the moral self… of the maker and of society… the ideal society, accords with the notion that the representation here is in itself ‘ideal’.
The language of the print (and its fellow prints of that century) is metaphoric, paradigmatic; its uses of realism are therefore specific, limited, restricted. The figure of Onoe Kikugoro at left identifies the signs for the actor’s facial features - but only enough for the print buying public to acknowledge. (The art of likeness in print was called Nigao, the artist Toyokuni I expanded the reach of Nigao or 'true likeness' in 1817 and even wrote an instruction manual about how to achieve it titled, Quick Instruction in the Drawing of Actor Likenesses. This was a sophisticated code that conveyed the features of individual actors without breaking the convention of the kabuki face with its heavy make up and stylised expression. He stresses the importance of the nose, the eye, the mouth and the eyebrow. Portraits were almost always shown in three-quarter view rather than in profile or straight on, the artist was to draw the nose first, then the mouth, the brows, the eyes and finally the outline of the face itself.)
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Kunisada, Actor as Otokodate, 1844 |
Therefore, to echo Bucklow’s commentary on Bacon, these are all metaphors for the psyche - a Jungian might extend that to include the collective unconscious. Jung in fact expands this metaphor himself in Psychology and Alchemy (1968) describing the temenos as a ‘square-space’ that might - especially in alchemy - resemble a rose garden with fountain, an arena whereby an encounter with aspects of the unconscious might be had… in this way one might as Jung describes it, ‘meet one’s own shadow’, personifications of the self, characters (actors) of one’s own, imaginative theatre.
This theatre as a metaphor for the imaginative psyche was expounded by the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott who described the ‘insult’ of reality upon the infant mind. Winnicott elaborates a ‘potential space’ not dissimilar to Jung’s description of the temenos. As a consolation for the loss of omnipotence Winnicott postulates a potential space created out of necessity by the growing infant to which inner reality and external life both contribute. He surmised that the child fills this theoretical arena with symbols, the accumulation of symbols maturing in time to the semblance of a cultural life which would ideally imitate the first life with the mother. Winnicott described this intermediate area as ‘the location of cultural experience’… I suggest that the dream-like temenos of Japanese prints is just such an arena… a dreaming space for a stressed culture, a pooling of common cultural knowledge, expectation and desire.
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Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861) Ichikawa Danjuro VIII as Sukeroku, 1850. |
These metaphors do not need to be rooted and in fact demand the freedom to exist as signs and symbols; emblems on a field, that is the freedom they in fact need… the freedom whereby they are able to adopt meaning.
The prints and the individuals imagined in them, do not want shadows because to adopt them would undermine their importance and their independent existence. When they were conceived, the absence of shadows allowed them to drift like ghosts through the dream lands of the Edo psyche and allows them now to inhabit a new less understood existence that nevertheless is the basis for their continuing, enigmatic importance.
No Shadows, Image as Sign in Ukiyo-e is online at the Toshidama Gallery from the 21st of November 2019.
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Toyohara Kunichika (1835-1900) Onoe Kikugoro V as Taira no Masakado, 1890. |