a creative universe
PRAISING SHADOWS
This month Orando Vincent Truter retreats to explore the Japanese aesthetics of shadows as a potential antidote to the 'over exposed' luminescence of our modern condition. To the bat cave we go!
The vaunted brilliance of modern occidental aesthetics has brought many a bright idea to light. We have spent the better part of ‘modern’ civilization illuminating a global trajectory of exchange, aesthetic appropriation and creative cross-pollination across different design disciplines. We have lit the way to a dizzying array of needs and even more mesmerizing and innovative ways in which to satisfy these engineered desires. The future is quite literally getting brighter and a febrile mood has set in at the dawn of a small side effect called global warming. It has become clear that if we continue to stare at our own sunny disposition we most certainly run the risk of going blind. The future is so bright I got to stay out of the sun, wear shades indoors and spend hours trying to shed some light on a malady I cannot explain in any other two words – “over exposure”. But maybe that’s just me?
So I retreat, look for a cooler place and a new definition of cool while I am at it. In this descending attempt to avoid the flash-light flicker of modern life I find myself looking to terrains that could possibly render nimble my previously held notions of beauty and keep me curtain-drawn and slipper wearing till way too late in the day.
Now my gentle admonition is that I am not very well versed on the ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ of occidental aesthetic theory. What I want to offer here is very insubstantial and in serious danger of being another misreading of deliberate Japanese material. Try as I may to excuse myself from being a ‘Japanophile’ I cannot help but feel drawn to the shadowy nuance I see in the Japanese approach to aesthetics as exemplified in a seminal little text by Japanese architect Junchiro Tanizaki entitled in Praise of Shadows.
This short essay from 1933 traces the aesthetic corruption of Japanese ways of life by Western influence. The essay was to a large extent an indictment of the frivolous adoption of foreign ways in Japan and a romantic account of the shadows that permeate the pre-modern Japanese lifestyle: from the darkened mouths of geishas to the unlighted alleys in the traditional Japanese home. Cherishing a place for thought and behavior that steps outside of Western illumination Tanizaki wrote, “I marvel at our comprehension of the secrets of shadows, our sensitive use of shadow and light.”[p14] To Tanizaki, the “brilliance” of modern electric lighting was a metaphor for modernisation engulfing the precious darkness and shadows that lent enigma and beauty to Japanese architecture, lacquerware and pottery. The foreword of the English translation of the book by Charles Moore from the School of Architecture at UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles] casts the potential of the appreciation of shadows Tanizaki offers us as an opportunity for deep reflection on our own modes of inhabitation, suggesting that, “It could change our lives” [p2]. Why not? Over the course of 16 small chapters Tanizaki subverts the hierarchies we have grown so accustomed to.
One of my favorites is Tanizaki’s personal reflection on how “darkness is an indispensable element of the beauty”[p23] of Japanese lacquerware. To Tanizaki the very lacquerware that seems so vulgar sitting on a shelf whilst illuminated with electric lighting, becomes dignified, dense and potent when illuminated by lantern. When rendered in shadows the lacquerware “recedes into darkness, conjuring in their stead an inexpressible aura of depth and mystery, of overtones but partly suggested”. [p24] In this cosmology the disappearance of the lacquerware into the very fiber of the low-lit room makes for a trance-like moment of reverie in which the golden patterns of the object are imprinted, “on the surface of the night itself”. [p24] It may be said that in contrast us here on the ‘fluorescent bulb side’ of matters celebrate the gleaming visible object with little regard for the burnish and patina as it compounds with the darkness and in fact comes to drink the light.
Despite such simplistic observations on the value-add of the shadows to such domestic objects, Tanizaki takes us further into the darkest of spaces within the traditional Japanese home. Here we see a reverie for the alcove leading into the bedroom, a space in which no light is ever allowed to pierce. So too we become privy to the “uncanny silence of these dark places” also found in the innermost rooms of the traditional temples. In my experience one is often too quick to see these simple alcoves and rooms as minimalist inventions of paired-down ‘Japaneseness’, they are in fact filled to the brim. Shadows fill them with a maximal allowance of depth and darkness. These recesses and unlit spaces hold within them a temperament that is not at all concerned with the outward radiance of things, but rather an emphasis on the inner resonance and veiled aspects of our aesthetic consciousness. It is not the expression of the idea, not the willful execution of a sensibility, not acting, but being.
Take for instance the tradition of blackening the teeth practiced by Tanizaki’s mother. She used to blacken her teeth so that the entire mouth may recede, and the white of the teeth remain imperceptible, especially when smiling. The practice of blackening the teeth again reveals a certain relationship to the dark, not only foregrounding the face, but rendering the very interior of the body a part of that shadowy materiality. It is an ideal of beauty no longer practiced since 1890, But Tanizaki conjures it with great reverence as he speaks of his mother and sisters and the “ghostly beauty of those older women” [p45].
So too did these women tint their lips with an iridescent green, shaved their eyebrows and whitened their faces, a beauty which no doubt needs to be appreciated in a good dose of unsteady candle light. By extension the rest of the body was layered in Kimono, swaddled in shadows, revealing very little by way of physique. Again an economy of representation where the faint white face exists without the eroticized mass of the occidental body. Certainly not a curvaceous, fleshy aesthetic, the body of the Japanese woman was reliant on the darkness, were it not for the shadows “there would be no beauty”. [p46] The lack of curves in this silhouette may very well be unappealing by western comparison, but to strip these layers from the body to reveal the physical form “drives away whatever beauty may reside there”. How exquisite this interplay between what is visible and what is not, a world where one’s fashion sensibility is “in effect no more than part of the darkness, the transition between darkness and face.”[p44]
Darkness has a palette, it is not a monochromatic hole to be filled, illuminated or otherwise banished by fluorescence. Tanizaki gives us a fairly exotic, but ultimately expansive look at our own aesthetic sensibilities tracing what he calls the “unforgettable visions of darkness” he has been privy to in his life. In one of his most climactic encounters with darkness Tanizaki describes a visit to the old Sumiya teahouse in Kyoto. Here he encountered the most unique quality of darkness deserving of his lyricism,
“it was a repletion, a pregnancy of tiny particles like fine ashes, each particle luminous as a rainbow. I blinked in spite of myself as though to keep it out of my eye…”[p66]
Our over-exposed, over-lit and rather sun-stroked modern condition can certainly do with a dose of shadowy cool, or at least an addition to the palette. The central tenet of Tanizaki’s offering is clear- there are inverted modes of aesthetic appreciation that has the potential to expand our own. Our benumbed response to all that is illuminated stands in contrast with a world where shadows are not relegated to notions of chaos, incomprehension and ambiguity but rather a place where “darkness causes us no discontent” and we can “resign ourselves to it as inevitable” [p50] Here, in the depths of the shadows that shroud them, the realm of aesthetics can preserve a secret force.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Tanizaki’s exposition of darkness and shadow may just afford us a new liberty from which to cast our critical glances. This dissenting move, this celebration of the darker realm of aesthetic consciousness can quite effectively be mobilized in the face of our fever. For me, in practical terms: do less, veil more, filtering may be more necessary than producing, don’t overemphasize originality, take time to digest experiences, be, with precision. As you have gathered, the reverence for what is cultivated in darkness alludes to something slightly more highbrow than a gross-out fest.This humble little offering makes for the first of three esoteric expositions around the theme of darkness and how veiling more- can possibly lead to less empty pleasures and more authentic aesthetic experiences. Next I hope to stretch in typical torture table fashion our occidental parameters of beauty by having a quick look at the way in which ugliness, or the horrific can become modes of liberation and even seedbeds of beauty, so keep a lookout for more on the aesthetics of ugliness or ‘Shuaku no bi’ as my Japanese colleagues refer to it.
Biblioraphy
Junchiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows (New York: Vintage, 2001),
The vaunted brilliance of modern occidental aesthetics has brought many a bright idea to light. We have spent the better part of ‘modern’ civilization illuminating a global trajectory of exchange, aesthetic appropriation and creative cross-pollination across different design disciplines. We have lit the way to a dizzying array of needs and even more mesmerizing and innovative ways in which to satisfy these engineered desires. The future is quite literally getting brighter and a febrile mood has set in at the dawn of a small side effect called global warming. It has become clear that if we continue to stare at our own sunny disposition we most certainly run the risk of going blind. The future is so bright I got to stay out of the sun, wear shades indoors and spend hours trying to shed some light on a malady I cannot explain in any other two words – “over exposure”. But maybe that’s just me?
So I retreat, look for a cooler place and a new definition of cool while I am at it. In this descending attempt to avoid the flash-light flicker of modern life I find myself looking to terrains that could possibly render nimble my previously held notions of beauty and keep me curtain-drawn and slipper wearing till way too late in the day.
Now my gentle admonition is that I am not very well versed on the ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ of occidental aesthetic theory. What I want to offer here is very insubstantial and in serious danger of being another misreading of deliberate Japanese material. Try as I may to excuse myself from being a ‘Japanophile’ I cannot help but feel drawn to the shadowy nuance I see in the Japanese approach to aesthetics as exemplified in a seminal little text by Japanese architect Junchiro Tanizaki entitled in Praise of Shadows.
This short essay from 1933 traces the aesthetic corruption of Japanese ways of life by Western influence. The essay was to a large extent an indictment of the frivolous adoption of foreign ways in Japan and a romantic account of the shadows that permeate the pre-modern Japanese lifestyle: from the darkened mouths of geishas to the unlighted alleys in the traditional Japanese home. Cherishing a place for thought and behavior that steps outside of Western illumination Tanizaki wrote, “I marvel at our comprehension of the secrets of shadows, our sensitive use of shadow and light.”[p14] To Tanizaki, the “brilliance” of modern electric lighting was a metaphor for modernisation engulfing the precious darkness and shadows that lent enigma and beauty to Japanese architecture, lacquerware and pottery. The foreword of the English translation of the book by Charles Moore from the School of Architecture at UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles] casts the potential of the appreciation of shadows Tanizaki offers us as an opportunity for deep reflection on our own modes of inhabitation, suggesting that, “It could change our lives” [p2]. Why not? Over the course of 16 small chapters Tanizaki subverts the hierarchies we have grown so accustomed to.
One of my favorites is Tanizaki’s personal reflection on how “darkness is an indispensable element of the beauty”[p23] of Japanese lacquerware. To Tanizaki the very lacquerware that seems so vulgar sitting on a shelf whilst illuminated with electric lighting, becomes dignified, dense and potent when illuminated by lantern. When rendered in shadows the lacquerware “recedes into darkness, conjuring in their stead an inexpressible aura of depth and mystery, of overtones but partly suggested”. [p24] In this cosmology the disappearance of the lacquerware into the very fiber of the low-lit room makes for a trance-like moment of reverie in which the golden patterns of the object are imprinted, “on the surface of the night itself”. [p24] It may be said that in contrast us here on the ‘fluorescent bulb side’ of matters celebrate the gleaming visible object with little regard for the burnish and patina as it compounds with the darkness and in fact comes to drink the light.
Despite such simplistic observations on the value-add of the shadows to such domestic objects, Tanizaki takes us further into the darkest of spaces within the traditional Japanese home. Here we see a reverie for the alcove leading into the bedroom, a space in which no light is ever allowed to pierce. So too we become privy to the “uncanny silence of these dark places” also found in the innermost rooms of the traditional temples. In my experience one is often too quick to see these simple alcoves and rooms as minimalist inventions of paired-down ‘Japaneseness’, they are in fact filled to the brim. Shadows fill them with a maximal allowance of depth and darkness. These recesses and unlit spaces hold within them a temperament that is not at all concerned with the outward radiance of things, but rather an emphasis on the inner resonance and veiled aspects of our aesthetic consciousness. It is not the expression of the idea, not the willful execution of a sensibility, not acting, but being.
Take for instance the tradition of blackening the teeth practiced by Tanizaki’s mother. She used to blacken her teeth so that the entire mouth may recede, and the white of the teeth remain imperceptible, especially when smiling. The practice of blackening the teeth again reveals a certain relationship to the dark, not only foregrounding the face, but rendering the very interior of the body a part of that shadowy materiality. It is an ideal of beauty no longer practiced since 1890, But Tanizaki conjures it with great reverence as he speaks of his mother and sisters and the “ghostly beauty of those older women” [p45].
So too did these women tint their lips with an iridescent green, shaved their eyebrows and whitened their faces, a beauty which no doubt needs to be appreciated in a good dose of unsteady candle light. By extension the rest of the body was layered in Kimono, swaddled in shadows, revealing very little by way of physique. Again an economy of representation where the faint white face exists without the eroticized mass of the occidental body. Certainly not a curvaceous, fleshy aesthetic, the body of the Japanese woman was reliant on the darkness, were it not for the shadows “there would be no beauty”. [p46] The lack of curves in this silhouette may very well be unappealing by western comparison, but to strip these layers from the body to reveal the physical form “drives away whatever beauty may reside there”. How exquisite this interplay between what is visible and what is not, a world where one’s fashion sensibility is “in effect no more than part of the darkness, the transition between darkness and face.”[p44]
Darkness has a palette, it is not a monochromatic hole to be filled, illuminated or otherwise banished by fluorescence. Tanizaki gives us a fairly exotic, but ultimately expansive look at our own aesthetic sensibilities tracing what he calls the “unforgettable visions of darkness” he has been privy to in his life. In one of his most climactic encounters with darkness Tanizaki describes a visit to the old Sumiya teahouse in Kyoto. Here he encountered the most unique quality of darkness deserving of his lyricism,
“it was a repletion, a pregnancy of tiny particles like fine ashes, each particle luminous as a rainbow. I blinked in spite of myself as though to keep it out of my eye…”[p66]
Our over-exposed, over-lit and rather sun-stroked modern condition can certainly do with a dose of shadowy cool, or at least an addition to the palette. The central tenet of Tanizaki’s offering is clear- there are inverted modes of aesthetic appreciation that has the potential to expand our own. Our benumbed response to all that is illuminated stands in contrast with a world where shadows are not relegated to notions of chaos, incomprehension and ambiguity but rather a place where “darkness causes us no discontent” and we can “resign ourselves to it as inevitable” [p50] Here, in the depths of the shadows that shroud them, the realm of aesthetics can preserve a secret force.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Tanizaki’s exposition of darkness and shadow may just afford us a new liberty from which to cast our critical glances. This dissenting move, this celebration of the darker realm of aesthetic consciousness can quite effectively be mobilized in the face of our fever. For me, in practical terms: do less, veil more, filtering may be more necessary than producing, don’t overemphasize originality, take time to digest experiences, be, with precision. As you have gathered, the reverence for what is cultivated in darkness alludes to something slightly more highbrow than a gross-out fest.This humble little offering makes for the first of three esoteric expositions around the theme of darkness and how veiling more- can possibly lead to less empty pleasures and more authentic aesthetic experiences. Next I hope to stretch in typical torture table fashion our occidental parameters of beauty by having a quick look at the way in which ugliness, or the horrific can become modes of liberation and even seedbeds of beauty, so keep a lookout for more on the aesthetics of ugliness or ‘Shuaku no bi’ as my Japanese colleagues refer to it.
Biblioraphy
Junchiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows (New York: Vintage, 2001),
Add a Comment
© 2010 Created by Editor-in-Chief
You need to be a member of pythagoras-tv to add comments!
Join pythagoras-tv