Place: At this time, the Society does not have a fixed lecture site.
Information: ASJ Office
Before introducing the speaker, our President, Dr. Berendt, made a few announcements. Dr. Kazuo Tamayama was in the audience, ready to sell copies of his book Tales by Japanese Soldiers (see the May Bulletin); the International Research Center for Japanese Studies was holding a lecture at the Asahi Hall in Yurakucho on June 2nd, and fliers were available.
Our speaker was Mr. Brian Falconbridge, FRBS, of Goldsmiths College, University of London, and he had taken as his subject "The Brush of Asia and the Forms of Europe". Mr. Falconbridge began by explaining that he was speaking as a European who was a visual artist by vocation, and an academic and teacher by necessity. It might seem strange that a practitioner of art should teach, but artists also had to be theoreticians. They had to theorize their own practice, in order to be able to differentiate their work from that of others; this meant that they had to have an awareness of the work of others in order to form their own point of view. Constructing one's own point of view was a continuous process of establishing an idea and then trying to give it visual form, and then working from this visual form to establishing an idea, and thereafter constantly repeating this process. An artist must look into the past as well as the future, trying to find a creative process that was original and yet not alien or unintelligible. In this sense it could be said that honzetsu or honsetsu -- the allusive variation on an earlier work -- was an apt description of any work of art; he did not know of any work of art that did not refer to at least two others.
In order to understand one's own culture, it helped to look at the culture of others. He had chosen the deliberately ambiguous phrase "the brush of Asia" for the title of his talk because the word "brush" had many meanings. First, as well as being an instrument for the application of paint or ink, a brush could also be an implement for sweeping; aspects of Asian culture might sweep away dusty ideas. Then a brush could also be used to polish, and reveal innate qualities. Finally the word might refer to a sharp encounter, introducing a note of tension, or a milder encounter which might have a lasting beneficial effect. His choice of title implied an inevitable separateness between cultures, and he proposed to draw attention to the ways in which versions of Asian culture could be glimpsed in Western art practice. In doing so he would not cover ground that had already been well covered but would limit himself to a small number of Western artists who had provided him with inspiration and had influenced his own practice. By re-seeing their work through a filter of Japanese sensibility he had been able to redirect his practice with greater confidence and purpose.
As an artist, he could be called a cross-cultural scavenger. In his work he had been influenced not only by many artists he had encountered directly, but also by artists of other times and other cultures. His own encounter with Japanese thought and culture was merely that of a tourist, an enthusiast who admired aesthetic qualities that had found particular resonance in Japan. And it was the poet Matsuo Basho who had opened the door for him to these qualities. Firstly there was wabi, the sense of beauty to be found in modesty and simplicity, and sabi, the beauty found in natural images. (He had asked a Japanese student of his what he felt were the quintessential Japanese qualities, and he said that they were wabi-sabi -- but he could not define them! It was indeed difficult to say what they consisted in.) Next came aware, the regret for the transience of things, yuugen, a mysterious profundity, shiori, a tender sensitivity towards delicate objects, and karumi, a lightness of touch. Finally there was kougo kizoku, "awakening to the high, returning to the low". He had allowed all these qualities to brush against his own developing ideas, to enable them to become, not more Japanese, but more themselves. In his own practice he was drawn to the reserved rather than the expressive, the modest rather than the extravagant. These qualities that he had described, although quintessentially Japanese, yet found a partial resonance in Western sensibility (there was perhaps a little wabi-sabi in the British), and were not outmoded but were still capable of offering direction. He thus proposed to explore these two points of cultural comparison, with reference to a range of artifacts, including some of his own.
Mr. Falconbridge now began to show slides, beginning with the observation that an artist approaching the work of others, especially that of sculptors, found it difficult not to imagine the processes involved in its production. He recalled the words of a former teacher of his, the British sculptor Reg Butler, spoken when showing slides of the so-called Venus carvings of around 30,000 to 10,000 B.C., small pocket-sized objects. Butler had commented that he felt he could have sat down with the men who made them and had a conversation about sculpture. Mr. Falconbridge then showed works by Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti and Kurt Schwitters which had been a major source of influence on him and others. They could all be linked to an aspect of Japanese sensibility in that they were small-scale, unheroic, spiritually charged and deceptively simple. He began with early works by Picasso containing a kind of "wabi", of which the artist had later said that he and others like him had simply put their enthusiasm into the work, and that had been enough for them. These were all small sculptures made of everyday materials -- wood, paper and so on -- standing 16 to 25 cm. high.
The works by Giacometti contained a kind of "sabi". Some of them were busts only a centimetre or so in height and were dwarfed by their bases. (He had submitted one when asked to produce a sculpture for an exhibition in Zurich, but the architects had protested at its small size and it had been replaced by a larger work. There is also an apocryphal story of a friend of Giacometti's asking if he could go to his studio and see his work; Giacometti replied that that was unnecessary, and produced examples from a small box he had with him. Mr. Falconbridge observed that with every retelling of the story, the box got smaller!) The third artist, Schwitters, was the true inventor of collage and his works could be seen as examples of "shiori" "karumi" and "kougo kizoku". He was born in Hanover in 1887 and died in England in 1948, and was ground-breaking in his use of ephemera and detritus, working with whatever came to hand -- or to foot. In his elevating of the lowly and humble, he produced works which were intense in their colour, exquisite in their detail, delicate in their construction, and often witty in their content.
This strand of the "ordinary made extra-ordinary" within European art may be seen in the tradition of the "still life", which may be traced back to classical antiquity. Caravaggio's "The Supper at Emmaus" has a still-life foreground of all the objects on the table which reach out and embrace the spectator within the scene. Velasquez's "Christ in the House of Martha and Mary" had a similar foreground, and these works, together with others that were exclusively on the theme of the still life, seemed to Mr. Falconbridge to follow the advice of St.Theresa of Avila to "contemplate ordinary objects". One of those still lifes, by Francisco Zurbaran, seemed sacramental, with its own profound simplicity, a kind of wabi-sabi. Mr. Falconbridge then showed two photographs of non-art subjects that yet seemed to capture enduring visual themes. The first was of a man and woman in the 1920s or 1930s wrapping files (rasps) but conveying a "sacramental" image involving mundane objects. The second was of a wooden spoon, broken into four pieces which were arranged in a straight line. This had been found in a condemned man's cell and was possibly the last thing he did before his execution; a minute object that achieved great presence with minimal material.
Mr. Falconbridge then spoke specifically of the work of Basho, whose influence he had referred to earlier, notably Yuasa-sensei's translation of Oku no Hosomichi. These poems epitomized for him reserve yet passion, understatement yet completeness. He was attracted not only to the use of small objects, but also to the dramatic range of scale of objects within each individual haiku. He picked four poems which used increasingly diminutive objects and asked Professor Masako Hiraga of Rikkyo University to stand up and read the Japanese originals. The first was of a clam on a beach, the second of a cricket under a helmet, the third of the mosquitoes in his hut, and the last of a speck of dust not to be found on white chrysanthemums. In each case, the small object made the larger one in the poem seem monumental by comparison.
Mr. Falconbridge finally came to his own work, in which he said he had been influenced by elements within the European tradition which had shown him that passion and austerity were not incompatible, and by talks with other artists at home and in Japan. He had come to gain an enthusiasm for the reduced statement, restrained in emotion and economical in scale, and yet capable of referring to the monumental; a kind of hako-niwa, "a garden in a box" in which the world could be seen in miniature and we could imagine ourselves being made miniature within it. The works he showed, made over a period of 25 years, were all on a tiny scale, some constructed of assembled detritus, others of bronze.
In conclusion Mr. Falconbridge said he had tried to show the value of cultural history and the possibility that ideas and influences could flow over great distances. In his own case, his instinctive attachment to the contemplative and interior, as expressed through the small scale, had found encouragement in the Japanese sense of understatement and economy of scale.
Only a short time was left for questions, and the meeting closed with a vote of thanks proposed by Mrs. Shigeko Tanaka, who took the opportunity to speak of the artistic qualities displayed in the main building of Seisen University, which had been designed by Josiah Conder.
Adapted from "The Asiatic Society of Japan Bulletin No. 6", June 2001, compiled by Prof. Hugh E. Wilkinson and Mrs. Doreen Simmons.
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