Roots, attachments. The quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding.The things passed on from one generation to another, lovingly, with care; human chains, the rituals and gestures that bind, more than words can say, a common inheritance, even for those without title. The loops of time seemingly endless, but the shape of hands remarkably the same, revealing hidden affinities of the soul.
The door was open and the house was dark.
~~~
You're reading stuff you never thought you'd even pick up: JCO's memoirs; De Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes; Cheever's Journals. There you sit, quite clinical with your blunted lead pencil, trying to dissect someone's life, distill the parts you like into a choice phrase here or there. De Waal works, somehow. Leads you to Primo Levi and the Wrench. If the Periodic Table is anything to go by then I must head down to Judd or Skoob tomorrow.
~~~
What is art? Bizarre to think that the National had a whole stack of icons lying in its basement, as if to say: not quite art, or not quite western enough. Lacks the drama and the psychological dimension that one usually associates with art. But calligraphy too has suffered the same fate: respectable, one dare says, but a minor art nevertheless. And what of miniatures-which bore you to death? Too small in scale to be significant, to suggest the vagaries of human emotion, or the intellect struggling with the will? Or Kenneth Clark on the Polynesians: a beautiful idyll, but there's no Rembrandt. Art should suggest the universal but not, perhaps, something that is so unchanging. And the other half has to be steeped in contingency...
'This idea of the miniature was often held as the reason that Japanese art seemed to lack ambition. They were brilliant at the laborious fashioning of rapid feeling, but fell down when it came to the grander feelings of tragedy and awe.'
citations: Iris M., Seamus Heaney, Edmund De Waal.
p.s. Hmm...makes me wonder about the stylized forms of erotica as well (Shunga) versus the rather naff ones in the west.
4 comments:
yes, if one wants the "feelings of tragedy and awe", one hast to read Shakespear and Dostojewski, and not japanese authors. but isn't there something more profound and after all more human in their restraint and vagueness? more refined, too.
you don't like miniatures?
I dunno, roxana..don't like the word "more". Who can say? restraint and vagueness are probably properties of all art and so it's only a question of balance, emphasis, no?
but i do agree with you: it was what the second part of the post was trying to question: can we only see the profound, the beautiful in a few forms, and not in others? for example, the geometrical patterns in Islamic art may offer a kind of tranquillity but for some it might not be direct enough, only creating an atmosphere, as it were. the importance of the void seems almost inescapable in many islamic forms.
No, don't like miniatures at all. Just as i don't like persian carpets. my favourite are ones that 'caucasians', mainly because they seem , to me at least, to symbolize the middle ages, a meeting of the east and west. But that's pure speculation. Celia knows a lot about islamic patterns (and patterns in general).
but why don't you like miniatures?
but i think that by 'more' here i wasn't trying to speak about something general, or generally valid, just that for some souls, or on particular occasions for the same soul, and perhaps on all occasions for other souls, there is something more profound in that kind of japanese restraint.
and i don't know whether restraint and vagueness are properties of all art, there are art movements which specifically went against these principles, take the expressionism, for ex.
Well, that's a tough one. I think it's partly to do with the ones that I've seen (mughal) are invariably to do with the court. Of course, that in itself cannot be the full answer since courts have, throughout history, sponsored great art. Hmm...so I think it's more to do with the Persian style or delicacy. I'm much more drawn to the 'abstract' or aniconic in Islamic art.
But I don't even find them beautiful. for example, I could stand all day in front of Rembrandt's 'jewish bride' and be mesmerized by it (in fact, last year I was fortunate enough to actually see it). But miniatures leave me cold. When I think of the fakeness of 'the east' I think of miniatures.
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