Japonist Remnants

There's exciting news on the academic front: Lina is presenting at her very first conference. It's just a graduate symposium, but it's being held in the sunny locale of UCLA. I really liked the paper idea that I proposed for the conference, so I'm very excited that is was chosen, but now the problem is that I actually have to write the paper!

The theme of the symposium is "Remnants," which I can only assume was dreamed up during some sort of beach-side drug-induced powwow. It's a typical term for academia in that you thought it referred to something fairly specific, something left over or a surviving remainder, but once you try to define what might be and not be a remnant you realize that the term could encompass literally everything. As the symposium's organizers themselves pointed out, the entire "field of art history can be conceived of as a discourse of the remnant."

So the challenge in submitting an abstract to a symposium about everything is how to make your paper topic sound like it fits the theme without (a) sounding like everyone else's abstract and (b) using the word "remnant" 15 times in one paragraph. I wanted my topic to relate to Japonisme, but I also wanted the opportunity to write about something new, something I hadn't had a chance to discuss yet in my seminar papers. So I returned to some images I had come across last year that depict Japanese women for a western 19th century audience.


Basically, the abstract points out that even though some scholars have argued that Japonisme (the western interest in Japanese arts and society beginning in the mid-19th century) helped objectify Japanese people as having certain essentialist characteristics, visual representations of Japanese people have rarely been analyzed for how they might have contributed to this problem. So my paper argues that images of Japanese people that circulated in the west represented them as remnants, that is, not just as the remains of another far away culture, but also as the remains of a long ago civilization. By constructing Japanese people as remnants of an "old" Japan that was still going on, Japan gets constructed as a place living in the past, as a decidedly non-western, non-modern place.

I'm particularly into this image, which I found more recently, that represents a "Japanese Village" that was set up as a kind of amusement park in London. Newspaper articles from the time suggest that it was incredibly popular, with an average of 3,000 daily visitors, so popular in fact that an eager entrepreneur decided to set up an "Indian Village" along similar lines. Despite the different political relationships England had with India (its preeminent colony) and Japan (merely an economic and military dependent), the cultures of India and Japan were presented to the English public in sometimes similar ways. My favorite example of this is the Great Exhibition in Brussels, in which the English pavilion contained both an Indian village and a Japanese village, the latter graced with a statue of Queen Victoria. You really can't make this stuff up.

Frackelton's Dessert Plates

The spring semester has come and gone, and although I mentioned them in my last entry, somehow I never got around to actually blogging about Susan Frackelton's Dessert Plates. This set of small (about 6" diameter) porcelain plates hand-painted by Susan Frackelton c. 1890 was the subject of my seminar paper for a methods & theories of material culture class. For those who don't know, "material culture" is a catch-all term for physical objects that aren't really considered art but that academics still like to study, for example, dessert plates.

My department (and art historians generally) maintains an annoying division between material culture and visual culture, as though visual culture doesn't take material form and material culture has no visual component. Everything I want to study (e.g. fashion, furniture) could be considered both material and visual culture, because they are often material objects that people use but are also culturally constructed and circulated through predominantly visual media (like magazines).


But that's a tangent for another time! Once again I seem to be trying to get out of writing about Frackelton's Dessert Plates, much as I was all last semester. For whatever reason I just couldn't get excited about these objects or the paper I wrote on them.


Sure they're prime examples of the nineteenth-century china-painting craze, which makes them exemplary of popular yet marginalized "women's" arts. Sure, they incorporate Japanese and other self-consciously artistic motifs, making them part and parcel of my developing ideas on Japonisme and the Aesthetic Movement. They are even rather pretty, and remind me of a prized set of china currently owned by my mother that at least two out of her three daughters have their eye on. But a twenty-page paper? Really?


Somehow, I managed it, and the professor duly praised it, but I can't help feeling like I was just going through the motions. I figure it was good practice for my future career as a museum curator, when presumably I will have to write many a catalog entry for objects that I find neither beautiful nor interesting. But don't let me influence your own opinion of these pieces of material/visual culture. Just ask yourselves, if you had twenty pages to fill, what would you say?

Goldsworthy Redux

Two years ago I had the amazing experience of being an intern at the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, an experience that was partially documented on my previous blog "The Starbucks Experiment" (so named because my day job, literally my 5 am to noon job, was at Starbucks). As readers of that blog know, my main project at NGA was to conduct research on Andy Goldsworthy, a contemporary British land artist who had recently completed a permanent work in the Gallery. However, Goldsworthy is better known for his "ephemeral" works, which usually involve tramping through the landscape and created a sculpture out of leaves or something that will disintegrate in a matter of time. What's interesting about these supposedly ephemeral works is that Goldsworthy always photographs them, as though to create a permanent record, gives the works a title and sells the photographs to the public in gallery-grade prints and mass-market books.

I've found myself thinking about these photo-works again in my visual culture theory class on "Word & Image," and conveniently enough, for our final project we were asked to revise our thinking on something we had worked on previously. This has given me the perfect opportunity to pour over my Goldsworthy research, which is much more voluminous than I remembered. It's basically my mini Arcades Project, about 50 pages of single-spaced typed notes, most of which are block quotes from various sources, organized under often-amusing headings like "how is Goldsworthy's work post-modern?" Even more amusing are my own comments, which reveal disturbingly simple ideas about words & images like "images are silent, words speak." How could a good art historian write such a thing!

So, for my paper I'm analyzing word-image combinations in Goldsworthy's most recent book,
Enclosure. And although they bring up lots of thorny issues that we've raised in class, I find myself coming back to the one word-image issue our class didn't address: titles. I never realized before how titles constitute Art (with a capital A). Example: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party designates an installation piece that is a work of art, as opposed to say, what you had to celebrate your birthday. But other objects that art historians study for their historical and aesthetic significance do not get italicized titles and, by implication, are not Art. Almost all decorative arts fall into this category, so that a set of works I'm writing on for another class are captioned as "Susan Frackelton, Dessert Plates, hand-painted porcelain, c. 1890" and not as "Susan Frackelton, Dessert Plates." What amazes me is the great lengths that art historians have gone to in order to preserve this "artist's name + italicized title = artwork" equation, routinely making up artist's names and titles like "The Master of the Apocalypse" (yes there really is one) or Still Life with Goblet.

Goldsworthy manipulates these conventions to distinguish between documentary and Art photography. Most of the photos that show the construction of his more permanent works are given simple captions. But when the photo is of an ephemeral work, that is, a work which no longer exists outside the photograph, then the image is designated as Art and captioned with an italicized title. I won't argue with the sheer convenience of italicizing titles of artworks, the way a simple change in typeface lets the reader know that the author means Judy Chicago's installation and not a form of hospitality involving the main meal of the day, but Goldsworthy's titles also show how they can be used to ease anxieties about what is and is not a work of art. Those conventions for separating art from non-art are worth questioning, and I'll argue with them in my own way, by boldly writing a seminar paper in which Susan Frackelton's Dessert Plates are italicized, each and every time.