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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Friday, February 23, 2007
An interesting article from Cabinet Magazine on the history of shadows:"The prisoners in Plato's cave were incapable of gazing directly into the light of knowledge. They had their backs to this bright light and saw only the shadows cast on the cave walls. Plato's point was that they saw only the shadow of reality, not reality itself. The image had a tremendously negative charge for Plato and he linked the image with the shadow—both were copies of reality. And so, from the beginning on, to attain true knowledge one had to renounce the shadow stage and progress out of the cave, into the sun... I was struck by the strange parallels between the Platonic story of the origins of knowledge and Pliny's story about the origin of painting. Maybe one of the most important differences between them is that, in Pliny's story about the origin of representation, the shadow wasn’t charged with a negative aspect: the story of the maid of Corinth tracing her lover’s shadow on a wall and thereby giving birth to painting is a wonderful story, a love story, and not at all negative.
Leonardo, and others after him, said that the representation of shadows had to be correct but was not obligatory in painting. The painter was free to choose whether to represent them or not, because to represent all cast shadows would be too much."
The dichotomy between light and shadow is one that places Plato in the same moral hierarchy as the opposition of the light to the outer darkness in christianity. Clearly, the view taken by Pliny was nonetheless also to persist (most obviously through the tracing of a subject's profile as delineated by their shadow in the eighteenth century), the Western painter most noted for his interplay of light and shadow is after all the amoralist Caravaggio, with his sexualised and dissident saints. The shadow was also seen as a metaphor for the inner life in German fairy tales and expressionist cinema. One thing I am surprised the article doesn't mention is an essay by the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki entitled In Praise of Shadows:"Modern man, in his well-lit house, knows nothing of the beauty of gold; but those who lived in the dark houses of the past were not merely captivated by its beauty, they also knew its practical value; for gold, in these dim rooms, must have served the function of a reflector. Their use of gold leaf and gold dust was not mere extravagance. Its reflective properties were put to use as a source of illumination. Silver and other metals quickly lose their gloss, but gold retains its brilliance indefinitely to light the darkness of the room. This is why gold was held in such incredibly high esteem... In most of our city temples, catering to the masses as they do, the main hall will be brightly lit, and these garments of gold will seem merely gaudy. No matter how venerable a man the priest may be, his robes will convey no sense of his dignity. But when you attend a service at an old temple, conducted after the ancient ritual, you see how perfectly the gold harmonizes with the wrinkled skin of the old priest and the flickering light of the altar lamps, and how much it contributes to the solemnity of the occasion."
Tanizaki suggests that Oriental aesthetics valued shadow above light, therefore preferring wood and lacquerware to tiles and ceramics. For example, a Tudor building like Hardwick Hall was constructed with much of its walls consisting of windows to cast light on the bright tapestries within and to overcome the darkness of the wood. Later, rococco buildings such as Versailles or Sanssouci were decorated in bright colours with large windows on one side of a room and mirrors on the other. In each case, the goal was to banish shadow and darkness.
One of the problems of this thesis is that it can be better described as polemical than descriptive. After all dark woods were a favoured building material for much of Western history and ceramics were largely imported from the East. The axonometric perspectives used in Oriental art commonly lacked an explicit light source and often tended to omit shadow altogether. When Tanizaki attributes the importance of gold to being a reflector in subdued light that will not easily lose its lustre, he forgets that this is precisely why it was popular in the West as well). The polemic springs from a backlash against the Westernization of Japan that followed the 1867 Meiji restoration; much of the essay consists of invective against the unconscious Western assumptions in many modern conveniences, recalling Camille Paglia's assertion that cinema had always been an implicit concept in the Western visual imagination (e.g. electric lighting where Tanizaki undermines some of his case by noting that the Japanese were more enthused by electric lighting than any other nation save the United States; in contrasting cultures it becomes clear that the cultures in question are far from being monolithic entities. Not to mention his own refusal to inhabit a house as uncomfortable as his aesthetics advocated) which veers between pleading for recognition of Japanese identity as being 'separate but equal' and denouncing Western civilisation as being tasteless and uncouth (since it is the origin and otherness of many of these conveniences which seems to trouble Tanizaki at least as much as the unwelcome nature of the changes).Labels: Aesthetics, Culture
posted by Richard 10:01 pm
