Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Those who are capable of clear criticism must accept my opinion

I've been reading The Chinese on the Art of Painting by Osvald Siren. A translated excerpt from a text by art critic Teng Ch'un made me chuckle:

Someone said that Kuo Jo-hsu went too far, but I do not think so, therefore I now place the high officials and hermit scholars in two different classes, thus establishing my own humble opinion. Those who are capable of clear criticism must accept my opinion.

I'm not sure if English was Siren's first language, or whether he was just an academic, but his translations are clumsy and his general prose style is absent-minded, so translated excerpts tend to sound a bit babel-fish goofy anyway, but I really liked the idea of everyone having to accept Teng Ch'un's humble opinion. If they were capable of clear criticism, of course. Otherwise they could tell him to stuff himself.



Anyway...

I've long found myself far more drawn to traditional Chinese and Japanese painting than to the European tradition, and I do have some ideas why, but they recurred to me again this evening in a slightly different, or perhaps just very slightly more focused form. Really the refinement of attitude is only very minor, but it occurred to me that in Western art, traditionally, there has been much more of a tendency to murder by dissection. That is, I think, the defining tendency of Western thought generally. The reason I have had so little response to the great oil paintings in the various Western galleries I have wandered through, and such absorbed fascination when, for instance, seeing a Sesshu exhibition in Kyoto, is that, quite simply, to make the most ludicrous but necessary generalisation ever, Western art is completely dead. It has been pre-murdered by Western thought.

Let's go back to one of Siren's badly translated excerpts from the ancient Chinese texts of art criticism:

By revolving their thoughts and preparing the brush (licking the brush) the painters can represent the characteristics of everything, but there is only one method by which it can be done thoroughly and exhaustively. Which is that? It is called the transmitting of the spirit. People think that men alone have spirit; they do not realize that everything is inspirited. Therefore Kuo Jo-hsu despised deeply the works of common men. He said that though they were called paintings, they were not painting (as art), because they transmit only the forms but not the spirit. Consequently the manner of painting which gives the resonance of the spirit and the movement of life is the foremost. And Kuo Jo-hsu said that it has been practised only by high officials and hermit scholars, which is correct.

To me this is a mixture of what is so obvious that it hardly needs saying - although the obvious does seem to need repeating from time to time - and the frankly bizarre, in the form of weird, archaic Chinese hierarchical 'issues' that I don't claim to understand. (Perhaps there's a connection? I mean, part of the murderous dissecting quality of the Western mind is it's ridiculous dualism, which is also the dualism that leads to 'progress', real or so-called, because there is the constant dynamic of thesis, antithesis and - hopefully - synthesis, which can perhaps be seen in constant revolutions of thought and fashion. By contrast, Imperial China was, I believe, a place of great statis. Teng Ch'un himself, writing at round about, or shortly after, 1167, states: "Since olden times there have been many amateurs who have studied the art of painting very carefully. Consequently the records about it form more than one book. But in the T'ang period Chang Yen-yuan collected all the information about famous painters and classified them. His work reaches from Hsuan Yuan (prehistoric time) until the first year of Hui-ch'ang (841) and is called Li Tai Ming Hua Chi. In the present dynasty Kuo Jo-hsu wrote the T'u Hua Chien Wen Chih, which reaches from the first year of Hui-ch'ang to the seventh year of Hsi Ning (1074). These two books are the most important; other books are simply repetitions." In other words, there had been so little change in art criticism and the philosophy of art since prehistoric times, that you only really needed to read two books to know the whole lot. This sense of stasis actually fascinates me. I know many people would be appalled by it, but I find it in many ways attractive. I could go on about the implications, but this was meant to be a short post.)



The transmitting of the spirit... To me it can't really be argued that this is what art is all about, and, traditionally, Chinese art achieves this much more readily than the European tradition. I look at Chinese paintings with the same sense of refreshment and unwearying fascination that I have when looking at a tree, or at clouds. It truly is art created in the spirit of nature. It is alive, as opposed to dead Western art, upon which I can't keep my eyes resting for very long before I turn stalely away with a stifled yawn. (Ridiculous but necessary generalisation.) But no, actually, no, the generalisation isn't even that ridiculous for me. It's not really that much of an exaggeration. There's something of the textbook about Western art. Oriental art, traditionally... I can feeling it breathing back at me, the way the leaves of a tree breathe. And, of course, the fact that this 'can't be argued' is highly objectionable to Western artists and intellectuals, because they're all about argument. That's their thing. Thesis, antithesis and synthesis. That's what they do. Personally, I prefer photosynthesis, but, you know, the Western artist can't sit still long enough for that. You have to overthrow the last thing and then overthrow the thing you've just replaced it with.

All this leads me, of course, to Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, and since all roads lead to Tanizaki, where else? In particular I want to mention his long essay In Praise of Shadows, which is to me such a key text, and such a precious text, that I hardly even dare mention it here in case it becomes too popular or something and is dragged out of the shadows where its title tells us it belongs. I will continue nonetheless. In this essay Tanizaki laments the fact that Japan was unlucky enough to collide with a "superior civilisation" and therefore be forced to adopt the technology of that civilisation rather than develop a technology more suited to its own culture and spirit. Western paper, he tells us, is no good for writing on with a Japanese brush. The Western phonograph destroys the subtleties of the silence between notes on which traditional Japanese music depends. Technology is not culturally neutral; it comes with all kinds of cultural assumptions, which it forces upon any who find they must use it.



History has taken the turn that it has, but perhaps it could have taken another. If Western art is defined the tendency to murder to dissect, then how much more so Western technology? Western art is dead, and Western technology is death. But what if there could be another kind of technology that was full of the transmission of the spirit and alive, breathing the same air as nature? Wouldn't that be a better path to take than the one we presently tread?

Those who are capable of clear criticism must accept my humble opinion.

Labels: Chinese painting, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro