Tuesday 3 July 2012

BOOK: Shibusa - PART 3 - Chapter 8

SHIBUSA - Extracting Beauty
See Overview if you are not sure what this page is about (it can be found on the header bar also)

PART THREE
Contextual Writings
Chapter 8: History and Techniques of The Kimono
by Makoto Mori (edited by Pip Dickens)


Extract (with kind permission of University of Huddersfield Press)



Hikari To Kage (Light & Shadow), oil on canvas, copyright Pip Dickens


History of the kimono

 
The original meaning of the word ‘kimono’ is ‘clothing’, although today it is often translated as ‘something to wear’. In modern-day Japan the term also often refers to traditional Japanese clothing in general. Although the history of Japanese clothing prior to the Nara period (710–94) is not known in great detail, during the Heian period (794–1185) there are records that describe the clothing of the day. Here we find evidence of the origin of the contemporary kimono in the kosode, which was originally worn by the aristocracy as an undergarment.



The kosode is a garment with a body, sleeves and a pair of collars that drape from both shoulders and cross over each other in front of the chest. Kosode means ‘small cuffs’; another type of clothing worn prior to the kosode had a larger cuff opening – as wide as the length of the sleeves – and was called osode (see Figures 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3). Clothes for the nobility during the Heian period had smaller cuffed openings in order to keep the body warm, so the kosode became a popular undergarment for the nobility from the end of the tenth century through to the beginning of the eleventh century.

The kosode became popular with aristocrats as an outer garment from the latter period of the Heian period to the beginning of the Kamakura period (1185–1333), and many nobles wore a kosode tailored from gorgeous cloth.  A samurai’s daily clothing (or formal public clothing) since the Heian period was a tube-shaped single costume called teboso, which was very similar in shape to the nobility’skosodeundergarment.

In the Kamakura period (1185–1333) samurai began to call the teboso garment kosode. Later, kimonos worn by the general public also began to be referred to as kosode because of the similarity of their shape. Ordinary people’s teboso had a white ground without a pattern and were worn as outer garments. Occasionally, plain or easy tie-dyeing was applied, but there were often bans on their decoration.



From the late Muromachi period (1336–1573) to the Momoyama period (1568–1603) the kosode developed further, with direct similarities to today’s kimonos. During this time Japan was often engaged in intensive warfare (both feudal and with the Mongols), which led to a general shortage of textiles and clothing. As a result, the simple kosode was adopted as the formal outerwear among samurai in the ascending class. Its smaller sleeves were also more practicable for physical movement. Thus the kosode became common throughout society, and not merely the exclusive garment of the nobility.



During the Heian period (794–1185), the narrow tube-shaped sleeves of the kosode became larger, although the cuff width remained almost the same. By the Momoyama period (1568–1603) the kosode shape had evolved into a configuration similar to the modern kimono. We also know that the word ‘kimono’ had become synonymous with kosode; for example, it is used in a report by the Portuguese missionary Joao Rodrigues, who came to Japan in around 1577. We can assume, therefore, that people began to use  the word ‘kimono’ to mean not only clothing in general, but to refer specifically to the kosode. As economic prosperity increased during the Muromachi and Momoyama eras, and through to the Edo period (1603–1868), female apparel became more decorative, thanks to the relatively peaceful and prosperous social conditions. Patterns on clothes became larger, and loose clothes with longer sleeves, or length, became popular (see Figure 8.4). Despite the Edo shogunate often prohibiting the wearing of this kind of clothing, the advent of bolder patterns and highly innovative yuzen techniques (hand-applied decoration of textiles, described below) heralded an explosion in kimono design. The Edo period represents the pinnacle of traditional kimono design (see Figures 8.5 and 8.6), and many modern designs are influenced by kimonos from this period.


[End of Extract] Makoto Mori's history of kimono also includes data of the kimono economy and also contemporary approaches to kimono design and production. pages 117-134 ]



More information about this book, and ordering information:
Book details:
Shibusa - Extracting Beauty
Edited by Monty Adkins and Pip Dickens
ISBN-13: 978-1-86218-101-4
Size: 280 x 210mm
Pages: 144
Number of images: 97
Images in colour: 89

published by University Huddersfield Press
Email enquiries to: university.press@hud.ac.uk
Online Shop

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My website: www.pip-dickens.com 

BOOK: Shibusa - PART 3 - Chapter 7

SHIBUSA - Extracting Beauty
See Overview if you are not sure what this page is about (it can be found on the header bar also)

PART THREE
Contextual Writings
Chapter 7: The Craftsmen of Kyoto
by Pip Dickens


Extract (with kind permission of University of Huddersfield Press)





The art and craft of kimono making precedes the Western concept of haute couture (developed in mid-nineteenth century Paris by British designer Charles Worth), where many skilled people combine to produce specific elements of a bespoke garment. As outlined in Chapter 2, it takes many skilled artisans to make a katagami stencil and this, in turn, is but one element contributing to a kimono’s fabrication and design. There are a very significant number of different, highly skilled, procedures and techniques employed at each stage. Dyeing, painting, embroidery, and silk making are fast disappearing in Japan. No computer can completely replace these skills and there is real danger of exchanging original skill for simulacrum effect – for example, a computer-generated pattern that replicates a shibori technique. However, computers are able to capture, record and archive a vast library of techniques as reference material. 

The kimono industry is suffering a Janus-faced conundrum of transition versus tradition. It shares parallels with Western Art’s recent history of reproduction in the mechanical age in that a computer-generated image of a painting is not an artwork – it is an image of an artwork. The painting becomes something different once it has been reproduced – colours change, spatial depth is lost, materiality is lost. Reproduction is only as a good as the camera that has photographed the original work. As we move further and further away from the original, we move further away from the point of art itself – the object, and how it is made and what it is made of. 

The reason for this transition in the kimono industry is due in part to the decline of skilled artisans and a younger generation who cannot justify, economically, the time-investment in apprenticeships to learn these skills. The pressure on the industry to build a viable business practice has required it to explore and exploit other technologies. The alternative of hiring in traditional skill sets and expertise from a diverse yet ever-dwindling pool of resources is becoming less and less practicable. Writing in 2007, Anthony Faiola from the Washington Post described the last generation of skilled artisans in the Nishijin district of Kyoto:

Yasujiro Yamaguchi worked the humming loom in his private workshop. Patiently lacing golden threads through a warp of auburn silk, he fashioned a bolt of kimono fabric blooming with an autumn garden in shades of tea green, ginger and plum. But Yamaguchi, like Japan’s signature kimono, is slipping into winter. At 102, he is among the last master weavers of Nishijin, the country’s most celebrated kimono district, and his pace has  slowed. He rubbed the morning chill from his knuckles, fitted his hunched shoulders deeper inside his indigo jacket and resolutely pushed on.

At the time of the interview with Faiola, Yamaguchi was one of only three masters left who could actually create a kimono from scratch. All were over 70 years old and none had apprentices. Yamaguchi stated: ‘It is a sign of the times … I am not sure who will carry on this tradition for future generations. I no longer have the time or energy to teach someone now. Even if I did, where would they work?’


Faiola reports that sales of Nishijin kimonos and related products fell from US$2.7 billion in 1990 to a record low of US$477 million in 2006; production of kimonos in this region (which is known for its quality) dropped from 291,000 to just 87,382 garments. 

In 2011, through an introduction from Professor Yuzo Murayama, Director of Innovative Globalization of Kyoto’s Heritage Industries at Doshisha Business School in Kyoto, I met three designers who are bravely negotiating the chasm between tradition and transition, utilising kimonos (and kimono techniques) in different ways. For Murayama, these three designers exemplify new possibilities in Japan’s cultural business sector:

Although Japanese culture is enjoying a worldwide boom, particularly in ‘anime’ and ‘manga’, Kyoto’s heritage industries are mired in a slump. Some are even in danger of disappearing completely. One reason for
this lies in the fact that heritage industries have lost their horizons for lateral development, particularly their motivation for entering the global marketplace. The only means of overcoming these difficulties are those of novel innovations and of going global. The concept that holds they key to its success is that of ‘cultural  businesses’. The Kakushin Juku [a class being offered by Doshisha Business School] is leading the way along the path from heritage industries to cultural businesses.


[End of Extract] the chapter includes reviews of three Kyoto craftsmen: Yuonsuke Kawabe, Taro Matsumara and Makoto Mori ]



More information about this book, and ordering information:
Book details:
Shibusa - Extracting Beauty
Edited by Monty Adkins and Pip Dickens
ISBN-13: 978-1-86218-101-4
Size: 280 x 210mm
Pages: 144
Number of images: 97
Images in colour: 89

published by University Huddersfield Press
Email enquiries to: university.press@hud.ac.uk

BOOK: Shibusa - PART 3 - Chapter 6

SHIBUSA - Extracting Beauty
See Overview if you are not sure what this page is about (it can be found on the header bar also)

PART THREE
Contextual Writings
Chapter 6: Sharing of Textures: crossovers in contemporary art
by Roy Exley


Extract (with kind permission of University of Huddersfield Press)

Figure 6.3 Stripe 3, 2009, oil on paper, 32.5 x 22.5cm.
© Pip Dickens


They said, ‘You have a blue guitar / you do not play things as they are.
The man replied, ‘Things as they are / are changed upon the blue guitar.
Wallace Stevens, The Man
with the Blue Guitar

The crossover as a breaching of (arbitrary) boundaries 


Back in the eighteenth century, when Henry Fielding was inspired by the drawings of William Hogarth (such as the notorious image of Gin Lane) to embark upon his classic novel Tom Jones, the concept of ‘crossover’ did not even exist. Neither the hoi polloi nor the gentry could have possibly foreseen the unbridled hybridity that would permeate the arts two centuries later. Cross-fertilisations between the arts became commonplace, not only cross-genre, but also cross-cultural, and this sort of hybridisation took place in the work of such modernist artists as Pablo Picasso, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Jacob Epstein, who all created work inspired by traditional African tribal masks. In the 1960s the American jazz saxophonist Joe Harriott and Indian violinist John Mayer collaborated to create a fusion of classical Indian music and modern jazz. This was all part of the ferment that included Ravi Shankar’s tutelage of George Harrison on the sitar and the traditional Indian raga, which led to a change of direction in the music of Harrison and The Beatles, and all that followed under their influence. 

As a parting gesture to accompany the final curtain on the currency of modernism, in the late 1960s the partitions between artistic disciplines were decisively torn apart along the seams of their increasingly brittle, perforated and sutured integuments. The manifestos of individual disciplines were turned into a miasmic epilogue that succumbed to an unstoppable, burgeoning swell of hybridity – a hybridity that became the forerunner of the conceptual movement of the 1970s. The seeds of this disjunction had, of course, been sown long before, in the works of artists such as Marcel Broodthaers, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Daniel Buren, Bruce Nauman, et al., whose work and ethos anarchically, and fatally, punctured the already decaying modernist edifice and its shrine, the white cube. They were precursors, preparing the way for the advent of events, performances and mixed media installations – the age of pluralism had not just arrived to besiege the citadel of modernism but had stormed its gates and broken through. Could the provocative and often visceral performance work of such artists as the Americans Adrian Piper and Carolee Schneemann, or the Austrian Hermann Nitsch, have prospered without the pioneering work of these forerunners? 

Between 1956 and 1958 the French-based Greek architect/composer Iannis Xenakis collaborated with the French architect Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris) to create the Phillips Pavilion at the Brussels World Fair, the form of which was inspired by Xenakis’ composition Metastasis and in which his composition Concret PH was performed, where an empathy between architectural space and sound dynamics was needed to achieve a perfect realisation of the composition for an audience seated within its space. Le Corbusier had conceived the idea of an ‘electric poem’ to engage with that space and in turn be enhanced by it, in which, in his words: ‘Light, colour, image, rhythm and sound join together in an organic synthesis’. Xenakis’ Concret PH was performed at the Phillips Pavilion in 1958 alongside Edgard Varèse’s groundbreaking electronic composition, La Poème Électronique. The latter work was fed, with spectacular results, through 350 revolving speakers, giving the impression of sound moving through space, and creating the
illusion of a tangible material entity. This calculated synthesis between architecture, lighting and electronic sound created a novel and spectacular holistic experience for the audience and was a prime example of successful cross-fertilisation of previously separate artistic genres.



[End of Extract] ]



More information about this book, and ordering information:
Book details:
Shibusa - Extracting Beauty
Edited by Monty Adkins and Pip Dickens
ISBN-13: 978-1-86218-101-4
Size: 280 x 210mm
Pages: 144
Number of images: 97
Images in colour: 89

published by University Huddersfield Press
Email enquiries to: university.press@hud.ac.uk

BOOK: Shibusa - PART 2 - Chapter 5

SHIBUSA - Extracting Beauty
See Overview if you are not sure what this page is about (it can be found on the header bar also)

PART TWO
Shibusa: An Artist's Perspective
Chapter 5: Smashed Pianos and Dysfunctional Brushes
by Pip Dickens


Extract (with kind permission of University of Huddersfield Press)




Figure 5.5 Dickens, Composition #7, Shibusa series – , 2011,
oil on canvas, © Pip Dickens


About grey

In the Shibusa series of works, references of blurring and shadow evolve from darker realms contained within earlier series of works into ‘lighter’ forms. Blending and gradation of paint create quiet spatial transitions against which entities that traverse across it are thrown dramatically into sharp focus, like particles of dust passing in front of the eye in a half-lit room (see Figure 5.5). The aim is towards the sensorial rather than the drama of my previous works, such as the Film Forensic paintings (see Figure 5.6) and the dark charcoal drawings: Space Race, Elephant Man  and the Femme Fatale series. In these earlier works a sense of disaster, danger or extinction pervaded, both through the subject matter and the use of phenomenological entities such as fog, cloud, blurring and evaporation. The inclusion of greys in these new works – the colour of limbo, neither darkness nor light, and so a floating colour – also aligns with some aspects of  shibui and, perhaps, ideas about restraint and also reflection. Tanizaki’s memories of childhood are a paradox of light and shadow – a compelling dramatic greyness when reminiscing on how women dressed in those days (1890 Tokyo): 

For a woman of the past did indeed exist only from the collar up and the sleeves out; the rest of her remained hidden in darkness… Most of her life was spent in the twilight of a single house, her body shrouded day and night in gloom, her face the only signof her existence. Though the men dressed more colourfully than they do today, the women dressed more sombrely … their clothing was in effect no more than a part of the darkness, the transition between darkness and face … the Tokyo townswoman still lived in a dusky house …when they went out it was often in a gray kimono with a small, modest pattern.
Grey is often perceived as neutral, dead, old and unemotional, yet it is a colour mix that can produce endless tones and hues. It can be warm, cool, hard or soft. Grey acts like a ‘switch’, illuminating the quality of brighter colours placed in its vicinity. It is probably the most useful of all colours, because it is comprised of many. It is a colour of transition – a facilitator.

Recent works by British painter Estelle Thompson utilise grey and its relationship with other colours to astonishing effect. The works Thompson exhibited at Purdy Hicks Gallery in October–November 2009 were substantial objects constructed from MDF and paint. The picture plane is divided horizontally and vertically to produce rectangular sections of independent colour fields. Such compositions are not new in abstract painting, but in Thompsons’ paintings the mind of an illusionist is at work. The grey sections have a bright burnished, metallic quality – their surface showing signs of abrasion-like brushed aluminium. The painting Head in Hand (see Figure 5.7) comprises a grey upper panel and a lower panel divided vertically, producing two coloured panels: to the left a magenta, the other a madder red/pink of soft gradation that is at its most intense at the top and bottom  – the middle section ‘bleeds’ into the lightest pinks of a young rose. The overall impression is one of quiet activity – the secret life of colours – with each panel creating its own atmosphere through weight, brilliance and saturation. The panels are rigidly demarcated yet actively conversing with one other – quietly ‘on the move’ within their own boundaries. Though the sections of the painting are hard and exacting, their confluence creates exciting contrasts and lyrical exchanges. These qualities exist both when standing in close proximity to the surface of the works and at a distance, yet they are experienced in different ways. The blended ‘pink’ panel appears to articulate, as if it were made of card bending outwards at the centre to catch the light. The upper grey is more akin to architectural, polished aluminium sheets, blended by light and surface- scratched, yet it is curiously lightweight and exudes the shimmer of a summer’s day by the sea. The equatorial line in the centre of the painting, though precisely engineered and exacting, somehow emits a contradictory haziness.  


The resultant series of works is a successful paradigm shift between the convention of hard edges in abstract painting and a softness that articulates – the antithesis. The panels appear contained in their own ‘atmospheres’ of colour, calling to mind a natural landscape and the joy of colour expressed – not a traditional solidity of even-handedness and sameness, but the endless tonal and chromatic capabilities of colour. The use of blurring here is less about concealing or restricting vision but rather revealing what colour is.

[End of Extract] This Chapter has in-depth review of Estelle Thompson's paintings, the works of Fuyuko Matsui, the concept of Shibusa/Shibui, Junichiro Tanizaki, the colour grey and shadow and how clock-time changed painters' colour palettes toward the end of the 19th century]



More information about this book, and ordering information:
Book details:
Shibusa - Extracting Beauty
Edited by Monty Adkins and Pip Dickens
ISBN-13: 978-1-86218-101-4
Size: 280 x 210mm
Pages: 144
Number of images: 97
Images in colour: 89

published by University Huddersfield Press
Email enquiries to: university.press@hud.ac.uk

BOOK: Shibusa - PART 2 - Chapter 4

SHIBUSA - Extracting Beauty
See Overview if you are not sure what this page is about (it can be found on the header bar also)

PART TWO
Shibusa: An Artist's Perspective
Chapter 4: Low tech and high tech: the tail should not wag the dog
by Pip Dickens


Extract (with kind permission of University of Huddersfield Press)

The Cherry Tree (In Memoriam 2011), 152.5 x 152.5 cm, oil on canvas, Pip Dickens
Copyright Pip Dickens


The issue of exploiting computer technology is really a question of how it is exploited and to what ends, for there are skills in using technology (as indeed with gaining expertise in anything). Richard Sennett states in a discussion with Grayson Perry and Laurie Taylor (Thinking Allowed, BBC Radio 4) that we need to be careful about assessing what skills stand for:
What tends to happened in Britain is that
the word ‘skills’ stands for procedure –
how to do ‘X’. It doesn’t stand for ongoing
experience of doing ‘X’ better, so when we
test young kids we test whether they can do
a procedure or whether they are capable of
learning from whatever baseline they start
from them. It is tick-box learning.

Sennett also defines the relationship between the artisan and technology:

The greatest dilemma faced by the modern
artisan-craftsman is the machine. Is it a
friendly tool or an enemy replacing work
of the human hand? In the economic
history of skilled manual labour, machinery
that began as a friend has often ended up as
an enemy.

One of the most significant elements of our collaboration [Monty Adkins and Pip Dickens] was having to exchange concepts and developments with another person – things that are normally very private and difficult to articulate. The received image of a sketch does not always convey, wholly,what the artist is aiming to accomplish.  Sketches are visual/audible notations for self-reference – shorthand solutions, or approaches, indicating processes that might be called into play in a painting or sound work. The sketch, be it hand-wrought, or digitally created, can be misleading, or mysterious, to anyone other than the artist, without some form of supplementary explanation – appraised only on its visual/audible merits, not for its hidden meaning or intent. Over a period of some months we exchanged numerous sketches (see Figures 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4 and 4.5), before developing preliminary paintings and sound works. This process prompted valuable discussions of the sketches where both our interpretations and ideas could be shared. 

The sketches, then, are thoughts in their nascency – sometimes fixing only on a single aspect of a concept. As a process, or ‘tool’, the sketch has four purposes: exploration, germination, filtration and design. Different artists’ ‘sketches’ filter and evolve concepts in different ways – that is the freedom artists have in developing skills independently of an external agency. It is research, and research is part and parcel of many artists’ practice. But the how, why and what of this research is individually determined.

From Gillies to Gaga: the sculptures of Paddy Hartley

Paddy Hartley’s Project Façade exemplifies how a dedicated and passionate interest in a subject matter can result in a body of artworks that develop a momentum of their own. Hartley believes in the skill of making – hands-on – but has also been shrewd in exploiting high technology in order to share the histories and research behind the work and so place his artworks in specific context. Project Façade is a series of 16 sculpturally embroidered garments that interpret and symbolise personal histories of servicemen who suffered severe facial injuries during the First World War. Hartley’s focus is on the New Zealand surgeon Sir Harold Delf Gillies, who developed crucial facial surgery techniques. Gillies worked with pioneering surgeon Hippolyte Morestin (dubbed the ‘Father of the Mouths’ for his innovative surgery in skin grafting), which Gillies observed in during the First World War at the British General Hospital in Rouen. Gillies returned to England and began his own groundbreaking work in the field of maxillofacial surgery. His work predates that of his cousin Archibald McIndoe, and his equally extraordinary work (with Rainsford Mowlem and Tommy Kilner) with facially disfigured Second World War servicemen, which became known as the ‘Guinea Pig Club’: Archibald McIndoe went to the Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead.  Mowlem worked at St. Albans and Kilner at Roehampton, while Gillies established the army service at Rooksdown Hospital, near Basingstoke. All were involved in the treatment of facial casualties in the Second World War and McIndoe in particular was instrumental in the rehabilitation of his patients, the majority of whom were badly
burned bomber crews and fighter pilots.

The large proportion of serious injuries and disfigurement in the First World War was unprecedented, due to mass production and development of artillery. Guns, rifles, tanks, machine guns, gas and grenades bombarded and killed, injured and traumatised surviving servicemen. The first self-powered machine gun, the Maxim, was nicknamed the ‘devil’s paintbrush’ because of the physical damage it wrought in the First World War. Such damage was graphically illustrated in François Dupeyron’s 2001 film La Chambre des officiers, based on the book of the same name by Marc Dugain, which charts the experiences of Adrien Fournier, a lieutenant in the Engineers during the First World War. Fournier was struck down in the field  and was removed to a maxillofacial unit shared by similar victims, and spent the rest of the war undergoing experimental reconstructive surgery.

[End of Extract] This Chapter then goes on to review the works of Paddy Hartley in depth.



More information about this book, and ordering information:
Book details:
Shibusa - Extracting Beauty
Edited by Monty Adkins and Pip Dickens
ISBN-13: 978-1-86218-101-4
Size: 280 x 210mm
Pages: 144
Number of images: 97
Images in colour: 89

published by University Huddersfield Press
Email enquiries to: university.press@hud.ac.uk

BOOK: Shibusa - PART 2 - Chapter 3

SHIBUSA - Extracting Beauty
See Overview if you are not sure what this page is about (it can be found on the header bar also)

PART TWO
Shibusa: An Artist's Perspective
Chapter 3:  Pattern rhythm, vibration and colour
by Pip Dickens


Extract (with kind permission of University of Huddersfield Press)



Figure 3.2 Dickens, Blue Caribbean Vibration, Moiré series, 2003, oil on canvas, 152 × 152 cm.
Collection of artist, © Pip Dickens




The katagami stencil, while evidently a practical tool for the purpose of colouring and
patterning a variety of substrates, including kimono fabric, has recently found itself an object of desire in the West. Collectors,including myself, are attracted by its many startling qualities: intricate, delicate and complex designs, many of which convey optically vibrant arrangements. Given the use of the stencils in busy textile workshops, where dyes and resist materials are pressed through them again and again, it is not surprising that few of them survive in good condition today. However, whatever the aesthetic or design quality of the stencil, its most valuable asset is the evidence it provides of the virtuosity of the craftsperson – the hand skills of the artisan.  The Leverhulme Trust Award  collaboration with Monty Adkins has used the katagami stencil as a symbol of how we can best investigate the synergy between music and painting. By drawing on the stencil’s qualities (and that of the stencil’s maker), themes emerged that directed us towards specific approaches in developing new works and the elements contained in those works.
 

It is important to emphasise how the stencil has developed a symbolic role (and why I have linked it directly to Richard Sennett’s writing on craftsmanship) because elements of the stencil’s aesthetic properties have also been absorbed and explored within preliminary works. The stencil, therefore, has played two distinct roles in this project: an important visual reference, and a symbol of good  making skills. 

It is also useful to reiterate the ‘imperative to protect performance’ mentioned in the
previous chapter, because continuity – skill of control – of the handmade mark is an important component within painting: be it through rehearsal (repeated many times),
through experimentation (trial and error) or through the action of painting where a skill of rhythmic control may be called into play. The same is true of musical performance and composition.  


In this chapter I introduce three series of visual artworks: my own Moiré series, paintings by Bridget Riley and photo-booth collages by Liz Rideal. All these works evidence these skills consciously, without relegating repetition to the banality of design or ‘wallpaper’. Rather, these are highly original approaches due to the physical engagement of the artist through innovation; the skill of repetition and rehearsal; and the ‘X’ factor which, ultimately, is the role that an artwork plays while in production: the work creates a ‘dialogue’, or response to, actions imposed upon it during its development. Each of these artists demonstrates a very distinct and individual approach to pattern, rhythm, vibration and colour. Moreover, each evidences different levels of use of technology and hand skills.
 

In Chapter 2, I introduced Sennett’s comments about skills and the corollary between those of the Japanese katagami cutter, revealing the importance of time, physical coordination and ritual in order to hone skills. In the nineteenth century the publisher Andrew White Tuer also signified the importance of practice and repetition in Japanese skills in order to become expert: 

The Japanese, who has naturally a fine sense of colour and form, is taught draftsmanship in the same manner as he is taught writing – that is, copies are ‘set’ which are laboriously transcribed over and over again until the pupil can draw, say, a chrysanthemum of conventional shape, almost as easily as you and I … can
scribble a b c.


[End of Extract] This Chapter then goes on to review the works of Pip Dickens, Bridget Riley and Liz Rideal in depth.



More information about this book, and ordering information:
Book details:
Shibusa - Extracting Beauty
Edited by Monty Adkins and Pip Dickens
ISBN-13: 978-1-86218-101-4
Size: 280 x 210mm
Pages: 144
Number of images: 97
Images in colour: 89

published by University Huddersfield Press
Email enquiries to: university.press@hud.ac.uk

BOOK: Shibusa - PART 2 - Chapter 2


SHIBUSA - Extracting Beauty
See Overview if you are not sure what this page is about (it can be found on the header bar also)

PART TWO
Shibusa: An Artists Perspective
Chapter 2: The katagami stencil: handmade machine
by Pip Dickens

Extract (with kind permission of University of Huddersfield Press)



Figure 2.1 A katagami stencil: Japanese hand-cut stencil for printing on to kimono fabric. Collection of Pip Dickens, © Pip Dickens











We have trained our hands in repetition; we are alert rather than bored because we have developed the skill of anticipation. But equally, the person able to perform a duty again and again has acquired a technical skill, the rhythmic skill of a craftsman, whatever the god or gods to which he or she subscribes.
(Richard Sennett, The Craftsman)
 
'The Craftsman' is the first of Richard Sennett's three volumes on material culture, with particular srcutiny of the 'skill of making things well'.  He refers to many areas of craftsmanship, including that of arts and crafts, as well as music, architecture, social use of buildings, psychology and interaction within the workplace. Frequent reference is made in his thorough and enlightening investigations of oriental methods of working:in the industrial context of companies such as Nokia, or in his discussion of ‘the lesson of minimum force’ – understanding and controlling muscles in order to master the skill of using knives well. 


Rhythm, ritual and respect for the sharp knife are key to becoming expert at controlling the tool. Most important of all is time. In what Sennett calls the ‘rhythm of concentration’, the commitment of practice to become expert at anything (to gain tacitknowledge) requires the investment of 10,000 hours. Sennett converts these hours into practising 3 hours a day for 10 years. This is a rule of thumb, but he points out that compressed apprenticeships – for example that of a goldsmith, or the intensive training undergone in a doctor’s internship –while taking fewer years, equates to roughly the same amount of time. His reference is to psychologist Daniel Levitin’s This is Your Brain on Music, where this magic number keeps cropping up in the context of how long it takes composers, athletes and authors to become expert.

It comes as no surprise to have found this same period of time – 10 years – quoted in research into how long it takes a cutter of katagamistencils to become expert. Moreover, the Japanese fully understand, and celebrate, the ‘rhythm of concentration’ their artists and artisans have dedicated their lives to it in order to become expert – many being honoured as Living National Treasures. The way in which these individuals are of significant cultural importance reveals just how significant physical skills are to the Japanese in general.  Japan has an international reputation for its technological sophistication, for embracing machine production and for pioneering innovation. But there is something else, too – a qualitative approach that harks back to the fundamental elements of craft: of making things well and investing time in learning (research). Research results in innovation and this, in turn, also throws up failed attempts along the way. Failures, therefore, are as useful as the successes if they are appreciated within the context of learning. Some failures result in new innovations and inventions. Failures offer three choices: exploit them in the current work, acknowledge them and use them as a positive approach in future works, or acknowledge they are redundant – aesthetically and practicably never going to work. Thus a ‘no go’ area is as useful as a ‘green light’ when investing time and materials into an artist’s practice.

Ise katagami is a Japanese method of making stencils with fine and elaborate patterns, which can be used to print on to a variety of substrates (this is called katazome). The katagami stencil is a sophisticated paper stencil created with a variety of sharp knives or specially shaped punches (see images).  The history of the katagami stencil can be traced back to stencilling patterns on samurai warriors’ armour (leather helmets and stirrups, for example) in the Nara period (710–794). Some sources state that katagami already existed by the late Muromachi period (around 570).

The Book of Delightful and Strange Designs, Being One Hundred Facsimile Illustrations of the Art of the Japanese Stencil-Cutter, published in 1893 by Andrew White Tuer, suggests that the use of the katagami stencil flourished in the seventeenth century (Edo period 1603–1868). Miyazaki Yuzen (referred to as Someya Yuzen by Tuer) is identified as an artist of great significance in popularising the development of yuzen-zome–  hand-painted designs on silk using resist-paste techniques and, most importantly, dye-fast techniques. Miyazaki Yuzen was originally a painter of Japanese fans. His artworks were very popular and he was persuaded to produce works on kimono fabric, which, in turn, resulted in a unique style of hand-painting becoming highly popular in the Meiji period (from 1868). His new innovations proliferated across the textiles industry during this time, and so began a boom in designing, printing and painting on fabric – examples being the kimono and polychromatic suspended pictures called kakemonos. It is interesting to note how an artist working in a specialised area can bring new innovations to another quite distinct practice.  Subsequently, Kyoto-born artisan Jisuke Hirose further developed techniques in yuzen-zome(or katazome): printing pattern using paper stencils and chemical dye, which further popularised these associated techniques on a range of textile  substrates. Yuzen technique employs two methods of approach: tegaki (hand- dyeing/painting) using brushes (painting); and kata(stencil-dyeing), a technique to dye silk using a cut-out paper template (printing). 



Figure 2.2 Detail of a katagami stencil showing itoire work (silk meshing) for
structural support and resilience. This image represents about 2.5 × 2.5 cm
of the cut stencil. Collection of Pip Dickens, © Pip Dickens


[End of extract - more information on this book and purchase details below]




More information about this book, and ordering information:
Book details:
Shibusa - Extracting Beauty
Edited by Monty Adkins and Pip Dickens
ISBN-13: 978-1-86218-101-4
Size: 280 x 210mm
Pages: 144
Number of images: 97
Images in colour: 89

published by University Huddersfield Press
Email enquiries to: university.press@hud.ac.uk

Monday 2 July 2012

BOOK: Shibusa - PART 1 - Chapter 1

SHIBUSA - Extracting Beauty
See Overview if you are not sure what this page is about (it can be found on the header bar also)

Detail from Composition #2, Katagami series of paintings,
oil, on hand-dyed and washed canvas 
copyright Pip Dickens

 

PART ONE
Shibusa: A Musician's Perspective
Chapter 1: Exploding Stillness
by Monty Adkins (Professor)


 Extract (with kind permission of University of Huddersfield Press)


The association of sound and image has been a subject that has fascinated composers and artists for centuries, and can be traced back as far as the investigations of Artistotle and Pythagoras into the correlation between the light spectrum and musical tones. Although the main theoretical texts that discuss the relation between music and painting emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century, most notably centred around those artists associated with the Bauhaus and the famous meeting in 1911 of Arnold Schoenberg and Wassily Kandinsky, practical investigation and experimentation between colour and sound has its origins further back in instruments often termed ‘colour organs’, such as the clavecin oculaire constructed by Louis Bertrand Castel in 1734. In 1720, some 14 years prior to the construction of the clavecin oculaire, Castel wrote, ‘Can anyone imagine anything in the arts that would surpass the visible rendering of sound, which would enable the eyes to partake of all the pleasures which music gives to the ears?’ The clavecin oculaire was a device that used 500 candles, 240 levers and pulleys, and 60 reflecting mirrors to illuminate a 2-metre-square frame with 60 coloured windows (5 octaves of 12 tones, each with a specific hue), each with a curtain that was automatically raised when the corresponding key on the harpsichord was struck. Many such instruments were developed throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – Kaster’s pyrophone, Vietinghoff-Scheel’s chromatophon and Thomas Wilfred’s clavilux are but a few examples of instruments that all worked on a similar premise. All these instruments were based around the keyboard as a means of triggering colour–pitch combinations. In the twentieth century this tradition of using a physical mechanism to produce an association of sound and colour continued with experiments using film to combine sound and image, particularly in the work of Norman McClaren, Oskar Fischinger (who created his own colour organ – the lumigraph – in the late 1940s)  and Walter Ruttman.  

Aside from these mechanical devices aimed at multisensory stimulation, conceptually the most coherent approach is found in Richard Wagner’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk, expounded in his essay ‘The artwork of the future’ of 1849, and which he defined as a unification of music, song, dance, poetry, visual arts and stagecraft.

Although Wagner’s influence on future generations of composers is often discussed in terms of his dvancements in harmonic thinking and the emancipation of the dissonance, the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerkcan be traced through Schoenberg’s opera Die Glückliche Hand (1910–13) and Scriabin’s Prometheus (1911) – both of which were accompanied by carefully choreographed coloured lights – and Ives’ unfinished Universe Symphony 1911–28), as well as countless contemporary multimedia spectacles. At the same time as Wagner’s development of the Gesamtkunstwek, a shared vocabulary emerged between painting and music that extended beyond mere metaphor – works in both creative disciplines were discussed as compositions, panels or improvisations that have a form. James Whistler went further and titled his paintings with musical terms such as ‘nocturne’, ‘harmony’ or ‘study’, and  most famously the Symphony in White series (1862–7). The purpose of such titles was to emphasise the tonal qualities of the composition and to reduce the emphasis on narrative content. In Karl Gerstner’s book The Forms of Color, he observes that: Each musical tone can be defined by three parameters:

1) frequency (pitch),
2) amplitude (volume), and
3) overtones (tone color).

Each color can likewise be defined by three parameters:

1) color tone (or hue, according to Munsell),
2) lightness (or value), and
3) purity (or chroma).

In the early part of the twentieth century the mapping of colour to musical pitches was the principal reoccupation of Roy de Maistre, a contemporary of Klee and Kandinsky. De Maistre’s 1935 painting Colour Composition Derived from Three Bars of Music in the Key of Green (Colour Scale on a Musical Theme from Beethoven) is typical of his work and is based on a system the painter developed from Sir Isaac Newton’s theories of colour, expounded in the latter’s treatise Opticks of 1704. De Maistre believed that ‘a mathematical relationship of frequencies …united the physical phenomenon of light and sound’.

During the first part of the twentieth century a number of composers were also active as painters. Schoenberg painted a number of expressionist works and maintained close contact with Wassily Kandinsky and Der Blaue Reiter group. Schoenberg’s pupil, John Cage, created drawings and paintings that often used similar chance techniques to those employed in his compositions; indeed Sharon Kennedy maintains that ‘Cage’s awareness of silence in music can be seen through its abundance of white space in his piece called Stones 2(1989)’. While only Kandinsky purported to experience an intense synesthesic bond between sound and image, it is clear that the visual work of both Schoenberg and Cage were informed by their musical aesthetic.

As digital technologies proliferated during the second part of the twentieth century, it might be assumed that the connection between music and painting would become lessened in favour of music in conjunction with the moving image. Yet despite the propensity of visual music in our contemporary culture, painting is still a significant source of inspiration for contemporary sound artists and composers. The influence of painting on music comes in many forms: the initial structural model of Kaija Saariaho’s Verblendungen (1982) was a brushstroke from which the composer abstracts simple geometric shapes that control parameters such as tessitura, harmonicity and polyphony, and the relationship between the orchestra and the electronics. 


[End of extract - more information on this book and purchase details below]




More information about this book, and ordering information:
Book details:
Shibusa - Extracting Beauty
Edited by Monty Adkins and Pip Dickens
ISBN-13: 978-1-86218-101-4
Size: 280 x 210mm
Pages: 144
Number of images: 97
Images in colour: 89

published by University Huddersfield Press
Email enquiries to: university.press@hud.ac.uk