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- Convenors:
-
Julie Nelson Davis
(University of Pennsylvania)
Ewa Machotka (Stockholm University)
Erin Schoneveld (Haverford College)
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- Stream:
- Visual Arts
- Location:
- Torre B, Piso 5, Auditório 3
- Start time:
- 31 August, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This roundtable panel presents three case studies where print, as a material form, expands its message through reproduction and the material representation of "art" in its moment. Using the lens of materiality we further demonstrate how print also engaged "afterlives" for its subjects.
Long Abstract:
This panel will take the form of a roundtable interrogating how the medium of print, as a material form, expands its message through the act of reproduction. Each of the presenters will offer a short analysis of a specific work, using it as a methodological frame for questions about the relationship between print, materiality, visuality, and response. With each of our case studies, we begin by considering how the printed image adapts its source materials (poetry, sketch, and painting) to engage a larger dialogue on the material representation of "art" in its moment and within the form of the printed matter itself. We consider how three different forms of printed production--the illustrated book, the sheet print as a set, and the magazine--also uses seriality to expands the experience of the viewer. The presentations will end with an open-ended question about materiality and medium, setting out potential topics for what is, we hope, a free-wheeling conversation with the audience about print matters.
Our three papers span the artificial divide of the modern and premodern through the lens of materiality and demonstrate how print opened up the potential for the "afterlives" of their subjects. In first case study the theme of the Six Jewel Rivers (Mu Tamagawa) shows how the poetic trope was transformed into the 'landscape', giving that classical theme a new life, resonant with economic, social, and ecological associations in a time of natural disaster. In the second presentation, an illustrated book is reconsidered in terms of its mobility, through its production to its afterlife in nineteenth-century Paris. Turning to the coterie magazine as the final case study, issues of the expanded reach of mechanical printing and photography made European modernism of earlier decades visible to a wider public in Taishô Japan. As material objects, these printed forms presented viewers with a range of new experiences that went beyond the visual stimulating new modes of circulation and contact. All three media provided a cultural space in which artists constructed social and aesthetic networks of exchange and display.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Julie Nelson Davis (University of Pennsylvania)
Paper short abstract:
Kitagawa Utamaro and Jippensha Ikku collaborated on the illustrated book, Annual Events of the 'Azure Towers,' Illustrated (Seirō ehon nenjū gyōji) in 1804. The material form and the afterlife of this book will be investigated a case study for the power of print to define its subject.
Paper long abstract:
In 1804 artist Kitagawa Utamaro and writer Jippensha Ikku offered a review of the annual events of the licensed pleasure district, the Yoshiwara, to the readers in Edo, in pictures and text. Their publisher, Kazusaya Chūsuke, bargained on this being a best-seller and issued the book in two printings—one in full color and one in monochrome—at two price points. In the intervening years the book has become one of the most famous in the history of the illustrated book in Japan. It also became one of the most influential sources for understanding the licensed quarter and it cemented the writer and artist's reputations as expert in the Yoshiwara's exclusive and elusive customs.
In this presentation, I will begin by addressing the materiality of the book, its structure, format, and production, and consider how its representational strategies served the quarter at the same time that they clad it in a veneer of glamour. This discussion will turn to an analysis of the afterlife of this text, by looking at how it was interpreted by later critics, in Japan and abroad, as though documentary in intent. In these narratives, Utamaro, as Edmond de Goncourt wrote, was posited as the "official painter" of the quarter, due to the persuasive power of the images, while Ikku's calligraphy text was largely overlooked (due in no small part to the difficulty it presented to readers unfamiliar with Edo kuzushiji). Through a close reading of this title, of both text and image, this talk will engage issues of the materiality, mobility and afterlife of this title, offering a new methodological approach to the early modern illustrated book both in Japan and beyond.
Erin Schoneveld (Haverford College)
Paper short abstract:
This paper adopts the premise that "modernism began in the magazines and the magazines in which it began were shaped by modernity to" offer a new approach to understanding the critical role that art journals like Shirakaba (White Birch, 1910-1923) played in the evolution of modern Japanese art.
Paper long abstract:
Founded in April of 1910, Shirakaba (White Birch, 1910-1923) redefined modern art for a new generation of Japanese artists and writers. One of the first art magazines to reproduce the works of Rodin, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Matisse, Shirakaba provided a critical framework for discussing European modernism. Subverting established hierarchies of artistic production and exhibition, Shirakaba served as an avant-garde platform to advocate individuality and subjective expression.
This paper adopts the premise of Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman that, "modernism began in the magazines and the magazines in which it began were - all of them - shaped by modernity" to offer a new approach to understanding the critical role that periodicals like Shirakaba played in the evolution of modern Japanese art. As material objects, art magazines presented readers with a range of new experiences that went beyond the visual to ones that stimulated touch and smell, offering new modes of circulation and contact that created a deeper physical connection between artists, the work of art, and the viewer/reader. Through an analysis of Shirakaba's material qualities such as layout, content, format, and technologies of production I will argue that art magazines - more than other printed materials like newspapers and books - represented the ephemerality of the moment and became important sites for artistic practice by providing a cultural space in which artists and writers could construct new social and aesthetic networks of exchange and display in Taishō Japan.
Ewa Machotka (Stockholm University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores visual imaginaries of the poetic trope of Mu Tamagawa or 'Six Jewel Rivers' in Edo-period popular printed culture from the perspective of materiality, the physical features of objects embedded in social and cultural practices.
Paper long abstract:
Imagining Mu Tamagawa: Visuality and Materiality of Landscape Prints in the Late Edo Period.
In the last decades 'landscape' has been the subject of extensive investigation by art historians, human geographers, ecocritics and others. Since the groundbreaking study by Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (1989), who perceived 'landscape as a way of seeing', scholars have been discussing it as a social rather than a 'natural' phenomenon, and one often implicated with power (W.J.T. Mitchell, 2002). However, when it comes to the study of images commonly defined as 'landscapes' the question of 'representation' of topography and its meaning tends to prevail, rather than inquiry into the material role of visual praxis, and issues of the object's circulation and its performativity and ever-changing agency.
This paper explores visual imaginaries of the poetic trope of Mu Tamagawa or 'Six Jewel Rivers' which flourished in Edo-period popular printed culture. It will interrogate selected prints designed by Kitagawa Utamaro (ca. 1753-1806), Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), and Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861) in with regard to materiality, the physical features of objects embedded in social and cultural practices, and the spaces in which the objects were produced, consumed, and displayed.
The paper notes that although related to specific places, i.e. six Tamagawa rivers, visual imaginaries of the Mu Tamagawa theme are dominated by human figures, with the notable exception of works created in the 1830s and 1850s, two critical époques in Japanese social and environmental history, which were impacted respectively by the Tenpō Famine and the Ansei Earthquakes. It explores circumstantial relationships between images and their socio-historical contexts that may underlie this shift in pictorialization conventions. It also argues that on the one hand, this shift points to a characteristic performativity of poetry, but on the other hand, it also challenges the paradigms of 'representation' that perceive visual objects as texts while disregarding their diverse social functions.