Art review: Dai Nippon/The Tale of Genji

Published on Monday 14 September 2009 19:02

DAI NIPPON: KABUKI PRINTS FROM THE HENRY DYER COLLECTION *** GLASGOW SCHOOL OF ART THE TALE OF GENJI: PRINTS FROM THE HENRY DYER COLLECTION *** CENTRAL LIBRARY, EDINBURGH

IN THE Menji period, in the last decades of the 19th century, the revolution that brought Japan into the modern world was built on the acquisition of Western technical and industrial skills. Scots played a vital part in this. The most famous was Thomas Blake Glover, founder of at least two Japanese institutions, Mitsubishi Engineering and Kirin Beer. Glover was from Aberdeen, but because engineering, shipbuilding and heavy industry were the key Japanese concerns, contacts with Glasgow were important.

Among the many Scots who contributed so much to Japan was Glasgow graduate Henry Dyer. An engineer, he was recruited in 1873 at the age of just 25 to the post of professor of engineering and first principal of the new Imperial College of Engineering in Tokyo. Through the innovative and effective teaching methods he introduced, he shaped the future of Japanese engineering. The consequences, both good and bad, are a significant part of the history of the modern world.

Dyer spent only ten years in Japan, but he clearly had a passionate interest in the country and its culture and amassed a considerable collection, particularly of woodblock prints. He bequeathed part of this to the Mitchell Library in Glasgow. Even-handedly, his daughter later made a similar gift to the Edinburgh City Libraries. The two parts of this collection together form a marvellous resource. The colours in woodblock prints are notoriously sensitive to light – leave a colour print on the wall too long and all you will have left is the black-printed outlines. As the Dyer prints were evidently acquired as new and have rarely been exhibited since, they are in very fresh condition.

A selection is on view in the Mackintosh Gallery at Glasgow School of Art. In parallel, Edinburgh Central Library is showing a selection of images that are, a little confusingly, not originals, as the prints are in the Mackintosh Gallery, but reproductions. Nevertheless the two shows provide an opportunity to assess Dyer's little-seen collection. We don't know much about the circumstances in which he acquired it, but there is no reason to suppose that this was not in Japan in the 1870s. The majority of the prints and most of those on view belong to the Utagawa School of the mid-century whose leading artists were Kunisada and Kuniyoshi.

Their favourite subjects were taken from the characters and plots of the Kabuki theatre, a kind of Japanese pantomime with popular actors, familiar characters and formalised plots. Although it was begun by women in the 17th century, their performances became too licentious and they were later banned. So female impersonators became a popular feature of Kabuki, just as they are in pantomime, and they frequently appear in these prints, towering and ambiguous as any pantomime dame.

The Kabuki performance is characterised by exaggerated gestures and expressions. In Kagekiyo Emerging from a Rocky Cavern by Kuniyoshi, the character, who has been held captive in a cave, emerges with his hair standing on end and his eyes crossed in a wild expression of extreme emotion. The costumes are also rich and part of the attraction of this style of print is the tremendous complexity of space and pattern that is achieved by inter-cutting these elaborate costumes with equally elaborate backgrounds. Characters often interact violently, as they do in Rustic Genji, by Kunisada, for instance, and the visual collision of their contrasting costumes gives added force to the drama. The portrait of the actor Ichikawa Danjuro, also by Kunisada, is a wonderful essay in pure pattern, but typically the dominant pattern is also a visual pun on the name of the character he represents.

This kind of thing proved inspirational in the West – you can see how the work of artists such as Gauguin, Vuillard and Bonnard echoes prints like these. From the 1860s onwards artists were looking closely at Japanese prints in particular, because they seemed to offer a way of making pictures that was not locked into the idea of illusion: that a picture is something that you look into to see mirrored there some kind of objective reality, whether real or imagined. In contrast, in these patterned images the picture space is clearly independent of any illusion. Though it is rich in references to the known world, the image seems not to be unduly beholden to it. Instead the artist is free to pursue a more intuitive approach to picture-making. This proved a fertile example to the pioneers of modern art in the West.

Dani Marti withdraws from sh(OUT)

PRODUCTION of these prints was closely controlled, and the Imperial censor's stamp is an important authenticating mark. Unhappily, this finds an echo in contemporary Glasgow. In keeping with the progressive tradition of the city that produced men like Henry Dyer, modern Glasgow has launched projects like its sh(OUT) programme, promoting human rights through contemporary art. This year this is dedicated to "lesbian, gay, bisexual, intersex and transgender life". This is also linked to the annual Glasgay! Festival, part of the same admirable policy. Artist Dani Marti was invited to Glasgow for this year's sh(OUT) programme and given a residency. He was to make films and also present films he had made already. Their collective point is, as he puts it: "To address key issues such as gay men's health and well-being, social and lifestyle factors, the stigma of homosexuality, and stigma associated with HIV status and disclosure."

Seven films were to be shown at the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), together with a sound piece and a sculpture made of blood-red pot scourers – being both a symbol of ordinariness and domesticity and of the cleansing power of disclosure. I have not seen his films so I cannot review them, but I did have the chance to talk through them with him with images in front of us.

If I did review them, I would in effect be reviewing a non-event: Marti withdrew all his work from its showing at GoMA, scheduled for this week, after being told that he could show only a small part of it. The rest was deemed unsuitable. It is to be shown independently in premises at Parnie Street and for a single afternoon at Tramway in November, but that doesn't let either GoMA or Glasgow Council off the hook. The form of Marti's films is confessional. There is some nudity, but nothing graphic. Individuals talk directly about their experiences; some are harrowing, some are shocking. But if sh(OUT) is a campaign for human rights, then surely it is crucial to make people aware of a human reality like the one Marti presents where, in the face of exactly the social pressures to which GoMA has succumbed, the concept of "rights" becomes meaningless.

But what is worse is that, according to Marti, when he told Culture & Sport Glasgow that one of his films was screened in Zurich to public acclaim "their response was that Zurich is a much more advanced city for the arts than Glasgow, and that the public in Glasgow was not educated enough and was not ready for it". I hope that is not really the opinion Glasgow Council holds of its citizens.

&149 Dai Nippon and The Tale of Genji run until 10 October; sh(OUT]: Contemporary art and human rights is at GoMA until 1 November.