NOTES
- The chief methodological culprits named are Marxist sociological models, with their recent derivation in the “analysis of visual culture,” and cultural studies readings, particularly those of a psychoanalytic bent (8). All page references to the Art and Thoughtvolume appear in brackets.
- For a good example in this volume, see Jonathan Vickery s explication of Fried and Cavell: “One of the paradoxes of minimal art is that, despite its apparent meaningless it has prompted a considerable quantity of ‘theory’ or speculative criticism. For Cavell, if we have to supply an explanation or a theory for the artwork to become intelligible, then either it, or we, have failed” (119). If that is the case, and if description is more apt as Cavell argues, then there is no case for an essay like Vickery's, which attempts to explain Cavell and Fried on modern art in their own terms, because we could only benefit from reading their descriptions of art, not an essay explaining their theories of modern art. Vickery's essay is worth reading though, but that means not taking Cavell or Fried at their own word at times. For instance, Vickery argues that both eschew any a priori determinates for art, yet shape for Fried, as Vickery presents it, is surely the nearest possible equivalent (a point reinforced by the terms of Fried's own appraisals of Joseph Marioni's painting in the late 1990s).
- Costello also makes the suggestive remark that Tate Modern's monumental quality hints at an “impending obsolescence” in the manner of the grand railway stations being built as cars went into mass- production for the first time. Will we be able to say that video killed the monumental art museum?
- Cited in Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986) 44.
- Amelia Jones notes that American “modernist formalism” “oversimplified” Kant. Still that does not stop her from chastising Kant nonetheless: the modernist formalist supports his claim, she goes on to say, by recourse to “what Kant termed a disinterested judgment, one untainted by sensual appreciations or bodily desires” (79). Jones's triumphant tone often over- determines her arguments and the differences she wishes to instantiate. Thus, her reading of Merleau-Ponty appears rather one-dimensional, and hectoring, alongside Alex Potts's study which directly follows. Although, he characterizes Kant much the same way, I prefer Melville's imperative to attend to “the rough patches in our received narratives” (163). Rather than triumphant overcoming and quick dismissals, much of the best critical work today takes in these less heroic sounding zones.
NOTES
- See for example, Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge Mass.: MIT P, 1997) and Deborah Bright ed. The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire (London: Routledge, 1998).
- See Deborah Bright, ‘Introduction: Pictures, Perverts and Polities’, in The Passionate Camera 4.
NOTES
- Above all the work of Omuka Toshiharu and Mizusawa Tsutomu which is generously acknowledged by Weisenfeld. Among many other writings are Omuka Toshiharu, Taishôki Shinkô Bijutsu Undô no Kenkyû (Tokyo: Sukaidoa, 1995); Omuka Toshiharu, Nihon no Avan Gyarudo Geijutsu, Mavo to sono jidai (Tokyo: Seidosha, 2001); Mizusawa's many catalogues and Omuka's and Mizusawa's co-edited “Mavo no Jidai,” Art Vivant 33, 1989, are standard references in this field. The period has also not entirely escaped attention outside North America, however, and both Omuka and Misuzawa were contributors to the exhibition and catalogue of Modern Boy, Modern Girl, ed. Jackie Menzies (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1998) and to the exhibition symposium papers now published as Elise Tipton and John Clark eds, Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s (Honolulu, U of Hawaii P, 2000) in which Weisenfeld also wrote a chapter. Weisenfeld s book has a 2002 publication date, gives no sources later than 1999, and most are from before 1997.
- See J. Clark, “Modernity in Japanese Painting,” Art History 9.2 (June 1986) 213–31.
- Such as, to give typical examples only, Tanaka Atsushi et al., Shajitsu no Keifu III, Meiji Chûki no Yôga (Tokyo: Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, 1988); Kitazawa Noriaki, Me no Shinden (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1989); Sakai Tadayasu et al., Takahashi Yûichi- Ten (Kamakur: Kamakura Kindai Bijutsukan, 1994).
- See J. Clark, Modem Asian Art (Honolulu: U of Hawai'i P, 1998) 185–9.
- See J. Clark, “Indices of Modernity: Changes in Popular Reprographic Representation,” Being Modern in Japan and the chronology on printing and publication 200–205.
- Even a relatively introductory history accepts 1900 as the date of attainment of 90% school attendance. see W.G.Beasley, The Modern History of Japan (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978) 140.
- The eminent intellectual historian Harootunian, in a position widely in circulation among scholars in North America in the 1990s, argues that “despite the appearance of a linear narrative that starts with modernism and ends with fascism…modernism and fascism were contemporary with each other, sharing the temporality of simultaneity and constantly imbricating each other,” H. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000) xxxi.
- On one of the new spaces for this culture see Elise Tipton's essay, “The Café, Contested Space of Modernity in Interwar Japan,” Being Modern in Japan.
- See Gennifer Weisenfeld, “Touring Japan- as-Museum: NIPPON and other Japanese Imperialist Travelogues,” positions: east asian cultures critique 8.3 (winter 2000).
- See Murayama Tomoyoshi, Engekiteki Jijoden (Tokyo: Tôgô Shuppansha, 1971) 293. Thanks to MizusawaTsutomu for this reference.
- See Omuka Toshiharu, Taishôki Shinkô Bijutsu Undô no Kenkyû (Tokyo: Sukaidoa, 1995) 613, 622–3
NOTES
- Roger Benjamin, ed., Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee, exh. cat. (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1997).
- Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific (New Haven:Yale UP, 1984).
- Edward Said, Orientalism (Harmonds-worth: Penguin, 1978).