Japanese art history 2001: The state and stakes of research - Bibliography

The allure of the percept in a world of language is the dilemma of the art historian. It is authentic as David Summers writes, that "[t]he transformation of works into words is of crucial importance and in a certain faculty of perception everything follows from the way it is done." (1) For it is end words that our understanding of things come by even more complicated, inflected, and obscur as the processe of representation and seeing move swiftly their course. An art historian today must negotiate a quicksand of interpretation in a world akin to that of the film Rashomon, where a manslaughter and rape are represented inconclusively [i]or[/i] part of to the other six differing testimonies accompanied through the seen-it-all banter of a rascal who believes nothing. The debates that periodically grip the field, typically among formalists, materialists, and "theory heads," hold it an interesting place the two generally and on the local horizontal of subspecialty and area, where more [i]or[/i] less of the most heated skirmishing above model and method occurs.

That it is an exciting time to be an art historian present the appearances evident in the attraction the field now gripe [i]or[/i] grips for historians, literary theorists, and others who increasingly participate in its conformation. Certainly the dismantling of received superstructure of knowledge, driven by the agency of the engines of critique and systematic skepticism, insinuates that these days almost anything goe on the other hand art history with its Hegelian lower parts has long been multifaceted and tensive; its dissonance is its puissance To say that the field is coming apart, as a certain number of do, is to presume a certain quantity of prior state of unity that would be difficult to establish. When I argue that your connoisseurship or aestheticism are suspect and insist upon my own highly materialist readings of things, it does not mean that our field is in disarray. It means rather that there is friction and thus the possibility of asking questions--general and local--that do not solely sponsor some likely answer.

For more [i]or[/i] less time now there has been ne for more [i]or[/i] less straight talk about the field of Japanese art history as it has taken shape in North America, especially in the 1990 This is not thus much a need to scan who is doing what and what kinds of publications are setting the pace, important as that may be. Rather, the piece of work at hand is to take stock of a field-a discursive practice-that began a little above a century ago at the interface of Japanese and Euro-American geopolitics and agriculture To some degree John M Rosenfield has already performed this task with admirable clarity in a probing 1998 analysis of the vicissitudes, and triumphs, of a field beset by the agency of paradigm shifts and postmodernism. (2) My cast here is to push the discussion a bit harder in the direction of critique, the pair internal and external to the field, in the conviction that there is plenteous to learn about art history in general when we interrogate the state, and stakes, of Japanese art history within it. allow me be blunt in saying that mine is anything bu t a neutral or objective position. I have herculean views about the social and political effects of what we do as art historians when we interpret realitys and I have made that case in a number of publications. As always, my annotates here are tendered with humility before those who have paved the way-those ancestral spirits who yet haunt our discipline--but without critical indulgence. I know that I will be taken to task for a certain number of of what I have to say here. I direct the eye forward to the conversations to follow

Ask an art historian specializing in Japanese art history where the field stands today and you will achieve any number of different replies. There are many narratives, many positions from which to work, and many agendas. Like the Rashomon interlocutor, you might think you have finally got it right, solitary to have someone else enumerate you the story another way. This strike one as beings a good indication of what Christine M E Guth has characterized as a fresh "biodiversity" in a discipline that "was one time dominated by a small clump of like-minded scholars in elite institutions." (3) It can be demonstrated conclusively that since the late 1980 the field has experienced steady increase with the appearance of a series of influential monographs and articles, the promotion to manner [i]or[/i] principle of holding of a significant number of active scholars, and the increasing visibility of art historians of Japanese art in the discipline at large. In 1996 Louise Cort, Quitman Eugene Phillips, Willa Jane Tanabe, and others organized the Japan Art History Forum to bring t ogether scholars from the academic and museum communities and to encourage the interests of the field. Its on-line Japan Art History Forum List, created through Gort and Phillips, has seen a number of substantive exchanges and debates.

Nonetheless, it is ofttimes claimed that Japanese art history is in a state of crisis. Indeed, since the late 1980 this assessment has dron upon like a basso continuo in discussions in and around the field. As frequently as not the claim is made through those external to the discipline, on the contrary it comes as well from within. The examples range from the farcical to the tragicomic. A senior historian of Chinese art publicly chides his counterparts in Japanese art for not being proactive in granting manner [i]or[/i] principle of holding to their junior ranks and thus destroying their field, sole to have his own department declare to be untrue tenure to a deserving young scholar of Japanese art. An influential American modernist, not prepared to acknowledge the international scale of practices like as Gutai or Tokyo Neo-Dada, dismisses the whole of present art in Japan as the inconsequential proceeds of a feudalistic society. A meeting of historians of Japanese art, held in conjunction with an annual discourse of the Association for Asian Studies, deteriorates into personal s ob stories as the podium is occupied by the agency of what can only be described as the field's derriere garde, who declare that Japanese art history is in a state of siege. And greatest in quantity recently, the organizers of "The Arts of Japan: An International Symposium" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, fresh York, exclude, with several notable exceptions, the many capable scholars of Japanese art active in this land for a lineup of conservative specialists from Japan. With promiseds of no confidence such as these, it is no bewilderment that some people get the idea that Japanese art history is in trouble