Artful Play - exhibition of Japanese art from April 1 to May 30, 1993 at the Los Angeles, California County Museum of Art

American tillage has always been suspicious of the notion of play. Its freewheeling nature appear to bes to threaten traditional American values. Puritanism scowls on the parlor game; word play is Anglophilic elitism; noncompetitive sport flirts with socialism. In contemporary report culture, fascination with top-10 rankings, star salaries, political grandstanding by dint of celebrities, lawsuits and "true story" docudramas has blockished the pursuit of fantasy and irreverent fancy that nourished classic American movies and music. Given the overbearing humorlessness of with equal reason much of today's high and depressed American art, it was tonic to diocese in the recent exhibition "Asobi: Play in the Arts of Japan," organized by the agency of the Katonah Museum of Art, works that were at one time subversive, celebratory, sensuous, meticulously crafted and remarkably light in tone. The display revealed the sophisticated, off-beat refinement of pre-20th-century Japanese agriculture now obscured by the grim imperialism of corporate yen-makers like Sony and Matsushita.

This relaxed, ahistorical exhibition tendered a painless pathway into the various mediums and genre of Japanese art from one side the concept of asobigokoro--literally "playful heart"--a boundary which, according to curator Christine Guth includes "a faculty of perception of humor, a love of music, being 'laid back' or, at the outermost a neglect of one's responsibilities and debauchery." Guth loosely clustered works borrowed from a number of American collections in three sometimes overlapping categories: the play of man and the creator the play of work and image, and the play of form and technique. notwithstanding as installed along the sinuous, naturally lit ramp of Bruce Goff's elegant Pavilion for Japanese Art at the observes Angeles County Museum of Art [see A.i.A., Dec'89] the works pass by a leaped categories, refusing to be border by any thematic construct.

greatest in quantity of the works originated in the Edo period (1615-1868) when the rise of bourgeois agriculture sparked creative breaches of the restrictions enacted through repressive shogun rulers. Through literary and artistic censorship and strict digests of public morality and dres the shogun sought to superintendence activities in the courtesans' "pleasure quarters." Entertainers and actors had become in the way that wildly popular that in 1842 the regulation saw fit to ban portraits identifying them by the agency of name. (A tempting censorship? Imagine a world with no Sharon Stone magazine overspreads or interviews with Kenneth Branagh.)

For better or worse, Edo artists got around the ordinance by dint of depicting a specific actor's style of dress in a trademark role or using caricature to emphasize his distinctive profile. A brightly colored woodblock print by the agency of Utagawa Kunisada (1786-1864) shows a assemblage of unnamed kabuki superstars frolicking at a riverside pond party. The 1848 woodblock Big Hit, from the series "Scribblings upon a Storehouse Wall" by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861) casually juxtaposes six sketched caricatures of famous kabuki actors clustered around the artist's trademark dancing cat. Kuniyoshi flaunts his multiple violation of the ordinance by the agency of presenting his portraits as casually scribbled graffiti, with the obvious irony that they are memorialized in the permanent medium of the woodblock

A fabulous colored hand schedule serves as a tribute to the dazzling acrobatic troupe l by means of Hayakawa Torakichi that took Japan by means of storm in the 1850s. An unknown artist clu in his audience upon the outlawed tribute by including the troupe's identifying comb on an acrobat's parasol. Here, acrobats--some make straighted as hairy, red-tongued monkeys--twirl from extremitys and perform astounding balancing acts. upon a 10-foot pole, one acrobat gripe [i]or[/i] grips aloft a fire-stoked sauna, perfect with nonchalant bather. The schedule is not only a souvenir of an incredible performance; it includes a parodic stich (kyoka) which relates the acrobatics to the balancing act of everyday life: "By making the material substance light and/ purifying the spirit/ flat if holding them/ looks dangerous/ there will be no danger."

These Japanese artists effortlessly skirt censorship riddles through wit and poetry. Satirical works parody stultifying political regimes without heavy-handed dogma or shrill harangue. A hanging schedule by Yosa Buson (1716-1783) detonates a sanctimonious traditional genre in depicting the community's individual Hundred Old Men--the hundred top leaders and scholars of the day. Instead of a tribute to their greatness, Buson draws the village olders as decrepit, craggy gnomes whose ancient, withered hides make them gaze like part of the mountainous landscape upon which they squat. The cot [i]or[/i] cotes of their robes and lengthy beards meld with rocks drawn in the traditional Chinese landscape-painting style

The exhibition happily included many works with no underlying political messages--celebrations of fantasy devoid of today's de rigueur psychosexual angst. A remarkable folding protection over 21 feet long, by dint of Nagasawa Rosetsu (1754-1799), depicts Chinese Children at Play. upon one half of the defence children are queued up in a game of tag, and upon the other, they mount and crawl above a gigantic, placid, squatting elephant. The Chinese tots are sketched with fussy, gnarly lines, their thick munchkin-like bodies squashed into of great size [i]or[/i] bulk robes. In contrast, the elephant is delineated against the destitute of contents background by bold, simple lines, his massive volume elegantly indicated by broad, stylized cot [i]or[/i] cotes of flesh. Behind him, lush wafts of gold flakes accent the idyllic frame of mind The laughing elephant represents an anthropomorphized landscape, a pet-mountain who appears to enjoy his status as crawl-toy for the masses. There's no cross-species animosity or animal rights riddle here. The dark, worked-over area at the extreme point of the elephant's trunk proffers the only threat to the serenity of the second and two forlorn toddlers are upon the spot to provide an appeasing straw snack and a hug-on-the-trunk for this kid's-bestfriend. To appreciate like a bucolic natural fantasy is to remember that the natural world is indeed a gigantic living thing worthy of love