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

Art in America, July, 1993 by Michael Duncan

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

This relaxed, ahistorical exhibition offered a painless pathway into the various mediums and genres of Japanese art through the concept of asobigokoro--literally "playful heart"--a term which, according to curator Christine Guth, includes "a sense of humor, a love of music, being 'laid back' or, at the extreme, a neglect of one's responsibilities and debauchery." Guth loosely grouped works borrowed from a number of American collections in three sometimes overlapping categories: the play of man and god, the play of work and image, and the play of form and technique. Yet, as installed along the sinuous, naturally lit ramp of Bruce Goff's elegant Pavilion for Japanese Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art [see A.i.A., Dec.'89], the works jumped categories, refusing to be bound by any thematic construct.

Most of the works originated in the Edo period (1615-1868), when the rise of bourgeois culture sparked creative breaches of the restrictions enacted by repressive shogun rulers. Through literary and artistic censorship and strict codes of public morality and dress, the shoguns sought to control activities in the courtesans' "pleasure quarters." Entertainers and actors had become so wildly popular that in 1842 the government saw fit to ban portraits identifying them by name. (A tempting censorship? Imagine a world with no Sharon Stone magazine covers or interviews with Kenneth Branagh.)

For better or worse, Edo artists got around the ordinance by depicting a specific actor's costume in a trademark role or using caricature to emphasize his distinctive profile. A brightly colored woodblock print by Utagawa Kunisada (1786-1864) shows a group of unnamed kabuki superstars frolicking at a riverside pool party. The 1848 woodblock Big Hit, from the series "Scribblings on a Storehouse Wall" by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861), casually juxtaposes six sketched caricatures of famous kabuki actors grouped around the artist's trademark dancing cat. Kuniyoshi flaunts his multiple violation of the ordinance by 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 scroll serves as a tribute to the dazzling acrobatic troupe led by Hayakawa Torakichi that took Japan by storm in the 1850s. An unknown artist clued in his audience on the outlawed tribute by including the troupe's identifying crest on an acrobat's parasol. Here, acrobats--some dressed as hairy, red-tongued monkeys--twirl from poles and perform astounding balancing acts. On a 10-foot pole, one acrobat holds aloft a fire-stoked sauna, complete with nonchalant bather. The scroll is not only a souvenir of an incredible performance; it includes a parodic verse (kyoka) which relates the acrobatics to the balancing act of everyday life: "By making the body light and/ purifying the spirit/ even if holding them/ looks dangerous/ there will be no danger."

These Japanese artists effortlessly skirt censorship problems through wit and poetry. Satirical works parody stultifying political regimes without heavy-handed dogma or shrill harangue. A hanging scroll by Yosa Buson (1716-1783) explodes a sanctimonious traditional genre in depicting the community's One Hundred Old Men--the hundred top leaders and scholars of the day. Instead of a tribute to their greatness, Buson draws the village elders as decrepit, craggy gnomes whose ancient, withered hides make them look like part of the mountainous landscape on which they squat. The folds of their robes and long 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 screen, over 21 feet long, by Nagasawa Rosetsu (1754-1799), depicts Chinese Children at Play. On one half of the screen, children are queued up in a game of tag, and on the other, they mount and crawl over a gigantic, placid, squatting elephant. The Chinese tots are sketched with fussy, gnarly lines, their thick munchkin-like bodies squashed into bulky robes. In contrast, the elephant is delineated against the empty background by bold, simple lines, his massive bulk elegantly indicated by broad, stylized folds of flesh. Behind him, lush wafts of gold flakes accent the idyllic mood. The laughing elephant represents an anthropomorphized landscape, a pet-mountain who seems to enjoy his status as crawl-toy for the masses. There's no cross-species animosity or animal rights problem here. The dark, worked-over area at the end of the elephant's trunk offers the only threat to the serenity of the moment, and two forlorn toddlers are on the spot to provide an appeasing straw snack and a hug-on-the-trunk for this kid's-bestfriend. To appreciate such a bucolic natural fantasy is to remember that the natural world is indeed a gigantic living thing worthy of love.