A week of the arts

Last week DC and I spent a few days in Edinburgh attending various events at the main festival and the fringe. We saw street theatre, Chinese pole work physical theatre depicting aspects of sex, relationship and the AIDS crisis (a very intense and amazing show), an very complex and full clown satire of USA politics, a number of short plays (each nicely put together), Samuel Beckett's Crap's last tape (very good), a viola and piano concert, a shakuhachi concert, and on our first evening an exhibit of work by Sadao Hasegawa with a talk by two academics who have studied his and other's work in the same field. Hasegawa's work is rich and complex and he's known for homoerotic fetish art. To me he exaggerates fetish and indeed desire so as to be so ridiculous it becomes both transparent and transcendent. In this way he shows the deep humanity and connection at the heart of sex. His work draws on various cultural traditions and stories and he blends them in a unique way. And as one of the guys giving the talk pointed out he often sends threads out off the page... As a number of us in the audience noted there's softness in the work beyond the outrageous. A few pictures below:

It was as a result of sharing these with a friend that I got a recommendation to go to see the Making waves woodblock prints exhibition at York. And so DC and I visited that yesterday. Stunning! Such a vast number of exquisite prints, but a few stood out to me as described below:

This print depicts a cat looking out through the window of a courtesan's room at the free birds over Mt. Fuji, to the right is a rinsing bowl and a towel on the sill. I found this such a poignant image. Courtesans were often sold into the sex trade and must have had a harsh life. The bowl and towel allude to this and the cat looking out at free birds seems to mirror the captivity of the courtesans.

By comparison this depiction of a shrine in a snowy landscape has an open fresh feeling in which I can almost feel the cool air and hear the snow and the silence. When I put all the above works together like this I see a search for transcendence and the traps we can fall into.


Staying with landscape the following three prints showing falling water are so powerful in their depiction of the force and scale of the water. Again, to me the final one has a transcendent quality, but maybe that's just because it reminds me of the way I've seen the nineth picture of the ten ox herding pictures, reaching the source, drawn. I'd like to know more about the third print.

 

 

 

The following print is of a folklore character, Kintaro, a heroic boy and his bear. He is shown watching a fight between two mountain spirits. There's a wonderful softness in the bear, a weariness in the boy and to me this is an intimate study in how we humans loose our basic warmth and humanity and make unnecessary war.

For the colour, texture (I can almost feel and smell the cast metal) and composition the following is just delightful. The white and red is wrapping paper:

From Tsukioka Yoshitoshi's One Hundered Aspects of the Moon the following are so intimate and touch our longing deeply:

 The loyal servant watches the princes escape disguised as women, by moonlight.

 An old woman in the moonlight.

 A man drives his boat through high seas in the moonlight.

 That's the leg of a daemon this poor fellow has been wrestling with in the moonlight!

For the power in the fire, the night, the ships and the sea:

 

And for the playfulness and joy of the artist:

All these images require close and careful consideration, they're intimate, display our nature and are immensely skilful. If I had a mind to I could write about sex, spirituality, nature, human nature and so much more that is conveyed by these works. But really they speak for themselves and all I'd be doing is writing my own story. What I admire in the works and in those who have skill in the visual arts is that they take the messy wonder of life and show it for the splendour it wants to be, not divorced from the difficult but not absent. Each of the works above is rich in what is being conveyed, yet succinct. Some are challenging but all sit well with the other art forms DC and I have seen over the past week. One print I didn't photo but which nicely ties the week back to itself was one of a Komusō, a wandering non-monastic lay Buddhist from the warrior-class who were noted for wearing straw basket hats called tengai and playing the shakuhachi. The shakuhachi musician who's concert we attended entered the room wearing traditional costume and a straw hat. And I like that Sadao Hasegawa, a twentieth century Japanese graphic artist, was the link to an exhibition of Edo period woodblock. There were so many more wonderful prints, here are but a few.