Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Fw: H-ASIA: Thursday at AAS: Early Modern Japan Network, Panel II

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----- Original Message -----
From: "Monika Lehner" <monika.lehner@UNIVIE.AC.AT>
To: <H-ASIA@H-NET.MSU.EDU>
Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2013 1:53 PM
Subject: H-ASIA: Thursday at AAS: Early Modern Japan Network, Panel II


> H-ASIA
> February 5, 2013
>
> Thursday at AAS: Early Modern Japan Network, Panel II
> ******************************************************************
> From: "Patrick R. Schwemmer" <pschwemm@Princeton.EDU>
>
> EMJNet at the AAS, San Diego
>
> Once again EMJNet will present two scholarly panels at the AAS Annual
> Meeting in San Diego in addition to sponsoring two more at the main AAS
> meeting itself. We have a good bit to offer, but it is all bunched up on
> Thursday and Friday, so plan to come early!
>
> Overview
>
> Time: Thursday, 1:00 – 5:00 p.m.<x-apple-data-detectors://0>
>
> Place: Edward D
>
>
> Panel II:
>
> Curating Gestures: Performance and Material Culture in Early-Modern Japan.
>
> The subjects and objects of performance studies and art history might seem
> at first glance to be mutually exclusive, but this panel draws on the rich
> early-modern archive to explore performances starring objects, objects
> storing performances, and agents who signify in spaces between subject-
> and object-hood. Screech deepens our understanding of Tokugawa diplomacy,
> expanding in recent scholarship, by introducing an exchange of precious
> objects, many still extant, between Hidetada and King James I of England.
> Feltens, based on Ogata Kōrin's practice of painting on the spot before an
> audience using new media like ceramic surfaces and a combinatory logic of
> cultural cues from traditions like the noh theatre, argues for his
> centrality to period ideas of time and signification. Kanemitsu follows
> itinerant female bards as they change from the storytellers into the story
> told, picking up clues to their social identity from the material culture
> described in their ballads. Schwemmer introduces a previously-unknown
> picture-scroll adaptation of a post-medieval ballad which exorcises the
> violence of peacemaking, sublimating medieval warrior culture at the dawn
> of the Edo order. How do we conceptualize political or other agency in a
> performance studies that includes objects as actors? What does the
> performativity of artistry, curatorship, and exchange, mean for art
> history? We break new methodological ground with reference to bodies both
> animate and inanimate.
>
> Diplomacy and Performance in the Edo Period
>
> Timon Screech, SOAS, University of London
>
> This paper will look at the neglected subject of Edo-period diplomacy.
> While academics no longer call sakoku the defining feature of the Tokugawa
> state, studies of formal Tokugawa international intercourse have only just
> begun to emerge, mostly for the Korean case. Issues of performance and
> display at diplomatic encounters have barely been touched. I will take one
> case study, and lead from that into a wider inspection of the issues. The
> case study is the arrival of representatives of King James I in 1613. He
> dispatched a letter to the 'emperor of Japan' in 1611, which was duly
> delivered to Ieyasu, in retirement at Sunpu, two years later. Ieyasu was
> also given a telescope, probably the first in Asia. The English then went
> to Edo, where they exchanged gifts with Tokugawa Hidetada. Returning to
> Sunpu, they received a shuinjō, then proceeded to Kyoto, where they were
> given five gold screens, reciprocal presents from Ieyasu to the King. The
> whole episode took about a month, but it has never been properly analysed.
> There are scant records of the presents in Japan, but the fate of the
> objects sent to London is clear, and some are extant. The wider issue
> takes us from the performance to its representation. How were
> international acts promoted in public? Paintings and prints of Korean
> retinues have been studied, but what of the European case? I will conclude
> with assessment of important surviving works.
>
> Performance in the Work of Ogata Kōrin—Ceramics and Ink Paintings
>
> Frank Feltens, Columbia University
>
> This paper examines aspects of performance in Ogata Kōrin's
> paintings—largely ignored yet crucial for understanding the oeuvre of this
> important artist and the scene of art production in his time. Performance
> is manifested in Kōrin's work in two ways: through so-called paintings on
> the spot, artistic performances before an audience, and through aspects of
> theatrical performance like noh which permeated the artist's aesthetic
> consciousness. With examples of Kōrin's ink paintings and monochrome
> images which he added to ceramics by his brother Kenzan, I will show that
> in situ performances blurred the boundaries of artistic media and
> emphasized visual experimentation over meaning and representation. Kōrin
> painted both ink paintings and ceramic illustrations before audiences,
> making him the first Japanese painter to use ceramic surfaces in precisely
> the same way as the silk or paper ground of conventional paintings. These
> images in two vastly different genres were produced in a minimum amount of
> time and emphatically spotlighted individual virtuosity. Subsequently, in
> spite of their reduction of form and content, the paintings immediately
> garnered a long-lasting appreciation as collectible manifestations of a
> single occasion, a never-reoccurring point in time. The Edo period
> demonstrated a particular awareness of time which I believe constitutes a
> central aspect of Kōrin's performed paintings. In light of this cultural
> context, I will illustrate how Kōrin used performance as a social tool and
> as a means to disseminate his skills as a painter, while demonstrating how
> performance altered contemporaneous receptions of materials and artworks
> themselves.
>
> In Search of Female Voices
>
> Janice S. Kanemitsu, Cornell University
>
> Described as the narrative origins of jōruri, the late sixteenth-century
> tale of Lady Jōruri describes the romance between the daughter of a
> wealthy lord and the teenage Minamoto no Yoshitsune, a fictionalized
> imagining of the heroic warrior before the Genpei War. Although much light
> has been shed on the identities and careers of jōruri reciters from the
> 1600s onward, both by Tokugawa-period writers and modern scholars, we know
> little about those who initially crafted, disseminated, and revised the
> tale of Lady Joruri. And especially considering the amount of Japanese
> scholarship focused on the Tokugawa-period puppet theater, the lack of
> research into its "origins tale" seems curious. By tracing the flow of and
> ripples in the transmission of this tale and its related narratives,
> including the ballad-drama Eboshi-ori (The Hat Folder), as well as the
> description of objects therein, I hope to trace the voices of female
> storytellers—both the stationary entertainers at the rest stations along
> Eastern Sea Route and the itinerant storytellers—and gauge a possible
> convergence in narrative dissemination and detouring. In the process, I
> hope to clarify a number of questions. How and when did the telling of
> this tale pass from female entertainers to blind monks? Do the different
> versions of the tale allow a profiling of the storytellers? What do the
> descriptions of objects within the narrative(s) teach us about the
> possible producers, mediators, and consumers of the tale? Could the
> character identified as the younger sister of Kamata Masakiyo (former
> vassal of Yoshitsune's father, Yoshitomo), who repeatedly appears in this
> series of related narratives, actually represent a group of female
> storytellers?
>
> The Princeton Sagamikawa Scrolls and the End(s) of the Ballad
>
> Patrick Schwemmer, Princeton University
>
> I have found a previously-unknown illuminated manuscript of the ballad
> (mai/bukyoku) Sagamikawa in Princeton's Firestone Library. Sagamikawa,
> also extant in a few early-seventeenth-century prints, is an exorcism of
> the violence of peacemaking: the archetypal shogun Yoritomo is haunted at
> a ribbon-cutting ceremony by a host of great souls whom his constructions
> have displaced, but his preferment of a good vassal over a bad one
> assuages their anger. Their ghostly laments read like a medley of classic
> sixteenth-century ballads, and so Fujii Natsuko argues convincingly for
> Sagamikawa's exclusion from the ballad canon. But why was such a
> pseudo-ballad written? I argue that this post-ballad ballad represents a
> hitherto-undiscussed stage in the well-known seventeenth-century evolution
> of the genre from oral performance to reading material to narrative
> picture scroll: the demand for ballad-like texts was sometimes met with
> texts that had never been ballads. The Princeton exemplar, the only extant
> manuscript or scroll of Sagamikawa and the only version with painted
> illustrations, embodies the endpoint of this development. Its text shows
> scholasticizing improvements like the addition of exact dates and more
> elegant diction, and its paintings lavish gold leaf, azurite, and
> malachite on masterful compositions in the Tosa style. Finally, its
> calligraphy is in the hand of the Kyoto bookmaker Asakura Jūken (fl. c.
> 1660-1680<tel:1660-1680>), and so I situate it within the
> seventeenth-century Kyoto renaissance described by Pitelka et al: it
> protests the death of the old (dis)order while simultaneously
> participating in the sublimation of medieval warrior culture under the pax
> Tokugawa.
>
>
>
> Respondent: Morgan Pitelka, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
>
> ******************************************************************
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