Center for Chinese Studies UCB, talk, Tues Sept. 27. 1995
I'm here to talk abt methodological issues, as I see them, raised by directions taken in Chinese painting studies of recent times. I've written out a kind of text, very quickly, as fast as I could type; no less rambling for being written down.
Let me begin by talking abt where I see myself going in my own research and writing. Some of you heard series of three lectures at UAM--representations of women in late Ch. ptg. I've recently prepared another, which I'll give on Oct. 14 in other CCS series (Friday lectures.) Both deal with bodies or groups of Ch ptgs that don't fit into standard accounts of the subject, accounts that are based heavily on Chinese textual sources. Almost everything I've been doing for some years is implicitly or openly a critique of those accounts of Ch ptg, including my own from earlier years, that accept more or less uncritically the versions of it presented in standard Chinese writings. What this means I can't go into here without pictures; but central to it is issue of pictorial representations that are more or less naturalistic, realistic, illusionistic--whatever. These words don't by any means mean the same thing; but can be lumped together for my present purpose as a kind of composite designation of what I'm talking about: Ptg that represents, somehow persuading us that it's "true to outer reality," showing us what the thing or scene really looks like. Chinese turn against this powerfully in their theoretical writings--refer to it as hsing-ssu or "form-likeness": which comes to be a pejorative term from at least the 14th century on. Looked on as low-class, philistine criterion for judging art. In recent western discussions of art we can find a curiously similar phenomenon: what was once an acceptable concept, "truth to nature" or "truth to outer reality", now not only questioned but denied as a workable idea--nothing is more unacceptable in recent discourses on art than that; kind of taboo topic. But I want nonetheless to make it central to my talk today.
In context of Ch. ptg, means (among other things) representations that don't emphasize hand or handwriting of indiv. master ("brushwork") , or include allusions to past styles in the ptg (giving it an art-historical character), or otherwise adopt one or another of the devices that serve to infuse high-culture values into work. I find myself more and more drawn to ptgs that implicitly (not explicitly--artists who do this kind of ptg are typically voiceless) implicitly reject the whole aesthetic system of literati or scholar-amateur ptg, pictures that are meant to be read & appreciated & used as pictures, as satisfying representations of their subjects, and that consequently are condemned & ignored & virtually expunged from "official" versions of Ch ptg--works by So. Sung acad. masters, certain Ming artists including those of late Ming Suchou, certain works of 17-18 c. that incorporate elements of western illusionism. (My preoccupation with the anti-representational bias of the literati, and with the excluded areas of Ch. ptg., began in my Norton Lectures fifteen years ago; I've been struggling with it ever since, and taking some flak from colleagues for it, especially Chinese.)
Now we get to crux. When we speak of "representation," term used these days (for instance in campus journal of that name) for literary, pictorial, even musical representations. (Trendy people hyphenate etc.) Although these dif. kinds of representation are sometimes treated as though they raise similar problems, really profoundly different. Possibility of illusionism--picture that persuades it's "like real thing," "like image in mirror" etc. more present in visual arts than in literary, where whole notion of "representing" thing or event in words raises big problems. In old-fashioned, somewhat discredited version, picture could be more or less truthful to nature, could approach status of photograph, i.e. as a seemingly "objective" rendering of what's out there before your eyes. Argument made that invention of photography coopted this function of ptg, made it pointless--photograph could do it better. Svetlane Alpers deals with 17th cent. manifestations--use of camera obscura in Dutch ptg or Canaletto etc. Music somewhere in between: if composer chooses to "represent" bird-calls, say (as 18c French composer did), we could presumably determine by computer or otherwise whether he had "got it right," or how right. Or Honegger, "Pacific 231"--or (moving away from "representation") Chopin in "Raindrop Prelude" or Richard Strauss or Berlioz, program music--etc. Electronic recording of course equiv. of photograph: "true" representation. 18th cent. composer made series of little tunes you could play on your recorder to teach to your finch. Now would play record. Nothing quite like this in literary "representation"--something in poetry or prose may seem "true" or "right" to us, but this dif. matter. Also, of course, question of objective truth in writing history (which I gather is becoming a discussable issue again.) At conference on sacred mts in China, one scholar (etc.)
In spite of these differences between basic nature of representation in different media, writers on pictorial art today (who would like us to call it "visual culture") try to persuade us that problems in pictorial art not essentially different from those in literature; all essentially matter of convention, like linguistic conventions, arbitrary and culturally-conditioned system of signs, one of which corresponds as well as any other with "outer reality". (I know perfectly well the objections to the terms I'm using; but don't want, for now, to be prevented or intimidated by that from using them.) Powerful argument made by dominant theorists that whole idea of "truthful" representation misdirected; illusionism purely another cultural convention, etc. I have on other occasions made arguments for why I think this doesn't work. Don't mean to do that today; will only say that the whole notion seems to me loony, leave it at that.
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