Kenjiro Okazaki

A twilight

It is a great honor for me to be able to give this talk at Anthroposophical Society today. I thank you for the opportunity. I am basically an artist, though in parallel to my artistic activities, I have thought and written about things around art so I’m also regarded often as a critic. But my concern is art, and my interest in culture in general is only an extension of this primary focus.

However, if one attempted to understand the shifts that occurred in modern art, its background obviously concerns culture in general. When a big change occurs in the fine arts, it is always the case that this change cannot be comprehended as a development that pertains strictly to art. For instance, the emergence of abstract art represents one of the biggest shifts in art in the Twentieth Century. But the shift of cognition underlying abstract art had already taken place in the nineteenth century. Abstract art corresponds to the core problematics of what is broadly called “Modernism.”

Based on these ideas, I curated an exhibition from April to June this year, at the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, which reconsidered the emergence and development of Abstract Art.〝Abstract-Art-As-Impact〟(抽象の力) . A part of what I thought in connection to this exhibition is written in the text I’ve handed out so I’d be grateful if you could read it.

The exhibition was organized based on the thesis that the premise for the emergence of abstract art lay in the doubt towards grasping something through its visual representation. This suspicion towards the visible, so to speak, has three aspects:

A visual image represents something merely through convention which is itself limited to a specific tradition or region. If the expressive form or style differ, the represented image also changes. A singular visual image cannot represent the real figure of an object. The figure itself is constantly changing and never stable. The exterior appearance does not represent the reality of an object. The similarity in shape does not suggest identity of character. Dolphins and sharks look alike, but as species, dolphins are closer to hippopotamus. 1. is the awareness that what is represented is reduced to a method pertaining to a particular culture; 2. is the awareness of a radical increase in observable data brought about by shifts in technology; and 3. is about the transformation or evolution of scientific cognition. These all reflect structural shifts in culture that occurred in modernity.

The late nineteenth century development in art from Realism to Impressionism corresponded precisely to such shifts of cognition. This was already apparent in the works of Turner or Constable. The poet Rimbaud and Cezanne, who was the same age as Rimbaud, gave a name to the experience of intensity that goes beyond the senses to grasp an object in a direct manner: “sensation.” As is well known, correspondence was a phenomenon where individual senses resonated together despite their differences, forming a singular, holistic experience. The search for this immediate experience was already of interest to artists around the world by the end of the nineteenth century. The logical basis of abstract art is located here.