Tuesday, January 28, 2020


 TANTRA AND AUTHENTICITY

I was eighteen when I went up to university to read for a degree in Philosophy and Psychology, and in the preceding months I had made my way through a preparatory reading list. Insensitive to the strengths of logical positivism and behaviourism, I found the suggested books disappointingly dry and pragmatic in the light of my interest in Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Freud, and Jung, and the first lectures confirmed my disillusion. I lasted perhaps two weeks at what was then known as ‘PPP’ (I had paid no attention at all to the prospect of the third ‘P’, which was physiology) before I requested a transfer to Oriental Studies. After a brief chat with my college ‘Moral Tutor’, who advised me cheerfully not to ‘go native’, I went to the Oriental Institute for another short interview. Academic life was relatively informal and relaxed in those days, and I was admitted without difficulty to the degree course in Sanskrit and Pali. As I recall, only two other students had enrolled that year, so I imagine that the authorities were happy enough to swell their number, if only by one. In retrospect, this was somewhat surprising. Other than a keen interest in Buddhism and Hinduism, I was poorly equipped to deal with the rigours of a degree that focussed on the intricacies of classical languages that were unknown to me.

It was not long before a brown paper package arrived from John Sandoe’s bookshop in Chelsea, which enclosed a postcard from a family friend, a very cosmopolitan Italian. He had heard, he said, that I was now reading Oriental Studies, and he was sending two books that he thought I might enjoy. The first was a Chinese esoteric text, ‘The Secret of the Golden Flower’, with a long introduction by Carl Jung; the other was ‘Tantra Art’ by Ajit Mookerjee. It was one of those oddly memorable presents that is never forgotten, and both publications were to become significant, perhaps especially the book on Tantra, which is substantial and full of compelling illustrations. I have been fascinated by Tantric art ever since. I liked the cosmic and metaphysical diagrams, the pictures of chakras, and the colourful gods; in short, I was drawn to a deeply seductive and unfamiliar form of spirituality.

Just before Christmas last year another unexpected gift arrived in the post. It was a beautifully produced catalogue of an exhibition of Indian Tantric and Jain art at Joost van den Bergh’s gallery in London, and it gave me occasion to reflect on why my interest in the subject has lasted for half a century, and how it led to the acquisition of a number of Tantric and other sketches, drawings, manuscripts, and bronzes, some of them quite similar to those in Joost van den Bergh’s show. Mine are not all of high quality, which raised another question. Although I would probably buy fine examples if I had the means to do so, I find myself content with what I have - so why isn’t the difference more important?

It has much to do with their blend of exoticism and authenticity. I like the artefacts if they’re worn or repaired, even if they’re fragments, and I’m not especially concerned if I don’t know exactly what their symbolism means. In other words, my interest is neither that of a scholar nor of a connoisseur. I appreciate their original usefulness and enjoy knowing that they served specific purposes that were related to strange metaphysical views of life. In that light, modern copies - and particularly fakes - have little appeal. Before I learnt where to acquire older work inexpensively, I occasionally bought more recent pieces, but something about them bothered me, and I eventually concluded that this was because I suspected that the maker’s motives, if not his or her techniques, had almost certainly changed. In time, after I had already accumulated some experience and a number of interesting old Tantric and ritual drawings, I was caught out when I purchased one or two fake Tantric diagrams, which had been drawn and painted on old paper. It was then that I realised quite clearly that what was most important to me was authenticity of belief.

Romanticism and much of Modernism bestowed great significance on what was considered to be authentic and pure, but today, when doubt and scepticism are culturally dominant, the ‘authentic’ has become a hybrid that often embodies clashing or contradictory qualities. This is not unwelcome, if only because old-fashioned 'authenticity’ was usually coloured with essentialism, nostalgia, idealism, or exotic ‘otherness’, but in these ‘post-truth’ days lies and fakes are often cynically flaunted, which is even less tolerable. One constant remains, however. With regard to matters of financial value, the question of authenticity or genuineness is predictably fundamental. Walter Benjamin’s ‘aura’, art’s approximation to a magical or supernatural force, may have diminished in the ‘Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, but the market has ensured that it hasn’t disappeared.    

I was probably drawn to Indian culture - and to Romantic notions of authenticity -  predominantly because of the countercultural spirit of the 1960s, which is when I first began to learn about them. I found it inspiring that there seemed to be an abundance of unorthodox ideas, structures, and strategies that offered liberation or fulfilment; Tantra and many other such paths were among them. Today, in my maturity and in a world of increasing anxiety and homogeneity, that promise has gone. The loss makes it even more alluring, but it has to be admitted that Tantra’s exoticism, as evocative in its associations as good joss-sticks or incense, undoubtedly accounts for much of its charm. I now wonder, with unwelcome doubt, if I would feel the same way about Tantric and other ritual artefacts if they were the fruits of my own inherited culture, or if a taste for such things suddenly became widespread and mainstream. Perhaps only formal quality and excellence would keep my interest alive, and I'd turn into a serious collector or true aesthete.


https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/tantra-enlightenment-revolution
https://www.joostvandenbergh.com/perfect-presence

Saturday, January 4, 2020

Rengetsu


An expert on Francisco Goya recently claimed that much of his accepted work was actually painted by helpers, pointing out, perhaps unnecessarily, that the value of an object collapses when it turns out to be by an assistant. ‘Artists in the shadow of a great master (can) illustrate his imagery, his style, his handling of paint, but the work is not infused with the unique individuality and strength of the original creator’, she said. This latter statement is rather more debatable than the first, and when I read it I was reminded of other ways of looking at the issue of authenticity, and of how I began to learn something about the work of the well-known Japanese poet, potter and calligrapher, Otagaki Rengetsu.

Some time ago, while browsing among  Japanese ceramics on an auction site, I came across a small jar that caught my eye. Coarsely made, one side was covered with a thick black glaze; the other was left raw, incised with an unidentified poem. The auction description said that the piece was old, but that it wasn’t made by Otagaki Rengetsu, whose style it resembled. It sold for far more than the estimate. A few weeks later it reappeared, so I deduced that either the buyer hadn’t paid or had returned it. The jar didn’t sell at the second attempt, but on the third time of asking it did, at a fraction of the price realised on the first occasion. This interested me, both because I liked the jar very much and because I couldn’t quite understand what was going on.

I began to do a little research on Rengetsu, and I soon discovered that she was a nun who had lived and worked near Kyoto during the second half of the 19th century.  Even to my untrained eye, I could see that the style and quality of the ceramics attributed to her varied dramatically, as did their value, but it seemed almost impossible to be sure what was authentic and - as often is the case with Japanese ceramics - what was ‘good’ and what was ‘indifferent’. As I kept on looking, regularly asking for information from dealers and sellers, occasionally buying small pieces, I slowly began to grasp what was going on. I found that there are many modern copies of her work, most of them tributes to Rengetsu’s  style and sensibility. There are also copies made in her own lifetime, collaborations with other ceramicists and assistants,  pieces made by assistants (who, with her permission, continued to sign their work with her name after her death), and , of course, her own productions, which range from quick and careless to the considered and accomplished.  Rengetsu lived until she was elderly, working constantly at her poetry, ceramics, calligraphy, and painting, and it is conjectured that she made about 50,000 pieces during her lifetime, so their quality is naturally inconsistent. Although one is fairly soon able to distinguish what are probably her best works from the rest, it is prudent to assume that there is almost always an element of ambiguity in attributions, and that it is appropriate to accept this in the same spirit as an appreciation of Japanese ‘kintsugi’, the gold-lacquered repairs that add to the beauty of so many broken or fractured pots. The contrast between refinement and haste, grace and ugliness, ubiquity and scarceness - all these oppositions are part of the appeal of Rengetsu’s work.

 Rengetsu, a Buddhist name that can be translated as ‘Lotus Moon’, was the daughter of a courtesan and a nobleman.  Adopted as a child by the Otagaki family, she was taught martial arts, literature, calligraphy, dancing, flower arranging, and the tea ceremony. Reputed to have been unusually beautiful, she married twice and had several children, all of whom died young. Following the death of her second husband Rengetsu became a Buddhist nun, kept moving home, and in old age settled permanently in a small tea hut in the grounds of a temple in Kyoto. After her ordination it became necessary to earn her own living,  so she took up pottery, deciding to produce inexpensive pieces that would be inscribed with her own ‘waka’ poetry.  It has been said that during Rengetsu’s lifetime they became so popular that most households in Kyoto owned examples of her work.

On her own admission, Rengetsu’s ceramics are rough and unskilled, but her poetry and calligraphy are sensitive and eloquent. The pots were made in the spirit of ‘wabi sabi’, a Japanese concept of beauty that alludes to the imperfect, impermanent and incomplete; in contrast, her calligraphy, which is found on scrolls, ‘tanzaku’, and paintings, is elegant, supple and strong. She wrote in ‘hiragana’, an old script rarely employed or understood today, which in the past was customarily used by women and less commonly by men. Similarly, although Rengetsu made cups and bottles for drinking ‘sake’, as well as utensils for the ‘chanoyu’ tea ceremony, most of her ceramics were intended for ‘sencha’, a less ceremonial version of tea drinking, again most often enjoyed by women. Her poems are traditional, self-effacing,  and full of feeling.

Living deep in the mountains
I’ve grown fond of the
solitary sound of the pines,
On days when the wind does not blow
How lonely it is!


I imagine, although this may be fanciful, that Rengetsu’s later years may have had something in common with those of the elderly Japanese woman in A Humble Life, a film by the Russian director, Alexander Sokurov. Umeno Matshueshi  lives alone in an old house in the mountains of Nara, spending her time in silence and equanimity, eating frugally, tending the fire, sewing, and praying. The camera observes her intently, juxtaposing interior mages of the wooden house, chilly and barely lit, with outside views of the garden, clouds, streams, and forest.  At the end of the film the old woman recites her own ‘haiku’ poems about loneliness and loss. A Humble Life is beautiful and dreamlike, its elegiac mood close in tone to the first section of Sokurov’s extraordinary Spiritual Voices: From the Diaries of War, a prolonged visual meditation on a melancholic snowy landscape, overlaid with murmured reflections on the deaths of Mozart and his mother. The film ends, more than five hours later, with brooding views of a dark mountain range on the Afghan border, where bored and anxious Russian soldiers are preparing to return home.


https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/dec/28/goya-paintings-many-not-work-of-spanish-master-studio-assistants
http://rengetsu.org/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01I7ul0iL8Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXJm3qyjVrc