The Art & Philosophy of Bonsai

in Art, Nature, Philosophy | January 9th, 2020

We all know what to think of when we hear the term bonsai: dwarf trees. Or so Shinobu Nozaki titled his book, the very first major publication on the subject in English. Dwarf Trees came out in the 1930s, not long after the Japanese art of bonsai started drawing serious international attention. But the art itself goes back as far as the sixth century, when Japanese embassy employees and students of Buddhism returning from sojourns in China brought back all the latest things Chinese, including plants growing in containers. By six or seven centuries later, as scrolls show us today, Japan had taken that horticultural technique and refined it into a practice based on not just miniaturization but proportion, asymmetry, poignancy, and erasure of the artist’s traces, one that produces the kind of trees-in-miniature we recognize as artworks, and even masterworks, today.

It hardly needs saying that bonsai trees don’t take shape by themselves. As the name, which means “tray planting” (盆栽), suggests, a work of bonsai must begin by planting a specimen in a small container. From then on, it demands daily attention in not just the provision of the proper amounts of water and sunlight but also careful trimming and adjustment with trimmers, hooks, wire, and everything else in the bonsai cultivator’s surprisingly large suite of tools.

You can see a Japanese master of the art named Chiako Yamamoto in action in “Bonsai: The Endless Ritual,” the BBC Earth Unplugged video at the top of the post. “Shaping nature in this way demands everlasting devotion without the prospect of completion,” says its narrator, a point underscored by one bonsai under Yamamoto’s care, originally planted by her grandfather over a century ago.

You’ll find even older bonsai at the National Bonsai Museum at the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington D.C. In the video “Bonsai Will Make You a Better Person,” curator Jack Sustic — an American first exposed to bonsai in the military, while stationed in Korea — shows off a Japanese white pine “in training” since the year 1625. That unusual terminology reflects the fact that no work of bonsai even attains a state of completeness. “They’re always growing,” say Sustic. “They’re always changing. It’s never a finished artwork.” In National Geographic’s “American Shokunin” just above, the titular bonsai cultivator (shokunin has a meaning similar to “craftsman” or “artisan”), Japan-trained, Oregon-based Ryan Neil, expands on what bonsai teaches: not just how to artistically grow small trees that resemble big ones, but what it takes to commune with nature and attain mastery.

“A master is somebody who, every single day, tries to pursue perfection at their chosen endeavor,” says Neil. “A master doesn’t retire. A master doesn’t stop. They do it until they’re dead.” And as a work of bonsai literally outlives its creator, the pursuit continues long after they’re dead. The bonsai master must be aware of the aesthetic and philosophical values held by the generations who came before them as well as the generations that will come after. Wabi sabi, as bonsai practitioner Pam Woythal defines it, is “the Japanese art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature, of accepting the natural cycle of growth, decay, and death.” Shibumi (or in its adjectival form shibui) is, in the words of I Am Bonsai’s Jonathan Rodriguez, “the simple subtle details of the subject,” manifest for example in “the apparent simple texture that balances simplicity and complexity.” Looked at correctly, a bonsai tree — leaves, branches, pot, and all — reminds us of the important elements of life and the important elements of art, and of the fact that those elements aren’t as far apart as we assume.

Kintsugi: The Centuries-Old Japanese Craft of Repairing Pottery with Gold & Finding Beauty in Broken Things

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Wabi-Sabi: A Short Film on the Beauty of Traditional Japan

Discover the Japanese Museum Dedicated to Collecting Rocks That Look Like Human Faces

Watch Japanese Woodworking Masters Create Elegant & Elaborate Geometric Patterns with Wood

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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A Brief History of John Baldessari (RIP) Narrated by Tom Waits: A Tribute to the Late “Godfather of Conceptual Art”

in Art | January 6th, 2020

All modern art is conceptual in some way, bound to aesthetic theories and combative manifestoes against complacency. But only in the movement known as capital “C” Conceptual Art do the ideas become more important than the objects. Conceptual Art traces its history to Marcel Duchamp and the Surrealists who declared war on the bourgeois cultural status quo.

Later experimental artists did the same by elevating mass culture to the status of high art: advertising, comic books, Hollywood spectacle, and—in the past twenty-five years or so—the Internet: Pop Art foregrounded concepts over objects by means of pastiche and metacommentary. The work of L.A. artist Ed Ruscha, for example, centers slogans and clichés over ambiguous images that sometimes look like stock desktop backgrounds.

Both Duchamp and Ruscha were influences on American Conceptualist John Baldessari, who passed away yesterday at age 88, leaving behind a legacy as “arguably America’s most influential Conceptual artist,” according to L.A. Times critic Christopher Knight. Born of European parents and raised in Southern California, Baldessari incorporated humor, satire, and Pop Art elements into his work.

He did not begin his career, however, as part of a movement, and he never expected to have much of an audience. In the early sixties, he was teaching high school art in San Diego and felt “totally isolated,” he says in the interview with Knight below. Baldessari resigned himself to a “normal life,” painting when he could on the weekends. These conditions inspired him to “try to figure out what art meant for me, what was the bottom line.”

Baldessari answers the question, to laughs from the audience, with typical laconic wit: “anything you put on canvas is art.” Baldessari reversed Duchamp’s formula. Put a cinderblock in a museum, he says, and it becomes art through context, but put a canvas on the street and it doesn’t become something else. It always retains its status as an art object. Such objects, for Baldessari, served mainly as material platforms for ideas.

“Pictures are not enough, Baldessari seems to suggest,” writes Alex Greenberger in an ARTnews tribute. “Concepts matter equally, if not even more.” Baldessari has been called “the godfather of Conceptual Art” for this insight, says Tom Waits says in his narration of “A Brief History of John Baldessari” at the top. He’s also been called a “master of appropriation” and “Surrealist for the digital age.” He never limited himself to just canvas but worked in almost every medium of visual and textual art.

Those media included credit card and iPhone app design. Art isn’t only material: it is virtual, ephemeral, and disposable. Baldessari demonstrated his own commitment to destroying the past when, in 1970, he burned all of the work he had made between 1953 and 1966 for a conceptual piece called The Cremation Project. But he wasn’t an art world anarchist. As he toyed with and challenged tradition, he also helped instill it.

Baldessari become famous enough to have warranted a guest spot on The Simpsons (and was awarded a National Medal of Arts). He became wealthy enough by far to quit his day job. But he never stopped teaching, from high school to posts at CalArts, UCLA, and UC San Diego. “I’ve taught all my life,” he said in 2003, “Everything from grade school to college to juvenile delinquents.”

We might be inclined to see in his teaching philosophy a key to understanding his conceptual universe: “I set out to right all the things wrong with my own art education. But I found that you can’t really teach art, you can just sort of set the stage for it.”

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Love the Art, Hate the Artist: How to Approach the Art of Disgraced Artists

in Art, Gender, Life | January 3rd, 2020

Hate the sin, never the sinner. — Clarence Darrow

As a culture, we’ve largely stepped away from the sentiment described by the famed lawyer’s 1924 defense of murderers Leopold and Loeb.

Apply it to one of the many male artists whose exalted reputations have been shattered by allegations of sexual impropriety and other ruinous behaviors and you won’t find yourself celebrated for your virtue in the court of public opinion.

But what of those artists’ creative output?

Does that get bundled in with hating both sin and sinner?

It’s a question that historian and former curator Sarah Urist Green is well equipped to tackle.

Green’s PBS Digital Studios web series, The Art Assignment, explores art and art history through the lens of the present.

In the episode titled Hate the Artist, Love the Art, above, Green takes a more temperate approach to the subject than comedian Hannah Gadsby, whose solo show, Nanette, included an incendiary takedown of Picasso:

I hate Picasso. and you can’t make me like him. I know I should be more generous about him too, because he suffered a mental illness. But nobody knows that, because it doesn’t fit with his mythology. Picasso is sold to us as this passionate, tormented, genius, man-ball-sack. But Picasso suffered the mental illness…of misogyny.

Don’t believe me? He said, “Each time I leave a woman, I should burn her. Destroy the woman, you destroy the past she represents.” Cool guy. The greatest artist of the 20th century. Picasso fucked an underage girl. That’s it for me, not interested.

But Cubism! He made it! Marie-Thérèse Walter, she was 17 when they met: underage. Picasso, he was 42, at the height of his career. Does it matter? It actually does matter. But as Picasso said, “It was perfect—I was in my prime, she was in her prime.” I probably read that when I was 17. Do you know how grim that was?

Grim.

A different sort of grim than the horrors he depicted in Guernica, still an incredibly potent condemnation of the human cost of war.

Should exemptions be made, then, for works of great genius or lasting social import?

Up to you, says Green, advocating that every viewer should pause to consider the ripples caused by their continued embrace of a disgraced artist.

But what if we don’t know that the artist’s been disgraced?

That seems unlikely as curators scramble to acknowledge the offender’s transgressions on gallery cards, and emergent artists attempt to set the record straight with response pieces displayed in proximity.

Green notes that even without such overt cues, it’s very difficult to get a “pure” reading of an established artist’s work.

Anything we may have gleaned about the artist’s personal conduct, whether good or ill, proven, unproven, or disproven, factors into the way we experience that artist’s work. The source can be a paper of record, the Internet, a guest at a party repeating a personal anecdote…

It can also be painful to relinquish our youthful favorites’ hold on us, especially when the attachment was formed of our own free will.

What would Hannah Gadsby say to my reluctance to sever ties completely with Gauguin’s Tahiti paintings, encountered for the first time when I was approximately the same age as the brown-skinned teenaged muses he painted and took to bed?

The behavior that was once framed as evidence of an artistic spirit that could not be fettered by societal expectations, seems beyond justification today. Still, it’s unlikely Gauguin will be banished from major collections, or for that matter, the history of art, any time soon.

As Julia Halperin, executive editor of Artnet News observed shortly after Nanette became a viral sensation:

A Netflix comedy special is not going to compel museums to throw out their Picassos. Nor should they! You can’t tell the story of 20th-century art without him…. Although glossing over, whitewashing, or shoe-horning stories of Picasso’s abuse into a comfortable narrative about passionate genius may be useful to maintain his market value and his bankability as a tourist attraction, it also does everyone a disservice… we can understand Picasso’s contributions better if we can hold these two seemingly incompatible truths in our minds at once. It’s not as uplifting as a straightforward tale about a visionary creative whose flaws were only in service to its genius. But it is more honest—and it might even help us understand the evolution of our own culture, and how we got to where we are today, a lot better.

Green provides a list of questions that can help individual viewers who are reevaluating the output of “problematic” artists:

Is the work a collaborative effort?

Does the work reflect the value system of the offender?

Are we to apply the same standard to the work of scientists whose conduct is similarly offensive?

Who suffers when the offender’s work remains accessible?

Who suffers when the offender’s work is erased?

Who reaps the reward of our continued attention?

As Green points out, the shades of grey are many, though the choice of whether to entertain those shades varies from individual to individual.

Readers, where do you fall in this ever-evolving debate. Is there an artist you have sworn off of, entirely or in part? Tell us who and why in the comments.

Watch more episodes of the Art Assignment here.

When The Surrealists Expelled Salvador Dalí for “the Glorification of Hitlerian Fascism” (1934)

The Gestapo Points to Guernica and Asks Picasso, “Did You Do This?;” Picasso Replies “No, You Did!”

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Join her in NYC on Monday, January 6 when her monthly book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domaincelebrates Cape-Coddities (1920) by Roger Livingston Scaife. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 11 ) |

How Cartoons Saved R. Crumb’s Life, and How R. Crumb Turned Cartoons into an Art Form (NSFW)

in Art, Comics/Cartoons | January 2nd, 2020

Robert Crumb, the iconic, founding figure of the underground and alternative comix scene, began his career as the ultimate outsider. “I was so alienated when I was young that drawing was like my only connection to society,” he says in the video interview above from the Louisiana Channel, “the only thing I could see that was gonna save me from a really dismal fate of god knows what.” He had no social skills and no other abilities to speak of. He was debilitated by self-doubt yet inflated by the buoyant ego of the lone artist determined to “make [his] mark on the world.”

What Crumb calls his “two sides” have never been reconciled, although he has left behind certain racial caricatures in more recent work and he claims, in a recent interview with Nadja Sayej, that he is “no longer a slave to a raging libido.” But his shameless indulgence in exaggerated stereotypes was always a blunt instrument that both pulled readers in and pushed them away from the more subtle satire and pathos in his comics. As an editor at a London gallery put it, “there’s something irreconcilable at the heart of the work that doesn’t resolve towards a single vision of beauty.”

Crumb’s comics are “about seduction and repulsion. You are drawn into the work and you are judging yourself as you look at it.” We are also judging the artist. Crumb has been called racist, misogynist, a bitter, hateful loner with a nihilistic streak five miles wide. These descriptions happen to apply to a significant number of convicted and potential terrorist killers these days, the very people we seek to marginalize from public discourse with hate speech laws and public shaming and shunning.

As you might expect, Crumb has no tolerance for such things as fall under the heading “political correctness.” Suppressing art that offends “can even lead to censorial policies in the government,” he says, defending the rights of the artist to say whatever they deem necessary. His work, he says, even at its most extreme, was necessary. It saved his life. “The artwork I did that used those images and expressed those kinds of feelings, I stand by it…. I still think that’s something that needed to be said and needed to be done…. It probably hurts some people’s feelings to see those images, but still, I had to put it out there.”

Some of Crumb’s imagery is hard to defend, such as his use of blackface imagery from the 1920s and 30s, and his sometimes violent objectification of women, from the point of view of characters nearly impossible to separate from their creator. But why, if his art is confessional, should he not confess? In so doing, he reveals not only his own teeming desires. Crumb illustrated the male hippie unconscious as well as his own.

After starting a relative mass movement in underground comix in the 60s (and becoming a reluctant legend for “Keep on Truckin’”), he says, “I decided I don’t want to be America’s best-loved hippie cartoonist. I don’t want that role. So I’ll just be honest about who I am, and the weirdness, and take my chances.” Crumb’s candor happened to lay bare many of the attitudes he observed not only in himself but in the denizens of the San Francisco scene, as he told Jacques Hyzagi in a very revealing Observer interview (which prompted a very bitter feud between the two).

The hippie culture of Haight-Ashbury, where it all started for me, was full of men doing nothing all day and expecting women to bring them food. The ‘chick’ had to provide a home for them, cook meals for them, even pay the rent. It was still very much ingrained from the earlier patriarchal mentality of our fathers, except that our fathers, generally, were providers. Free love meant free sex and food for men. Sure, women enjoyed it, too, and had a lot of sex, but then they served men. Even among left-wing political groups, women were always relegated to secretarial, menial jobs. We were all on LSD, so it took a few years for the smoke to dissipate and for women to realize what a raw deal they were getting with the ne’er-do-well hippie male.

Do we see in Crumb’s work, in which burly, huge-calved women dominate weak-willed men, a celebration or a condemnation of these attitudes? We can say, “it’s complicated,” which sounds like a cop out, or we can go back to the source. Hear Crumb himself explain his work, as a product of two warring selves and a need to draw himself into the world without holding anything back. He showed other artists and writers who were also “born weird,” as he says, that they could tell their stories entirely their own way too.

Underground Cartoonist Robert Crumb Creates an Illustrated Introduction to Franz Kafka’s Life and Work

The Confessions of Robert Crumb: A Portrait Scripted by the Underground Comics Legend Himself (1987)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

RIP Syd Mead: Revisit the Life and & Art of the Designer Behind Blade Runner, Alien & More

in Art, Film, Sci Fi | January 1st, 2020

Has any year ever sounded more futuristic than 2020, the one we all live in as of today? 2019 came close, mostly because it was the year in which Blade Runner took place. Though initially a flop, Ridley Scott’s cinematic adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? soon became a contender for the most influential vision of the future ever put on screen. This owes not just to the directorial skill of Scott himself, but also of the many collaborators who set their imaginations to the year 2019 — then nearly 40 years in the future — along with him. Among the most important was concept artist Syd Mead, who died this past Monday at the age of 86.

Mead credited as an inspiration for his own Blade Runner work Métal hurlant, the 1970s French comic book that brought attention to the even more deeply influential art of Moebius. But his own career as an illustrator and industrial designer, already far along by that time, had also prepared him thoroughly for the job. That career began in 1959 with Mead’s recruitment to the Ford Motor Company’s Advanced Styling Studio, where he spent two years thinking up the cars of the future. He then illustrated publications for other corporations before launching his own design firm in 1970, working with European clients including Philips and Intercontinental Hotels, and later nearly every Japanese corporation that mattered, from Sony, Bandai, and NHK to Minolta, Dentsu, and Honda.

That was in the early 1980s, when we all looked upon Japan as a vision of the future. To an extent we still do, not least because of the Japanified future envisioned in Blade Runner — as well as the one envisioned in its recent sequel Blade Runner 2046, also a beneficiary of Mead’s contributions. No matter how much Japan fascinated Mead, Japan repaid that fascination tenfold, seeking him out for film and animation projects, putting on shows of his work, and even publishing a digital collection of his art as one of the very first CD-ROMs. (I myself first heard of Mead from Syd Mead’s Terraforming, a Japanese-made video game for the Turbografx-CD that made use of his visuals.) This was perhaps an unexpected development in the life of a kid from Minnesota who spent his youth drawing in solitude, even one who grew up absorbing the sci-fi swashbuckling of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.

But unlike those kitschy, dated worlds of flying cars, gleaming towers, rocketships, robots, Mead created credible, enduring worlds of flying cars, gleaming towers, rocketships, robots. That must owe in part to an instinct, developed through industrial design work, of rooting the fantastical in the possible. A look back at the full scope of his art — which you can glimpse in the trailer for the documentary Visual Futurist: The Life and Art of Syd Mead at the top of the post as well as in the montage video just above — reveals that Mead really believed in the futures he drew. And by having believed in them, he makes us believe in them. The real 2020 may not bring any of the sky-high buildings, impossibly sleek vehicles, or sublimely vast pieces of infrastructure that Mead could render so convincingly. But however the next year — or the next decade, or indeed the next century — does look, it will owe more than a little to the imagination of Syd Mead.

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“The Long Tomorrow”: Discover Mœbius’ Hard-Boiled Detective Comic That Inspired Blade Runner (1975)

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The History of the Fisheye Photo Album Cover

in Art, Music, Photography | December 31st, 2019

Like gothic script in heavy metal, the fisheye album cover photo seems like a naturally occurring feature of certain psychedelic strains of music. But it has a history, as does the fisheye photograph itself. The Vox video above begins in 1906 with Johns Hopkins scientist and inventor Robert Wood, a somewhat eccentric professor of optical physics who wanted to duplicate the way fish see the world: “the circular picture,” he wrote, “would contain everything within an angle of 180 degrees in every direction, i.e. a complete hemisphere.”

Rather than putting them to underwater use, later scientists employed Wood’s ideas in astronomical observation. Their next stop was the professional photography market: the first mass-produced fisheye lens, made by Nikon, cost $27,000 in 1957. From academic journals to the pages of Life magazine: mass media brought fisheye photography into popular culture. An affordable, consumer-grade lens in 1962 brought it within the reach of the masses. For the way it compresses angles, the fisheye lens “was, and always has been, a handy tool to capture tight quarters, as well as huge spaces.”

The fisheye lens suited the Beatles phenomenon perfectly, compressing backstage hallways and stadium-sized crowds into the same hypnotically circular dimensions. “Perhaps its greatest strength was making rock stars appear larger than life.”

The fisheye photo “reflected the trippiness of the psychedelic era.” Although one of the earliest uses on an album cover was Sam Rivers’ Fuschia Swing Song, it soon adorned the Byrds Mr. Tambourine Man and—of course—the cover of Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced. The iconic band photo of the Experience, taken by graphic designer Karl Ferris, inspired hundreds of psychedelic imitators.

Ferris thought of the fisheye photo with reference, again, not to the ocean but the stars: Hendrix’s music, he said, was “so far out that it seemed to come from outer space.” In order to introduce the band to audiences who hadn’t heard of them yet, he conceived of them as a “group traveling through space in a Biosphere on their way to bring their otherworldly space music to earth.” Inseparable from space travel after NASA’s many fisheye photos of the Apollo missions, the fisheye album cover contains entire worlds in a single droplet, and promises to transport us to the outer reaches of sound.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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A Recently-Discovered 44,000-Year-Old Cave Painting Tells the Oldest Known Story

in Art, History | December 31st, 2019

Where did art begin? In a cave, most of us would say — especially those of us who’ve seen Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams — and specifically on the walls of caves, where early humans drew the first representations of landscapes, animals, and themselves. But when did art begin? The answer to that question has proven more subject to revision. The well-known paintings of the Lascaux cave complex in France go back 17,000 years, but the paintings of that same country’s Chauvet cave, the ones Herzog captured in 3D, go back 32,000 years. And just two years ago, Griffith University researchers discovered artwork on a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi that turns out to be about 44,000 years old.

Here on Open Culture we’ve featured the argument that ancient rock-wall art constitutes the earliest form of cinema, to the extent that its unknown painters sought to evoke movement. But cave paintings like the one in Sulawesi’s cave Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4, which you can see in the video above, also shed light on the nature of the earliest known forms of storytelling.

The “fourteen-and-a-half-foot-wide image, painted in dark-red pigment,” writes The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, depicts “about eight tiny bipedal figures, bearing what look to be spears and ropes, bravely hunting the local wild pigs and buffalo.” This first known narrative“tells one of the simplest and most resonant stories we have: a tale of the hunter and the hunted, of small and easily mocked pursuers trying to bring down a scary but vulnerable beast.”

Like other ancient cave art, the painting’s characters are therianthropes, described by the Griffith researchers’ Nature article as “abstract beings that combine qualities of both people and animals, and which arguably communicated narrative fiction of some kind (folklore, religious myths, spiritual beliefs and so on).” Given the apparent importance of their roles in early stories, how much of a stretch would it be to call these figures the first superheroes? “Indeed, the cave painting could be entered as evidence into a key aesthetic and storytelling argument of today — the debate between the paladins of American film, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, and their Marvel Cinematic Universe contemporaries,” writes Gopnik.

If you haven’t followed this struggle for the soul of storytelling in the 21st century, Scorsese wrote a piece in The New York Times claiming that today’s kind of blockbuster superhero picture isn’t cinema, in that it shrinks from “the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.” (“He didn’t say it’s despicable,” Coppola later added, “which I just say it is.”) And yet, as Gopnik puts it, “our oldest picture story seems to belong, whether we want it to or not, more to the Marvel universe than to Marty Scorsese’s.” If we just imagine how those therianthropes — “A human with the strength of a bull! Another with the guile of a crocodile!” — must have thrilled their contemporary viewers, we’ll understand these cave paintings for what they are: early art, early storytelling, early cinema, but above all, early spectacle.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Visual Introduction to Kintsugi, the Japanese Art of Repairing Broken Pottery and Finding Beauty in Imperfection

in Art, Creativity, Psychology | December 30th, 2019

Kintsugi, the Japanese art of joining broken pottery with gleaming seams of gold or silver, creates fine art objects we can see as symbols for the beauty of vulnerability. Surely, these bowls, cups, vases, etc. remind of us Leonard Cohen’s oft-quoted lyric from “Anthem” (“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”) Writer and artist Austin Kleon touches on this same sentiment in a recent post on his blog. “The thing I love the most about Kintsugi is the visible trace of healing and repair—the idea of highlighted, glowing scars.”

Kintsugi, which translates to “golden joinery,” has a history that dates back to the 15th century, as Colin Marshall explained in a previous post here. But it’s fascinating how much this art resonates with our contemporary discourse around trauma and healing.

“We all grow up believing we should emphasize the inherent positives about ourselves,” writes Marshall, “but what if we also emphasized the negatives, the parts we’ve had to work to fix or improve? If we did it just right, would the negatives still look so negative after all?”

A key idea here is “doing it just right.” Kintsugi is not a warts-and-all presentation, but a means of turning brokenness into art, a skillful realization of the Japanese idea of wabi-sabi, the “beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete,” as Leonard Koren writes in Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers. Objects that represent wabi-sabi “may exhibit the effects of accident, like a broken bowl glued back together again.” In kintsugi, those effects are due to the artist’s craft rather than random chance.

When it comes to healing psychic wounds so that they shine like precious metals, there seems to be no one perfect method. But when we’re talking about the artistry of kintsugi, there are some—from the most refined artisanship to less rigorous do-it-yourself techniques—we can all adopt with some success. In the video at the top, learn DIY kintsugi from World Crafted’s Robert Mahar. Further up, we have an intensive, wordless demonstration from professional kintsugi artist Kyoko Ohwaki.

And just above, see psychologist Alexa Altman travel to Japan to learn kintsugi, then make it “accessible” with an explanation of both the physical process of kintsugi and its metaphorical dimensions. As Altman shows, kintsugi can just as well be made from things broken on purpose as by accident. When it comes to the beautifully flawed finished product, however, perhaps how a thing was broken matters far less than the amount of care and skill we use to join it back together.

The Philosophical Appreciation of Rocks in China & Japan: A Short Introduction to an Ancient Tradition

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

The Art & Philosophy of Bonsai

A Brief History of John Baldessari (RIP) Narrated by Tom Waits: A Tribute to the Late “Godfather of Conceptual Art”

Love the Art, Hate the Artist: How to Approach the Art of Disgraced Artists

How Cartoons Saved R. Crumb’s Life, and How R. Crumb Turned Cartoons into an Art Form (NSFW)

RIP Syd Mead: Revisit the Life and & Art of the Designer Behind Blade Runner, Alien & More

The History of the Fisheye Photo Album Cover

A Recently-Discovered 44,000-Year-Old Cave Painting Tells the Oldest Known Story

A Visual Introduction to Kintsugi, the Japanese Art of Repairing Broken Pottery and Finding Beauty in Imperfection

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