The Jomon Art School
Archaeological relicts form schools - of art and life - that reach across many thousands of years in many parts of the world. When thinking about the Jomon period in Japan, we can imagine an archaeological super-school that embraces three schools:
The School of Living Then This is a school of immense scale and internal diversity, spanning the archipelago of Japan, and thousands of years, from 12,000 to 2,000 B.P. approximately. To place such a large geographical area and long period of time within one school, under the name of Jomon Living Then, is just a matter of convenience. Living then - and there - must have involved a multitude of local and regional traditions that people lived within, mixed, extended, or broke away from. Perhaps there even fusions from one era to another, within what we call the Jomon period.
The Buried School This refers to all those relicts of life - deliberately artistic and otherwise - that have been buried for long periods of time. It does not refer to materials lost and found within the life of a single generation or family or community, although these examples could be seen - mistakenly - as metaphors for the longer-term process. The implications of burial and rediscovery change in complex ways as the chronological and cultural distances become larger and larger.
Earlier peoples of the Jomon period were presumably less visible to their cultural and genetic descendants hundreds of years later in same period, than they are now in the present era of massive earth-moving and systematic excavation. The Buried School began even as the School of Living Then continued, but in the centuries around 2,000 B.P. there does seem to have been a major cultural shift in Japan, marked by the development of what is known now as Yayoi culture. This shift may have have been associated with a more marked loss or forgetting of the Jomon past than in earlier centuries - but what is cause and what is effect is difficult to say.
The Buried School is acknowledged here because we can be fairly sure that most of the Jomon past is still buried - under ground and under water. The forgetting of ancestors does not mean that they have completely ceased to exist. Many kinds of 'burial' can be imagined, and thinking about this can lead to new ways of discovering what was buried and bringing it into our present life.
The School of Living Now Like our ancestors, all of us alive now are living in with some awareness or memory of the past, and some awareness or preconception of the future. We face uncertainties, just as we have always faced uncertainties, and this is an inevitable consequence of being conscious and having memory and imagination. Some uncertainties allow us the pleasures of suspense and mystery, others are sources of anxiety or fear. Living artists can turn to ancient sources for inspiration, and for reassurance that art can be valued in many different ways. There are innumerable different niches for artists and art, when all the dimensions of human existence are considered. Art produced now may somehow survive far into the future, not just in collections and museums, but also in buried schools of the future - 'underground art' in the most literal sense. Buried art is not necessarily dead art - it is only dead if it has disintegrated completely, with no record or physical trace, or if it is not recognised as art, or as the work of human hand, when excavated.
Art will never die! is a motto cherished by many - yet there are also artists who embrace the temporary aspects of life and art. Whatever our philosophy, it is probably more useful to be optimistic than pessimistic, if life and art are valued at all. A fully circular argument can also be made: if art is present in all expressions of human spirit, and human spirit is present in all art, then art and humanity will never die so long as one or the other persists. This argument might appeal to those who recognise the possibility - or inevitability - that all our accumulated efforts will eventually have an audience of nothing but inanimate stones. But what if there is spirit in everything? To imagine that stones are animate is perhaps the ultimate expression of optimism, and this may be related to the possibility that animism is our oldest form of religion.
Despite the uncertainties we face as residents of an overcrowded and damaged planet, losing our living and optimistic spirit is unlikely to be very useful, but losing our egocentric view of the world may be what is most needed - for our own survival. One way of escaping from 'us now' is to explore us in the long and distant past. That is the present author's purpose in developing the Jomon Japan website. Welcome to the Jomon Art School (PJM 3.10.03; revised substantially 25.12.03).
Artists under the influence
See also our notes on past exhibitions.
Sajiro Tanaka was inspired by Jomon pottery in his development as a potter. In an interview for Namazu Net (1999) he notes "...the ideas of transiency are part of Buddhist thought. We often feel that when we see fragments of pottery. Mononoaware (pathos) is not only a feeling of sadness or of melancholy, but because everything in this world is in flux and everything must die, it is an absolute truth."
The fragments recovered by archaeologists are thus meaningful as reminders of the transiency of the whole pot, and the life of the people who used that pot, despite the apparent permanency of the parts (which will also disappear eventually), and despite our own living presence as biological or cultural descendants (our personal egotistic hold on life is transient) (PJM 3/7/03).
The late Okamoto Taro was a popular sculptor and writer inspired by Jomon art. The Okamoto Taro exhibition was a major retrospective event at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (Jan. 2003).
Tatsuzo Shimaoka, is a potter who studied Jomon pottery closely. He refined the technique of rope-impressed inlay for his own purposes, and was recognised as a Living National Treasure in 1996. Modern ceramic artists have also been inspired by clay figurines (dogu) from the Jomon period.
