JК
Dogs and Demons :: Керр Алекс
Страница: 25 из 270That feeling of joy has never faded; the nation never stopped to catch its breath and look back, andthe result is that Japan has become a postindustrial country with pre-industrial goals.
It's a dangerous combination, and the effect is sterility. Drive through the countryside and you can see the sterilization process everywhere, for the damage lies not only in large-scale projects that flatten the curves of beaches and peninsulas but in many an aluminum or asphalt detail: be it a trail in a national park or a humble path through the rice paddies, every track must be paved, lined with concrete borders, and fenced with high chrome railings. To give some sense of the sterility of the new Japanese landscape, here is an image from close to my home: in Kameoka, a walkway goes alongside a pond that used to be the moat of the local castle, and on the other side is a small park that until a few years ago was a shady, grassy hideaway, where people sat on the lawn and boys played soccer. The grass and the shade were hopelessly «messy,» though, so the city recently redid the park, paving over the grass and cutting down the trees. Now few people linger in the park's empty expanse of masonry edged with neat borders of brick and stone. In the middle stands one official cherry tree, with a granite monument in front engraved with calligraphy that reads «Flowers and Greenery.»
Japan's traditional culture sprang from a oneness with nature, but it is sterile industrial surfaces that define modern Japanese life. It's a stark contrast, but a real one. The gap between Japan's traditional image of itself and the modern reality has riven the nation's present-day culture. Artists must make a hard choice: try to re-create a vanished world of bamboo, thatched houses, and temples (but in a cultural context in which sterility rules and all these things have become irrelevant) or go with the times, giving in to dead, flat industrial surfaces. Cut off from the latest trends in Asia or the West, designers find it hard to conceive of natural materials used successfully in a modern way, or of modern designs that blend happily into a natural context. This unresolved cultural conflict is a secret subtext to art and architecture in Japan today.
It is not, of course, only the Japanese who find flat sterile surfaces attractive and kirei. Foreign observers, too, are seduced by the crisp borders, sharp corners, neat railings, and machine-polished textures that define the new Japanese landscape, because, consciously or unconsciously, most of us see such things as embodying the very essence of modernism.
It's a dangerous combination, and the effect is sterility. Drive through the countryside and you can see the sterilization process everywhere, for the damage lies not only in large-scale projects that flatten the curves of beaches and peninsulas but in many an aluminum or asphalt detail: be it a trail in a national park or a humble path through the rice paddies, every track must be paved, lined with concrete borders, and fenced with high chrome railings. To give some sense of the sterility of the new Japanese landscape, here is an image from close to my home: in Kameoka, a walkway goes alongside a pond that used to be the moat of the local castle, and on the other side is a small park that until a few years ago was a shady, grassy hideaway, where people sat on the lawn and boys played soccer. The grass and the shade were hopelessly «messy,» though, so the city recently redid the park, paving over the grass and cutting down the trees. Now few people linger in the park's empty expanse of masonry edged with neat borders of brick and stone. In the middle stands one official cherry tree, with a granite monument in front engraved with calligraphy that reads «Flowers and Greenery.»
Japan's traditional culture sprang from a oneness with nature, but it is sterile industrial surfaces that define modern Japanese life. It's a stark contrast, but a real one. The gap between Japan's traditional image of itself and the modern reality has riven the nation's present-day culture. Artists must make a hard choice: try to re-create a vanished world of bamboo, thatched houses, and temples (but in a cultural context in which sterility rules and all these things have become irrelevant) or go with the times, giving in to dead, flat industrial surfaces. Cut off from the latest trends in Asia or the West, designers find it hard to conceive of natural materials used successfully in a modern way, or of modern designs that blend happily into a natural context. This unresolved cultural conflict is a secret subtext to art and architecture in Japan today.
It is not, of course, only the Japanese who find flat sterile surfaces attractive and kirei. Foreign observers, too, are seduced by the crisp borders, sharp corners, neat railings, and machine-polished textures that define the new Japanese landscape, because, consciously or unconsciously, most of us see such things as embodying the very essence of modernism.