Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rudolf Arnheim is Professor Emeritus of the Psychology of Art at Harvard University. For many years he was a member of the Psychology Faculty at Sarah Lawrence College, and he spent his last ten academic years at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he now lives.

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This book will be a joy to ramble through for all lovers of Arnheim's work, and indeed for anyone who shares his contagious interest in the order that lies behind art, nature, and human life.

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Parables of Sun Light: Observations on Psychology, the Arts, and the Rest

University of California Press

Since the Soviet rocket circled the moon and returned to the Earth a few days ago, my perception of our celestial satellite is beginning to change. No longer do I see it in a class with the lamp on the ceiling, with places at a distance where I will never go. Now the moon looks like a landmark on the horizon, distant but reachable. A path leads through space to the outer world.

Different ways of viewing hewn stones. "And if thou wilt make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone: for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it" (Exod. 20:25). The stone's geometry can be seen as its nature: it is regular, crystalline, rational. Or, its straightness may denounce the violence of human interference, incompatible with the sacrosanct.

Niels Bohr, speaking about complementarity, is concerned with "two statements that are both true although they contradict each other." Whether this can happen in physics, I do not know; but it cannot happen elsewhere. "Intuition" and "intellect" may be complementary in the sense in which two angles can add up to 180; but they

are not complementary in Bohr's sense, because they do not contradict each other. One can reach the midpoint of a mountain slope by descending from the top or by climbing up from the bottom; but there is no contradiction. Only statements can contradict each other; facts cannot.

On board ship, the rhythmical rocking is perceived as the progress of time. When the boat finally stops, it is as though time is stopping. Later, on land, time seems to stand still until the sense of voyage has been forgotten.

When we visited the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, the guide said, "This gate used to be three hundred years old!" Wood architecture can decay fast and is replaced when needed. The reconstruction of old buildings, so disappointing in the West, is successfully practiced in the East. Taste, style, and the method and criteria of workmanship have changed so little over the centuries that an old building can be remade authentically. Identity is preserved not by the matter of the wood but by shape, once invented and then reembodied from time to time.

Struggling with his l s and r s, the young Japanese insurance agent filled out our application form, describing our house as "wooden dwelling covered with mortal."

The stage of the Kabuki-za Theater in Tokyo occupies the long side of the house. Long and low, it can display crowd action without crowding. Figures can be distanced from each other by generous intervals without losing contact. Even when only one or two actors perform, they do not seem lost, because all distances are in accord with the dimensions of the stage. I saw a prince in a long conversation with the ghost of his dead retainer throughout which the two actors were separated by a distance of about one-third of the stage. They seemed close enough,

and the total expanse looked appropriate, even though the prince was supposed to be held prisoner in a temple.

Sometimes a ceremonious scene fills the entire breadth of the stage, but the stage can also be divided into more than one setting. An interior and an outside garden may be shown in juxtaposition so that the garden is not merely a background espied through a window or door but serves to counterpoint the scene as the coordinated partner of the interior.

Pasternak's novel would be a better book without Dr. Zhivago himself, who is not really made to exist. In a work of art, a figure comes to acquire presence by the function it fulfills. There would be no chess game if the knight were not defined by his moves, the bishop by his. Dr. Zhivago is given no such function. His withholding himself has no effect upon the total setting. In fact, that setting itself is no more than a patchwork of scenesmagnificent scenes sometimes, because Pasternak is a gifted miniaturist. But a collection of scenes is no novel.

The principal failure of the book, however, is the absence of history. Never does his story resound with that most momentous happening of our times. It is as though an American during our Revolution would complain, "All this dreadful shooting, and the brutality, and the waste of perfectly good tea!" The doctor does not measure up to the immensity of the event of which he is condemned to be a part. Not surprisingly, the book finds much success with the kind of liberal who wants freedom but does not quite know what for.

A chess game at the stage of one of its moves illustrates the contention of the psychologist Kurt Lewin that no forces can be active in a given situation other than those contained in it then and there. Knowledge of what hap-

pened before can be illuminating but is not indispensable. The past need not act upon the present.

The impersonation of women by Kabuki actors looks shocking at first. An elderly, paunchy gentleman plays the part of the maiden. The squeaky voice he affects does not sound feminine but like a takeoff. Soon, however, one realizes that these first impressions are misinterpretations, derived from our expectation of an "illusion" style of staging. For us, a young woman on the stage must appear to be a young woman. The Kabuki theater, however, is highly stylized throughout. The male actor does not intend to produce the illusion of a particular woman; rather he represents femininity. Art is creation, not illusion. Baiko, the famous impersonator of women, may be an elderly man, but Matisse and Maillol, creators of lovely female figures, were no more girlish than he. The impersonations of the onna-gata are no more unnatural than the tiny mouths of the courtesans in Utamaro's prints.

Taking your hot bath in a wooden box, you feel at home with the touch of the wood, which is a product of nature like your own skin. The unnaturally hard smoothness of our tubs!

A modern school of flower arrangement (ikebana ) goes far beyond the traditional style by abandoning organic materials and working in metal, glass, and stone. An exhibition of the Sogetsu school of ikebana gave me much to think about. Many of the works were simply what we would call abstract sculpture, made with welding equipment and using various objets trouvs. But by being exhibited in the company of traditional flower arrangements, these new works revealed an unsuspected ancestry.

In the West, abstract art developed from the gradual rarefaction of subject matter. In the East, it derives from three practices of abstract shape: flower arrangement, calligraphy, and the color schemes and textures of ceramic glazes. In consequence, Japanese abstract artists seem to be more at home with the modern media than are their Western colleagues. And the little old ladies in kimono, the devotees of ikebana, did not stop their attention when the exhibition presented them with inorganic displays.

A display of Japanese erotic art, ranging from a powerful twelfth-century scroll (painted, I believe, by the master of the rabbit and frog scroll of the Kozanji Temple in Kyoto) to Utamaro and Hiroshige and their modern imitators. Seeing the detailed representations of the human genitals, I realized how decisively the visual image of any object is shaped for us by the form it acquires through pictorial tradition. The penis was perhaps the only object in the world of which I had not seen such detailed artistic depiction. Suddenly it emerged from a twilight of vagueness and assumed a precise visually defined character and expression, half tree trunk, half serpentsharpened, translated, interpreted.

Because of this transfiguration of the subject matter into artistic form, I felt no trace of smuttiness in these pictures. The ancient scroll, in particular, conveyed a frantic struggle for satisfaction with almost desperate ferocity. The huge genitals portrayed the disproportion of a mind overwhelmed by sex. Proudly equipped with their gigantic members, these men looked absurdly overburdened. And as the tricky males and females grappled with each other, they offered the tragicomic spectacle of Homo sapiens unwisely enslaved by a ridiculous-looking activity.

On an advertising pillar in Fukuoka at night, outlined by neon lights, the large star pattern of a snowflake rotated slowly. What an opportunity for abstract sculpture! I re-

member Henry Moore telling me that safety regulations prohibited him from mounting his sculptures atop the London Time-Life Building on vertical axles, which would have made them mobile.

We say "He kissed her hand," whereas "he kissed her" means that he kissed her mouth. The person is in the face. But, when "he touches her," he may be doing so anywhere on her body. In touching, body meets body. A kiss aims at the core.

In the ideograph for rain (Figure 1) the sky dominates as a detached line, separate from the field on which the drops fall. Children make the same separation when they paint the sky as a blue strip separated from the ground by empty space.

Figure 1

To be pushed and crushed by the hundreds and thousands of persons milling through the National Museum to see the Shosoin Treasures from Nara was a disheveling but heartening experience. The remarkable interest of the common man in these fine works of ancient handicraft!

However, can a single, small object in a mass culture still serve the function of art? Try to get a glimpse of an inlaid box or precious manuscript over several rows of heads while you are shoved past the showcase! Formerly, few persons saw such objects or knew of them. By now, as the privilege is extended to all, nobody can see them. I thought of this also in the Uffizi and the Louvre. The Mona Lisa, although in full sight, is no longer visible, precisely because she can be seen by everyone.

In Yasujiro Ozu's film Ukigusa [Floating Grass ] the theme of restless wandering is represented at a very slow pace, like a heavily grinding wheel loaded with weights. The effect is obtained by carefully composed pictures, static and definitive in aspect. Each speaking actor is so compellingly framed by the walls, lanterns, and flowers of the background that he cannot move and often does not move. Much dialogue is presented in straight frontal shots, the two or three partners appearing singly and successively at the same place and in the same position. Instead of locomotion there is replacement. Picture postcard shots of the harbor and its white lighthouse open the film, and similar empty settings are insisted upon throughout. The immobility of the "floating" world, which causes the tragedy of the story, is conveyed by the restraint of external action.

On the square-shaped No stage the persons not involved in the actionthat is, the musicians and singersare lined up along the sides. Actors also sit frontally or on the side when they are waiting or otherwise quiet. Action, however, is almost always conducted diagonally: then the actors face the corners of the stage, and the spa-

tial axes of the dialogue are at an angle with the basic framework of the square stage. Obliquity expresses action.

Chinese and Japanese poetry must be seen to be understood. A word like the Chinese chu , meaning "a feeling of harmony and friendship," is nothing more than an identifying sound chip, but it is written as a combination of two signs, one standing for person, the other for center or middle. The visual image of the ideograph renders the life-giving service of etymology.

A powerful admonition to us teachers appears in a footnote to an article on the Chinese philosophy of education. In its original, mysterious English: "In a fable about the musical-instrument maker Ta-Sheng, a chapter of the Chuang Tzu, one cannot make a good instrument, one can only discover it. After having been discovered, it is then manufactured, thus the operation is from Nature to Nature, that is, the Nature which is hidden in the prototype. It may be said that this story expresses also the idea of Chinese education."

Gestalt psychologists might refer to the solfeggio way of naming musical sounds, which asserts that the absolute pitch level of a tune does not matter. Do-re-mi means conceiving of musical structure purely in terms of relation.

To express a climax of emotion, the Kabuki actor crosses his eyes and thereby shortens the distance between the pupils. For the viewer this contraction heightens visual

tension, a device related perhaps to the facial expression of the fierce temple guardians in sculpture, whose eye axes converge strongly, concentrating the glance intensely upon a nearby target. In the actor on the stage the convergence of the eyes seems to exclude any focusing upon the outer world and to withdraw attention to the inward experience of passion and thought. Compare this with the Buddha figures, whose eye axes run parallel, bent on the infinite.

In the Kabuki theater, the stage surrounds the audience; in the No theater, the audience surrounds the stage. In Kabuki, the encirclement overwhelms the audience, which sits as though on an island, attacked by the surf of the action. In the No, the audience is gathered around the play as though around a lovely exhibit, to be explored actively.

The visible accesses leading to the stagethe hashigakari of the No and the hana michi of the Kabukiprovide the stage action with arrival and exit, crescendo and decrescendo. They also add time to the play in space.

Two examples of how intimately life and writing are connected in Japan: (1) During a recent devastating typhoon, hundreds of people, among them fifty children, were stranded on a mountain in Nara prefecture. The helicopter flying over Yoshino Mountain noticed the children standing in lines forming the ideograph for "Help!" (2) The ronin , or masterless samurai, who took their famous revenge early in the seventeenth century, were forty-seven in number. But since forty-seven is also the number of the syllables in the syllabary, the ronin in the Kabuki performance of Chushingura carried small wooden tablets, each showing one of the katakana characters. Is this identity of number coincidental? In fact, the full name of the play is Kanadehon Chushingura .

Excerpted from Parables of Sun Light: Observations on Psychology, the Arts, and the Rest by Rudolph Arnheim Copyright 1990 by Rudolph Arnheim. Excerpted by permission.
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