Art Swap 2013: Japanese Calligraphy

Every Monday for the rest of the year I’ll be highlighting a different project from Art Swap 2013. Interested in joining next year’s fun? Post in the comments section, or e-mail ianmrogers[at]hotmail[dot]com. 

 I didn’t make this – Yukichi Fukuzawa did.

I’d originally planned on writing a short story for the Art Swap; but wouldn’t it have been more fun to try something new? 

Japanese calligraphy, or shodō, is a Japanese art form dating back over 1600 years, though it’s now practiced mostly by elementary school students as a required course. The country is proud of its calligraphic writing: one sees it inscribed on pottery, hung over restaurant doors, framed in museums, and sold on the street.

When I was in Japan, one of my students gave me a calligraphy set and showed me the basics: air-tracing kanji and hiragana letters over paper, pouring the ink, holding the brush straight over the paper, then, and only then, drawing the strokes that make up the letters. The strokes follow a strict order, and you can lose yourself in the pattern.

In calligraphy, setting up one's work space is an integral part of the process. I’m getting there.

But that was three years ago. Earlier this summer I set out with my ink bottle, instruction book, and plenty of scrap paper to learn enough calligraphy to make an Art Swap project. The strict posture and rigid brush handling feel unnatural at first, but your hand soon becomes used to holding the brush while the other steadies the paper, and, with practice, it soon feels like writing anything else.

I did make this one though. Try to guess whose name it is!

My end result was sixteen names written in katakana (Japan’s special alphabet for foreign words and names – think of it like Japanese italics) for everyone in the swap. They weren’t bad for a first try, though the later names were marred by brush flattening and humid working conditions. To help people decipher their altered Japanese names (mine, for example, is pronounced ian rojāsu), I printed up How-To reading guides to accompany each one. (Not to Art Swappers: There’s still a prize out there for anyone who can solve the final quiz!) 

My first attempt at hiragana.

As a bonus, last weekend I made my own 5x7 card for Bennington’s alumni weekend exhibition, to be hung with the rest of the cards in the Deane Carriage Barn in their yearly alumni project. It occurred to me that this was the first creative thing of any kind I’d done for Bennington since graduating, which gave me the pleasant feeling of contributing to a community that, though it now feels decidedly foreign, once meant a lot to me. And if it not for the Art Swap, I doubt I would have done anything at all.

(Special Note for Bennington Alum: If you’re interested in the 5x7 exhibition, the received-by deadline is this Friday, September 6!)

Naoshima

I miss a lot of things, not all of which I realize I miss until I'm around them again and am struck with the familiar pang of memories long past. One of those things is art.


Naoshima island has lots of art, carefully placed on beaches and on cliffs overlooking the Seto Inland Sea or packed haphazardly on the walls of the Art Houses scattered around the island. The Nao Shima sento (public bath) pictured above is a fine example of the massive throw-together of different objects I've always loved (as anyone who's ever been in my bedroom, dorm room, or current apartment can attest) set against the traditional Japanese wooden houses and narrow streets of the island (which, unlike the rest of Japan, was not obliterated during World War II). The inside was decorated with Japanese pulp covers, a blue and white ceramic collage of pearl diving, a desert landscape made up of potted plants, and a really big elephant.


Nao Shima would have nothing to offer except old houses and fantastic views had Japanese architect Tadao Ando and a handful of others not brought contemporary art and architecture to the island, with the end result being creativity blended with the natural environment unlike anyplace else I've seen in Japan.




We rode rented bicycles around the island, stopping at oceanfront fields to gleefully view sculptures and statues from all angles, then rush on to the next stone pillar or severed boat sculpture. We toured bizarre art houses ranging from temples with rock gardens and scattered flowers to clapboard structures with digital numbers counting down and waterfalls painted on dark blue walls. There was so much to see, and all of it was spread around the island in a place where people lived and worked, not roped off or into bright o-miyage-crammed tourism zones.



The greatest place we visited was Ando's Benesse House, the island's biggest museum and main attraction. Besides the awesome things inside (including a ring of Ultraman action figures and an ant farm made up of sand painted up with the flags of the world), Ando's architecture blends the concrete building with the natural arc and grassy outline of the surrounding hill. The courtyard above is hung with time-lapse pictures of the sunrise on the Seto Inland Sea, and in the still of the twilight I could see the other stout islands jutting out of the water and the bridge from Honshu to Shikoku stretching out over the horizon. I had not expected to feel this way, but the scene brought me back four years and across half a world to a hill in southwestern Vermont where the Green Mountains jutted above the tall cedar walls of the art studios, a rusty diving board stood guard in a forest grove, the occasional hovercraft lumbered across the lawn, and ceramic sea creatures rested on the shores of a peaceful, reed-filled pond.

That any place could remove me so completely from the mundane daily struggles of the post-college abyss is a testament to its power. The only thing left is not to forget.

Shameless Bennington Self-Promotion

I recently had an urge to update my contact information on the Bennington Alumni website, and requested a copy of the Alumni Magazine. (Thanks, Dorothy.) Aside from one of Steven's essays on Marlene Dietrich and a few other interesting articles, the magazine was plagued by the usual shameless requests for donations disguised as inspirational banners. One article that I found equally ludicrous was a report on student house renovations, which contained some egregiously poor attempts to describe the character of each house. I'm reposting some of the most ridiculous Facts here:

Kilpatrick
Fact: The house is known for hosting several of the largest annual parties on campus.
This is a really nice way of saying that Kilpat (for only Liz Coleman and the Alumni Magazine refer to the house by its full name) had the honor of hosting the Dress to Get Laid Party, celebrating the day when Bennington upperclassmen can have sex with freshmen every October 1st, debauching the campus every St. Kilpats Day, rigging a bathroom soap dispenser to serve alcohol, and filling a kiddee pool in the common room to use as a skeezy hottub in addition to countless other infamies I'm not even aware of.

Fels
Fact: Has its own washer and dryer and one of the newest kitchens on campus.
This is the most useless fact I could possibly think of to describe a Bennington house. Is Fels really so uninteresting that it has to be described in terms of its appliances?

McCullough
Fact: According to house chairs, McCullough has a very strong house community with an emphasis on food and spontaneity. House members provide a great deal of support for one another.
A contradiction of terms, a sentence that begins with "According to..." can hardly be considered as fact. Poor editing aside, "support" in this sentence actually refers to McCullough residents lending their +10 mana counters when their housemates encounter wandering bands of orcs during Larping tournaments.

Leigh
Fact: The Bennington Free Press says of Coffee Hours at Leigh that "no one knows exactly what goes on here, but everyone wants to be a part of it."
I find this hard to believe, and am pained that this was the best they could come up with for my former residence.

Dewey
Fact: Named after John Dewey, one of the fathers of the progressive education ideals that Bennington was based on.
Dewey is such a cesspool that the writer has decided to retreat behind historical detail rather than risk disgusting everyone with an accurate description.

Finally, last and certainly least:

Wooley
Fact: Legend has it that Bob Dylan once hung out in one of the rooms of the house after he performed at Bennington.
I think you mean "fucked a girl in one of the rooms of the house," yes?

For Steven

Steven Bach used to start each Monday screenwriting class by asking us what movies we’d seen over the weekend. He’d go around the table asking everyone, no matter how much work he’d assigned for that day; and sometimes one response would provoke him into a story about the film in question or someone he knew in the movie business that would hold us all in silent attention until that final denouement when he’d break the silence with: “So Harry, what’d you see?” Always the showman, when Steven spoke the subject matter always came alive. Whether he was describing Romeo and Juliet as a play “about two fourteen your old kids who do it,” ruminating on Moses’ speech impediment, or defending the college’s educational philosophies (“You kids don’t realize that most other places are just glorified community colleges compared to Bennington”); we listened.

But it was always the world of old Hollywood that he created most vividly as his passion added a zany realism to a subject that in the wrong hands could become little more than a sequence of names, dates, and deteriorating celluloid. You could almost hear David O Selznick fast-talking his way to the top and see D.W. Griffith peeking down the blouses of the underage girls on set. That was his world, and to sit in a Steven Bach class or to read even a single page of one of his books was to lose yourself in that magic. He knew full well that world was foreign to us and was always asking us questions to probe the extent of the generation gap (“Do you kids know Rita Hayworth?”). Modern Hollywood blockbusters seemed to fill him with confusion and disgust—like when he’d fumblingly refer to The Matrix Overloaded or The Matrix Overboard—though behind those misnomers lay a wisdom about the workings of Hollywood I still don’t understand after six terms of classes and 400 pages of Final Cut.

He spent most days in class tearing into our mistakes and pushing us to create work that could compare to William Goldman’s lyrical terseness or Bud Schulberg’s brutal power. I got that crazy feeling that maybe he really believed in us; and perhaps that’s why I was always trying to impress him and consequently was always so devastated by the poorly-planned scripts riddled with sentimentally clichéd ideas that I’d inevitably turn in. Bennington was a world of impossibly lofty standards for me that all-too often left me ashamed of my work or too embarrassed to even try developing it. But after four years of discouragement, I’ll never forget our Senior Dinner when Steven came up to me in that flamboyant orange ruffled shirt he reserved for social affairs to shake my hand and tell me how much he enjoyed the story I’d presented at the Senior Literature Reading because it had just been so funny. This was a story that had been subsequently rejected by the Interrobang (“Doesn’t fit the style of our publication”) and Silo (“We encourage you to submit again next year”). I had no idea how to respond. A man who had greenlit Woody Allen scripts, shared dinner with Orson Welles, whose vividly intense prose lingered long after I’d moved on, and who I admired more than any other person I’d ever known, liked my writing. I remember being flustered, humbled, surprised, and thanking him in that stuttering manner I adopt in awkward social situations. And that was the last conversation we ever had.

I still don’t know what to make of all that. One of the very few writers who presented his world to me and helped me believe that my dreams were actually within striking distance is gone. I’ll miss you, Steven.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This entry was very difficult for me to write, and though I'd love to record every memory I have of Steven Bach and what he meant to me and all of us at Bennington, I lack the skill or energy necessary for the task. Randall, however, has prepared a wonderfully honest series of essays in his blog, which I encourage you to visit.