Page 46 - Edo: Art in Japan, 1615–1868

subject) distance the viewer from the object in order to create the contemplative space, so that one
could say that here pictorialization creates for the viewer a distancing rather than a familiarizing effect.
Art, like many other discourses (philosophical, legal, or ethical), introduces a quasi-ontological
divide into reality by what it judges relevant for treatment, which it thereby "ennobles" and elevates
above the rest of common experience, while, conversely, through nontreatment, other wonderful items
are kept ordinary, commonplace, and outside the frame. It would be incorrect to view ukiyoe as a kind
of conscious protest against Nanga by an avant-garde seeking access to the field of art. Yet the fact
remains that it affirmed and celebrated precisely what Nanga denied treatment.
In subject matter, style, execution, and effect, ukiyoe aesthetics stands at the antipode from

the high aesthetics of Nanga. It is about what Nanga is not: city life and street people, commoners in 45
their place in the division of labor, well-known living figures of the cultural demimonde — sumo wrestlers,
courtesans, kabuki actors (see cats. 261, 262). These woodblock prints are not about being in a state
of quietude, which is exaggerated in Nanga pictures through idealization, but about doing and activity,
which the ukiyoe artists emphasize by overdrawing their dynamic sexual and theatrical qualities.
Ukiyoe do not avoid feelings. They often portray passion; they are about sensual pleasure and
the body, not at all about spiritual refinement or the mind. Their colors, ideally absent or subdued in
Nanga, consecrate the realm of the senses, ranging from the pleasing to the sensual and the carnal;
they stand for plain pleasure rather than rarefied enjoyment. Ukiyoe are about actual events — histori-
cal (vendettas), episodical (festivals, celebrations, traveling on the Tôkaidô road), or natural (rain or
snow scenes). They are about human, social practice. Because they have narrative as their essential
ingredient, they do not induce the viewer into contemplation. Instead, they arouse the emotions, elicit-
ing identification with the subjects represented, bringing the viewer closer to the social and emotional
plurality of the real world. These colorful handbills give this world new valence in and for itself by
objectifying it in representation, and by providing it with its own exaggerated nobility separate from

the spiritual world that Nanga art stood for.
Ukiyoe "non-art" was only given membership into the field of art accidentally, and only after
the demise of the Tokugawa period, when ukiyoe prints were discovered by artists in Europe who were
struggling to transform their own art field in the late nineteenth century. Once certified as art by Euro-
peans, the ambiguity that in the past had surrounded the artistic status of Japanese woodblock prints
was removed: these works have come to represent Tokugawa art par excellence — and deservedly
so, for this was the period when commoners put their mark on the world of culture for the first time
in Japanese history.