In Praise of Shadows

"I like books that try to preserve a sensibility, a moment in history, and Tanizaki definitely does here. He’s writing a little essay—in a kind of a casual newspaper column format—memorialising the world of traditional Japan in the moment that Tokyo is becoming super-modernised. There are trains running, skyscrapers going up, neon signs everywhere. Tanizaki is mourning what has been paved over, which is the old Japanese aesthetic of darkness, of softness, of appreciating the imperfect—rather than the cold, glossy surfaces of industrialized modernity that the West had brought to Japan at that moment. For me, that’s really valuable, because it does preserve a different way of looking at the world. Tanizaki’s idea is that we should look into the shadows instead of pursuing an ever greater light: we don’t need to pursue growth and expansion and profit; we don’t need to pave over the world with glass and steel. Instead, we should be living with what’s already around us and adapting to the ephemerality of life. Tanizaki confronts the same problem that we are now—that the world feels big and confusing and loud and too bright. He wants to retreat, to move to an older sensibility. I’m very sympathetic to that, I find it really appealing. We can’t go back to only having wooden toilets and eating in the dark, but I want to remember the fact that how things are is not the way they always were. I think that’s super valuable, a glimpse of another way of being in the world. Certainly minimalism, or the formal art movement of Minimalism of the 1950s and 1960s, did have roots in Zen. Artists like John Cage and Agnes Martin were among the first American artists to adopt those ideas, through the Japanese professor D T Suzuki, who was teaching at Columbia. There was this moment of transmission, when the ideas of Zen and Japanese Buddhism were coming to the United States for the first significant time. (Although it’s important to note that there was already more East Asian influence in California.) So these artists were literally influenced by Japanese culture, and adopting its ideas as they understood it. “Zen addresses this paradox of absence and presence; it advocates thinking about absence, and thinking about nothingness” But the ‘roots’ question is, again, difficult, because rather than a linear-causal relationship it’s better to say that the ideas of Japanese Buddhism have a lot in common with, or are very sympathetic to, what we talk about as minimalism now. Zen addresses this paradox of absence and presence; it advocates thinking about absence and thinking about nothingness, and engaging with ambiguity. Philosophically, I think there’s a lot in common, and aesthetically there’s certainly a lot in common. It’s austerity as a visual mode, which I think is really significant. So you can look at ink wash paintings, or calligraphy, which both put intention like the black mark against the white (or beige) void of the paper. In the book, I also talk a lot about rock gardens, an iconically minimalist image to Westerners—an empty visual field of rocks, and only a few big stones emerging from this field of gravel: one thing framed against nothingness. I think that has a lot in common with what most artists in New York in the 1960s did. It definitely has problematic politics. Tanizaki is definitely misogynist in this text. And it celebrates these experiences that are extremely pretentious and cannot be reclaimed. Like: oh, you know, wasn’t it great when puppet theater was only lit by candles; or, back in the day, all women were skeletal and that was beautiful. Those things aren’t great. But I do think that in this moment when we’re still confronting what industrialized modernity has done to us, this book has a lot to say. Because it advocates the opposite. There’s this really great line in there: We Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce, then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty. But the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light—his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow. I think, when confronting something like climate change or just the superhuman scale of everything that we’re dealing with right now, there is that desire to live more in the shadows, or to just live with what’s already around us—to live more quietly and softly than we have before. To me, In Praise of Shadows is one of the few texts that argues for that convincingly, and offers this beautiful way of living on a smaller scale. Personally, and this is just my own bias, I think no political or social movement can exist without a cultural aspect, a coherent cultural production. So the way that Tanizaki links this anti-Western, anti-modernity argument with an aesthetic and with a mode of cultural consumption . . . I think that is very productive, to use a dry term. It presents a meaningful alternative, I think. At the beginning of the book, he’s kind of literal about it. He talks about how instead of electric light bulbs, we should have candles or lanterns. He doesn’t want the transparency of glass windows; he wants the softness and diffusion of paper screens. But I think through the essay, shadow becomes a more metaphorical thing: searching for ambiguity in life, and trying to find a less greedy way of living. Shadow is this way of being that’s not about permanence; it’s not about accumulation. It’s just about being more in harmony with the world around you, being content with the shadow and the darkness."