Moche Warrior Pottery — Today’s History of the World in 100 Objects

Warrior, ceramic vessel, Moche culture, Peru

Another fascinating episode from the BBC/British Museum History of the World in 100 Objects series today on WNYC radio: Moche Warrior Pot fascinating being defined as connecting to the images and art that have informed my work.

Moche vessels

The Moche were a large, complex civilization in Peru 100-800 ad (pre-Inca), which had established cities with architecture and facilities that the Romans would have been envious of (according to the radio episode). Hearing they’d be talking about a Moche object my ears perked up. Moche masks have inspired faces I paint, and their ceramic portrait vessels, with spouts coming out of the tops of people’s heads, were some of the first objects I imitated, way back in High School ceramics class. In the BBC episode they spoke to a contemporary potter who analyzed the warrior pot and said they made hundreds and hundreds of these types of vessels, combining the use of molds and hand-building to mass produce them but give them individual qualities. Continue reading

Storytelling in Japanese Art — Onmyoji and Raiko: Super Heroes Team-Up vs. More Japanese Demons

The Drunken Demon

by Christopher Agostino

see also: The Eye of the Demon — a StoryFaces Performance to learn about the stage presentation I do based on the legends of the samurai and the demons that they fight

I ran into a couple of old friends at the Metropolitan Museum of Art yesterday in the exhibit Storytelling in Japanese Art. In an “emaki” (handscroll) illustrating the story of “The Drunken Demon” I found the hero samurai Raiko (who I know from a folktale I tell of his battle with the Goblin Spider) and Abe no Seimei (my favorite Onmyoji, or yin/yang magician)—both in the same story like a Spiderman/Dr. Strange crossover in an issue of Marvel Team-Up.

Marvel Team-Up — Twice as Many Pages! Twice as Many Thrills!

Emaki are like the original comic books or animated movies, telling a story through text and sequential illustrations. A scroll might be 30′ long, and to read it you would look at about two feet at a time, unrolling it with your left hand while simultaneously rolling it up again with your right. “The Drunken Demon” version in the exhibit was told over three scrolls from the Edo period by Kaiho Yuchiku (1654-1728). A boyish demon becomes terrible when drunk, stealing all the beautiful women. When he captures the daughter of an aristocrat, Abe no Seimei uses his powers to find where the girl is held, and the Emperor orders Raiko and his warrior companions to rescue the girl—which they do with the help of three gods disguised as men, a tree that grows across a chasm to become a bridge, some poisoned saki and a golden helmet. In the climactic illustrations, after a wild feast featuring human sashimi, the sleeping demon is depicted as filling an entire room (described in the text as 10′ tall, but illustrated as if 30′ tall) before Raiko cuts his head off, blood spraying out in a fine mist just like in the modern samurai movies like “The Warrior’s Way” (a fun one I watched last night). Continue reading

Oshiguma ― Kumadori ― Japanese Kabuki Theatre Makeup Prints ― “Leaving an Impression”

by Christopher Agostino

The process of a Kabuki actor applying his makeup is referred to as Kumadori, meaning “taking an impression”, in the sense that the makeup pattern conforms to the inner structure of their face and the interior persona of their designated character. After the performance, the actor may then leave an impression of the makeup on a silk cloth by pressing it against their face, creating an object of art called oshiguma.

Oshiguma of Ichimura-Uzaemon

In the book Kumadori (Toshiro Morita, 1985) there is a gallery of oshiguma prints from makeup worn by the Kabuki actor Ichimura-Uzaemon. The actor explains that the tradition began in earlier times when Kabuki actors needed to supplement their income and did so by making the oshiguma after a performance and selling it to admiring fans. As the prints became prized as art objects, actors would put their makeup on just to make the print:

Ichimura-Uzaemon creating an oshiguma

“A peculiar thing about the “Oshi-dori” [sic] is that an impression taken of Kumadori after performing dynamically on a live stage, seems to come off as if the actor’s actual face was there alive on the cloth. But when an impression is taken of a Kumadori painted only for the purpose of making an “Oshi-dori”, the result is totally lacking in life. It is here we see the mystical quality of the Kumadori.” ― Ichimura-Uzaemon in Kumadori, 1985

1922 oshiguma

Ichimura-Uzaemon is part of a long line of Kabuki actors to bear that name. Kabuki is a theatre tradition that is past on through families (by birth and adoption), as evidenced in this oshiguma from 1922, which featured Ichimura-Uzaemon XV (perhaps his grandfather?). It is described in the BBC radio broadcasts of  The British Museum series “A History of the World in 100 Objects”  as linked to a specific transitional period in modern Kabuki theatre, and includes the makeup prints of three actors that were, respectively, the 4th , the 15th and the 6th of their family’s lineage within the Kabuki theatre:

“An oshiguma, or face pressing by three Kabuki actors; Ichimura Takematsu IV, Ichimura Uzaemon XV and Onoe Baiko VI created after a performance of Momijigari, or Contemplating Maples, at the Shintomiza an old style Kabuki Theater destroyed in the 1923 Tokyo earthquake. They were part of the creative change in the Kabuki world when influences were continuing to open up the perceptions of the Japanese to Western ideas creating a crucible out of which emerged modern playwrights and plays”  (http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/7sG6iEl1SgeooiGokuePHw)

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Oshiguma . Collection of Ronald Cavaye

I came upon this wonderful oshiguma image (Nakamura Utaemon VI as the serpent of Sanuki in Nihon Furisode Hajime, May 1984, Kabuki-za. ) accompanied by a remarkable post called “Letter from London” in which Ronald Cavaye describes the experience of seeing a Kabuki performance, the ordeal it can be for the performers, and how the oshiguma is meant to capture the life force of the actor in performance―including the story behind this particular oshiguma. I have excerpted only a brief piece of his post here, and it really is worth going to the link and reading it:

“Everything about this oshiguma seems to convey that this performance was an ordeal. This actor was suffering for his art. There are no finely drawn lines of makeup here. Or rather, they may have been finely drawn by the actor in his dressing room, but here they’re misshaped and deformed by the ineluctable downward trickle of his sweat. The role is that of the eight-tailed serpent in the dance-drama, Nihon Furisode Hajime – 日本振袖始 – performed by Utaemon at the Kabuki-za in May, 1984. I saw that performance. It was amazing and I bought this oshiguma in the National Theatre in Tokyo where it was sold in aid of charity.”  http://www.kabuki-bito.jp/kabuki_column/letterfromlondon/post_197.html

Yves Klein, An "Anthropometry/Shroud"

It is a clear example of how the oshiguma is in itself a work of art, a static object that still contains the energy of the performance. The oshiguma concept inspired the work of art I generated a few years ago from my own Kabuki makeup (at the top of the post). And I wonder at the apparent stylistic connection to Yves Klein and his Anthropometries, which also capture the spirit of a theatrical action through impressing a painted person against cloth or paper (see Men Getting Women Naked and Yves Klein — Female Nudity in Art   http://wp.me/p1sRkg-ll )

And check out  Anatomy of an Oshiguma about that 1922 oshiguma, which includes this description of the medium as “make-up and sweat on silk”

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Ichimura-Uzaemon painted himself in several different character patterns for the book “Kumadori”. From left to right, these are Benkei-kuma (“Benkei’s Pattern”), Kuge-Aku (“Evil Aristocrat’s Pattern”), and Saru-kuma (“Monkey Pattern”), and look at how much his face changes from design to design—it would be hard to recognize these as all the same actor.

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