Save this picture! © Hiroshi Sugimoto, Villa Savoye via theworldofphotographers
Why bother pulling it apart or theorizing about it? Of course, so much of this is now part of the subconscious. I’m almost positive we could do a diagram tracing Apple’s design sensibilities back to something in Japan and perhaps farther back to Chinese aesthetics-where much of Japanese aesthetics was derived initially. Interpretations and misinterpretations of the “Other” were like an intoxicant to the Western imagination and innovation. It’s interesting to note that western modernity was greatly influenced by threads of culture coming from the “East”, as it were. Perhaps he didn’t anticipate the impact his little essay would have on a western audience hungry for cultural alternatives. “A Japanese room might be likened to an inkwash painting,” he says. While these may be the “empty dreams of a novelist”, as Tanizaki admits, they nonetheless endure in the world of design, always looking for something different, something new, something old, even. Hygienic tile bathrooms-to return to bathrooms for a moment-would have been rendered out of wood, stone, even paper. The shiny, reflective, well-lit world of western power and efficiency would have been more nuanced by depth, patina, wear. It posits a world that could have been in which technology is perhaps more muted, more in the background.
It offers a glimpse into an alternative strain of modernity that is not merely a romantic harkening back to simpler “ancient” times. It is theoretical for sure, but also grounded in the subjective experience of an extremely sensitive and articulate author. What it offers now, I think, is a phenomenological reading of space, an alternative to mere material or technical interpretations, or even “design thinking” that emphasizes innovation. Save this picture! © In Praise of Shadows UK Edition via .uk It is much more subtle than progressive and critical interpretations projected upon it. It’s somewhat problematic because it evokes a lot of wincing among PhD’s due to its “self-Orientalizing” inflections and evocations of the west versus the east paradigms, setting up absolutist juxtapositions and contrasts that position each in opposition to the other, the east being the “traditional” and “spiritual” and “passive.” All valid points for lit crit and certainly true for the period from whence it came. First published in Japan in 1933, it took until 1977 for it to be “discovered” and translated into English by a couple of Japan scholars-who else was paying attention to such things?įor being a book about aesthetics it can at once be enlightening, problematic, complicated, evocative, romantic, and critical.
It took a long time for In Praise of Shadows to make it into the western imagination. Save this picture! © Hiroshi Sugimoto, Guggenheim Museum via theworldofphotographers