Ghosts of Summer

Two recent shows at the Chicago Art Institute

In Japan, summer is the traditional time for telling ghost stories. Though winter might be the setting for a tale, it is the insect heat which brings haunting and reflection, memories of betrayals and revenge for ancient wrongs. If Halloween conjures cold tricks and jack-o’-lanterns, the Japanese summer beckons specters into the cruel warmth of July nights. In Shinto, being is not just the property of the living. Entities called kami inhabit all places, elements, and things. The dead are just as much a part of the natural world as we are. Occasionally our paths cross. And the soul’s salvation and its immortality? Well, which one? We do not have one soul, but four.

The Chicago Art Institute’s exhibit of Meiji period works, “Ghosts & Demons in Japanese Prints,” depicts all kinds of yōkai—demons, goblins, ghosts, wrathful spirits. It is a modest show in size but memorable in scope. Mostly woodblock prints, the artworks take inspiration from many different sources. One of the richest is the Kabuki theatre, with its kaidan monogatori, roughly ‘bewitching spirit narratives’. These plays use special effects with pullies, trap doors, masks, and flying sheets to startle the audience. Demons hang in the humid air and phantoms shriek from the wings. Fans of Shaw Brothers and wuxia films will recognize the inspiration.

There are several prints by Okumura Masanobu illustrating the old Chinese story of Shoki, Queller of Demons. Shoki (Zhong Kui) was a student who attained top grades in state exams but was stripped of his honors by the emperor because of his grotesque looks. Enraged, he beat his brains out against the walls of the imperial palace. Fortunately, Shoki’s gifts as an able administrator are respected in the Underworld, where his bestial looks are also an excellent qualification. He is appointed King of Ghosts and charged with maintaining discipline among this notoriously unruly lot. More importantly, he also became a Taoist deity and a perennial subject for plays, stories, comics, operas, and movies. Masanobu pictures him as a burly thug, a bloated enforcer whose cretinous intensity conceals supreme cunning and guile. He stares down the viewer arrogantly, sharpens his sword, almost shuffles out of the frame. Few things are worse than a hood with a sharp mind. Shoki also appears in technicolor in a delirious scroll by Kawanabe Kyōsai. Here he rides a tiger in a hurricane of crimson and gold. Depicting motion in a still picture was always considered one of the pillars of classical painting—see the Qing-era Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden—and this image of the whirling boss does the trick in spades.

Several of the most beautiful pieces are by Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831–1889), nicknamed the “Demon of Painting”.  A devoted sake addict, political cartoonist, and author of the first manga, he enjoyed a bad rep while being deeply admired for his skill. Like many of the greatest artists, he did prison time. His classic 1902 illustrations for the encyclopedic Night Parade of One Hundred Demons stress the absurd in the horrible. This element is usually lacking in the West, where despite some noble efforts, stuffy Victorianism still has a monopoly on the supernatural. Watching old footage of Pinochet strutting before his lackeys or the self-satisfied ponderousness of an oligarch like Elon Musk reminds us that the fearsome is ridiculous, blind and idiotic—a great blank stupidity, as in the faces of Goya’s militiamen or the dimwit hellspawn of Hieronymus Bosch.

Japanese ghosts hop and prance. Our nightmares are pricked with absurd moments, uncanny quantities that synthesize the humorous and the terrible. In real life, there is an unreality to extreme violence—theatrical and frozen, rehearsed or improvised from mysterious material. Outside of Japan, George Romero is an artist who understood this apparent contradiction well. In his 1978 film Dawn of the Dead, the undead shoppers move endlessly, emptily forward until some ordinary barrier like a busted escalator stops them. That they kill and eat flesh makes them horrific, but it is their relentless sloth which makes them to both silly and terrifying. The repressed return a second time as farce, consumers of their own past as consumers.

One of the most striking prints in the show is also one of the earliest, Katsukawa Shunshō’s 1783 illustration of a scene from the Kabuki play, Flower of Edo, made to commemorate an especially fine performance (the place and date are written on the ghost’s armband). The skeleton is a monk who was driven by love to renounce his vows of celibacy. After an impoverished and lonely death, he returns to haunt his beloved Cherry Princess. Capering into her chamber, this shy intruder spirit cannot keep away from the living form which still obsesses him. The supernatural is seen from the other side: it is we who haunt ghosts, compelling them to return by our indifferent arrogance.

The great Hokusai contributes an especially moronic walking corpse from his 1831 plates for One Hundred Ghost Tales. This ghost was an actor, Kohada Koheiji, homely like Shoki, but without his academic talents. Koheiji’s big break comes when a travelling theater company hires him as a rotting zombie to save money on costumes. After doing an early version of Method Acting by living in a cemetery to study the part, he suffers all manner of misfortunes and dies a mad beggar. Yet he also gains immortality as the greatest of all ghost interpreters. The lesson here is that being too good at something comes from decades of mediocrity followed by a lucky break. The reward is always a hideous parody of worldly success. Hokusai’s ghoul is sheepish, drooling over a scrim, a rictus half grimace and half sputtering smirk. He looks like he is still acting and does not know that his role has become real. This Hamlet-like situation is intrinsically humorous: the fool fooling himself fooling an audience that thinks the ghoul isn’t really a ghoul. Who is foolish enough to mistake their projection for what they truly are? And behind this projection, what is a personality and who makes its masks?

These Japanese monsters are urban spooks: administrators, jobbing entertainers, spies and cops. They slip into rooms and sway above marketplaces at midnight, buzzing like mechanized beasts and snooping on us like CCTV. Revenants of places and people, people tied to places by habit and the traces of these habits lingering. The ghosts of summer also bring back thoughts of adolescence, the most haunted part of one’s life before wraithlike old age. Monstrous alleys, manes of rats, No Loitering—and the first harrow fixation on figures not of this earth but more vivid than daylight (the phantom of love, the opening to death). The air is busy and choked, chirring and overfull. In dark Summer, fly and fall.

The other ghostly show is “Van Gogh & the Avant Garde: The Modern Landscape.” Here we are at the edge of the city, by riverbanks, in spectral afternoons contemporary in time with Meiji Japan. The artists are Georges Seurot, Emil Bernard, Charles Angrand, Paul Signac and Van Gogh. In many of these pictures, there is a solitary person set against a background (a factory, a field, a bridge, the river Seine), as if they had wandered into view and were caught unawares by the painter[i]. Van Gogh’s landscapes shimmer and convulse around this lone figure. Here for the first time in the West, the human being is not separate from the world, standing at the center or acting as a sentry for perspective, but has become part of the landscape. It is no coincidence that Van Gogh—a great admirer and copyist of Japanese and Chinese art—was the first to accomplish a Copernican revolution in painting while returning to a ‘primitive’ vision of the world as a unique moment, the memory of which is reconstituted as an essential reflection. As an image—as a painting, as a painting again.

Lost in the city, ending up at its limits, where water and the green world rise to meet the urban straggler, an alienated integration… And it is hardly strange that our deindustrialized era should see in these paintings not industry flourishing by the old romantic tracts of the country, but a prediction of decay and abandonment. Vines and moss overwhelm the gasworks, trees hem in a smokestack, people wander by walls which are the ruins of walls. Southbound, boarded up storefronts, disused factories flanking the Interstate, a racial canton, the result of decisions made on high whose picture is starvation and cruelty—and one figure walking alone down the street, caught in the rearview mirror of your car.

You see many things. On certain occasions, in certain states of mind, the grass on a city hill starts to flicker and gleam. There is a solid razor sharpness to the points of the leaves, but the field is also liquid at the same time. It is deep summer, in the solitary hour of heated distortion. Then the uncontrollable urge to laugh, or rather, giggle… not floating, but fixed in several places simultaneously. And the city, visible at the edges of this verdant plane—surely it should feel like the area is surrounded by the reservoir works and the highway walls, a crude feral allotment locked by colossal concrete, yet the opposite is the case—starts to recede, becoming smaller but not more distant, not so much vanishing as starting to assume its negative place in the whole scene. By this same displacement, the observer also loses himself in an ecstasy which demands that life be a constant present tense. Time seems a constellation whose lines are everywhere and whose points are nowhere. A strange feeling, common as dirt. It was one of Van Gogh’s tasks to picture it.

The show’s great success is that it allows painters we have called ‘Expressionist’ or ‘Pointillist’ to escape these posthumous designations. By the most predictable and trite arrangement, that of the similarity of the places in the paintings, hung almost like photos taped up on a kitchen wall, it avoids the crude idea that art must dazzle the audience. Experts would have you believe that thought is ‘intellectual’ and art is a reverie or rarified passion available only to solitary geniuses (and museum curators). The act of seeing as thinking is returned to the audience here, and maybe that is why the exhibition is always packed. Only distance can place a person, a solitary figure, before a painting without one being beneath the other. That is, in one’s own life—which, as banal as it is to say, is the life that has brought you here.

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[i] Around the same time, photography moved from imitating still life in painting to urban scenes in an attempt to capture bustling time in motion. In the sense that we always photograph places that will disappear and people who will die, all photography is spirit photography but in reverse. The naïve goal of sealing off time only sealed off a segment of light, duplicating but not seizing the arrangement of a chosen moment. The result is vertigo.