Hello everyone,
This is certainly an ambitious effort to establish relations between
the art of bonsai and the art of sculpture, and for that I commend the
authors highly. They've captured something that each of us knows
first hand as a delight of viewing world-class bonsai in person: the
importance of that all-critical third dimension:
[Sculpture] needs to be explored like a terrain in order to be
fully appreciated....As you look at it from different angles, the
shapes rise, fall, and flow into each other. There is a special kind
of interaction between you and the object: the constant discovery of
its infinitely varied parts. It invites you to move around and
explore. It changes every time you move. And there is another treat:
the element of surprise. There is always some mystery on the other
side. It doesn't give you everything from one angle.
These are welcome words, and ones that I'll reflect upon the next time
I stroll through an art museum. (I'd reflect them at a bonsai
collection as well, but when viewing bonsai, moving and peering low
and craning for another angle's view and watching what the tree
reveals is so totally second-nature that I hardly need to
Unfortunately, the rest of the article fails at exactly the task which
the authors assign us: moving around and viewing matters from all
angles. The authors have written an article so singlemindedly
literalist that they somehow manage to confuse the
structure of
an art piece with its
purpose and its
effects. The authors
view art from only one perspective --- that of its physical structure
and the interaction of that structure with the viewer --- and in doing
so, they fail to see even greater mysteries hidden on the other
side. Those mysteries, of course, are the emotive power of art, the
expressive function of art, the symbolic represention of art, the
human communion of art.
As a result, the authors are led into a set of absurdly absolutist
claims about the total absence of relation between bonsai and any
number of other art forms, including painting:
- In this article we will...show why bonsai should not only be
accepted as true, living sculpture but why we would be wise to put the
painting comparison to rest, once and for all. - I see no correlation with the definition of painting and bonsai. In
fact what many people fail to grasp is that painting is an effort to
represent three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface,
which differs greatly from bonsai in which we attempt to portray a
three-dimensional object using a three-dimensional surface....Bonsai
should be weighed against and compared to sculpture, though I would
suggest never with painting. - Comparing bonsai to painting; using painting to justify styling a
bonsai; displaying bonsai as a painting; or trying to ascribe
techniques of painting to the art of bonsai is not only futile, but
could well be harmful to the art form.
Without going in to tedious detail on every reaction that I have to
the piece, I can roughly categorize my disagreements into two main
objections. First, I find deeply questionable any claim that one art
has nothing to gain from comparison with another. All of the arts
evoke emotion and convey deeper meaning through the aesthetic sense
rather than through the rigid medium of cold verbal logic. This links
all of the arts together in such a fashion that comparisons among them
are never futile, for each taps into the living essence of our
humanity in ways that remain mysterious to philosophers, artists, and
scientists alike. Exploring and uncoverign and above all experiencing
these connections and interconnections will always be a valuable
course of inquiry. Thus if someone claimed that painting had nothing
to gain from comparison with music, because they use different media,
I would agree only in the narrowest of technical senses. Both can be
formal and classical, lyrical and romantic, dissonant and
discomfiting.
Second, bonsai, sculpture, and painting each create a represention of
reality, fantasy, or even sheer conceptual ideals by laying down
photons upon the most reactive of
two-dimensional canvases, the
human retina. These visual arts deal in a currency of human
perception, and the critical lessons of balance and perspective and
line and form and visual flow that function so well in one of these
arts most often carry over cleanly and beautifully to the others, in
that their effectiveness stems from the underlying universals of human
perception, not from any material-specific quirk of construction.
Rather than seeing only the material differences among art forms and
leaping quickly from there to the extreme position that bonsai
is sculpture (I disagree; it is bonsai, which is a very
different thing), I would suggest that the authors --- and their
readers --- look into each art form in turn, in their efforts to
understand and improve and experience bonsai. Indeed, I strongly
suspect least one of the two authors of this very piece would agree
with me. Attila Soos has argued eloquently in favor the comparison
between
Bonsai and the Ancient Art of Rhetoric , an art which bridges a
greater dimensional gulf than the two-to-three gap between painting
and sculpture.
Disclaimer: I am not without vested interest in this debate. I
have written several pieces (
1) (
2) on what painting can teach us
about bonsai, and I have additional such articles in preparation. I have
found the lessons therein to be valuable to my work as
a bonsai artist. Before I can accept the sort of assertions above, I
consider it incumbant upon the authors to explain precisely why these
articles of mine are "
not only futile, but could well be harmful to
art form" of bonsai.