Objects, people and stories

In his book 'The Entanglement' Alva Noë points out that the aesthetic experience is centred around the way that we engage with ourselves and the environments that we find ourselves immersed into. He suggests that the aim of this experience is to move from a position of not seeing to seeing, or from seeing to seeing differently. My recent work looking at how we materialise thought through the use of significant objects forms a parallel visual conversation with his thoughts about how we come to understand things. Evaluating and detecting things, he suggests are inseparable activities. We see the things we love differently to the things we don't care about. He states, 'Values are antecedent to the encounter with the object, because they are embedded in and find expression in the relationship that is the encounter with the object.' p112 He then goes on to say that these values are what makes the object 'present'. 

I have been sitting with people and drawing objects that they think are significant to them. In doing so I have tried to learn about how we can together come to some sort of agreement about the mutual imaging of that significance. This work is about how one person's values are gradually transferred to another person by conversation and as this process is visualised hopefully both of us can move on from 'not seeing to seeing differently' and when the work is then seen by others, perhaps it may help them see things differently too. 

I begin with making sketchbook drawings of a significant object. These drawings are made whilst making verbal conversation with the object's owner. As we converse significant ideas and thoughts begin to become apparent and they become the gateways through which the next phase of the work will be entered. 

One of the first conversational drawings

One of the first drawings done as we talk is a 'location' drawing. In this case right in the centre of the room is a small table, on which a pack of cigarettes, a bottle of whiskey and other 'being used' items surround a polished wooden carving of a baby crawling. 

Sketchbook pages made as we talk

The carving of the crawling wooden baby becomes central to our conversation. The memories associated with the sculpture begin to be related and a tale of a Thailand island and jungle wonderment begins to emerge, as the conversation opens out. Flying fish enter the story as a short sea voyage is remembered and a mystery 'shaman' type figure is introduced as a long gone supplier of Chinese heroin, in another conversation a memory of seeing fighting cocks surfaces. The baby is a carved figure from over 40 years ago, it may crawl across a table in northern England, but its dark polished rosewood surface, intimates another life, one from a time when our neighbour was a young man. Initially made as a symbol to help others see the child in all our lives, the baby was a like a narrative magnet and I begin to seek out other stories that it could be crawling into. In Thailand carvings of Baby Buddhas are common or at least were when this one was bought. A story of Buddha's birth may have been taken from a Hindu Rig Veda text, such as the birth of Indra. After Alexander the Great conquered central Asia in 334 BCE, there was a considerable intermingling of Buddhism with Hellenic art and ideas and the last echoes of that time, were now mingling with global tourism. Our neighbour in particular was trying to get off the day to day treadmill of office and factory work and was like the Beatles, looking for spiritual nourishment in the East.

Greek terracotta figure of a baby in a cradle

There an alternative origin narrative of the Buddha’s birth being pictorially re-invented after Buddhist traders returned from the Middle East with tales of churches hosting paintings and sculptures celebrating the birth of Jesus. But babies have always been potent symbols of fresh beginnings, new life, innocence and the possibilities of future lives.

Medieval icon, where the baby Jesus is depicted as a small man

Gradually this baby begins to draw around itself more and more stories. The Buddhist view of birth encompasses vast cycles of death, bardo (the state between death and rebirth), and rebirth. The experience of bardo is a result of the life or karma, of the being who enters it. Those who have recently died enter the bardo with a task of searching for the right conditions for their next rebirth, therefore the baby is also in many ways the re-entry into the world of an existing soul, so it is both old and young at the same time. Perhaps an echo of this is seen in the icon above. In Medieval art painters had to reflect the fact that the Church believed that Christ was essentially a perfectly formed and unchanging man during his entire life. I.e. Christ even when a child needed to appear in the form of an adult because he was not supposed to change with age. 

After talking to the crawling baby's owner about some of the possibilities for narratives, I take the sketchbook drawings away in order to work from them. Over the next week or so I begin developing them as images that are made to enhance or develop any narratives that were beginning to emerge during our initial conversations. 

The idea of the baby in the jungle begins to emerge as a story is written. The point is not to write a novel or a short story, but to see if some sort of narrative coherence can be drawn from the fragments of memory that my neighbour has held in his head for all these many years. This is how the first draft of a story was put down and it was decided that this would be a 'once upon a time' story, as for both of us, the tale seemed very like a fairy story, the jungle being a setting like a 'Just So' story or the forest of 'Little Red Riding Hood'. 

I was told a story whilst I made drawings, by a man who when young had experienced the 'hippy trail' in South East Asia, a story focused on memories that were triggered by a wooden carving of a baby Buddha that sat on a coffee table in the middle of his living room. I was also during this time, on evenings, reading another story, one that was focused on an exotic jungle, Chris Beckett's 'Beneath the World, a Sea'. In my mind the stories became fused, Beckett's vision seemed to me, to be of the unconscious mind becoming a landscape reality, as if the strange jungle described in the book, with its pools of other worldly waters, was a physically manifest unconscious, that was tapping into and revealing the subconscious desires of any character that entered it. Perhaps I thought, the remembered jungles of Thailand were like this too. The prints that then emerged from the drawings, became more and more hallucinatory; the passage of an ever growing old baby through imaginary jungles, becoming a journey into the subconscious. 

This was the story that had now emerged:

 

Once upon a time in Thailand in a small village that sat on the edge of a vast jungle, there was made a baby. It was a beautiful baby, lovingly carved from the wood of one of the jungle's rare rosewood trees. This wonderful baby’s name was Phayung, and he could crawl as soon as he was made. Because he was so beautiful and his heart so pure everyone who lived in the village wanted him to play with them. They felt him calm their fears as he crawled into their homes and he seemed to give the whole village a new life. However the village was a very poor one and life was hard. So one day when a kindly young foreigner who had heard of the magical nature of this wooden child came to the village and offered a large sum of money for him, he was exchanged; the villagers feeling that as the young man was so fresh faced and kindly looking, that he would treat the baby well and that he would at times bring it back on visits. 

The baby was much more than a baby, and it could never really be owned by anyone. Within a day, his new owner on picking it up had gently brushed his forehead against that of the wooden baby's and was astonished to hear a voice in his head. He was soon listening carefully to a constant babble of baby thoughts, thoughts that seemed at times very wise and which spoke of vast long ages of wisdom, but which were also silly thoughts, naive ideas about the world and at times totally incomprehensible jibber jabber. The young foreigner soon realised that the baby was someone very special and he was sure that a new life beckoned, especially once he had begun to understand what the baby was trying to tell him. 

Because the baby was a wooden boy, he yearned to be with the type of tree from which he had been carved. As well as having all sorts of insights into the new world he was experiencing, he had feeling that came from his past life as a growing tree. Eventually he asked the young man if he could be sent back into the jungles out of which he came. But the young man was from somewhere else and had just been passing through, he didn't know one jungle from the next and of course didn't want to let such a special wooden baby go. But the baby persisted, it now spoke of little else and the man began to become irritated and more importantly very aware that his special find would be of little use if all it could ever do was go on and on about returning to the jungle.  Gradually he made up his mind to follow any instructions the baby might give him about returning to the jungle and so began to ask questions about the nature of the place the baby had come from. It was, said the baby a place surrounded by water, his log had been floated down a river and then carried across a salty sea. There had been a tree that had grown from a seed, that had itself been grown from the seed of a tree, that had been grown from the seed of a tree, that had been grown from the seed of a tree under which in its shade the Buddha had once sat, and during that time had achieved his enlightenment. Each of these trees had lived to be many hundreds of years old and every one had held within the possibilities of its heartwood a new life. 

 

The man grew frightened of what he was now hearing. He realised that not only was this baby special, it may have had a deeply spiritual message to transmit, one that he was not in any way worthy of. He looked around and decided that where they were was as good a place as any for the baby to find its family. All these trees looked similar to a man who had grown up in a city far away and it was clear now that the baby had its own mind and that a wooden mind could never in reality be used to help his own fleshy one accomplish anything. After wishing him good luck, the man put the baby onto the ground and watched as it began to crawl off into the thick, dense jungle that surrounded them. As it did a haze began to settle over the man's eyes and he fell asleep. On waking he couldn't quite believe in the baby's existence, but began to trace his way back and to think of all those reasons why he ought to travel back to his former life. 

 

The baby quickly disappeared into the undergrowth. For what seemed like many years he crawled through the dense undergrowth, his lovingly polished dark brown skin glistening in the dampness of early mornings. His tautly curved but very solid back, at odd times emerging like a stone tortoise, pushing itself up and out of the dense leaf compost of the forest floor and when it did other creatures might find the time to gaze in its direction and wonder what it was. Gradually over time the jungle creatures accepted the baby as their companion and after even more time they forgot to even remember he existed.

Then one day the baby found another very like himself. As he crawled into a sheltered jungle glade he came across a seated figure. It was, like the baby, made of rosewood, but it was not crawling. It did move, but only by swaying very slightly, as if surrounded by invisible breezes. It had one hand resting on its right leg, the hand’s fingers pointing downwards, its third finger just touching the ground. The other hand rested on its lap, its palm facing the sky. Its calm eyes were nearly closed, with pupils looking down towards the jungle floor, upon which the baby now crawled to a halt.  The rosewood baby gazed back up into the figure’s eyes and as he did he realised that at last he had found what he had been looking for.

The figure he had found seemed familiar, it had a skin of warm polished wood that was exactly the same as the baby’s. It also had a voice, an inner sound, not one like the other creatures of the jungle, not a voice of shriek, or gibber or squawk, this was a voice of singing and of chanting and it called to the baby. It had been calling for a long time, calling the baby to witness; calling it to re-find it's body, to re-vive itself in a new form as an earth-touching element. The wooden carving told the baby a story of its own enlightenment, of how once like the baby it had crawled on wooden hands and knees for many years through the jungle looking for answers, until one day after meditating on its life, it had realised that all was illusion and that all it had to do was to accept this and desire would disappear and he could at last be at one with the rest of the jungle. Therefore he now longer had to crawl, but could sit still and as he did he became a centre around which all things could be entangled, a centre around which spokes could radiate out and connect with all the illusions of reality but not be affected by them. 

The baby was a Buddha, the seated statue was a Buddha too; both copies of the innumerable bodies of Buddha. By splitting himself in this way Buddha was able to touch and experience the vast infinity of possibilities that could be. Each of these experiences of Buddha was of cosmic significance, and even though the jungle like all things was an illusion, it was one to be experienced as an episode of wonder and in that wonder a kernel was found around which an idea was formed that helped the Buddha accept the illusion of age. 

 

“We contain multitudes”, chanted the two carvings, harmonising their voices, and vibrating their wooden bodies as a unity. Until one day they finally separated and the crawling baby crawled away back into what it formally believed was reality.

 

How long the baby stayed had there in the shadowy jungle glade is not known, but when finally he crawled back into the jungle, the baby knew that its time as a jungle baby was coming to an end and he needed to make his way back to the place from where he started. 

 

The jungle he found had however changed, paths previously worn smooth by his passage now gone, familiar trees and streams and stones now strange and even the sounds of what were reassuring animal messages, were now distorted and tuned towards threats. He was lost and he had to find himself again.

After what seemed many years the baby saw a thinning of the trees and shafts of light breaking through in such a way that he knew he had reached the jungle’s edgelands and that soon he would be able to make his way out and back into the place of his making. As he finally crawled out of the jungle, he passed a small still puddle of dark water and looking down into it he saw his reflection for the first time since the start of his journey and staring back was no longer the face of a baby but the face of an old man, and no longer did the jungle surround him, it fell away and as he looked to see where he was, he thought he recognised the form of the young man who had once owned him, but no, it was only an old man sat on a couch, an old man staring past the baby with eyes that were now finding it hard to see the things of this world, but which were beginning to peer gradually into the next.'

The story now became central to how the visual work was evolving. 

A new series of drawings and collages were then made, but this time they were designed to be made into prints, so that the ideas emerging could be solidified and firmed up, thus giving the emerging narrative more traction. 

The baby crawls into the jungle

Baby enters the jungle

The baby in the jungle

The baby spots something in the distance

The baby meets his former self

The baby in the night jungle

The baby returns to the world as an old man

Other memories are also drawn, flying fish and fighting cocks seemed particularly important to my neighbour and images of men and babies, all of which didn't go any further but which helped with the growing dialogue around which the central story grew. 

We talked about the fact that everyone's life has stories entangled into it and that all it took to unpick those stories was often a conversation or a chance meeting that could trigger a memory or an association. We also talked about the nature of images as memories, such as my neighbour's old fading photographs and how they were very different to the new images that were emerging from the story. I some ways they are both illusions, but both contain within them certain truths about how we experience the world through the stories we tell. 

 So as this process was visualised did we move on from 'not seeing to seeing differently'? I certainly had a very different idea of what the wooden baby in my neighbour's front room was about. My neighbour had confronted something in his past that now meant that he saw it much more mythically and that what was for him a fading memory, was now something not just shared but which was a kernel around which new stories could be grown. Above all we had a shared experience, memorised in the form of drawings and prints, each one of which could be re-visited and could become a trigger or starting point for yet another elaboration of a constantly growing tale of a wooden baby learning from its journey through an imagined world. 

As the baby story began to evolve it reminded me of 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' by Oscar Wilde. The fictional artist Basil Hallward, was infatuated with Dorian's beauty and somehow managed to create some sort of magical fetish in the form of Dorian's portrait, an object that would soak up the visual impact of all the evil deeds that Gray would in his life go on to perpetrate. Ivan Albright would be chosen to paint the final look of this painting for the 1945 film, an image that could be seen as the dimetric opposite of the carved baby. In the one instance the baby is frozen in its cherubic form, the art form of carving operating to trap its shape forever within a block of rosewood. However the painting made of Dorian Gray is constantly changing; each evil deed undertaken by Gray, is etched into the painting's surface, until an image begins to emerge of an ageing, dissolute man, who has finally realised that his time on this Earth is up.

Hopefully the story of the baby in the jungle has a much simpler message, one that allows us to accept age as something natural to us all, and that my neighbour and myself take heart in the fact that age and approaching death are things of wonder. 

See also:

The narrative tradition in drawing

Why it matters (Conversations) 

Drawing and printmaking

The weaving of grids (stories of life)

What is a portrait?

Home is a belief

Loss of innocence and its rediscovery

Detail of an imaginary landscape

On the subject of the loss of innocence and its rediscovery, Picasso is quoted as saying "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up" and he is also quoted as stating, "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child".

I was reminded of these quotes when I was listening to Kirsty Young's podcast 'Young Again' that was focused on an interview with the writer Phillip Pullman. He was he said at one time a middle school teacher and during the years 9 to 13 he saw children change their behaviours as they became self aware. He referenced in relation to this, 'On the Marionette Theatre' by Heinrich von Kleist, and this extract below is what I think he was referring to.

"About three years ago", I said, "I was at the baths with a young man who was then remarkably graceful. He was about fifteen, and only faintly could one see the first traces of vanity, a product of the favours shown him by women. It happened that we had recently seen in Paris the figure of the boy pulling a thorn out of his foot. The cast of the statue is well known; you see it in most German collections. My friend looked into a tall mirror just as he was lifting his foot to a stool to dry it, and he was reminded of the statue. He smiled and told me of his discovery. As a matter of fact, I'd noticed it too, at the same moment, but... I don't know if it was to test the quality of his apparent grace or to provide a salutary counter to his vanity... I laughed and said he must be imagining things. He blushed. He lifted his foot a second time, to show me, but the effort was a failure, as anybody could have foreseen. He tried it again a third time, a fourth time, he must have lifted his foot ten times, but it was in vain. He was quite unable to reproduce the same movement. What am I saying? The movements he made were so comical that I was hard put to it not to laugh.

From that day, from that very moment, an extraordinary change came over this boy. He began to spend whole days before the mirror. His attractions slipped away from him, one after the other. An invisible and incomprehensible power seemed to settle like a steel net over the free play of his gestures. A year later nothing remained of the lovely grace which had given pleasure to all who looked at him. I can tell you of a man, still alive, who was a witness to this strange and unfortunate event. He can confirm it, word for word, just as I've described it."

A key moment in Jewish and Christian religious terms was of course the fall of mankind. By eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, we were no longer innocent and knowledge brought with it the difficulties and vicissitudes of too much awareness; suddenly we realised we were naked. As knowledge is gained innocence is lost and we become more self-conscious. We have hopefully when children all at some point in our lives inhabited those states of unselfconsciousness; experiences that were often pure and joyful. As adults though we have to attain those types of experiences in other ways. The poet Lorca suggested that we could regain the poetry of unselfconsciousness via what he called 'el duende'; that quality of human 'lost in the moment' action that he found in the best flamenco dancers; who could attain an almost trance like state that made the experience of their dance unforgettable. Lorca believed duende could be found in all the arts, not just in dance, and that it could only come into existence when someone is totally possessed by the experience, one where subject and object are conjoined, where the physical world and the artist merge with the spirit world; and when this happens forms arrive as if “shaped like wind on sand”. (Lorca, in Berger, 2016, p.99) But to achieve that state, we need to practice and practice and practice, until our body/minds meld into one and we know what to do without thinking. As we get older, what we loose in spontaneity we can regain through hard work. Through practice, a new type of grace can be attained that is even better than the one we had as an unselfconscious child. Hard work and long effort can lead eventually to an apparent child like simplicity, which is the state I'm sure Picasso was referring to when he said it takes a lifetime to paint like a child.

Philip Pullman then went on to say that you don't make art because you are inspired, inspiration he stated is a reward for hard work. I have spent endless hours drawing, years and years of making artwork, and gradually I think I'm beginning to make some things that look easy, but which on second looking it hopefully becomes apparent that they have a deep complex conviction behind them.

Childhood is though always with us. I remember at the age of 10 looking out of the window of my bedroom in our house in Himley Road, Dudley. We were about to move house and I wanted to remember the landscape that I had spent so many hours playing in. My bedroom was at the back of the house, it looked out over the scarred wasteland that had been the space within which I had grown into my own self awareness. There was the slag heap down whose sides I used to run or ride my battered old scooter, bomb craters that I had in the past lined their edges with hedge clippings in order to make dens and hide away from everyone else. I looked at the walls that formed the backs of yards where the pigs were kept, animals that would inhabit my imagination throughout my life, a slag mound hillock on which I once stood holding a roof slate in my hand for an older boy to shoot at with his air rifle, the pain as the pellet went into my hand still remembered, the rusty remains of old factory equipment still left broken after wartime bombing, but which were now entangled in weeds; all a backdrop for vivid imaginary play.

That landscape is still with me now, the cradle of my innocence. I have tried to rediscover it time and time again, each time looking for a way of capturing something of that feeling of total immersion that comes from being lost in play. Part of an artist's role it would seem to me is to try to maintain some sort of naivety and to try and hold off the sophistication of adulthood for as long as you can, or at least to fold into the knowledge that comes with age, a memory of the innocence that came first. 

Landscape of the past

The drawing 'Landscape of the Past' is based on my memories of the time when I looked out of that bedroom window. I made the drawing about 5 or 6 years ago, so roughly 60 years after the actual experience. Has enough work been done to regain an innocent eye? I suppose that is up to others to decide, but within my own aesthetic process, the loss of innocence and its rediscovery are key components that need to be added into a mix of animist practices and a need to be entwined into the world and not to stand outside of it. I still struggle to accept the subjective insides that have become enfolded into me from a previous outside, but in that very struggle, perhaps my most interesting work is done. 

Running with low cloud and pig

The drawing 'Running with low cloud and pig' melds together several stories. Clouds were wonderful things to watch as a boy, I would lie on my back for what seemed hours just gazing at them and imagining worlds and creatures they contained. Then one day as a teenager I saw the film based on Michelangelo's life, 'The Agony and the Ecstasy' and saw Charlton Heston doing the same thing, but this time seeing in his clouds the Sistine Chapel Ceiling. This very romantic take on an artist's life effected me deeply and it was one of those 'moments of epiphany', whereby I realised that I wanted to be an artist. The clouds are tadpoles waiting to metamorphose into whatever they needed to. I run down the hill towards home, arms outstretched as I did as a boy, always about to take off, always about to fly. The pig, my nemesis, waits in ambush, all tales from a younger self, but now re-seen with an older eye. 

See also: 

Contemporary landscape 

Contemporary landscape part two

Drawing plants

Why do I draw?

Clouds

Carlfriedrich Claus and Sprachblatt

Carlfriedrich Claus's sprachblatt or speech sheets, are forms of a writing/drawing mix, whereby text is fused with texture, and as you stand away from the image, texture begins to dominate text, but as you focus in, text becomes more important. So for instance at the scale of screen reproduction texture is more immediately apparent and the image can be read as a visual sound.

The use of language in visual poetry was a specialty of Carlfriedrich Claus, who developed his work in the early 1960s. He believed that the 'naturalised individual’ ought to live in harmony with a 'humanised natural world’ and his ideas mix European philosophy with Eastern mysticism and the writings of Marx. His text-drawings, often drawn on both sides of transparent sheets, illustrate both the processual and dialectal approaches to his ideas. For instance you might get two pages that set out a thesis and antithesis in order to arrive at some sort of synthesis; however no matter how hard you try to 'read' these images, it is hard to avoid the sense that their meaning will always be hidden. 

'Aurora’ (1977)

This is how Claus wrote about his processes: "The production of speech sheets and of phoneme processes ran parallel. The speech sheets arose through my experimental use of my left hand (I am right-handed), and in doing so I noticed, first, the formation of internal blockages, like a psychological stuttering, and second, a different coloration of the content of my thought. (…) These phoneme processes or speech operations are not speaking in the sense of phonology, in which the specific scaffolding of a natural language must precede each act of speech. Here, the whole point is to break through this scaffolding, to break out of it or out of the prison of natural language, which determines in great part our relationship to the world. (…) Basically, the 'phoneme aggregate' suggests to the listener that he experiment with his own organs of speech and that he explore how various sounds, consciously articulated, affect his psychological state."

Carlfriedrich Claus: installation in the former Reichstag Building in Berlin

Carlfriedrich Claus at work

However it is in the work he did with sound that I think has the most potential to be revisited and thought about as a stimulus for students interested in contemporary drawing. Claus had been working on an installation from the 1950s to the 1990s, which addressed language as a written image and sound process. 'Lautaggregat K' used a spatial layer of sound, forming a 'sound aggregate', originally used for a WDR radio play, using a special stereophonic system; this sound material then forming the basis for a 1995 installation, in which several speech processes ran in parallel and were mixed at an editing desk. These layers of sound corresponded with the writing images, that were spatially arranged on transparent surfaces. The subject of the text dealt with philosophical themes, while the sound process itself was intended to be experienced physically. These two normally separate experiences, the intellectual and the physical being brought together.

Carlfriedrich Claus: sound processing room 1995

In his work there was a constant dialectical flip between reading, hearing and looking and he stated that his works aimed to impregnate ‘ways of seeing with lingual thinking’.  Perhaps I have been reminded of his work because Sue has begun working towards a PhD and she was looking at how work she had done in the past when curating sound artists, is now being archived. Sometimes our interests feel very different, but they also touch at sometimes unexpected points and this work of Claus's is I think an interesting case. He now has his own archive, where his acoustic work is available on 15 reel-to-reel tapes and 267 cassette tapes and it would be interesting to see what issues and problems the archive has faced in reconstructing experiences of his work for those who visit. 

The move towards a gesamtkunstwerk, whereby various elements of an artwork come together to create a totality, is something that at one point or another many artists consider, because by the nature of things artists try out various approaches to communicating related ideas. This often leaves you with a diverse body of work that only seems to make sense when the various elements are collected together. For myself the drawings Claus produced make far more sense when coupled with the sound pieces he made. I think in my own case my drawings make more sense when shown alongside my ceramics, prints and written work, but how to organise all the elements is at present something I'm not sure how to do, I need curatorial advice. 

See also:

Eye music

Drawing sound

Mapping as translation

Asemic writing

Drawing as portable sculpture

Drawing into installation

Old and new traditions

Tenmyouya Hisashi: RX-78-2 Kabuki-mono 2005 Version

I've posted a few times on other cultures and traditions, and the posts have tended to concentrate on the past and the historical legacy that comes with being part of a different culture. However there are other stories and one of the most common is how tradition and contemporaneity coincide. The Japanese artist Tenmyouya Hisashi for instance uses tradition to reflect on contemporary life and at the same time question the notion of tradition itself. His work questions what traditional culture is, not just in relation to Japan but everywhere.

When my son was a young boy he was fascinated by Transformer toys. The Transformers toy line was created by the Japanese company Takara and was initially marketed in Japan under the names of 'Micro Change' and 'Diaclone'. In 1984, the US company Hasbro bought the distribution rights to these toys and re-branded them as 'The Transformers' for a North American audience. The designs for the original figures, all of which could transform from one thing such as a car, aircraft, gun or even a cassette into robots, were made by Japanese artists such as Shōji Kawamori, (who was probably the most well known), but also designers such as Kouzin Ohno, (Ironhide, Jazz, Starscream) and Takayoshi Doi, who designed the Dinobots. I was at the time fascinated by the Insecticons who were designed by Takashi Matsuda. I thought I could see traces of Egyptian scarab beetle sculptures in their design; a design that was constructed so that these toys could transform from insects into robots. 

Egyptian scarab 

Bombshell Insecticon 

Takashi Matsuda also came up with the form of Megatron, a robot that could also transform into a gun. All of these toys had one thing in common, they could take on more than one identity. A tiny insect could morph into a giant robot, size constancy didn't seem to be a problem for a child's imagination. 

The cultural tradition young boys were growing up with in the 1980s and 90s was definably Japanese, especially as Nintendo released their Gameboy in 1990 hot on the heels of the Transformers coming to the UK. Culture within the commercial world of capitalism is global. Hasbro needed English names and associated back stories for the characters, so that they could be marketed to English speaking customers with a narrative that was understandable in relation to Western young boys and their interests and so they approached Marvel Comics and Bob Budiansky was given the job. He conceived the names of many of the original Transformers that would be then released onto the American and European markets, such as Megatron, Ratchet, Starscream, Sideswipe and Ravage. He also wrote the vast majority of the descriptive "tech spec" biographies printed on the Transformers' toy packages, giving each figure unique personality traits in the same way that Marvel superheroes such as Spiderman were constructed. In this way two cultures were blended, the world of Japanese toy design and the superhero world of American comics. The fusion would of course result in Marvel releasing another comic title, The Transformers'.

From Transformers the comic

You can easily spot the historical references in the design of the robot forms.

Traditional samurai armour

Tenmyouya Hisashi

Tenmyouya Hisashi's images illustrate the 'mash up' of traditions that occur as hybrid global cultures emerge. In 2006 the Japanese football team had qualified for the football world cup which was held in Germany. A game originally invented in England, now belonging to a world wide culture, a game that now represented serious international money and that also wanted to celebrate the inclusion of specifically recognisable 'other' cultures as proof that the game was now global. Tenmyouya Hisashi's images were perfect illustrations of this and his work was chosen as one of the posters that celebrated the event. The use of traditional gold leaf backgrounds to his images, now also signifying the background of wealth that at the time surrounded world football. His 'RX-78-2 Kabuki-mono' image of a Transformer toy, constructed again on a gold leaf background and this time with a traditional dragon wrapping itself around the robot, fuses the old and new traditions together in such as way that we are reminded that the robot's design is based on ancient Japanese warrior costumes. 

The robot within Japanese culture is particularly fascinating. It is an object that generates meaning for its Japanese observers and participants within a tradition that is specifically Japanese. Shintoism has been followed in Japan for over a thousand years and it is a religious tradition that embraces animism. Spirits or kami, can be seen to inhabit animals, natural features like mountains and many other non-human things. Therefore the idea of a robot being able to be animated by human like attributes was more easily assimilable by Japanese culture. There had also been a long tradition of automata using clockwork mechanisms. The term 'karakuri ningyō' refers to a variety of clockwork automats created in Japan during the 17th century.
Karakuri = ‘mechanism’ or ‘trick’ / ningyō = a puppet.

Chahakobi ningyō

A chahakobi ningyō or miniature tea server, was made in the 19th century by Hisashige Tanaka, founder of the Toshiba Corporation which would eventually become a diversified enterprise involved in electronics, electrical equipment and information technology and which is still based in Minato-ku, Tokyo and they of course now make robots for industrial use. The Toshiba Corporation website includes video demonstrations as to how its latest robots can do the work that used to be done by humans. 

Current Toshiba Corporation video of robot use

The next step up in technology to be used to make automata after clockwork was inflatable rubber tube hydraulics. Gakutensoku, a humanoid robot built in 1928 by Nishimura Makoto, used this technology to tilt its head, move its eyes, smile, and puff up its cheeks and chest. It was also programmed to use calligraphy skills. It has recently been reconstructed and a new computer-controlled pneumatic servo system has been designed to keep it going over 90 years after it was first put into operation. What was fascinating about Gakutensoku, was that this was a very early attempt to give human expressions to a robot and cemented the idea into modern culture of robots often being humanoid in form. For myself, I have tended to see this as a continuing form of animism and often think of these forms as being similar to pre-historic shamanistic figures, such as the one illustrated below of a bee faced Algerian shaman figure, that has mushrooms growing all the way around it. This might of course be an indication of early drug use, something that might have helped the shaman get deeper into character. The final form is another hybrid one, an image that suggests that the sharp differences between humans and other creatures is not as sharp as we think it is. 

Gakutensoku’s head could express human affect

An ancient Algerian shaman figure

Robots had gradually entered Japanese culture, and there was less of a worry in their society about how their introduction might effect our human lives in the future. Perhaps because they had had to deal with the aftermath of the atomic age of science fiction becoming atomic bomb science fact, the society was much more open to future casting, whatever the reason, the first mass-produced mechanical toy robots were built in Japan following World War II. These wind-up robots, typically made from tin and brightly coloured, captured the world's imagination and were the first step in the development of a new hybrid culture, whereby robots took on humanoid forms. 

Samurai armour the traditional form behind the modern icon

By the time that films such as Pacific Rim came out in the 21st century, the visual idea of what a robot should be like had been fixed, its Japanese lineage now locked fast into a global idea. 

Design for a giant robot for the film Pacific Rim 

Another culture has been mixed into the hybridity in the image above, that of the engineering 'blueprint'. This is used to give 'scientific veracity' to the design. A design which itself relies heavily on the ideas that came out of Japan in the 1980s, the forms and shapes of which were rooted in traditional samurai armour. The following my nose 'logic' of this post seems to be outlining a post-modernist idea of culture, but I didn't set out to imply that this was what I thought contemporary society was about. I was simply trying to unpack a few thoughts set into motion by looking at some Tenmyouya Hisashi images. As students sometimes it is worthwhile doing the same thing and what it often reveals is the importance of children's culture on what will become an adult world. When I asked the highly regarded contemporary sculptor Thomas Houseago where he thought his main sculptural ideas came out of, he told me that Sesame Street was right up there as one of his main influences. 

Oscar the Grouch in Sesame Street 

Thomas Houseago

For myself it was perhaps Sooty and The Flowerpot Men that have stayed with me all these years, which were, it could be argued, deeply animist ideas as well. In fact at one point I tried to bring images from the two worlds of puppets and humanoid robots together, fused around a memory of when my mother worked as an usherette in the Gaumont Cinema in Dudley during the late 1950s. I found the film so frightening, I had to get my Sooty puppet to watch it instead. 

Sooty watches 'The Day the Earth Stood Still'

I'm now living in an age that recycles the remains of the culture of my youth. Little Weed from the 1950s TV series 'The Flowerpot Men' seemingly a much more threatening thing now than she was at the time; she is no longer the polite weed of yesterday. In a time of global warming and ecological disaster, the taking seriously the life of a weed, seems so much more important and her sagacious advice to the flowerpot men, now seems more like a metaphor and a parable for about how we should have been listening much more closely to nature in the past, and that if we don't in the future, all of us will find ourselves redundant not just 1950s children's puppet shows. 

Little Weed from the Flowerpot Men

Capitalism is driven by a constant need for new forms, so what is current for one generation is totally outdated by the time the next generation comes through. This is something most of human society historically would have found very strange. In the distant past change was very slow and your grandparents' culture would have been virtually the same as the one you would experience. However our propensity for an animist relationship with non human things still remains a powerful force, so I am hopeful that we might eventually begin to treat the world as a living, complex entity, rather than a resource to buy and sell. We still have to deal with our existentialist angst and buying new things never did bring happiness, but reflecting on these issues can at least bring us some sort of awareness and in awareness lies knowledge and in knowledge lies wisdom and in wisdom lies the overcoming of the sadness caused by desire.

See also:

Japanese aesthetics

Drawing in Japan part two

Thinking with articulated body parts