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Point Régional : Chine - Japon

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Préparation aux voyages vers l'Asie, dont le Japon et la Chine. Appréciation comparée des mentalités.

par Alain Robert Coulon

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Carte || Liens communs || Liens Japon || Liens Chine

Alain R. Coulon collabore sur notre site à la rédaction et à la mise en forme des pages en chinois et en japonais. Il présente ses appréciations dans les textes ci-dessous après de longs séjours résidentiels en Asie.

"Alain Robert Coulon a séjourné 21 ans en Asie : 2 ans en Chine (un an à Pékin et un an à Nankin) et 19 ans au Japon (deux ans à Nagasaki et 17 ans à Tokyo).
A cela s'ajoutent 5 voyages en Thaïlande, 2 voyages aux Indes et au Népal. Il a traversé trois fois le continent eurasiatique de Pékin à Paris via Moscou (deux fois par le transmongolien -train chinois- et une fois par le transmandchourien -train russe-). Un article sur son dernier voyage est paru dans l'hebdomadaire "Valeurs actuelles"⁽¹⁾ (dernière semaine d'août 2000).

Sommaire des textes d'A.R. Coulon :

• Préface à la Philosophie japonaise des enfers d'Umehara Takeshi (février 2007)
  
  
• Abraham Michael Dayan's Pyramidal Demiurgism (août 2006)
• Cubism or pyramidism ? (septembre 2006)
• Dayan's pyramidism, a symbol of living matter's brotherhood (octobre 2006)
  
  
• VU DE LA FENETRE DU TRANSMONGOLIEN : DE TOKYO A PARIS, UNE TRAVERSEE AU COEUR DE LA PSYCHIATRIE DES NATIONS.
  
  
• Un sage en pays Tamoul au sud de l'Inde, Ramana Maharishi (1879-1950), ou le Voyage définitif. (mai 2004)
  
  
• Une nouvelle équation d'Einstein cachée dans la dimension extrême-orientale ? (mars 2003)
  
  
• Fin de l'Histoire ou recommencement de l'Histoire
  
  
• L'oeil de l'exil

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Cubism or pyramidism ?

by Alain Robert Coulon (Alain R. Coulon is a writer, philosopher and Asian specialist who has lived more than twenty years in China and Japan). (alainrobertcoulon1@yahoo.com)


^{[septembre 2006]}
(by Alain Robert Coulon)


I asked Abraham Michael Dayan if he had ever painted a cubist work. - Yes, he replied, but only one, ten years ago. It was a robot.
I found this answer full of signification. The birth of cubism has been a major art event of the past century. The date of this masterpiece, Les demoiselles d'Avignon, is 1907. The critic Vauxcelles is said to have been the first to use the name. He was speaking of "small cubes".
In fact, Cezanne, the father of modern painting called for the use of spheres, cones and cylinders, not cubes. The whole space geometry.

The idea was to analyze reality, to put art on the level of sciences developing fast at the time.

A painter has a brain, he is a researcher in his own way. He paints with his eyes and nervous cells. The hands are only a tool. In the same way, Glenn Gould and others said, rightly, that the pianist plays with his brain, not his fingers.

By the way, some nervous cortex cells have a pyramid form. Abraham Michael Dayan's art seems to emphasize triangles and pyramids.
I am wondering whether his pyramidism is not a better symbol than cubism, especially now, at the birth of our new century and millennium.

Let's us face it : a cube is a boring thing, a very bad shape. You look it at every angle, and it is all the same : six ordinary squares. Monotonous, anonymous squares. Four : the dread number. This is uniformity, a perfect symbol for hyper-democracy, even flat communism.

On the contrary, consider a pyramid : you have in it tension, progress, elevation, effort, positive hierarchy. The pyramid, this age old symbol, is as powerful today as it was in Egyptian art, three millennium before Jesus- Christ.
In it, is still hidden the mysteries of the world, the enigma of the self and the Self : the small one and the big one.

It has a base, it has a top, it is all going to a single point, towards a summit : you can call it Point Omega, or the Unknown, or the Unknowable, God, the One, Dao, Allah, Buddha, Shiva, whatever ...
So many names, cultures, quarrels, that there is no chance you will ever be bored.

Painters do not argue, do not speak, do not use words and concepts, do not fight. They just draw a shape. But they think, too. They think with shapes. And lines, colors, volumes.
It happens that a nose is more natural drawn as a pyramid than as a little cube. Same for a tree, a pine, a bird, a fish, a ship, a mountain.

The pyramid is an arrow which is penetrating deeply inside reality.

Dayan gives his own definition of his style : "puzzle pyramidal". This could be translated as : "hermetic pyramidism". As there have been three forms of cubism : analytical, synthetic, hermetic, the same could be said of pyramidism.

But the weakness of cubism is obvious : too abstract and too square, gross, rude, compact, heavy, clumsy.

A pyramid is sharp, elegant. It exhibits an asymmetry, it is unstable, it has both the strength and the weakness of the diagonal : try to put it on its top, and see what happens.

By the way, at about the same time as the birth of cubism, during the first quarter of the last century, dodecaphonism tried also to get rid of hierarchy in music.

In this twelve-tone technique, no note had to be superior of inferior to another one. Each had to appear once in a melody, at the same level, on the same plane : no tonic, no dominant, no harmonic cadence.

This was like hyper-democracy, flat communism, permanent revolution in the musical world. It can be said now that this art current, serial music, has been a failure. It has had almost no posterity, no lasting fertility.

The anchor of Western classical harmony is strong : it is based on the science of acoustics, the well-tempered scale, Pythagorean tuning.

In the science of shapes as well, in painting, the strongest form could obviously be the triangle, the traditional, eternal pyramid, not the cube which is close on itself, quite similar to a prison, a cell, and which can be analyzed, furthermore, as a compound of pyramids, or parts and bits of pyramids.

In the pyramid are eminently present the five golden pillars of Eastern philosophy's temple : subtlety (or mystery), elegance and lightness (the aesthetic factor), intellectuality, spirituality, interiority (or introspection).

in Dayan's paintings, matter evaporates as if it was seen through the mirror of a curved space-time, in a non-euclidean geometry which is an imaginary geometry, a pan-geometry, nevertheless, the real geometry for large space discovered by the mathematicians Gauss, Bolyai, Lobachevsky, Riemann in the middle of the nineteenth century. From one point beside a line, many more than one parallel can be drawn.

Energy and/or matter distort space-time and space-time is deeply changed, influenced by energy and matter. The fourth dimension of time is not separated from the vertical line, the horizontal line and depth, it is integrated in them, as the fifth dimension of curvature.
A strange tension force is at work, a torsion which can make a link between what exists before our eyes and the invisible, this complex relation between light and matter best expressed by extreme speed.

Artistic schematizing, that is to say stylization can give us the whole reality of a man, of a ballerina, a house, a ship, a church.
Or a small, ordinary cup on the table of a coffee shop, as well. And the hand which holds it, may be best drawn as a small triangle, because it is always moving, and very fast.

A single line, a single dot can be alive, full of energy.

And the void in the middle of a canvas is not useless, not at all a bad sign of laziness : it is a breathing space, a necessary link, a bridge between the visible and the invisible, obvious in Dayan's style as it is in the great Chinese or Japanese tradition of ink painting, or calligraphy.

In it, colors are allowed to move, to get heated, to burn white hot, smoking in evanescent forms.
As a result, between clouds, angels are roaming, ghosts perhaps, can be seen.

This art is an art of fractal geometry and many dimensions. Space-time continuum evolves inside, grows in an inner infinite, rolling on itself in a complex but elegant curve which is not a regular bell form, but a sharp shape, going quickly up in a peak, and down slowly in a very long tail, both rough and thick. Like the river curves, the snow flakes model, the fern patterns, the lungs shape. Like live itself.

Complex chaos. And however, simplicity and beauty.

As the ordinary cube could be said to be the fetish-image of the twentieth century, this art, very old and always new, the pyramidism, may be the symbol of the coming historical period, with many, many accompanying meanings : philosophical, religious, moral, as well as artistic, aesthetic.

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