(Even Radical) Illustration Requires (Normalizing) Convention: The Case of ‘Genre Art’ in Early Modern Japan

Abstract

Pictures that portray the ‘now’ of a lived reality from the vantage of witnesses emerged in Japan during the 17th century, when the mundane social life of contemporary commoners blasted into the visual repertoire of illustrated books. This change, a revolutionary one, belongs to the broader experience of early modernity, from Amsterdam to Nanjing, as seismic economic transitions helped occasion a new immediacy in social representation. Yet the radical newness of the imagery was quickly tamed by convention, which the author argues is indispensable to the legibility of all illustration. The visual conventions explored here include the ‘ordinary pictorial site’ (in the Japanese case such public spaces as theaters and bathhouses but quintessentially the street) that artists treated in a style of ‘generic factuality’ (combining a loving attention to material detail with stereotypical renderings of faces and bodies). Not so paradoxically, the very tropes and treatments used to convert novelty into normalcy also enforced inertia. If banality is one risk of convention, normativity is the greater problem. Training viewers to see one kind of world, illustrators elide any other.