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A Basic Feature of Ritual Art:
From Formality to Formalism
It is evident that Shinto liturgical rituals are formalized,
elegant performances exhibiting aesthetically honed, repetitive
patterns. A case in point is the basic action of bowing and
clapping--a series of invariant, solemn gestures occurring several
times in each ceremony. A more complex example is the appearance
of the shrine's hall of offerings (heiden). It presents itself as
an aesthetic object in several ways. It is a static, visual
composition dominated by horizontals, sharply delineated designs
of costumes and curtains, and the intersecting diagonals of bowed
bodies.
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At the same time, it is the area in
which offerings are precisely displayed, and the stage on which
the priests move, chant, and drum with stylized deliberation
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All this evinces order, rule, and
structure.
One way to approach the family of aesthetic characteristics that
we wish to highlight, is to imagine scoring such ritual
performances, as anthropologists sometimes do. Here we intend a
broad sense of score: any abstract notational system for
displaying, in skeletal ideal form, the underlying structure of an
object or event, usually an artwork or ritual. One could score a
daily purification ritual, for example, using dance and acoustic
or musical notations indicating the location of the priest and
audience, his posture, movements, costume, and "stage setting;"
and acoustically, the pitch, duration, and rhythm of the clapping,
chanting and drumming. Even the visual composition of the priests,
seated among the offerings on the raised platform, could be
"scored" in geometric terms--horizontals, diagonals, and areas of
contrasting color. To speak of scoring is to emphasize that
rituals are repeated, highly structured, and more or less fixed
sequences of events evincing many of the features of the visual
and the performing arts.
The score, of course, does not match every aspect of the
performance. For example, the clapping of the participants, led by
the chief priest is often uneven, but the score would clearly
indicate a certain number of equally spaced, synchronized claps.
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That is, scores not only display the
structure of a performance, but they rely on a distinction between
an idealized pattern and a concrete instance of the pattern. This
has an experiential correlate: we are sometimes aware, as ritual
participants, of trying to conform to an ideal pattern or
sequence. Scoring such events invites distinctions akin to those
between performance and script, or painting and geometric form. In
the theory of fine arts, such distinctions come under the heading
of formalism.
Formalism is an aesthetic theory peculiar to twentieth century
Western art; but it is claimed by its adherents to reveal a
universal, timeless, and culture-independent dimension of the
arts. Whether or not those ambitious claims are true, we believe
that art's formal dimension goes some way in explicating the
connection between art and Shinto practices of purification.
According to formalist doctrine, to perceive an artwork
aesthetically is to attend to its formal qualities.
These, in turn, are such features (speaking of the visual arts) as
color, composition, texture, form and line. Formalism takes our
attention away from the representational or narrative content of
the work, its emotional effects, and its instrumental uses. It
directs our attention to the way in which the artist has brought
together formal elements.
Six Persimmons by Mu-chi'i.
On this view, the well-known brush
painting by Mu-chi'i of six persimmons (casually arranged within
an otherwise empty space) is justly famous because of the texture
and line of the six images and their composition, not because
persimmons are an inherently compelling subject. Even minor
changes in the point of view or the spaces between the fruits will
result in very different and generally inferior effects.
In addition, formalism not only directs our attention to such
aesthetic dimensions as composition and color, but it further
directs our attention to underlying structural relations such as
geometric form or complementary relations among colors. With
respect to music, it emphasizes intervals and harmonic structures,
not just the melodic line.
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Formalism says, in effect, that what
is most important about art is not its content but its grammar. In
the evaluation of artworks, it is form that counts.
These structural features may not immediately be apparent to the
casual viewer, but they are operative nevertheless as the source
of the artwork's power to affect us aesthetically. Thus, formalism
adds an important consideration to the above discussion of
scoring. Not only can we distinguish in artworks and rituals
between the particular instance and the underlying form; it is the
latter that is claimed to account for their power. Formalism makes
apparent that the priest's ability to successfully manipulate
formal elements contributes to ritual efficacy.
Those who talk about art in formalist terms are often tempted to
use the word "pure." There are works that exhibit pure form, and
the contemplation of artworks involves a pure aesthetic gaze - a
way of looking that involves setting aside the usual utilitarian
concerns and striving to attend exclusively to the aesthetic
qualities of the artwork. It follows that formalism is fiercely
anti-instrumental. That an artwork expresses a political message,
for example, is irrelevant to its aesthetic evaluation. Art is
sometimes characterized, therefore, as divinely "useless,"
inhabiting a pure realm unsullied by utilitarian concerns.
When we learn to perceive artworks, we learn to attend to their
formal qualities and to suspend attention to other features such
as representative content or didactic force. Trained musicians
perceive the abstract pattern informing the sensuous sound of the
performance. In fact, no adequate account of the powers of music
can ignore the distinction between underlying structure, encoded
in the score, and the physical event of the performance.
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Yamamoto Yukimine demonstrating the rhythm of the score
Score of drumming pattern
The importance of this distinction,
for our purposes, is that the pattern enjoys a certain
"perfection" and operates at something of a "distance" compared to
the actual sounds. For example, the performance can be flawed
while the pattern necessarily remains unblemished. So, due to the
interplay of form with content, artworks are particularly
efficacious means for evoking in us a sense of a pure structure
separate from surface sensuous contents. These aesthetic
distinctions are directly applicable to Shinto ritual, because as
noted, these ceremonies display a rigorous formality. Hence, no
matter what instrumental view one may bring to the ritual, e.g.
that the offering are gifts to the kami to insure their blessings,
it will be irrelevant to the formal power of the ritual
performance itself.
Our point is that the deliberate, stylized quality of Shinto
ritual brings to mind the distinction between pure form and
particular shrine performances and that distinction can be further
clarified by formalist aesthetic theory which reveals an essential
and important power of art and of the ritual arts.
A Second Feature of Ritual Art: Liminal Efficacy
Another feature of Shinto rites is liminality. Like formality, it
is one of the powers of the ritual arts which connects ritual to
purification.
Some anthropologists, notably Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner,
claim to have uncovered a universal structure common to a certain
class of transformative rituals such as rites of passage. Such
rituals aim at changing the participants, either psychically or in
terms of social status. For example, via rituals, adolescents
become adults, and princes become kings. This view rests on a
particular analysis of change. In order to become something new,
one must first abandon the old, moving through a phase which is
neither new nor old; only then can one achieve, accept, or
construct the new. That middle phase of transformative rituals is
called the liminal phase. It is characterized as "neither here nor
there," or "betwixt and between," since it occurs between a phase
of ritual separation from one's previous self or status and a
phase of re-aggregation during which a new persona or status is
produced and legitimized by the community. At its most general,
liminality is thus a fluid phase promoting change. The ritual
participant is like the checker piece, temporarily lifted off the
board in a different (vertical) dimension, while being moved from
one square to another. Our ability to create liminal situations by
means of ritual is an important cultural discovery. It allows both
the control and promotion of changes deemed worthwhile by the
community.
For Turner, liminality involves temporarily setting aside or
stripping away some or many of the features of societal
interaction which govern daily life. This may be accomplished
subtly, artfully and symbolically, or, in some ritual traditions,
by means of suffering, cruelty, and violence (e.g., fasting,
vision quests, or physical threat). Typically, the ritual
participants are homogenized by finding themselves in a ritual
space that de-emphasizes differences in social status, erases
utilitarian concerns, and amends the sense of time. Turner
explains this situation by appealing to Hume's notion of the
sentiment of humanity--a basic and universal feature of human
nature inclining us to community, but prior to all particular
social structures. During the liminal phase, the participants are
united by this sentiment, depending on a deeper sense of community
temporarily unblemished by the usual, compromised and somewhat
external social constraints. Turner labels this relationship "communitas."
Applying these notions to the Shinto tradition, it is those
festivals that involve extreme physical effort or touch upon the
sublime--e.g. Hadaka Matsuri (Naked Festivals)--that first come to
mind.
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Konomiya Hadaka Matsuri
The participants in such festivals
may be temporarily transported to another realm of experience,
often quite ambiguous and demanding. During these interludes, the
usual conventions, demands, and distinctions of daily life recede
into the background. One may emerge refreshed or otherwise
transformed, and an experience of "communitas" may in fact occur
among those actively engaged in the festival.
In a less dramatic way, the daily purification ritual in a shrine
may also involve transformative moments. These more subtle and
subdued liminal experiences can best be illuminated by the notion
of a transforming journey and its associated
images--death/rebirth, the womb, darkness or fog, bisexuality,
eclipse, wilderness and emptiness. In myth, folktale, and
literature, liminality is expressed by going under (e.g., Alice
falling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland) or venturing forth
into strange realms (Dorothy in the Land of Oz or Xuanzang's
pilgrimage in his Journey to the West). In these realms, societal,
physical, and even logical laws may be suspended. Such tales
always show the protagonist before the journey into the liminal
realm and, at the end, indicate her/his return--transformed--to
ordinary life.
Similarly, each ritual encounter is something of a journey,
beginning with entrance through the torii, ablutions at the
temizuya, a walk to the shrine (which may involve a journey into
the forest as well), entrance into the outer hall to experience
various phases of the ceremony, and so on.
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This "journey" may enhance the
experience of distancing oneself from the dominant concerns of
daily life.
Currently, liminality is claimed to be not only an important
concept in ritual studies but also a widespread feature of the
arts. In general, artworks can represent liminal experience or
express its feeling tones, or produce something like liminal
experience. The production of liminal experience can be
illustrated by any powerful experience at the theater, for
example, after which one has the impression of having been in a
special realm (during the performance) and feels somehow changed.
A recent installation piece at a local fine arts museum provides a
more detailed example. By means of a darkened hall, the viewers
enter a room that seems completely without light. Gradually,
however, a rectangular area on the opposite wall, the size and
location of a large painting, becomes barely visible. It is
apparently a uniformly black canvas, except that it seems in some
way anomalous. As one approaches it, the space seems to be of
indefinite but considerable depth and slightly undulating. Any
viewer who ignores museum decorum and tries to touch the painting
finds only space! This otherworldly "painting" is actually a
rectangular hole cut in the far wall and opening onto another dark
and empty room. The only light in either room is a black light on
the floor of the second room and hidden from direct observation.
The rectangular space, which is "neither here nor there," is a
vivid representation and expression of liminality. It is also for
some viewers productive of a liminal experience. Here we are
taking liminal experience to be one kind of aesthetic
experience--one that involves disorientation, ambiguity, and a
sense of otherness.
A related example is the inner sanctuary (gohonden) of a shrine,
an "empty" box in the innermost worship hall that enshrines or
invites the kami and at the same time exemplifies the enigmatic
ontological status of kami which exceeds all attempts at
definition.
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In its ability to represent and
express an ambiguous and otherwordly state or process, the empty
box functions much like the dark empty room described above. But,
of course, there is an important difference: since the emptiness
at the heart of the shrine is generally hidden from view, this "liminality"
functions as an image of the imagination rather than a visual
image.
Note that though liminality may depend for its efficacy upon the
formal features of rituals-as-artworks, it is not to be confused
with those features. Liminality is not a grammatical feature of
artworks, but a phase in certain kinds of ritual, and an
experience induced by some artworks--a phase or experience best
described phenomenologically in terms of its experiential and
social effects. However, since liminality is a distinct and
widespread power of ritual and art, and since it creates an
extra-mundane effect, it shares with formal features qualities
relevant to the relationship between ritual art and
purification--a point we are now in a position to discuss.
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