自然的信使 | Nature’s Messenger
自然的信使
当平衡被被打破，天堂
选择那些最敏感男性，
让他们产生共鸣。
韩宇(768-824)
有些艺术家的大画幅图像或“强烈”的主题会像飞矢一样直击我们的眼睛，唯一的目的是让我们呼吸这个时代的刺鼻恶臭。山本昌南不是其中之一。他站在他们的对立面。他的照片甚至都不容易到达我们身边：我们必须自己出去才能见到它们；而且，由于它们的小尺寸，我们需要靠近作品，就像我们从钥匙孔里张望。与许多当代图像的暴力或壮观相比，山本提供了柔和和微妙，这并不是说任何形式的平淡或顺从；他的柔软就像一团薄雾，笼罩着风景并改变了它。
他的艺术也不符合任何当前的形式主义；甚至连20世纪先锋运动建立的那个落满灰尘的旧标签也不符合，先锋运动周期性地要求艺术家们向永久决裂的概念宣誓效忠。相反，他的个人诗学忠实于他的文化传统，他远离了推动许多当代艺术潮流的解构的惯性思维。从这个角度来看，山本似乎是一个怀旧的艺术家，一个“反现代”的艺术家。他的照片（几乎总是黑白的，精致地浸泡在茶或咖啡中）往往有故意磨损的边缘，有时会被撕裂或划伤，或小擦伤和细小污点；它们几乎像是从某个旧相册中取出的，时间已经留下了不可磨灭的印记。事实上，他的照片从来没有崭新外表上的那种虚构的光泽或花哨色彩带来的虚假的鲜活。山本拒绝让艺术品呈现“新”的外观；他鄙视任何看上去不受时间影响的东西。对他来说，任何新的面具都是虚荣的，是逃避时间蹂躏的尝试；只是虚幻的东西。当代历史事件的印记也不可能从他的照片中可以看到。只是时间的真实流动在图像的物质性上留下了退化的痕迹，反映了对万物转瞬即逝的哲学意识。这种耐心细致的暗房工作是罕见的美德，这在摄影界是绝无仅有的，将由机器产生的冰冷、连续的复制品变成一个独特的物体——一个经常可以放在手掌中的物体手。这为 摄影找回了手工维度，非常类似于过去画家和微型画家的旧手工行业。山本以画家的身份开始他的艺术生涯并非巧合。
他的艺术的另一个非常个人化的特征过去是——因为这是他不再做的事情——他将照片挂在艺术画廊的方式，故意散落在墙壁上。它们既没有像往常一样被框起来，也没有按任何顺序排列，它们形成了一个临时的、显然是随机的装置的一部分，但却具有一种叙事感，无论多么模糊或含蓄。奇怪的是，叙事元素——所谓的文学元素——是20世纪先锋运动，如立体主义、未来主义、抽象主义和概念艺术试图从艺术领域中驱逐的东西，其直接目的是集中所有在19世纪感伤的或地方性叙述的对立面，表达为纯粹的形式，现代性的新形式。但山本从来没有叙事或文学自负。他没有用图像讲故事，而是试图回归亚洲传统的时间连续性，目的是将时间重新融入空间；我想起那些长长的中国手卷，它们在展开时呈现出画中的风景。通过这种方式，超越了摄影图像的瞬间和狂喜维度，强调了一种鲜活的、可逆的时间动态。这似乎只是一个前卫的把戏，但山本似乎并不怀有任何纯粹形式创新的自负，也没有任何打破既定模式的意图。如果他这样工作，更多的是内容的要求，而不是形式的要求。他的艺术并非来自任何外在的形式主义，而是来自内心的需要，来自对世界秘密品质的不断追求。他在自然寂静空旷的空间中发现品质（23），在时间的微妙流动中，或在由无尽的存在链条上自然散发出来的美中：鸟、云、花、山、海、根、果、裸黑暗中伸展的身体，猴子、猫、昆虫……他的艺术是自然生命的体现。回归到本源。
几个世纪以来，欧洲文化将人类与自然隔离开来。首先，基督教剥夺了"异教徒“赋予自然的神圣价值：神性不再隐藏在自然现象中，而是存在于超越世界的超然上帝中。然后，现代笛卡尔哲学将自然简化为纯粹的物质，“res extensa”，为两个世纪后的进步神话可以完成其无情的征服做好了准备，并得到更具破坏性的科技的支持。经过几个世纪的基督教统治和现代化过程；在现代西方文明的集体想象中，大自然——现在已经被驯服了——已经变成了一种纯粹的装饰。一个实用的游乐园，有利于身体健康，有利于体育休闲，有利于工业探索。
尽管 20 世纪的技术发展在亚洲带来了同样的结果，但日本的传统有着完全不同的文化和宗教基础。在工业革命之前，日本人并没有像西方那样感到与自然隔绝，也不认为自己是自然的主人。作为神道教的继承人，日本人继续对这个宗教保持敬畏的态度。远东古代圣贤和艺术家的最大愿望是观察神道，发现其规律，并将其完全视为自己的。中国传统教给画家他们所谓的“理”的秘密法则，即构造所有自然形态的原理，以及“气”的原理，即研究使整个宇宙充满活力的生命能量的特征。在中国和日本，视觉艺术家并没有试图模仿事物的外观；他们的目标是反映支配所有自然现象的内在原则”。这包括通过不断的沉思将自然内在化，渴望与自然和谐相处，并与其最本质的方面建立内在对话。山本属于这一传统体系，或在至少支持激发他们灵感的最初想法。对他来说，生活的一切都是纯粹的内在：直接感知出现在我们周围的品质和能量——他自己声称感觉到——无论是来自海浪的温柔膨胀（ 89），被风吹断的树根的奇异形状（117），或蝴蝶翅膀的美丽形状和颜色（52）。与滋养了古代艺术大师的精神一致的是，他的照片也试图传递所有自然生命的诗意，那种只有艺术家才能捕捉和表达的透明而自然的美。“我试图成为自然的使者，”他在他的一篇文章中写道。
山本远离城市的喧嚣和喧嚣，作为森林居民，他将我们带回了亚洲僧侣和艺术家的古老沉思愿景。他的照片表达了生物的力量和简单性：从简单的事物中散发出强大而精致的美。这种原始的、自然的存在状态将我们最深刻的想象带到了几个世纪前我们被撕裂的失落世界，它的现实仍然在我们心中唤醒一种奇怪而模糊的无意识渴望，想要回到原点，回到我们自己。
但是，原始状态下的自然是什么？说白了，就是美。
没有什么比宇宙的这种神秘特质更短暂（或更深刻）了，却被被当今的艺术圈如此贬低，也许是因为美仍然是一种向往，一个从未实现的目标。然而，这种意义的丧失绝不意味着它的消失，更不是它的内容的过时。无论当今时代的官方声音怎么说，美是艺术的核心谜团，永远不会消失。
世界，宇宙的存在和进化并不需要美，美恰恰是这个世界中的别的什么东西，那个在你周围跳动的外在的神秘，隐藏在生命的核心。感受它，感知它，在哲学、宗教和艺术中产生了巨大的影响，并且从未停止过激起各种至关重要的狂喜。不用说，这并不是多余的事情。
Bychagoras（与赫拉克利特一起）是第一个设想宇宙中存在秘密和谐的西方思想家，他称之为 kúsmos。对于毕达哥拉斯来说，美体现在各部分的比例和相互关系上；这是所有古典艺术的基础，直到 18 世纪中叶，它在欧洲一直保持着优势地位。到了 19 世纪，启蒙运动已经将美的研究转变为美学，这是一个源自希腊语 isthèrikos 的术语，表示任何受感官感知的事物。因此，正是在 18 世纪，美学将艺术置于愉悦感官的孱弱无力的境地，剥夺了柏拉图在古代赋予它的所有形而上学意义。柏拉图式美的概念在整个中世纪仍然存在，并通过菲奇诺的新柏拉图主义在文艺复兴时期获得了最后的推动力。从美的观念被审美观念取代的那一刻起，艺术就开始经历一系列转变，表现为连续的对立的二元性——新古典主义/浪漫主义、现实主义/象征主义，直到二十世纪的前卫运动最终宣告了它的消亡。 1929 年，保罗·瓦莱里 (Paul Valéry) 写道：“美是一具尸体。它已被新奇、强烈、陌生，总之所有令人震惊的价值观所取代。”这就是目前的情况，在这种情况下，机构似乎在合唱，就像麦克白中的女巫唱的一样：“美即是丑，丑即是美”
在我们的社会中，美的消亡并不代表进化的征服，而仅仅是意义的剥夺，这是由于在此过程中失去了原始情感并忘记了支配它的知识原则。当然，回到对柏拉图形式的崇敬是毫无疑问的，对我们来说，与天体音乐一样陌生。美不能再是理想主义；我们的时代甚至无法要求这种超越性。我们太平凡了；缺失了梦想家的特质。对美的感受不能通过超越性获得，只能通过内在。只有通过重新发现它最遥远——但也是最专制的——对立面：自然，它才能回到我们充满矫揉造作人工痕迹的、技术化的世界。正如山本所做的那样回归。
但在这里同样重要的是要注意山本所有照片的美学概念的另一个基本特征：佛教基础。我指的是对二元论世界观的拒斥，这与西方传统如此格格不入，也就是说，明确愿意不在美与丑之间划清界限。佛教在这方面是非常微妙的。其观点是，任何把美作为丑的对立，或将新作为对旧的对立，都是有局限性的，并因此皆为“空”。
对山本来说，美并不是毕达哥拉斯所相信的严格的、宇宙的、神圣的秩序的结果，而是生活中的一切流动和谐的结果。
也许罗丹说的就是这个，自然界中的一切都是美丽的。自然形式，无论是不规则的、不对称的还是短暂的，总是保持美的品质：生命的“成功表达”（正如克罗齐所说）。是的，如果真理就是生命本身，美就是真理。
但美从何而来？它是自存在的，还是仅仅是主观性的产物？因为如果观察到的东西与观察它的人密不可分，那么美就是一种状态。然而，这并不意味着不能说美存在于我们自己的主观性之外。海鸟、野兔和马本身就是美丽的；他们生活在美丽中，对它一无所知，但因为他们是它的一部分。美只存在于人的目光和心中。
美是人人都能接触到的，但能够辨别和感受世界的这种品质是一个程度、敏感性或意识水平的问题。它不会向所有人显现。无数人每天路过同一个地方，却没有发现它的内在美，但另一个人可能会立刻发现它：美是一种状态。谁达不到这种境界，谁就无法感知美。没有人能成功地解释是什么产生了这种强烈的狂喜时刻。我们花了几个世纪的时间才发现美可能仅仅只是剥落的墙壁、空荡荡、朴实无华的房子，或者，正如山本向我们展示的，从泥土里拔出的，简简单单的树根。
毫无疑问，历史是在城市中锻造的，而不是在农村或偏僻的森林中。 但同样真实的是，这一天即将到来：我们星球上的自然生命的冲突———尽管一再推迟———将在人类历史上占据中心位置。 这是时间问题，是生存问题。 山本似乎宣布了一种适合这个时代的发展和精神需求的美的回归。 这种美的避难所不在城市或大都会博物馆或画廊中； 它们隐藏在地球上越来越少的自然空间中。 它们是遥远的、即兴的、自主的、不为人所知； 但价值巨大，因为它们唤醒的美感有助于艺术家和人类理解生活的本质。 它原来的透明度； 它神秘的极简性； 其为未来更新的强大力量。
Nature's Messenger
When the balance breaks, the heavens
choose the most sensitive among men,
and make them resonate.
HAN-YU(768-824)
There are artists whose large-format images or "strong" subject matter strike us like an arrow, straight to the eyes, in the sole aim of making us breathe in the acrid stench of our time. Masao Yamamoto is not one of them; he stands rather at the antipodes to them. His photographs do not even reach us easily: we have to go out ourselves to meet them; and, because of their small format, we have get up close to them, as it putting our eye to a keyhole. In contrast to the violent or spectacular nature of many contemporary images, Yamamoto offers softness and subtlety, which is not to say blandness or conformity of any kind; his softness is like that of a mist that envelopes the landscape and transmutes it.
Nor does his art correspond to any of the current formalisms; not even to that dusty old label, established by the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, which periodically requires artists to pay homage to the notion of a permanent rupture. On the contrary, his personal poetics are faithful to his cultural tradition, and he lives apart from the disintegrating inertia that propels many contemporary artistic trends. Seen from this viewpoint, Yamamoto may seem a nostalgic artist, an "anti-modern' artist. His photographs (almost always black-and-white and delicately bathed in tea or coffee) tend to have deliberately worn edges, sometimes torn or scratched, or small scrapes and tiny stains; they almost seem to have been taken from some old photo album where time has left its indelible imprint. Indeed, his photos never have the fictitious sheen of new surfaces or the phony liveliness of garish colors. Yamamoto rejects the new appearance of artistic objects; he disdains whatever seems to have been spared the effects of time. For him, any mask of newness is a vain pretention, an attempt to escape time's ravages; something simply illusory. Nor can the imprint of contemporary historical events be discerned in his photographs. It is only the actual flow of time that leaves its traces of deterioration on the materiality of the image, reflecting a philosophic awareness of the fleetingness of all things. But this patient and meticulous darkroom work also has the rare vitue, by no mcans common in the world of photography, of transforming a cold, serial reproduction, produced by a machine, into a unique object-an objec which often fits in the palm of one's hand. This restores to phorography an artisanal dimension very much akin to the old manual trades of the painters and miniaturists of the past. It is no coincidence that Yamamoto began his artistic career as a painter.
Another very personal characteristic of his art used to be-for it is something he no longer does -the way he would hang his photos in art galleries, deliberately scattered over the walls. They were neither framed nor arranged in any order, as is usual, but racher formed part of an ephemeral, apparently random installation, yet one with a narrative sense, however vague or implicit. Curiously enough, the narrative element -the supposedly literary element - was something that twentieth-century avant-garde movements, such as cubism, futurism, abstraction, and conceptual art, sought to banish from the realm of art, in the direct aim of concentrating all expression into pure form, into the new forms of modernity, at the antipodes of the sentimental or costumbrista narrations of the nineteenth century. But Yamamoto has never had narrative or literary pretensions. Rather than telling stories with images, he seeks to return to the temporal succession of the Asian tradition, in the aim of reinserting time into space; I am thinking of those long Chinese handscrolls that reveal a painted landscape as they are unrolled. In this way, a living and reversible temporal dynamic is emphasized, beyond the instantaneous and ecstatic dimension of the photographic image. It may seem a mere avant-garde trick, but Yamamoto does not seem to harbor any pretensions to purely formal innovation or any intention of breaking out of established molds. If he works in this way, it is owing more to the requirements of content than of form. His art does not emerge from any exterior formalism but springs rather from an inner need, from a constant quest for the world's secret qualities; qualities he discovers in the silent and empty space of nature (23), in the subtle flow of time, or in the beauty emanating naturally from the interminable chain of being: birds, clouds, flowers, mountains, seas, roots, fruits, naked bodies stretched out in the dark, monkeys, cats, insects... His art is an embodiment of natural life. It returns to the source.
For centuries now, European culture has segregated the human being from nature. First, Christianity stripped nature of the sacred value conferred on it by the pagan religions: the divine was no longer concealed in natural phenomena but to be found rather in a transcendent God existing beyond this world. Modern Cartesian philosophy then reduced nature to mere substance, res extensa, preparing the terrain so that, two centuries later, the myth of progress could consummate its implacable conquest, buttressed by ever more devastating technologies. After centuries of Christianity and modernity; nature--now tamed -has been transformed, in the collective imagination of modern Western civilization, into a mere décor. a utilitarian amusement park, good for one’s health, for physical recreation, and for industrial exploration.
Although the technological developments of the twentieth century have led to the same results in Asia, the Japanese tradition has utterly different cultural and religious underpinnings. Before the industrial revolution, the Japanese did not feel segregated from nature, nor did they consider themselves its masters, as has happened in the West. Heirs to Shinto, the Japanese have continued to maintain a reverential attitude toward this religion. The greatest aspiration of the ancient sages and artists of the Far East was to observe Shinto, to discover its laws, and to assume them fully as their own. The Chinese tradition taught painters the secret laws of what they called li, the principle that structures all natural forms, as well as those of qi, the study of the characteristics of the vital energy that animates the entire universe. In China and Japan, visual artists did not attempt to imitate the external appearance of things; their aim was to reflect the inner principle" that governs all natural phenomena. This involved interiorizing nature through continual contemplation, which aspired to harmonize with it and establish an inner dialogue with its most essential aspect. Yamamoto belongs to this body of traditions, or at least espouses the original idea that inspired them. For him, everything that lives is pure immanence: direct perception of the qualities and energies that appear around us--which he himself claims to feel-whether they come from the gentle swelling of the waves (89), the singular shapes of tree roots torn up by the wind (117), or the beautiful forms and colors of butterfly wings (52). In keeping with the spirit that nourished the art of the ancient masters, his photographs also seek to transmit the poetry of all natural life, that transparent and spontaneous beauty which only the artist can capture and express. "I have tried to be nature's messenger," he writes in one of his texts.
Yamamoto lives removed from the noise and bustle of cities, and as a forest dweller, he brings us back to the ancient contemplative visions of Asian monks and artists. His photographs express the strength and simplicity of living things: the powerful and delicate beauty that radiates from whatever simply is. That original, natural state of being that transports our deepest imagination to the lost world from which we were torn centuries ago, whose reality still awakens in us a strange and vague unconscious desire to go back to the origin, to return to ourselves.
But what is nature in its primordial state? Plainly and simply, it is beauty.
There is nothing more fleeting (or deeper) than this mysterious quality of the universe, so relegated by present-day artistic coteries, perhaps because beauty remains a yearning, a goal never attained. Nevertheless, this loss of meaning does not by any means imply its disappearance, and still less the obsolescence of its content. Whatever the official voices of the present age may say, beauty is the central enigma of art and will never disappear.
The world, the universe does nor ned beauty in order tO exist and evalve, Beauyij therefore that something else in the world, that exernal mystery thas throbs around u, concealed in the very heart of life. Feeling it, perceiving it, has had enormous conse quences in philosophy, religion, and the arts, and has never ceased to provoke grea. vital raptures of all kinds. Needless to say, it is no superfluous matter.
Bychagoras (along with Heraclitus) was the first Western thinker to conceive the existence of a secret harmony in the universe, which he called kúsmos. For Pychagoras, beauty is manifest in the proportion of parts and their reciprocal relationship; this was the foundation of all classical art, which maintained its ascendancy in Europe until the middle of the eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century, the Enlightenment had transformed the study of beauty into aestherics, a term derived from the Greek word isthèrikos, which designates whatever is subject to perception by the senses. It was in the eighteenth century, therefore, that aesthetics consigned art to the feeble realm of pleasant sensations, stripping it of all the metaphysical significance it had been given by Plato in antiquity. The notion of Platonic beauty remained alive all through the Middle Ages, receiving its final impulse in the Renaissance through the neo-Platonism of Ficino. From the moment the idea of the beautiful was replaced by the concept of the aesthetic, art began to undergo a series of transformations manifest in successive opposing dualities-neoclassicism/romanticism, realism/symbolismuntil the avantgarde movements of the twentieth century finally decreed its extinction. In 1929, Paul Valéry wrote: "Beauty is a kind of corpse. It has been supplanted by novelty, intensity, strangeness, in a word by all the shock values." And this is the present situation, in which the establishment seems to recite in chorus, like the witches in Macbeth: "Fair is foul, and foul is fair."
The death of beauty in our society represents no evolutionary conquest, but rather a mere deprivation of meaning, as a result of having lost a primordial sentiment along the way and forgotten the intellectual principles that governed it. Of course, there is no question of returning to the veneration of Platonic forms, no less foreign to us than the music of the spheres. Beauty today can no longer be idealist; our age is not even in a position to claim such transcendence. We are too prosaic; and not dreamers enough. The sense of beauty cannot return to us through transcendence but only through immanence. It can only return to our artificial, technologized world through the rediscovery of its most distant--and yet its most imperious--opposite: nature. Exactly as Yamamoto makes it so return.
But here it is also important to note another essential characteristic of the aesthetic concept of all Yamamoto's photographs: the Buddhist substratum. I am referring to the rejection, so alien to the Western tradition, of a dualistic vision of the world, that is, to the clear willingness not to draw sharp distinctions between beauty and ugliness. Butdhism is very subele in this respect. It postulates that any affirmation of the beautiful in opposition to the ugly, or of the new as a negation of the old, is a limited, and therefore illusory, perspective.
Beauty, for Yamamoto, is not the result of a rigorous, cosmic, divine order, as Pythagoras believed, but the consequence of a fluid harmony in everything that lives.
Perhaps Rodin was referring to this when he said that, in nature everything is beautiful. Natural forms, whether irregular, asymmetrical, or ephemeral, always conserve the quality of beauty: the "achieved expression" (as Croce put it) of life. Yes, beauty is truth, if truth is life itself.
But where does beauty come from? Does it exist in itself, or is it a product of mere subjectivity? Because if what is observed is inseparable from whoever observes it, then beauty is a state. Which does not mean, however, that beauty cannot be said to exist outside of our own subjectivity. Seabirds, hares, and horses are beautiful in themselves; they live in beauty without any knowledge of it, but because they are part of it. Beauty only exists in the human gaze and heart.
Beauty is accessible to all, but being able to discern and feel this quality of the world is a question of degree, of sensibility or level of consciousness. It does not manifest itself to everyone. Countless people can pass daily by the same place without discovering its intrinsic beauty, yet another person might go there and discover it immediately: beauty is a state. Whoever fails to attain to this state is incapable of perceiving beauty. No one has succeeded in explaining what it is that produces this intense moment of rapture. It has taken us centuries to discover the beauty of a mere peeling wall, or an empty, unadorned house, or, as Yamamoto shows us, some simple roots torn out of the earth.
There is no doubt that history is forged in cities, not in the countryside or in solitary forests. But it is no less true that the day is coming when the conflict--repeatedly post-poned-of natural life on our planet will occupy a central place in human history; it is a matter of time, of survival. Yamamoto seems to announce the return of a beauty suited to the vital and psychic needs of our time. The sanctuaries of this beauty are not in cities or in metropolitan museums or galleries; they are concealed in the ever fewer natural spaces of our planet. They are distant, extemporaneous, autonomous, secret models; but of enormous value, because the aesthetic feeling they awaken helps artists and human beings to understand the essence of life. Its original transparency; its mysterious simplicity; its great power of renewal for the future.
Jacobo Siruela