14 Why Do I Have to Do What You Say?
Why do I have to do what you say?
As children, many of us want independence and freedom so we ask why we always have to do what our caregivers say. Then, as we get older, we may disagree with family members, political leaders, or institutions that make decisions that affect us. In response to these disagreements we can practice defiance, or resistance to the authority or expectation that we dislike. In the arts, defiance can be overt and clear or it can be subtle and hidden.
In “Why Do They Have More Than Us?”, we considered social hierarchies and social disparity. We focused on kings, emperors, and colonizers often at the top of a hierarchy. Kings and colonizers don’t want to topple those hierarchies down. They want them to stay in place for as long as possible, because that’s how they stay in power. Those who defy social hierarchies choose to resist the disparity, actively commenting on it and making change. This sort of defiance is often entangled in postcolonial movements of recent centuries and decades, wherein organizations or whole societies want change from the colonial order and try to determine what their independent society will be like. Let’s start with resisting an established art style and then move into expressions of social and political defiance.
Making your own style
Have you ever heard someone referred to as ‘eccentric’? Generally, this means that they don’t follow the rules or social norms, and others think they are odd. Many artists have been called eccentric. A group of Japanese artists of the Edo period have been labeled “The Eccentrics” by recent scholars because of how much their style and content diverged from the norms of their day. One of the most famous of this group was Soga Shōhaku, who favored historic painting styles reaching back hundreds of years to the Muromachi period (the same time when the Karesansui in “What is Beautiful?” was created). Shōhaku is described as “unconventional” (DMA 2017) or as a “madman” who produced “weird” imagery (Editors 2021). Lions at the Stone Bridge of Mount Tiantai (Fig. 14.2) is an excellent example of his style.
This hanging scroll produced with ink on silk is almost 4 feet tall, a scale that impacts the viewer immediately. The subject matter is even more impactful. A lion overlooks a deep cliff near the center of the painting. A huge arch rises above the lion, with jagged cliffs receding in the distance. As we look closer, we realize that the lion at the center is not alone. There are hundreds of lions in a frenzy of movement. Some lions have already fallen from the topmost arch, descending into an uncertain mass of clouds.
Shōhaku depicts a narrative here, but in a very surreal way. The original story centers on a lioness who is determined to find which of her cubs are the most resilient. The lioness throws her cubs from the cliff’s height to test them. If they survive the fall or find a way to avoid it and return back to her, they are part