At the Japan Society, an exhibition of ukiyo-e has clawed its way into the spotlight. Ukiyo-e is a genre of woodblock prints, a familiar medium in Japanese art exhibitions. While these prints are always beautiful and historically intriguing, rarely do journalists pounce with such enthusiasm to laud woodblock prints. But who could resist a title like “Life of Cats”?
The exhibition, focusing exclusively on cats in ukiyo-e, was created by gallery director Miwako Tezuka. Cat-obsession has already bled into museums, but the Japan Society is not merely chasing the success of the Walker Art Center’s Internet Cat Video Festival: “Life of Cats” has been in the works for almost two years—granted, a brief period in museum time—and was inspired not by domestic trends but by the popularity of such exhibitions in Japan. In an interview with Artslant, Tezuka stated that she was initially skeptical of finding “meaningful elements I could bring out through this exhibition.” But once she started looking, she saw significant cultural and historical meaning loaded in each image of a cat. From scenes in the Tale of Genji to legends about monstrous cat demons, cats mean something specific in Japan, and that meaning is most visible not in a single picture, but in the collection of images together.
Setting also helps to construct meaning in museums. The ancillary art of exhibition design seeks to highlight the selected art and engage the viewer without taking away from the works themselves. In this case, graphics and design were provided by Clayton Vogel, who worked closely with Tezuka. Vogel’s mark is evident, if sometimes subliminal. For example, he drew inspiration from the red collars found on the cats in the prints, re-creating them on a giant scale to “draw people’s attention to details they might otherwise miss in the work,” he says. Every color, every piece of reclaimed fir wood, was included for a reason. Vogel enjoyed working on this exhibition because he was given the opportunity to “go bananas, go artsy.”
Miwako Tezuka was delighted as well, saying that it is “refreshing to see all these traditional prints and realize how cutting edge and contemporary those graphic elements were.” The whole production looks playful and contemporary. It’s charming.
But when you add the setting, which is so current, do you encourage modern connections at the expense of historical ones? Is there still coherent meaning in this exhibition? Across the East River, the Brooklyn Museum has a similarly amusing, long-term exhibition on cats: “Divine Felines: Cats of Ancient Egypt.” Curator Yekaterina Barbash has said that it “attempts to use peoples’ fondness for cats as a doorway into learning more about ancient Egyptian culture as a whole.” A familiar strategy. But it’s no guarantee that the exhibition accomplishes this task. When visiting the exhibition, a passing stranger quipped, “I can’t go in there, I’m allergic!” Which cat was he seeing? An Egyptian pharaoh’s or his girlfriend’s?
As you enter the exhibition, you see cats. Just cats. In this case, you see lions and housecats, male and female cats, god and guardian cats. Are these all united just by being cats? As it turns out, the Brooklyn Museum has something to say on exactly this topic. In 2012, the museum opened another ongoing exhibition called “Connecting Cultures: A World in Brooklyn,” and in its stunning bricolage of art from across human time, William Merritt Chase’s Girl in a Japanese Costume (ca. 1890) sits between Female Figure Standing with Arms Raised (by an unidentified Dogon artist) and a Japanese Jizo Bosatsu. Celestial models beg to be contrasted. A wall of beautiful American and English frames spanning centuries hang clustered together, containing mirrors or nothing.
“Connecting Cultures” is trying to make a point, very loudly. Museums typically use categories useful to visitors: time period, material, artist, or geography. But curator Kevin Stayton argues that “such a standard organization can also be limiting. It can prevent us from making new and exciting connections between geographical locations, time period and types of objects.” This may be why organization in museums isn’t traditionally focused on a single subject.
When museums collect items that share a subject such as “figures” or “frames,” they make those connections for the visitor. Museums create meaning by collecting things and displaying them in a certain way. They become authors. But curatorial authorship is not just the museum’s problem: Visitors make connections all the time, and when they make connections, they make meaning. Sometimes exhibitions that focus on a single subject can appear to be exploring this “connecting-cultures” strategy with abandon, surrendering the myth of the invisible and neutral curator. Works of wildly different origin, medium, and intention sit next to each other without explanation, sharing only a topic.
Consider the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s recent “Singing and the Silence: Birds in Contemporary Art,” which included a beautiful tree of orange resin birds, somber altars to dodo birds, and photographs of birds about to be released with trackers. By collecting these items, curator Joanna Marsh made herself artist and author: The meaning isn’t necessarily there to begin with, but if we make it—well, there it is.
Back at the Japan Society, we’re left with a question: What about those occasions when an existing meaning is what the curator seeks to highlight? The meaning of cats is what this exhibit is really about; and not “just cats,” but cats as the Japanese have seen them. Obviously, “just cats” is what gets many visitors through the door; but even if less-than-scholarly motives bring in visitors, the exhibition itself is meticulously curated. Is that enough to overcome connections to the present?
Miwako Tezuka has been fairly happy with the media portrayals of her exhibition, even with all the cat quips. She believes that “they understand that there’s substance in the exhibition even if the initial invitation is through the motif.” And although the Japan Society has paired the exhibition with a showing of viral cat videos and a cat adoption event, she doesn’t worry about viewers’ mixing their own notions of cats with the meaning in these works.
“People did have their own understanding of what cats are, so what we feel about cats might be different, but that’s the nature of image,” she says. She views the exhibition as a gateway into a more nuanced understanding of Japanese culture and art.
In conversation, Clayton Vogel lamented that visitors go through museums quickly. A visitor who pauses, a visitor who thinks and connects—that is the ideal audience for this type of exhibition, he believes. But we are all that visitor: Museums are meaning-making machines, and so are humans. As the Brooklyn Museum declares, “It is these connections that often help us understand what it is to be human and how the arts express that.”
Tara Barnett is a writer in Washington.
