Here’s an interesting post from Rope Springs Eternal which might cause some controversy
Rope bondage in the Japanese style is popularly thought of by its practitioners in Japan and elsewhere as an art form, but as such it is practically unknown by the artworld, meaning bondage has never been defined or validated by some agency appointed the task of positioning creative cultural artifacts. People who “do rope” often go by unusual titles (such as nawashi, dorei etc.) intended to confer some manner of special virtue in the creation of the living tableaus that characterize the forms and practice, and which appear (in the West at least) to imply the existence of a dedicated and objective critical cadre charged with assigning such titles. In Zen Buddhist Japan, entitlement is franchised within the iemoto system, a traditional way of controlling access to intellectual information and cultural endowment.1 Entitlement designating skill with rope is something that can neither be claimed nor striven for; the term nawashi (or kinbakushi, or whatever the latest terminal designation may be) is like a one-word Zen koan, its meaning a product of intuition rather than reason.I use the term living tableaus above because a case is sometimes made for bondage referring to the tying of inanimate objects (e.g., Barbie dolls, boutique display windows, etc.). I will be limiting my appreciation of bondage in this essay as signifying rope applied to sentient persons, specifically consenting adult sentient persons. Whether or not such adults themselves are doing the describing, Japanese bondage scenes employ a unique vocabulary to describe their forms and elements, and while these appear to be largely and uncritically accepted by rope connoisseurs in practice, thoughtful observers allow that most of the jargon is precisely that, jargon, being often of dubious provenance or etymology, in either Japanese or other languages. This aesthetic obscurantism not only advances the material interests of the iemoto but preserves the mystique of Japanese bondage, imbuing it with an ineffable quality that should be properly viewed as consistent with Zen predicates and teleology, and desirable in and of itself.
1 Shibari has become the de facto term denoting rope restraint in the Japanese style. Interestingly, according to well-informed sources working in Japan, erotic and artistic application of rope to a body for purposes of restraint goes as often by the English “bondage” as by shibari (or any of its variations).
2 The naming issue gets loopier still when we look at the etymology of the English “bondage”. In its erotic (and as well for our present purpose, artistic) calibration bondage is a popular appropriation of a term referring to ‘serfdom’ or ‘slavery’ according to Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. Only very lately has it come to be associated with sadomasochistic technique, specifically physical restraint. Etymologically the word is closer at its root to duty or obligation, rather than anything having to do with art or eroticism. Thus does Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage have more to do with social restraint than the other kind (although problems of art-making are the leit motif of that book, and at the thematic core of the author’s The Moon and Sixpence. Maugham had a thing for the Siamese-twinning of beauty and restraint). While many of the foremost Japanese exponents of shibari use the term liberally, it has only sketchy currency in Japan, and then perhaps as mostly a marketing hook by which to attract westerners keen to believe that their fancy has a bit of the exotic about it.
3 There are no qualified critical corps, organized schools of thought nor a collecting public by which one might objectively measure one’s advance to the rank of nawashi. As in the case of other aspects of the ancient iemoto system, it’s enough that an owner of the title grant it to another to give it meaning.
The one means by which prestige may be said to be more objectively endowed is by way of skilled and acknowledged photographers who have chosen certain shibari stylists for the development of their own portfolios. Whether or not being photographed by a recognized photographer is in itself enough to merit elevation in the eyes of one’s peers is open to dispute. A photographer, whatever their skills may be with respect to their own art, may not have any good idea of what constitutes skill with rope. Many fine photographs have been taken of dangerously sloppy rope work. Still, to the discerning eye there is much available in the play between partners and rope. In Japan, while the title nawashi appears to be conferrable by those who already have it, a convenient means of discovering who might be a worthy heir to the title would be to stumble upon a photographic record of well-done rigging. Self-proclaimed nawashi proliferate in America and Europe where the term is perhaps better understood as a role designation than as a tribute. Still, any title would be useless in a vacuum; nawashi in the West entitle themselves most often with reference to splendidly detailed photos of their own work and are as often vigorous in defense of their titles, so much so that at times one could be persuaded that Nawashist is the title being defended.
Cheekiness aside, I want to note that this way of developing a naming system in an inchoate art form is not without precedent. ‘Nawashi’ is passing into the history of doing rope bondage in much the same way as ‘tea master’ came to be applied in Japan to adept practitioners of that ceremony. While it is possible to study tea in a classroom setting, the ‘art’ of tea is thought to inhere in the ceremony alone, and then only as executed by one exhaustively steeped in its refinements and subtleties by discipline and time with tea. I will return to ‘teaism’ further along as I consider its role in the Japanese aesthetic sensibility, but for now we might allow that in fairness nawashi are at the point tea masters were thirteen hundred years ago when, according to Kakuzo Okakura, the poet Lu Wu became the first ‘apostle’ of tea when he inscribed his C’ha Ching (The Holy Book of Tea) during the T’ang Dynasty in China.
While there are innumerable volumes on the tying of knots, the working properties of rope, funicular physics and the like, there is no code, manifesto, convention, lexicon or other guide to the mystery of rope as an ancient aesthetic technology, as a metaphor for important aspects of human existence, or in its spiritual dimension as a means of sweetening the tragedy, noted throughout philosophy, of having been born. Throughout human history most ennobled pursuits have started out as commonplaces, often deemed vulgar, squalid or even misanthropic in the era of their origin. Societies naturally resist the valorization of the conventionally despised in the beginning stages of transformation from pariah to observance; everyone can think of a notion thought abhorrent in the past and a trifle today.
There is quite a bit available to loosely support the idea that shibari is an aesthetic pursuit, but to the best of my knowledge no one has ever undertaken to account for shibari as legitimate art, meaning art qua art, or when we use ‘art’ to fairly describe anything. The acknowledgment of shibari as art even among some of its most passionate adherents is thin. The overwhelming number of lovers who employ some form of bondage regularly, rigorously or dilettantishly, using rope or some other means, think more of their perversity as a pleasantly distinguishing mark of their sexuality than as something they loosen upon their own sensibilities or that of the wider world with any sort of contemplative or socially redeeming value. I will be considering art generally as a contemplative pursuit later in this essay, as well as the possibility that contemplative occupations are primary to our conscious lives. Coming to a satisfactory accounting for shibari as art requires my explaining my position on art qua art, be it shibari or any other kind; I will, in other words, be outlining a general ontology of art not only merely to categorize shibari as such, but to tie in many another devalued cultural artifact left for dead by the artworld. The goal will be less to mold shibari into an ontology of art than to blow the ontology of art open and outward such that it engulfs shibari, to be inclusive in a totalizing way of shibari and the whole of the artifactual world.
Posted by Mac K. at 11:30 AM