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Matsuri! Japanese Festival Arts. Organized by the Fowler Museum of Cultural History, University of California at Los Angeles; Gloria Granz Gonick, guest curator. Fowler Museum, Los Angeles, California, October 13,2002-February 9, 2003.
Exhibition catalogue: Matsuri! Japanese Festival Arts. By Gloria Granz Gonick, with contributions by Yo-ichiro Hakomori, Hiroyuki Nagahara, and Herbert Plutschow. (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 2002. Pp. 256, 9 inches x!2 inches; 295 color and 5 black-and-white illustrations. Distributed by the University of Washington Press.)
The entrance to Matsuri! Japanese Festival Arts exudes a calmness and serenity that many visitors might associate with a typical Japanese environment. Dim lights, cool air, and a minimalist display-a pair of hand-painted folding screens and a large torii, or "shrine gate"-evoke the tranquility of a Shinto shrine or the precise aesthetics of a Japanese teahouse. As one moves deeper into the exhibit, however, a frenzied beat of gongs and taiko drums begins to sound, and the bright, vivid colors of festival jackets, robes, and banners spring to lifeinviting one into the "joyously chaotic" world of matsuri. Shinto festivals performed by many local communities throughout Japan, matsuri (literally, "to offer worship") delight and astonish the deities with an explosion of visual arts, music, and dance, in order to ensure health and prosperity in the future. Guest curator and art historian Gloria Granz Gonick, who spent more than ten years documenting matsuri in Japan, uses an ethnographic approach that allows visitors to experience-as much as is possible in a museum gallery-the lively, energetic atmosphere of Japanese festival. Although the exhibit focuses on the central role of visual arts in communicating with the gods and reinforcing community cohesion, it also addresses the structure and aesthetics of matsuri as a whole. The floor plan follows the natural movement of a typical festival, which would begin in the quiet space of a shrine, build up to the exuberant parading of the...