For many years the relevance of the authorial intention in interpretation has been debated, but no conclusions have been reached. In this paper, I revisit the early stage of the debate and reconsider the concept of intention. My focus is on the article by Wimsatt and Beardsley in the Dictionary of World Literature (1943). Through the analysis of the article, I will illustrate the original implications of intention in the debate. Wimsatt and Beardsley insist the distinguish between the work-meaning and the intentional meaning. They argue that there exists only the work meaning. The intentional meaning premises the dualism of form and content. In this view, an author has the meaning of the work in his mind before the production, and then he casts the meaning into a work. However, Wimsatt and Beardsley presume that form and content are one and inseparable, and there is no need to assume the intentional meaning. In the early debate, there remained the influence of New Criticism which aspired to establish literary studies as a legitimate discipline and to overcome dualism. This suggests that the concept of intention in the early debate was simpler and more practical than now it is.

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KOBATA Junzo (1926-1984) is a rare aesthetician who brought the term “aesthetic consciousness (美意識)” to the forefront. The Japanese term “bi-ishiki (美意識)” has a different meaning from its German counterpart, “ästhetisches Bewußtsein”. The term “bi-ishiki” contains an ethical connotation in which it has to do with one’s attitude toward life and which has remained in everyday language. In his main work, The Philosophy of Aesthetic Consciousness, he argues that the essential trigger for an aesthetic experience is wonder, and the experience of wonder brings about “awareness of ignorance”. The transformation of the subject in this process can takes place in the continuity of life. This view is more obvious in his last book, whose title Gudoˉ Geijutsu (求道芸術) says that art seeks after truth. Gudoˉ or asceticism in everyday life overlaps with the potential of aesthetic consciousness for aesthetic experience. The everyday meaning of “aesthetic consciousness” is imporant for him for the seeking after truth. “Aesthetic consciousness” is part of the seeking after truth in everyday life. His continued use of the term “aesthetic consciousness” indicates his understanding of aesthetics as a way of life.

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The magazine “Bijyutsu Shinpo” (translated to ‘Art News’), which was launched in 1902, pioneered art journalism in Japan and introduced 31 artists who worked in Japan at the time through a series of articles. This study analyzes those articles and explores what kinds of artists were featured to understand the magazine’s journalism activities. The magazine often featured and introduced artists who attempted to take on innovative approaches (Shin-pa) over artists who sought to master existing painting themes and techniques (Kyu-ha). However, the first artist featured in the inaugural article was Hiroshi Yoshida, who belonged to the Kyu-ha group. He had just achieved success at the Ministry of Education Fine Arts Exhibition (Bunten), and his style matched the magazine’s ethos. Furthermore, the magazine sometimes featured untimely and overlooked artists, such as Hotsuma Katori. It featured Katori because of his efforts to understand artistic expression historically and his desire to innovate on top of that. In summary, the magazine usually selected timely artists based on their standing at Bunten but also sometimes featured artists depending on its sense of art. This activity was working to gain the reader’s trust in the magazine’s journalism and, moreover, display their sense of art.

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Michael Fried, in Manet’s Modernism (1996), proposes the concept of “facingness” as characterizing the relationship between painting and beholder in Édouard Manet’s art in the 1860s. In this paper, by analyzing Fried’s understanding of the status of the beholder in front of Manet’s paintings, I place Manet in Fried’s historical view of painting, and clarify his conception of the fundamental condition of pictorial modernism. First, I examine how Fried responds to Clement Greenberg’s and T. J. Clark’s interpretation of pictorial modernism and proposes his concept of “facingness” against their reading of Manet’s paintings. Second, by centering on Fried’s analysis of the existence of the beholder, I interpret Manet’s “facingness” as situating the beholder in a double bind of absence and presence in front of the painting. Third, in light of Michel Foucault’s formalist approach to Manet, I show how Fried and Foucault agree on the undecidability of the status of the spectator in front of Manet’s paintings. Finally, I conclude that Fried understands one of the origins of pictorial modernism as the status of the beholder in a dilemma between absence and presence, from which the spectator as the self-mobilized and autonomous agent can emerge.

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Santiago Sierra, a Spanish contemporary artist born in 1966, is renowned for his work called “remunerated actions,” which often involve the exploitative manipulation of the human body. The actions are performed by remunerating the participants. In previous research, Sierra’s works have been considered to provoke racial and economic disparities between participants and audiences through their structural devices, leading to “friction, awkwardness, and discomfort.” In contrast, this paper analyzes how Sierra’s representative work 160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People (2000) is reflected as “torture” to present an alternative interpretation of the discomfort. So, I focus on assistants’ behaviors that have not received attention in previous research by distinguishing between “labors,” the human labor force employed for the work, and “workers,” assistants executing the work’s intent. And I argues the worker’s two aspects through referencing the documents of torture Abu Ghraib Photography: worker quietly executes tattooing as a practical work, but becomes this action as a torturous play by smiling with the camera. However, Sierra assumes responsibility for these actions of the labors and workers in this work as an artist. This approach critiques the ambiguity of responsibility for its actions in the case of Abu Ghraib photography.

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A series of government schools for design education opened in rapid succession during the Meiji era. Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908), who formulated the policy for the Tokyo Fine Arts School, emphasized design education from its opening in 1889. At the Tokyo Technical School (est. 1890, renamed as Tokyo Higher Technical School in 1901), Principal Seiichi Tejima (1850-1918) established the Department of Industrial Designs in the Training Institute of Industrial Teacher in 1897, and the main school followed suit by establishing the same department in 1899. The Tokyo Higher Technical School actively adopted Western (particularly British) design theories and teaching methods. This influence is evident in the articles published in Zuan, the journal of the Dainippon Zuan Kyokai, a group founded by teachers and alumni of the school. Shinzo Komuro (1870-1922) further theorized the design methodology of benka or conventional treatment of plant motif and developed it into his book Ippan Zuanho (1907). This study identifies conceptual changes in the word zuan. Komuro distinguished between art and design (applied art), defining zuan as the result of careful consideration of an object’s use, materials, and manufacturing process. In this sense, he was a pioneer in the modernization of zuan.

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