Max Ryynänen

Aalto University, Finland

Paul Bowman has initiated the idea, that to understand martial arts and to make their study more useful for the academy, we’d need to ‘invent’ and institutionalize martial arts studies – like the martial arts themselves were ‘found’ and institutionalized some decades ago. Since the invention of the concept of art and building its institutional framework, aesthetics has had an important role in our understanding of the arts. I’d like to add to Bowman’s idea, that it would be important to initiate also a sub-branch of aesthetics of martial arts, to really understand what martial arts are. I claim that aesthetics is really in the DNA of how we conceive martial arts. What could this sort of subdiscipline include? 1) Many martial arts have turned into arts / aesthetic culture, mostly dance, through the need to hide them for political reasons (e.g. occupation and colonialism) or through the centrality of dance in the cultural context where they were developed or modernized. Already Plato writes about pyrrhichia, Greek military dance, and e.g. n’golo, kicking and stomping, and capoeira are good examples of this. Becoming dance is a strong historical phenomenon in martial arts (it never happens the other way, i.e. that a dance form would become a martial art). Also, martial arts are often used in a dance-like fashion, e.g. pentjak silat is today often performed in weddings. Here one could also think of martial arts like taido, which were developed with form and beauty in mind, and where the teaching still accentuates that. 2) The only martial art that has been really thought, for a moment, to belong to the institutional art system, is sumo, in late 19^th century, when the idea of art was imported to Japan (this ended fast) – but practices we today recognize as arts, e.g. painting and poetry were also part of the education of the military elite in East Asia (most famously the education and lifestyle of the samurai in the era of piece, before modernization, i.e. the Tokugawa period 1603-1868). The analogy between e.g. poetry and sword use was deep already in Miyamoto Mushashi’s writings, but the way these came together in the practice and code of the samurai later on offers an interesting cluster-case where martial arts and things we see as art collide and come together. Thirdly, martial arts are aesthetically pleasing to look at – at least often, maybe not that much judo matches or all forms of peasant wrestling, but e.g. karate katas and aikido throws, definitely. The fourth perspective is that somaesthetically moving in martial arts and feeling this movement is a sort of aesthetic pleasure, which stems from many backgrounds, e.g. heritage thinking (many martial arts are really old, and one feels like a living embodiment of cultural history), and an understanding of how the movement looks. It also provides classical pleasures tagged with aesthetic concepts, like ‘harmony’. The fifth perspective is the cultural aesthetization of martial arts including e.g. films, which have choreographed martial arts for our visual pleasure. In my talk I will try to give an overview of the needs and potentials of building a sub-discipline of martial arts aesthetics, and to accentuate problems and potentials of this idea.