“The world must be made Romantic”

The self-portraits of Tetsuya Ishida (1973–2005) feature a fusion of the human body and rusty machines or everyday objects, a modern form of the grotesque that, I argue, grows out of a German Romantic notion of humour that values sympathetic inclusion and fantastic amalgamation. Romantic humour, vital to Romantic ethics, is rooted in the self-mockery that drives audiences to extract the general from the particular. By age 26, Ishida had already declared his will to predicate his self-portraits on redemptive self-mockery: he cast himself as those plagued by the ills of Japanese modernity to embody their collective pain through the grotesque degradation of the artist himself. He thereby sustained the cultural critique of industrial modernity in the 1930s and 1940s, led by the Japan Romantic School (Nihon Rōmanha), an offshoot of Frühromantik. Markedly, Ishida’s ethical project, albeit in line with the legacy of the School, goes one step further by taking self-deprecating humour on board. The article is divided into two sections: first, I elucidate the nature of Romantic ethics formulated by early Romantics and picked up by Kafka, Ishida’s favourite novelist; second, I illuminate how Ishida’s grotesque self-portraits figure a confined world that, as Novalis would say, “must be made Romantic.”