MAYBE IT will always be the Orient's fate to exist, in the Occident, as a fantasy: not a real complex of cultures but a distant catalyst for the exotic, falsifying dreams of the Western imagination. ''Japan and Britain'', the Barbican Art Gallery's main contribution to this year's Japan Festival, seeks to demonstrate (in the words of one of its organisers) that ''the two nations no longer remain two separate cultural entities, but have become two strongly interrelating ones that grow progressively closer through mutual understanding.'' In fact, no such evolving rapprochement is established. The exhibition is a memorial to mutual misunderstanding. It might well have been devised to prove the truth of Edward Said's contention, in his fine, bitter book, Orientalism, that ''if the knowledge of Orientalism has any meaning, it is in being a reminder of the seductive degradation of knowledge, of any knowledge, anywhere, at any time.''
Uninformed appropriation of the forms and idioms of the art of other cultures is not necessarily a bad thing. The Demoiselles d'Avignon is not diminished by the fact that Picasso was largely ignorant of the sig-nificance of the Oceanic tribal masks that he took as sources for his own ''primitivism''. Creative misunder-standing of other civilisations might be said to lie at the heart of much Western art since the nineteenth cen-tury. There are, however, degrees of misunderstanding, and degrees of creativity.
Atkinson Grimshaw's portrait of his wife, Theodosia, which he titled Dulce Domum, is a fairly dreadful painting but also a wonderful demonstration of how Victorian attitudes to the Orient extended into Victorian decor. Japan, here, does not exist to be investigated, but to be plundered for knick-knacks. Mrs Grimshaw, as visitors to the RA Summer Show of 1885 would have noted, has surrounded herself with the very latest fashionable Japanese...
