pictogram exercise

Making language: impetus, workshop and visual languages
Harriet Edwards and Yen-Ting Cho
Journal of Writing in Creative Practice vol 6 no.1

Report on a workshop that arose out of awareness of the difficulty of translating Chinese or Japanese into English.  English has the ability to be very precise.  Chinese has no articles, tenses, phrasal verb prepositions (e.g. look up, look out), participles or auxiliaries.  Translation has to be loose, open.

The authors became interested in language rooted in pictograms.  This is very evident in early forms of Chinese calligraphy but there are some traces visible in contemporary characters.  They decided to try out some exercises to engage imaginatively with this.

Participants were given a theme, 'summer spaces' and asked to draw images that they connected with this. In pairs, they were asked to guess at the meanings of these, and they were given 'loan words' and 'compound words' (?) to expand the language.  After sharing their experience of this, they were invited to write a haiku or imagist poem - presumably using the language they were developing - and to translate it to their partner either in English or/and using sound or gesture.  (This last part was a little unclear)

I found myself fascinated by this and wanting to try it out for myself.  What is it like to write a language based on imagery, on the visible world?  What are its possibilities, its limitations?  How might this connect in to my - as yet to be developed - meaningless calligraphy? I like the participatory aspect of it.

yen-ting.cho@network.rca.ac.uk
harriet.edwards@rca.ac.uk

Chinese Calligraphy

Ouyang Zhongshi and Wen C Fong: Chinese Calligraphy
Yale University Press 2008

Wen C Fong: Prologue
Calligraphy and painting inextricably bound.  Both ideographs (the picturing of concepts) and painting (the picturing of nature) are seen as expressions of the artist's self, as bearing his/her 'presentational energy'.

WCF describes the component parts of one piece of early (1300BCE) calligraphy in 3-d terms:
'With their silhouettes fitting together and set against the flat material ground of the bronze surface, they create a planar structure with fully articulated organic forms in the round moving independently in space.'
Poised to go 3-d

The space around the figure is not just background but 'belongs' to the figure and contributes to its qualities.  A yin-yang relationship between line and surface, negative and positive, carrying energy .  Also a place that carries an extension of the calligrapher's body; calligraphy as '. . . the materialisation of the power of the artist. . . to appreciate calligraphy is to relive the physical action in one's mind.' (Gao Yougong)  A calligrapher uses their whole body, their calligraphy a kinaesthetic form.  Also connected to what is being represented: '. . . a correspondence between the form of motion in nature and the motion of his hand in drawing.'

Figurative painting is understood to convey the spirit of it's subject through its material form, through its 'form-likeness'.  The image through its magic likeness to this spirit is the prototype of the natural form (not the other way round as in western art).

Calligraphic brushstroke is the key to painting; what is painted is a 'trace', an extension of the artist's self. Contrast the western view of a painting representing something external to the artist and is considered from the viewpoint of the viewer; the presentation of the artist is missing e.g. from semiotic theory.  Objects can be painted calligraphically using different styles of brushstroke.

In standard script, the strokes and dots create the structure while the turning brushwork expresses emotion; other way round in cursive script.  Running style evolved at a time when expression of individuality was becoming possible.

By 8th century virtual space had evolved in painting with foreshortening and 3-dimensionality.  A landscape shows not what the artist sees but what is in his mind's eye; makes a vastness of scale possible which is organised into one of 3 planar structures, vertical, horizontal or mixed.  Continual adjusting of relationship to what might be seen as pictorial illusion.

To paint something was a process of aligning oneself with the understood truth of things, not mimetic.

The work is an invitation to contemplate. 

Art practice seen by some as a servant of the Dao or Great Way, by others as fed by it.

Calligraphers revisited past masters, copying, adapting innovating.  Who was chosen and how their work was treated could express political views.  Brushstrokes can be laden with art-historical connotations and so stylistically communicate intention and meaning.

A poetic appreciation of individual calligraphic works or styles eg. 'light as a startled bird', 'like vines and grasses linked together', 'a gentle wind breathing through the forest'.

Shitao's one-stroke painting - myriad forms emerging, all connected, brought into relationship and order by his one flowing stroke.

* * * * *

Flicking through the images in this huge volume, some of the things that caught my eye:

• the particular kind of elegance of incised script (as opposed to brushwork)
• decaying supports with ragged edges and rough holes, mottled surfaces (like a rough monoprint), edges of lines crumbling so form starts to dissolve
• the structures (boxes within boxes) that shape a character
• the way red seals animate a monochrome script; what governs their placing? (sometimes overlap script)
• calligraphy on bamboo strips; strips stored in transparent tubes and arranged vertically
• fluidity of 'I know your sadness' p131
• ying huang zhi, a type of semi-transparent beeswaxed paper used for tracing calligraphy
• vertical columns always very straight
• dense text, the effect of an eruption of space into this
• subtly different shades of paper (creams, browns, pale green) joined together
• cursive script looser than running; despite the names, characters are rarely joined together but much greater irregularity of size, emphasis given to different strokes
• the free-est calligraphy in the book is by Mao Ze Dong



Mao Ze Dong, Poem written on the Long March 1935

Dan Flavin

Dan Flavin The Complete Lights 1961-96
Michael Govan and Tiffany Bell (Dia Art Foundation and Yale University Press, 2004)

Michael Govan: Irony and Light
Using industrial materials, picked up Tatlin's cry of 'real materials in real space'. 
The tubes present sculptural possibilities and painterly (mixing colours together moves them towards white - with paints they go to black).
Rejected any mystical interpretation of his work, denied he had any inner vision and defended his work against academic interpretation.  Just fixtures and tubes that create an optical experience.  He said: Symbolising is dwindling - becoming slight.  We are pressing downward towards no art - a mutual sense of psychologically indifferent decoration - a neutral pleasure of seeing known to everyone.  In fact he didn't even create 'works' but rather 'proposals' for a particular situation.

Critics however cannot resist e.g. quotes Elizabeth C Baker saying that pure light has qualities of being 'seductive and confusing'; as overwhelming both the viewer and surrounding space; as having a 'symbolic capacity to arouse an emotional response; as retaining echoes of sun, fire, warmth, mystery, life. 

Brydon E Smith: Reflections and Thoughts about Dan Flavin
Quotes DF on his first tube piece: 

The Diagonal of May 25th, 1963

'There was no need to compose this lamp in place; it implanted itself directly, dynamically, dramatically in my workroom wall - a buoyant and relentless gaseous image which, through brilliance, betrayed its physical presence into approximate invisibility.'

Chinese painting exhibition

Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700-1900
Victoria & Albert Museum
Went back a second time to look at this; the first had been an overview, this time I was particularly interested in the material aspect of the works - how they were made and presented.
The shanshui (= mountain and water = landscape) paintings of the Song period (950-1290) meet the challenge of how to translate philosophical ideas - humanity's place in the cosmic order - into images. In the 12th century interest began to shift onto depicting naturalistic light.
In the Yuan period the austere 'aesthetic of solitude' emerged, black ink on white paper, with artists who had fled urban life with its constraints to live in the mountains, trying to express emotion and thought in image and poetry, the two interwoven.  A bond emerging between monks and scholars, 'apparition paintings' in pale tones expressing the immateriality of things.

Paintings take the form of:

• horizontal scrolls which juxtapose or combine calligraphy and image with textile bands between - this aestheticises joins between sheets of paper
• hangings bound by fabric either just above and below, sometimes divided, or along the sides as well
• albums of small paintings

A lot of inventiveness in this e.g. in the relative size of textile to painting, colour links between the two.  Upper bands (heaven) always larger than lower (earth)

Palette largely monochrome with touches - all the more effective for being just touches - of turquoise and soft jade green.
Ink washes appear to float on the surface of silk or paper.  Colour is never textured.

Brice Marden

Brice Marden Cold Mountain 

Brenda Richardson (Menil Foundation Inc, 1992)

1. The Three Perfections

Painting, calligraphy and poetry are held in highest esteem by the Chinese.

Calligraphy has been the most widely practiced.  Originated as picture-writing, but very few characters now retain any traces of this and mostly combine phonetic and semantic elements.  Evolution:

• o   Large Seal Script latter part of Chou dynasty (1045-256BC)
• o   Small Seal script Ch’in dynasty (221-206 BC)
• o   Clerical/Official style Han dynasty (206BC – AD 220)
• o   Square or Standard style soon after Han – orthodox script ever since
• o   Running and Draft scripts evolved alongside this – fluid, rapid to execute

(http://www.art-virtue.com/styles/tsao/)

Last three are most commonly used – others considered archaic

In Han period calligraphy achieved the status of an art form, reaching a peak in work of Wang Hsi-chih, the ‘sage of calligraphy’

Several of the literati of the late Northern Sung period were eminent calligraphers

Brushwork used in painting and calligraphy grew closer and greatest painters were usually proficient calligraphers.

2.  A Journey of Ghosts

On Han Shan and the T’ien-t’ai landscape, fleeing a false life, the Zen way to enlightenment. HS lived in poverty, an eccentric.  We have his words in his poems, but the calligraphy is by subsequent copyists.  Mostly made up of 8 lines, each comprising 5 characters and paired into 4 couplets – the visual form adopted by BM

HS lived at Cold Cliff and took on the name HS which means Cold Mountain.  As well as being a geographical place, this refers to a state of mind – one of renunciation equated with enlightenment, the Buddha within.

Video on Han Shan (interviews with translators, animated readings of poems)- http://www.cultureunplugged.com/play/2457/Cold-Mountain

3.  Weights and Leanings

On BM’s awe of Jackson Pollock, esp for his late works which critics conventionally see as a falling away from the earlier ones.  For BM White Light (1954) is ‘among the greatest and most fully resolved paintings ever made in the west’.  ‘The great thing about Pollock. . . was his conviction that each work is part of a continuing quest.  To be an artist is not about making individual works.  To be an artist is to do your work and let your work express the evolution of a vision. . .  it’s part of a living situation.’

Admires the fact that he never took the easy route; the amount of work and thinking within each painting.

Of JP’s very calligraphic drawing Untitled, 1950: ‘. . . it’s just three forms drawn with strokes of pure energy.  It is one of the most compelling works in the history of art.

Sees that the apparent layering in the paintings is deceptive, that there’s an organic weaving back and forth through the ‘layers’ creating areal space between them.

‘. . . if you’re responding, you enter a world that is really inexplicable.  The painting’s world is only explicable in the sense that it is what you’re looking at. . . That’s why painters make paintings: to have you be in that place.’

Speaks of JP’s Scent as being burned in his mind.  And the black and white paintings as being so strong and bizarre: ‘They have weights and leanings in them that you just can’t understand at all.’ 

The intense energy that comes from looking at a JP painting.

BM keeps postcards of JPs work on his drawing table and books on him to hand; frequently visits his paintings in NY.

Other source of awe is Cezanne – in both the process of works evolving, ‘a true relation between artists and the art they make’:

‘The whole thing about making a painting, is that the next painting is supposed to be a better painting.’

4.  Mountain-Water

= Chinese term for landscape painting.  According to Tsung Ping (375-443) the primary mark of excellence of a painting is that it reveals the artist’s true feeling, their communion with the landscape’s essential nature, not that it is realistic.  This essential nature is not obvious from the landscape’s physical features but is revealed to the artist through direct experience of the heart/mind, transferred via eye and hand to the painting and there available to be directly apprehended by the viewer.  So it is transcendental, it goes beyond physical appearance; spiritual communion.  It is relational.

The mountain is a revered space where supernatural powers can be attained and ultimately immortality.

Chinese aesthetic theory has as much a spiritual basis as formal/technical. 1^st two criteria in critic Hsieh Ho’s influential 6^th century list are ‘rhythmic vitality’ and ‘bone/structure’.

Emphasis is on the brushline.  ‘To paint is to draw boundaries’ (1^st century Shuo wen, dictionary). The brushstroke is both descriptive and expressive.

Poetry has as much a place in a painting as objects.  In this way calligraphy becomes incorporated in art.

Emphasis on the moment of execution (dance-like) rhythmic vitality, the personality of the artist and the spirit of creation, intuitive awareness, enlightened states.

According to myth, in far-off times fabulous beasts emerged from the Yellow and Lo Rivers bearing on their backs the Tortoise Characters (so writing like the marks on a tortoise shell) and the Dragon Chart (precursor of I Ching?)

1984 BM saw ‘Masters of Japanese Calligraphy’ exhibition in NY.  He was in the midst of working on stained glass windows for Basel cathedral so formalized religion was already at the forefront of his mind. He was captivated by the energy of the calligraphy and kept a copy of the catalogue to hand at all times. Went from this to Chinese poetry.

He saw calligraphy as a form of drawing that for him was an opening to a meditative state.  He read Chinese poetry in translation and started exploring Chinese poetry, life, politics.

Began work on his Etchings to Rexroth, the translator of Tu Fu’s poems and was thinking about the relationship between form and content.

Was then given a copy of Red Pine’s translation of the Cold Mountain poems (he already knew of Gary Snyder’s) in which the calligraphy and translation are printed on facing pages – enabled him to make a connection between the visual form of the characters and the emotional/spiritual meaning.  Fascinating evolution of his drawn response to these, first based on the form of the written poems, then joining calligraphy with image: 

‘I think of Chinese calligraphy as simply the way I see it, not knowing the language. . . But if someone translates a piece for me, and I hear the relationships I am affected by that. . . I use the form of calligraphy, then it disappears, but, it’s always there, in some way. . . The drawings now look more like Chinese landscape and less like calligraphies. . . For me, drawing is about the state that the person would be in who’s standing in the drawing looking at the mountain, it’s about sensing that.’ (Notes there is usually a figure on a journey, a pilgrimage, in a Chinese painting)

5.  A Better Painting

1988 began work on drawing and small paintings inspired by Cold Mountain and often loosely incorporating forms from nature – spiral shells, palm fronds, body parts (often a sense of dancing figures) – ‘natural objects turning into, and not quite turning into, abstract forms.’

Retained the glyph-and-line structure of the poems.

‘[The works] starts out with observation and then automatic reaction, and the back off, so there’s layering of different ways of drawing. . . ‘

In December took delivery of the materials for a 12’x9’ painting which became CM 1. The size was a deliberate challenge in terms of retaining movement and life.  Thinking a lot about which of JP’s paintings worked and why – when they communicated a sense of JP being fully engaged, struggling both formally and spiritually with the work.  He was aiming for paintings in which both ‘he and the viewer can get lost as characters in an unfolding story of each individual’s personal telling’ (BR)

6 months after completing this one in 1989 he set up 5 more to work on contemporaneously (though never on more than one on any one occasion).  Each was to look different from the other in terms of palette and marks.  He didn’t want them to be just large drawings – wanted to allow a relationship to develop between ground and lines. To be carried right across the painting.  Found the size daunting – any decision had

Took till 1992 to complete all 6. 

Basically monochromatic, carefully mixed blacks, diluted with terpineol, wiped back, painted over, grays, gray-greens.  Some colours took days to mix.  It didn’t occur to him for a long time that this was the palette of traditional Chinese painting.  Makes a mark with an extended brush and immediately scrapes it off with a palette knife. Kept layers very thin; lots of scraping, sanding and rubbing back, use of solvents between layers. Lines became translucent.

All the mistakes, re-thinkings are dimly or clearly visible – honesty.  Positive erasures.

Spends more time looking and thinking than actively painting

Happy to paint with people around him and plays a wide mix of music. Relaxed but focused.  Fluid body movements, dancing energy.

Still drawing and also made a print series – etchings and aquatints, their stages of development photographed.  Drawings more easily done in a more meditative state because freer, more automatic; in the paintings, every mark had to be considered.  But he tried more for this in the paintings – losing himself, going beyond rational control.  When he looks now at photos of the different stages, he finds it hard to relate to the process ‘I don’t know what I did to get them to this place.’

He keeps going till the work is ‘fully resolved’, ‘right there’, ‘out on the plane’ – though he’s unsure whether he could take a decision about this (exhibition deadlines usually assert their timeframe)

6.  The Everyday Mind

Chinese expression for a piece of Zen calligraphy is hsin-yin, ‘heart print’ – or hsin can translate as mind or spiritual nature.

BM’s starting point was the 40-character structure of HS’s poems but the result does not look like calligraphy; at most, there is some conjoining of form with content that is rooted in calligraphy.

He describes them as ‘open situations’ i.e. to a certain extent open to differing interpretations

In painting he understands himself as moving along a visual path towards something he doesn’t know about.  ‘It’s more like knowing yourself by forgetting about yourself, learning not to be so involved with yourself.’

Deepening understanding and appreciation of Zen.  Came to see that art was less about creating the perfect painting and more about striving to live a perfect life, from which perfect painting might flow.  ‘. . .  the Buddha’s perfect.  And you can become perfect.’   Buddhahood is lived out in the everyday.  For the Chinese, a truth is only arrived at through experience living in the world, not abstractly; their paintings and calligraphy mirror this.

Family is at the heart of his life.

 ‘What is Marden’s is light. This is a subject that has become his.  He sees everything in terms of light.’ (BR)   He’s said ‘Color is a way of arriving at light.’ – light is what gives vitality, life. (The kind of light the paintings are hung in is also critical.)

The unfolding of the works, the dialogue between them he believed is the crucial thing about his work.  And feeding into that dialogue is everything he has lived through, thought about, painted. ‘Cold Mountain is not about Cold Mountain. . . Cold Mountain is about Brice Marden.’ (BR)

Mark Tobey

Ed Kosme de Baranano and Matthias Barmann (Ambit, 1997)

KdB: Tangle of color on line

From 1935 developing calligraphic marks – 1944 exhib of White Writing (he later likened this to an explosion of flowers over the earth): interweaving white filigree lines which appear to vibrate – sensation of light and movement, completely covering surface, freezes time in its own moment, like something alive, intertwining light that creates multiple points of focus, the painting as a place of action rather than a representation, becomes its own reality, movements rather than subjects, ‘Writing the painting, whether in color or neutral tones, becomes a necessity for me.’ Meditative, gestural, free but controlled.

Min Chih Yao ‘The influence of Chinese and Japanese Calligraphy on Mark Tobey’ (Chinese materials centre 1983) – influence of cursive writing – curvilinear, threadlike, slight variation of widths, esp Japanese kana style.

Fields of light or suggestions of

Interconnecting streams of colour, wandering, nomadic. Plastic energy.

Expressed the rhythms of the city.

Importance of spaces between

Superimposed brushstrokes destroy those beneath.

Dilute paint, sumi ink

Spent 4 months 1934 in monastery in Kyoto learning about brushwork. Discovered here ‘the magic of a line that never closes’.  This period provided him with an enduring lifestyle and view of the world.  But quite clear he was a westerner, doing this as a westerner.

For him calligraphy was not an abstract art but an art that gave form.