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2. Reading Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky: A Case Study in the Making of Meaning
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33 chapter two Reading Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky A Case Study in the Making of Meaning ro g e r t. a m e s introduction Iam not concerned here to speculate on authorial intent—what Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky (Tianshu 天書, Figure I.1) might mean to him as the artist of this installation.1 And there are better informed interpreters available to evaluate the many different, often insightful, sociological and political interpretations of this work. Among such scholars are those who would read this installation as a critique of the meaningless babble (and sometimes Babel) of the ossified Maoist political ideology eventuating ultimately in a Cultural Revolution that tried to smother the living history of Chinese culture. There are other scholars who see in it a putative expression of the very absurdity of life in contemporary China in which nonsense has become the common sense. And then there are also those scholars who interpret it as an indictment of the suffocating politics of the art establishment that vilified A Book from the Sky in its 1987 debut. We must agree with such readings at least to the extent of allowing that the particular social and political context is integral to the art itself, and that such interpretations are most illuminating. Again, I am not an art historian who might be able to make profitable associations between A Book from the Sky and other examples of “conceptual art”—a genre of art that promises a message we might not immediately understand, but that invites an 34 roger t. a mes open-ended range of speculation about meaning. The poised yet silent pianist in the Carnegie Hall performance of John Cage’s 4 Minutes and 33 Seconds and Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s saffron Christo’s Gates that have fluttered in Central Park are provocative in just this way, with the not unlikely possibility that the ultimate message is the work of art itself. I do, however, want to take a stand and dispute any suggestion that Xu Bing can be explained as playing largely to a foreign audience without significant recourse to his own Chinese cultural tradition. Specifically I want to extrapolate off of a familiar postcolonialist discourse that might suggest contemporary artists such as Xu Bing live in the nations of others and participate in the Anglo-European postmodern discourse without adding up to anything in and of themselves. These critics ask: Are such Chinese artists ideologically imprisoned as they depend on Western values and discourse for their art? Is this contemporary art really rooted in Chinese culture, or is it yet another excellent example of cultural self-colonization?2 locating xu bing’s a book from the sk y w ithin chinese cultur e What I have to offer here is a phenomenological description of my own response to Xu Bing’s art—what the “new art” of A Book from the Sky means to me as a student of Chinese philosophy when I attempt to locate it within the formative cosmological assumptions of Chinese culture. I want to argue that for me at least, Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky certainly evokes some associations that are decidedly Western—James Joyce’s enigmatic Finnegans Wake, for example , comes immediately to mind, as do the “Ukiyo-e” paintings of Vincent Van Gogh with his impression of Chinese characters on the picture frames. But Xu Bing’s work also stimulates a much richer reflection that is located squarely within a familiar Chinese cultural discourse and a demonstrably Chinese understanding of the way in which language works in the production of meaning. I want to suggest that, in contrast to this decidedly Chinese understanding about where meaning comes from, there are persistent cosmological assumptions about language and meaning that have predominated within the Western philosophical narrative, and that such assumptions would provoke a fundamentally different reading of A Book from the Sky. [44.223.31.148] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:38 GMT) Reading Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky 35 At the outset we must allow that A Book from the Sky is multivalent , and will not be reduced to some single authoritative interpretation . In fact, Xu Bing’s own title for this work was originally “A Mirror to Interpret the World 析世監,” which he himself changed when an appreciative member of the audience suggested that it meant A Book from the...