John Cayley
John Cayley — now teaching at Brown University in the guise of a
pioneering practitioner and theorist of digital language arts — was
once, in the late 1980s, a curator in the Chinese Section of
the British Library. There,
he had experience with research relating to items in the Dunhuang
collection and, moreover, had the high privilege, occasionally, of
examining some of this material firsthand. Chinese calligraphy
remains a research interest for Cayley. The calligraphy of the major
part of the Dunhuang collection is a wonder of calligraphic art on a
global scale, but this ‘major part’ chiefly represents the art of
the religiously motivated scribe rather than that of the
scholar-artist, the Chinese person (usually man) of letters.
Nonetheless, the collection—as we will see from the item Cayley has
sponsored and which is also one of his very ‘favourite things’ —
does contain uniquely precious evidence for the high art of
calligraphy, China’s finest visual art, still its most dearly and
commercially valued traditional art form.
Besides aspiring,
some day, to a significant connoisseurship of Chinese calligraphy,
John Cayley is also a poet and a translator of poetry and has been
small publisher of these complementary language arts. He has
published translations from Gu Cheng, Yang Lian, Bing Xin, and
others, and assembled a book-length study of the well-known
contemporary artist Xu Bing. Links to his experimental writing in
what he calls networked and programmable media are at programmatology.shadoof.net. Recent and ongoing projects
include imposition, riverIsland, what we will,
and The Readers Project. His last printed book
of poems, adaptations and translations was Ink
Bamboo (Agenda & Belew, 1996).
In 2001 Cayley
was the winner of the Electronic Literature Organization’s Award for
Poetry (eliterature.org).
Currently he is a Professor in the Department of
Literary Arts at Brown University, with a brief to teach
and develop writing in digital media. His most recent work explores
ambient poetics in programmable media, writing in immersive
artificial audiovisual environments, and aestheticized vectors of
reading. He also publishes theory about these new modes of writing,
essays on subjects such as the role of code in new writing, the
temporal properties of text, and something he calls ‘writing to be
found’ both with and against the ‘services’ that threaten us with
overwhelming statistical models of language.
John Cayley writes:
Or.8210/S.3753 is not a sutra, nor a scroll. It is a
relative small fragment of distinctively tinted, ‘fancy’, paper
with traces of cursive characters. These traces would be
immediately recognisable to any student of Chinese calligraphy
and likely also to anyone more generally educated in the Chinese
cultural sphere, extending beyond the mainland, throughout East
Asia and now, the globe. This vastly more numerous group would
not only see that the calligraphy was good, they would be likely
to know the name of the artist who wrote these characters and is
responsible for their aesthetic form, Wang Xizhi (303–361),
China’s most famous calligrapher. Strangely, in terms of a
Eurocentric understanding of high art, nearly all of these
amateurs of calligraphy would also know, without having to be
told, that these traces of ink on the paper of Or.8210/S.3753 were not actually put there by Wang
Xizhi. The true students of calligraphy amongst them would be
aware that the current state of scholarship suggests to us that
there are no actual traces of Wang Xizhi’s brushwork extant. As
the eminent art historian, Robert E. Harrist, puts it in the
title of a highly relevant article, we have nothing but ‘copies,
all the way down.’ How then do we understand the significance
and value of this treasure? We say that Or.8210/S.3753 is a fragment of a fatie or ‘model (of) calligraphy’. We can say further
that the art of Chinese calligraphy is a complex practice that
has embraced many forms of what, from a Eurocentric perspective,
we would regard — and tend to denigrate — as ‘copying’.
In the
Chinese cultural sphere, these practices of ‘copying’ are
understood as authentic and generative, and many of them are
able to preserve, more or less intact, the aesthetic and
cultural value of fine artistic works. In all their
instantiations and despite their variously mediated
transmission, such works of aesthetic writing may be
definitively associated with a first author, with a single,
named and often famous calligrapher. Or.8210/S.3753 is a freehand copy (Chinese: lin) and is dated, by its inclusion in
the Dunhuang collection, to the Tang dynasty. The personal notes
and courtesy letters written by Wang Xizhi were preserved and
copied due to the beauty of his writing. Once his calligraphy
had achieved the status of fine art treasure — within his
lifetime — rare originals and more widely disseminated copies
immediately became models for all calligraphy students and
remain so right down to the present day. Or.8210/S.3753 is a remarkably early copy of one of
these models. The most prized collected copies of Wang Xizhi’s
writing (such as Xingrang
tie or Ritual to Pray for Good
Harvest in the John B. Elliott Collection) are
tracing copies, although these tracing copies done, probably
under imperial patronage, with a finesse that somehow preserves
even the spontaneity of the first artist’s cursive
gestures.
Successful copies of all kinds may capture the shenyun or ‘spirit resonance’ of Wang’s
writing. Whenever performed by a calligraphic master, a freehand
copy—most often written with some earlier ‘model’ or fatie at the calligrapher’s side — may
capture the shenyun of the first writer and
become itself a model. For Or.8210/S.3753, we have no indication of its
contemporary calligrapher’s name, but we can see for ourselves
that the characters are good and the early date of this copy
renders it all but uniquely precious. There is another fragment,
in the Pelliot collection in Paris (Pelliot chinois 4642), likely from the same set of
model copies and based on the same series of Wang Xizhi models,
the Shiqi tie or ’17 model
calligraphies.’ The majority of Or.8210/S.3753 comprises the lower remains of a brief
eight-line note known to calligraphers and connoisseurs as
the Zhanjin tie.
For
still wider dissemination, model calligraphy might be traced and
transferred onto the surface of prepared tablets or monumental
stones. The character forms, no matter how cursive and gestural,
were then carefully carved in intaglio. Finally, models could be
‘published’ from these inscriptions by making ink rubbings on
sheets of paper tamped into the carved incisions — a slow process,
but one that allowed for multiple ‘prints’ to be reproduced from
the same model. Rubbings from the earliest carved inscriptions —
think of all the mediating steps in this complex tradition of
reproduction! — might themselves come to be esteemed for their
preservation of a calligrapher’s writing and its shenyun. If the stones were later lost
or destroyed, a rubbing might be all that was left. There are,
in fact, a few treasured early rubbings in the Dunhuang
collection, including Or.8210/S.5791 with the calligraphy of Ouyang Xun
(557-641). Some time ago, as an experiment, I took a digital
image of the main part of Or.8210/S.3753, and overlaid it on a scan from the
publication of a much later rubbing based on the ‘same’ work.
The white character forms of the rubbing are still, in
principle, traceable back to the initial brush strokes of Wang
Xizhi, but there can have been no direct connection — other than
through artistry and shenyun — with Or.8210/S.3753’s anonymous freehand traces of ink on
Tang dynasty paper. The way in which the two images align is not
perfect but it is extraordinarily close — perceptible evidence, in
a sense, of the preservation of shenyun across centuries and despite many and various
processes of transmission by generative reproduction.
How
valuable to wealthy collectors over time? In his essay 'The Cost
of Living and the Cost of Art in Late Ming China’, Craig Clunas
quotes a Chinese source giving evidence that some version —
necessarily a reproduction — of this very piece of calligraphy,
the Zhanjin tie, changed hands
in the late Ming for almost twice what it would cost to buy the
equivalent of a Park Avenue or Mayfair mansion. In 2010, four
lines of Wang Xizhi’s calligraphy — probably Tang tracing copies
— sold at auction for £29m. A fragment of silk with nine lines
on it had been torn in half and the first four lines were
disposed of for this fabulous sum.
Clunas, Craig. ‘The
Cost of Living and the Cost of Art in Late Ming China.’ Association of Art Historians. Sheffield,
1988.
Giles, Lionel. Descriptive Catalogue of
the Chinese Manuscripts from Tunhuang in the British
Museum. London: Trustees of the British Museum,
1957.
Harrist Jr., Robert E. ‘Copies, All the Way Down: Notes
on the Early Transmission of Calligraphy by Wang Xizhi.’ The East Asian Library Journal X.1 (2002):
176-96.
‘Rare Chinese calligraphy scroll fetches $46m at
auction.’ BBC News Asia-Pacific, 22 Nov. 2010. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-11811868.
Link to original post on IDP blog.