MCLC: Xu Bing's Book from the Ground

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Jonathan Landreth <jslandreth at chinafile.com>
Subject: Xu Bing's Book from the Ground
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I'd like to share with readers the following story just published on
ChinaFIle, a new online magazine from the Center on U.S. China Relations
at the Asia Society in New York.

Jonathan

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Source: ChinaFile (11/21/12): http://www.chinafile.com/new-tower-babel

Xu Bing's "Book from the Ground: From Point-to-Point"
<http://www.chinafile.com/new-tower-babel>
The Everyman Tale in Icons
By Sheila Melvin

Xu Bing <http://www.xubing.com/>, the renowned Chinese artist whose many
laurels include a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award and an appointment
as vice president of China’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, has long
demonstrated a fascination with the written word.

His groundbreaking work, Book from the Sky, looked like Chinese
calligraphy, but was actually nonsensical characters. Square Word
Calligraphy, on the other hand, looked like Chinese but was actually
English, while A Case Study of Transference was two live pigs—one inked
with fake English and the other with fake Chinese—copulating in a
book-strewn pen.

Now, after years creating art that explores, and upends, the power of the
written word, Xu Bing has authored a novella, which was published in early
summer. Formally titledBook from the Ground: From Point-to-Point, the tale
recounts twenty-four hours in the life of a young white-collar worker in a
major metropolis.

We are only now realizing the true significance of the Tower of Babel—our
languages have stagnated and are utterly unsuited to the global village...

The man, who remains unnamed, seeks to advance his career and find love,
but, like many of us, spends most of his time tending the minutiae of
daily life: he battles constipation, burns his breakfast, dreads his boss,
drinks too much beer, and spends too much money. The main prism through
which he experiences the world is electronic—he compulsively checks
Twitter, Google, and Facebook, spends his day making PowerPoint
presentations (when not surreptitiously checking email), and searches
online for romance. At night, characters from video games populate his
anxious dreams. This prosaic existence is interspersed by a few
device-free moments of genuine humanity, as when he contemplates marriage,
yearns for nature, visits a friend who is sick, comforts another who is
heart-broken, and brings a bouquet of roses to a blind date.

Like Leopold Bloom—the main character in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses,
which also takes place within a single day—the main character of From
Point-to-Point is something of an Everyman. But, where Bloom is a hero, a
latter-day Odysseus, Xu’s Everyman is an icon—that is, an actual icon.

Indeed, if this plot summary sounds slim, consider this: From
Point-to-Point is “written” without a single word—at least as they are
traditionally defined. Instead, it is composed with hundreds of icons, or
pictograms, that Xu has been collecting for years. Where Book from the Sky
can be read by no one, Book from the Ground can be read by any one. It is,
in other words, a remarkable effort to create a universal form of written
communication that transcends cultural, linguistic, class, and educational
backgrounds. In Xu’s words, “The illiterate can enjoy the delight of
reading just as the intellectual does.”

Sample page from Book from the Ground

Xu, in conversation with me and my husband, and in an essay he wrote about
the Book from the Ground project, explains that the idea came to him
during the many hours he spent in airports and on planes, where he
regularly encountered pictograms. He began to study airline safety cards,
which he calls “humanity’s earliest examples of common knowledge texts.”
Then, in 2003, he saw a pack of chewing gum that had written on it, in
pictograms, “after use, please wrap in paper and dispose in trash can,”
and was inspired to begin collecting enough pictograms to tell a larger
story. He argues that we are only now realizing the true significance of
the Tower of Babel—our languages have stagnated and are utterly unsuited
to the global village in which we live. Philosophers have long dreamed of
a shared language (and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some
of Europe’s greatest minds thought this language could be rooted in
Chinese) but in today’s world, it is increasingly a necessity as much as
an ideal. And, thanks to global marketing images and icon-based computer
commands, we are increasingly primed to “read” visual symbols.

This all makes great sense and I certainly think the MacArthur committee
got it right when it deemed Xu a “genius.” But for one who is as possessed
as I am by the power of the written word, From Point-to-Point was a
challenging read. I marveled at its beauty on the page but was frustrated
by the absence of lyric and poetry, which are so anchored to sound, and
annoyed by the clumsy manner in which my brain “translated” the
pictographs into words and sentences I could comprehend. Simple though the
plot is, there were also parts I frankly didn’t get because I didn’t
understand the icons. (Fortunately, I had readily available translators in
my eleven-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter, who instantly accepted
the premise of a book of icons and had little problem following the
story.) I also got a bit tired of story’s emphasis on bodily functions and
bathroom humor, and the lack of big ideas—but, then again, I feel that way
about much of contemporary fiction.

Xu shares this frustration—he professes embarrassment at having to resort
to standard written language in order to explain the premise of his
pictographic script. But, as he says, the significance of this effort is
in the attempt and all written languages go through lengthy periods of
development. Book from the Ground: From Point-to-Point is a work in
progress—it is also a genuine work of art.