Chapter 1 L anguage I de ol o g i e s in the Text- base d A rt of Xu Bi ng Implications for language policy and planning Adam Jaworski Contemporary art has been a site of intense linguistic production for several decades. Visual artists have been experimenting with new ways of displaying or enframing language, employing transformative processes and forms of symbolic manipulation that frequently contest or subvert dominant language ideologies. In this way, artists produce new ‘regimes of language’ (or “regimes of discourse”, Pennycook, 2002, p. 92) that regulate or unsettle “moral and political visions that shape attitudes and behaviour” (Tollefson, 2011, p. 370). When artists use language as a medium in their practice, their works enter a broader sociolinguistic ield, whereby linguistic forms carry social values of distinctiveness and possibility as deined by participants’ (artists’ own, audiences’ and critics’) assumptions, perceptions and interpretations, or – in other words – their language ideologies (Irvine, 2001). Irvine refers to language ideologies as “ideational schemes, whether about language or other things [that] have some relationship with point of view… and the viewer’s baggage of history and partiality” (Irvine, 2001, p. 24). But displays, or performances, of language in the form of art installations, especially on a vast scale, as is the case of some examples to be considered below, are not merely manifestations of the artist’s ideologies of language. hey are instances of historically consequential (Silverstein, 2001) language ideological debates that “develop against a wider sociopolitical and historical horizon of relationships of power, forms of discrimination, social engineering, nation-building, and so forth” (Blommaert, 1999, p. 2). All the linguistic choices we make and the publics (Gal & Woolard, 2001) we ‘project’ them onto result from some planning eforts, more or less conscious, individual or FigureSample_Chap01.indd 1 4/26/2017 3:59:43 PM 2 Language ideologies in the text-based art of Xu Bing institutional. Woolard and Schielin (1994) suggest that all language policy and planning decisions are underpinned by speciic language ideologies. Bolander goes as far as to consider “language policy as ideology” (2017, p. 262; original emphasis), in contrast to the view of “language policy as discourse” (Barakos, 2012, p. 169; see also Tollefson, 1991). Likewise, Lo Bianco (2004, p. 750) argues that “[i]n the absence of overt or explicit detailed planning […] ideology operates as ‘default’ policy”. Naturally, debates about language ideologies take the form of discourses and metadiscourses and they also presuppose, shape and reshape language ideologies according to social actors’ dominant regimes of representation (Blommaert, 1999). his is again echoed by Bolander (2017, pp. 261–262), who, building on Pennycook (2014, p. 2), argues “that it is not so much language as language ideology that is the object of language policy”. Furthermore, any public display of language, or so-called linguistic landscape, can be considered as a tool of and an arena for the implementation of speciic language policies (Shohamy, 2006). Executing text-based works requires visual artists to make choices akin to the linguistic planning and policy decisions to be found in other areas of linguistic landscapes with regard to the selection of linguistic codes, genres, visual styling, emplacement, and so on. hus, language policy and planning cannot be separated from social actors’ language ideologies situated within the chains of broader language ideological debates. In the context of the present discussion, I focus on the ield of artistic production as a site of sociolinguistic activity to underscore the role of individual agency in language policy, planning and the execution or shaping of linguistic texts. In this sense, I follow Ricento’s (2000) critical and postmodern perspective on language policy and planning, in which the notion of agency is understood as individual and group processes of language use, attitudes and any overt policy decisions. Speciically, Ricento (2000, p. 208) poses the following question: “Why do individuals opt to use (or cease to use) particular language varieties for speciic functions in diferent domains, and how do those choices inluence – and how are they inluenced by – institutional language policy-making (local to national and supranational)?”. In response to Ricento’s enquiry, Lane (2015), for example, demonstrates how eforts to standardize a minority language (in this case, Kven, a Finnic minority language in northern Norway) can lead to diferent reactions from its speakers, from embracing the idea of standardization by ‘ixing’ its written version to resisting such standardization of Kven by considering it a ‘broken’ language. In a radically diferent context, Roth-Gordon (2009) demonstrates how in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, gíria, a favela (shantytown) slang, has come to be enregistered (Agha, 2003) in the 1990s alongside the Portuguese national standard. Confronted with violence from both the military police and drug gangs, the option of using, or disavowing, one register or the other, allows individual speakers to navigate Brazil’s regime of “diferentiated citizenship” by strategically indexing diferent personas, places and allegiances, and constructing newly vulnerable and newly marginalized city residents. Finally, Moriarty and Pietikäinen (2011) discuss two examples of individual, ad hoc language planning initiatives in the context of language revitalization and normalization: an Americanborn, long-term Irish resident performing stand-up comedy in his newly acquired FigureSample_Chap01.indd 2 4/26/2017 3:59:43 PM Adam Jaworski 3 Irish, and a Finnish–Sámi bilingual rapper performing his rap lyrics in Inari Sámi. he authors cite evidence of both artists receiving much exposure in their national communities through mainstream and online media and contributing to fresh perceptions of the two endangered, minority languages as ‘modern’ (or ‘cool’) and appealing to young people. Woolard and Schiefelin (1994) observe that the locus of language ideologies has been identiied in language use as well as in metalinguistic discourse. Both these sites of linguistic ideology, which are also the ‘tools’ of any language policy, are explored here through the examination of several works of text-based art by the artist Xu Bing (‘language use’)1, as well as the artists’ own and various commentators’ interpretations of his works (‘metalinguistic discourse’). Collectively, they demonstrate how the ield of artistic production and criticism contribute to language ideological debates about Chinese – in particular about Chinese writing – and the nature of language more broadly. In the following section I discuss briely some aspects of Xu Bing’s biography and artistic practice, speciically related to his use of language. Next, I discuss his diverse language ideological positions underpinning four of his major works. I conclude by ofering some relections on what students of language policy and planning might learn from extending the scope of their interest to text-based art. Xu Bing and the Origins of His ‘Language Art’ Practice My key point of reference in this chapter is the contemporary conceptual artist Xu Bing. Xu Bing was born in 1955 in Chongqing (Sichuan Province, China) and brought up in Beijing, where his father was Professor of History and his mother a member of staf in the Department of Library Science, both at Beijing University. his environment provided Xu Bing with access to and interest in books. Although as a child he was unable to read them, he enjoyed their appearance on the rows of shelving, their texture, and the smell of paper and ink. His father encouraged and provided instruction in Xu Bing’s study of calligraphy. As early as 1969 and 1970, during his time in middle school, Xu Bing developed a keen interest in typography, layout and the visuality of writing more generally. He collected newspaper fonts and planned at some point to compile a “handbook of artistic lettering” (Erickson, 2001, p. 34). Before Xu Bing graduated with a master’s degree in printmaking from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1987, his perspective on language was inluenced greatly by his experience of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). For Xu the most signiicant shit in the Cultural Revolution was the use of language as an instrument of propaganda, which had a direct impact on his family: “At the time there was a saying: ‘Use your pen as a weapon and shoot down reactionary gangs.’ My father was a reactionary” (Xu Bing, 2001, p. 16). In one interview, Xu Bing recounts an early memory of a FigureSample_Chap01.indd 3 4/26/2017 3:59:43 PM 4 Language ideologies in the text-based art of Xu Bing particularly dramatic encounter with big character posters, when he saw the name of his father, Xu Huamin, written in huge letters on a poster that proclaimed ‘Down with Xu Huamin’ (Erickson, 2001, p. 34). In 1974, as a well-educated young man, Xu Bing was sent for three years of re-education to the tiny village of Shouliang Gou in Yanqing county, some 80 kilometers northwest of Beijing. During these years, despite the tedium of peasant work and poor living conditions, Xu Bing drew and painted portraits and landscapes, designed notices for Chinese New Year celebrations, weddings and funerals, and pursued the study of typography in his work for the mimeographed revolutionary periodical Brilliant Mountain Flowers. During this period, Xu Bing honed his skills as a draughtsman, calligrapher and typographer, and, on his rare visits home, he beneitted from attending art exhibitions and occasional instruction from the husband of one of his mother’s colleagues, the oil painter Li Zongijn (1916–1977). Aspects of his artistic practice were inluenced by some of the literacy (and illiteracy) practices in the countryside. For example, he observed how some of the elders who struggled with writing and reading would locate characters from ritual texts in scraps of print and copy the characters on to white cloth, and he “marvelled at the writing he saw painted on furniture, where auspicious phrases of four characters were arranged overlaying each other as a single character” (Vainker, 2013, p. 14). Ultimately, although he considered the Cultural Revolution “an historically unprecedented experiment” that “resulted in disaster” (Xu Bing, 2011, p. 51), his experience of living among the peasants of Shouliang Gou turned him into an artist “with a socialist background” (ibid., p. 52) following Mao Zedong’s (1893–1976) admonition to create “art for the people”. Xu Bing’s early life was marked by a growing “mistrust of language” (Erickson, 2001). When he was very young, he was unable to read the books in his mother’s library; when he was old enough to read them, he was not allowed to do so. Soon ater he learnt to write and mastered traditional calligraphy, the government introduced the policy of simplifying Chinese characters to foster widespread literacy2. Once the grip of the Cultural Revolution began to loosen, Xu Bing started reading voraciously the books he had been forbidden to access in previous years and joined in countless intellectual debates. He felt overloaded by this new barrage of words, which he likened to a state of chaos: “I felt the discomfort of a person sufering from starvation who had just gorged himself. It was at this point that I considered creating a book of my own that might mirror my feelings” (Book from the Sky, see below) (Xu Bing, 2001, p. 14). Finally, at the age of thirty-ive, he emigrated to the United States, where he was confronted with a new linguistic environment that required him to learn yet another way of speaking and writing. he resulting conlict between his actual level of knowledge and his ability to express that knowledge found expression in his later work (Square Word Calligraphy, see below) (ibid.). Yet, the sources of Xu Bing’s thematization of language, writing and calligraphy in his work must be put into a broader perspective reaching beyond his personal experience of early calligraphy education, training in printmaking or typographic services for a revolutionary journal. Chinese communism, which Xu experienced since his early FigureSample_Chap01.indd 4 4/26/2017 3:59:43 PM Adam Jaworski 5 life, was as much a social as a national ideology, aiming at the restoration of the splendour of a great empire and civilization in combination with Western-like modernization (Hobsbawm, 1994). As in other nation-building projects, the establishment and promotion of a national language, including a writing reform, in China was considered a necessary condition for the unity and modernization of the country from the beginning of the proletarian revolution in the irst half of the twentieth century (Chen, 1999), a sentiment shared quite some time earlier by nineteenth century Protestant missionaries in China (Hutton, 2008b). In this respect, Chinese communist leaders adhered to the Herderian Romantic ideology of “the complex anchoring of language in national character, history, and society” (Bauman & Briggs, 2003, p. 170). Even if the enregisterment of Putonghua (Dong, 2010) as a national standard did not invoke Herderian references to national literature and literary language as capable of capturing the “national characteristics” of its people (Hutton, 2006, p. 85), the discourse of a shared language has always gone hand-in-hand with the discourse of Chinese nationalism, something that Xu has always been keenly aware of: Mao’s transformation of culture was meant to ‘touch people to their very souls.’ Most deeply rooted was his transformation of language, because the Chinese language directly inluences the methods of thinking and understanding of all Chinese people. To strike at the written word is to strike at the very essence of the culture. Any doctoring of the written word becomes in itself a transformation of the most inherent portion of a person’s thinking. My experience with the written word has allowed me to understand this. (Xu Bing, 2001, pp. 13–14; added emphasis). In this quote, Xu Bing echoes Herder’s (and Mao’s) position that for a nation (Volk) the “wealth of views on tradition, history, religion, and principles of life reside[s] in language, all of the people’s heart and soul” (Herder, 1793; cited in Votruba, n.d.). he next section explores how Xu Bing variably orients to the national language ideology in four diferent works/projects. Speciically, I will argue that the national language ideology is upheld and re-inscribed in his video animation, he Character of Characters, subverted in the installation Book from the Sky, inverted in the project Square Word Calligraphy, and transcended in the project Book from the Ground. The Works he four examples of Xu Bing’s work to be considered in this section are derived from the following projects: he Character of Characters (2012) – an animated video themed around the history of Chinese writing and China (Figures 1–4); Book from the Sky (Tianshu) (1987–1991) – an installation featuring books and scrolls printed with ‘false’ Chinese characters (Figures 5–6); Square Word Calligraphy – (1994–) an ongoing project of writing (predominantly) English texts in a stylized Chinese script (Figures 7–9); and FigureSample_Chap01.indd 5 4/26/2017 3:59:43 PM 6 Language ideologies in the text-based art of Xu Bing Book from the Ground (Dishu) (2003–) – a multimedia project and novel ‘written’ with visual symbols and icons drawn from ‘everyday’ visual culture (Figure 10). he Character of Characters (2012) – Re-inscribing National Language Ideology In his video he Character of Characters (2012), Xu Bing tells the story of China through the story of the Chinese language, speciically its writing system and the art of calligraphy. he seventeen-minute animation presented on a large, eleven-metre wide screen resembles an unfolding of a traditional Chinese scroll. It is premised on the idea that calligraphy has given rise to “the essential diference between Eastern and Western ways of thinking, which allows viewers to understand the Chinese national character, today’s China, and the possibility of China’s future through the Chinese writing system” (Xu Bing, 2012a, p. 60). A close link between the national language and the character of the nation is also invoked in the following quote, which explains the main ‘thesis’ of the video: My intention in this animated ilm is to set forth my views on the origins of the Chinese people and their distinctive qualities – respect for tradition and ceremony, ability to bear hardship without complaint, irmness cloaked in gentleness, and ability to change with the circumstances – by means of analyzing, examining, and reimaging a handscroll by Zhao Mengfu now in the Guanyuan shanzhuang collection… Ater watching the entire ilm, one will in fact come to understand the content of a ‘thesis’ on calligraphy and the distinctive qualities of the Chinese people. (Xu Bing, 2012a, p. 27; added emphasis) Xu Bing’s story begins with the primordial irst line, irst brushstroke, embodied in the Chinese numeral one “一” (Figure 1). Its multiplications, permutations and combinations give rise to a rich and complex writing system consisting of thousands of characters (Figure 2). Xu Bing locates the essence of Chinese writing, and implicitly of the entire Chinese culture, in the power of a single brushstroke. Just as legitimizing claims to nationhood and to nation-states’ bounded territories are typically located in the distant, indeed timeless, mystery-shrouded past (Anderson, 1983; Hobsbawm, 1990), the beginning of Xu Bing’s history of Chinese writing is grounded in the legend of the mythical, four-eyed igure Cang Jie, whose extraordinary Figure 1. Still image from Xu Bing, he Character of Characters (2012; sound and color; 16’45’’); “一” ; approx. 00’57’’. ©Xu Bing Studio. FigureSample_Chap01.indd 6 4/26/2017 3:59:44 PM Adam Jaworski 7 Figure 2. Still image from Xu Bing, he Character of Characters (2012; sound and color; 16’45’’); All characters; approx. 01’02’’. Detail of the letmost part of the image enlarged below. ©Xu Bing Studio. Figure 3. Still image from Xu Bing, he Character of Characters (2012; sound and color; 16’45’’); Landscape with Myna Bird and Human Figure; approx. 02’21’’. ©Xu Bing Studio. Figure 4. Still image from Xu Bing, he Character of Characters (2012; sound and color; 16’45’’); History of character reforms; approx. 11’57’’. ©Xu Bing Studio. seeing powers allowed him to invent writing by observing patterns in nature. Cang Jie’s written characters come to life as transformed patterns on turtle shells, bird feathers, mountain slopes, rivers, palms and ingers. he characters come to signify objects (e.g. trees) and animals (e.g. birds) that may be long gone from view: “hrough Cang Jie’s mythic vision, humankind gained the ability to see and create meaning (and history) as our eyes connected to a brain that learns to make meaning in the factory of the mind” (Hammers, 2014, p. 112). Xu Bing models his landscape in the early part of the animation on the painting Autumn Colors on the Qiao and Hua Mountains by the great artist of the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322). Zhao’s landscape is brought to life representing a world where the irst sounds emerge from nature. A myna bird lies in and starts making sounds. A human igure then appears and a battle of sounds between the bird and the human igure ensues. (Figure 3). he display of characters in the opening sequence (Figure 2) alludes to another famous work by Zhao, his seven-scroll calligraphy of the Sutra on the Lotus of the Sublime Dharma, known for its grace and balance, and copied by many subsequent artists. By recontextualizing the scroll genre and a widely admired FigureSample_Chap01.indd 7 4/26/2017 3:59:44 PM 8 Language ideologies in the text-based art of Xu Bing landscape painting by a past master, Xu Bing minimizes the “intertextual gap” between his work and the tradition of Chinese art, constructing for his viewers a sense of history, authenticity and community (Briggs & Bauman, 1992; Gal & Woolard, 2001, p. 8; see also below). In the following scenes, Xu Bing narrates how writing came to be central in all areas of Chinese social life: the slow process of literacy education, philosophy, divination, and ritual. For Xu Bing, Chinese characters are highly revered; they represent a supreme, artful expression of one’s sophistication and demeanour, and an insight into one’s personality. But writing is also a tool of political power, with emperors and rulers of China throughout Chinese history down to Mao Ze Dong introducing orthographic reforms and inventing new characters and fonts to make their mark and assert their authority over the people, who had to follow their way of writing and thinking. In Figure 4, the irst three images from let to right are captioned: “Calligraphy by Emperor Huzong of Song”, “Calligraphy by Emperor Xuanzong of Tang’, and “Calligraphy by Yongle Emperor”. he fourth image is a stylized representation of the Communist Party Congress with a huge portrait and signature of Mao Ze Dong (going let to right) in his own, simpliied calligraphy. Finally, both the tradition of copying Chinese characters and their ideographic nature are brought to the present and linked to mass produced goods in Chinese factories, unauthorized copies of trademarked goods made in China, and Chinese people’s apparent obsession with luxury brands and their logos, e.g. LV, CC, CK (Erickson, 2012, p. 19). his is represented in the right-most image in Figure 4, by a hand holding a pen with a stylus, marking a shopping bag with a generic, red “X” symbol. In his aim to show “the relationship between the Chinese language and the unique origin of the Chinese national character” (Xu Bing, 2012a, p. 34), the artist iconizes (Irvine & Gal, 2000) Chinese script as distinct from the ‘Western’ tradition (see above) and as responsible for the artistry, perseverance and spirituality of the Chinese people. A similar language ideology can be found among many post-Enlightenment scholars, who, according to Irvine and Gal (2000), believed that languages coincided with nations’ cultural and spiritual dispositions, although predating the political activity of constructing nationhood. his naturalness and distinctiveness of languages provided nineteenth-century linguists with a reliable basis for legitimating nation-states, or, in the case of the European colonial project, polities that were suitable for colonial administration. Implicit in this language ideology is the moral superiority of a nation united by a common and uniied written script, indicative of the erasure (Irvine & Gal, 2000) of any linguistic diversity of the Chinese empire, and subsequently, the Chinese nationstate. No matter how much Xu Bing aligns or misaligns with some of the narrated episodes (e.g. politically-motivated orthographic reforms, or consumer-driven obsession with luxury brand logos), he tells the story of Chinese characters as an intertwined story of the Chinese national language and Chinese national identity, both of which arise in tandem through a dialectic process of mutual co-construction (Joseph, 2006; Silverstein, 2000). FigureSample_Chap01.indd 8 4/26/2017 3:59:44 PM Adam Jaworski 9 Book From the Sky (Tianshu) (1987–1991) – Subverting National Language Ideology Dated 1987–1991, Book for the Sky was irst exhibited in Beijing in 1988. Subsequent exhibitions of the enlarged, full-scale work, or its smaller versions, took place in numerous locations in Asia, North America, Australia and Europe. he complete installation includes four stich-bound volumes with indigo covers referencing traditional Chinese binding style and scholarly content, presented with hand-carved walnut storage boxes, with additional copies opened and arranged as a massive rectilinear ‘carpet’ on a low pedestal on the loor (Figure 5). Large, undulating scrolls hang from the ceiling over the open books with additional panels hanging on the surrounding walls. he books and scrolls are all printed with approximately four thousand ‘false’ Chinese characters invented by the artist and carved onto pear wood printing blocks. When exhibited for the irst time in Beijing’s National Gallery in 1988, the Book from the Sky attracted harsh criticism from the central government and created much anxiety, even anger among the visitors who, upon entering the gallery space, inevitably Figure 5. Xu Bing, Book from the Sky, 1987–1991. Mixed media installation / Hand printed books, ceiling, and wall scrolls printed from wood blocks inscribed with “false Chinese characters”; dimensions variable. Installation view at “Crossings”, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1998. ©Xu Bing Studio. FigureSample_Chap01.indd 9 4/26/2017 3:59:45 PM 10 Language ideologies in the text-based art of Xu Bing assumed that they would be able to read the text, but on closer inspection of the ‘text’ realized that it was not possible. Although it is commonly acknowledged that in much cursive calligraphy “the beauty of the brushstrokes and the structure of the characters” are deemed to be more important than the meaning of the words (Harrist, 2013, p. 33), Xu Bing’s radical separation of calligraphy from literacy confused most of his audiences and angered many. Harrist explains that these reactions were compounded by two factors: irst, Xu Bing’s invented characters, at least at irst glance, appear familiar, hence accessible, as they adhere to the conventions of symmetry and internal structure of real characters and are composed with “perfectly orthodox vertical and horizontal strokes, diagonals, dots and hooks” (Harrist, 2013, p. 40), and second, the typeface used by Xu Bing is based closely on the form of the characters known as the ‘Song style’ (Song ti), widely used during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), known as a golden age of printing in China (Harrist, 2013, p. 37) (Figure 6). Besides having no ixed meaning, Xu Bing’s characters have no ixed sounds. Although some Chinese characters do carry some information of how they should be pronounced, they cannot be ‘sounded out’ in the same way as unfamiliar words can in alphabetic scripts (Harrist, 2013, p. 39). Following Gal and Woolard (2001), by creating and displaying the Book from the Sky, Xu Bing imagines a public of illiterates, in particular targeting the educated and typically literate speakers of Chinese. According to Silbergeld (2006, p. 20), the work creates a democratizing efect “in a kind of egalitarianism of induced illiteracy”. Figure 6. Xu Bing, Book from the Sky, 1987-1991; detail. ©Xu Bing Studio. FigureSample_Chap01.indd 10 4/26/2017 3:59:46 PM Adam Jaworski 11 Most commentators on the Book from the Sky emphasize the meaninglessness of its words, yet the ‘meaning’ of the piece and its various interpretations have been widely debated. In the absence of discernible propositional content, or perhaps because of this absence, the emphasis of the debate has oten tended towards the questions of Chinese writing as a repository and manifestation of ‘Chineseness’, implicitly, and inevitably, shiting the weight of the debate towards the idea of national language ideology; the idea that the installation subverts by questioning the standardization of Chinese characters. From a sociolinguistic point of view, in addition to the apparent structural plausibility of the characters and the readability of their font, there is a third possible reason for the confusion and discontent felt by many gallery-goers, particularly those who can read Chinese – the work’s genre. he volumes making up the installation are closely modelled on recognizable, historical Chinese formats of philosophical, medical, reference and literary books. In their page layout, paper quality, folding, string binding, and the colour of the covers (indigo), the books follow meticulously the principles of traditional Chinese book-making. he walnut presentation boxes carefully assembled by hand with wooden pegs and dovetailed joints amplify the ‘authenticity’ of the books’ appearance and their gravitas. he only generic innovation, pointing to the inluence of Western art on Xu Bing in creating the Book from the Sky, is that it is an art installation (Erickson, 2001, pp. 44–45). Following Bakhtin (1986), Briggs and Bauman (1992) discuss genre as a structural property of texts, however, not as immanent, ixed and unitary but, despite being conventionalized, as open-ended, emergent and ambiguous. Genre is also indexical, that is co-occurring with other entities such as the context or subject matter (Briggs & Bauman, 1992, p. 141). Briggs and Bauman consider genre to be “quintessentially intertextual”, that is linked “to generalized or abstracted models of discourse production and reception” (ibid., p.147), rather than to single utterances, as, for example, is the case with reported speech. hus, by invoking a genre, producers of discourse create associations between their utterances or texts with speciic places, times, persons or acts, and in doing so they claim authority to decontextualize and recontextualize these temporal, spatial and social connections for their audiences. he process of genre recontextualization can have diferent efects depending on the degree of it between a particular text and its generic model. When the “intertextual gap” (Briggs & Bauman, 1992, p. 149) is minimized, the text is maximally interpretable due to its closeness to its generic precedent, and the producer takes the authoritative stance by sustaining the conservative and traditionalizing textual formats. When the gap is maximized, a degree of disorder, chaos and fragmentation is introduced to the text, possibly impeding its interpretability, while the producer claims authority by introducing individualizing and creative aspects to his/her discourse. hrough its title, Book from the Sky is metapragmatically framed as a ‘book’.3 Its formal properties discussed above (printing technique, binding, page layout, typography, materiality, etc.) demonstrate great care in the artist’s reproduction of recognizable traditional Chinese book formats. It’s key unreal quality is its unreadable orthography. As has been mentioned, upon realizing that they cannot read the text of the Book from the Sky, Chinese speakers felt a degree of unease, confusion or even anger. For them, FigureSample_Chap01.indd 11 4/26/2017 3:59:46 PM 12 Language ideologies in the text-based art of Xu Bing probably, unreadable calligraphy could be justiied in some hard-to-read cursive calligraphy inscriptions or rubbings but not in a printed book, especially with perfectly legible typography. What they may have failed to appreciate in that moment was that the Book from the Sky creatively exploits an intertextual gap being presented in the secondary or complex genre (Bakhtin, 1986; Briggs & Bauman, 1992, p. 154) of an art installation indexing the vast literary tradition of Chinese writing, libraries and big character posters of the Cultural Revolution era. Unwittingly, the visitors’ reaction co-constructed and replicated the efect of overload and chaos in Xu Bing’s “loss of meaning” that motivated him to make the work in the irst place (Erickson, 2001, pp. 38–39). Although beyond his control, some of these reactions may have been intended by the artist, precisely by exploiting and celebrating the intertextual gap of the Book from the Sky. Characterized by its regular and orderly strokes, the song-ti typeface has come to be associated with (or ‘enregistered,’ Agha, 2003) with a degree of formality, conveying factuality and accessibility; as Xu Bing explains, “over time it has become like the newsprint style of today […] I didn’t want to express my own personality. I wanted there to be a tension between the seriousness of the execution and the presentation and the underlying absurdity that animates the project” (Leung et al., 1999, p. 89). he piece is, then, a recontextualization of a tradition, or the idea of tradition in book writing, printing and binding, but it is also an act of de-individualizing the author, a paradoxical move to create a ‘loss’ of meaning or knowledge and a sense of disorientation in the ‘readers’ who, upon realizing that the characters they are trying to decipher are deliberately wrong, are re-positioned as an ‘Other’ – marginalized outsiders and onlookers.4 he invented script, a secret code which is opaque even to its inventor, establishes the stance of an outsider for the ‘author’ and for the ‘reader’ alike. But, in a throwback to Xu Bin’s experience of the Cultural Revolution, it is also an act of deiance against language as propaganda in the hands of an oppressive regime. Finally, the reportedly unsettling efect of the Book from the Sky on the Chinesereading public may have come from their orientation to ‘denotational ideology of language’ (Silverstein, 1979), which considers the production of denotational (i.e. referential) meaning to be the sole rationale for the existence of language, and the ‘standard language’, especially in its written form, to be the ideal embodiment of this function. hus, the deceptively ‘traditional’ appearance of the books and scrolls in the installation led some visitors to insist on inding at least traces of denotational meaning in the Book from the Sky (Abe, 1998). Square Word Calligraphy (1994–) – Dialogic Language Ideology he sense of linguistic disorientation that Xu Bing achieved in the Book from the Sky for his Chinese-reading audience has been replicated in his Square Word Calligraphy (1994 –) for their English-reading counterpart, albeit with diferent resources and with diferent efects. Having moved to the United States in 1990, Xu Bing experienced a sense of linguistic limitation in functioning in the predominantly English-speaking FigureSample_Chap01.indd 12 4/26/2017 3:59:46 PM Adam Jaworski 13 environment (Xu Bing, 2001). As a way of reconciling his cultural accentedness (Blommaert & Varis, 2015), he created a script for writing English that resembles Chinese characters, which may be considered his linguistic self-portrait. He then developed the project as a means of engaging the broader public with contemporary art in the spirit of his socialist stance of art for the people. Given Xu Bing’s intended bilingual “strategic ambiguity” (Heller, 1988), for Englishspeakers, the text written in Square Word Calligraphy is, at irst sight, unreadable as it appears to be written in Chinese. On inspection, and not without some diiculty, readers of English can make out the words. he convincing, initial efect of the texts appearing to be Chinese calligraphy is achieved by strict reliance of rendering the letters of the Latin alphabet according to the elements of Chinese orthography. For example, ‘w’ is rendered as the shan radical 山, and ‘o’ as the kou 口 radical (Lee, 2015, p. 451) (Figure 7). his systematicity makes it possible for Latin-script users to learn how to write in square word calligraphy. Some of the installations of Square Word Calligraphy include interactive ‘classrooms’ with desks, exercise books, brushes, ink, blackboards Figure 7. Xu Bing, Square Calligraphy Classroom, 1994-1996. Mixed media installation / desk, chair sets, copy and tracing books, brushes, ink, video; dimensions variable. Exhibition and audience participation view at “hird Asia-Paciic Triennial of Contemporary Art”, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia, 1999. ©Xu Bing Studio. FigureSample_Chap01.indd 13 4/26/2017 3:59:46 PM 14 Language ideologies in the text-based art of Xu Bing and video instruction manuals (Figure 8). Subsequently, a computer programme has been developed to allow members of the public to type in their surnames in alphabetic writing and then display their surnames on a large panel in ‘New English Typography’.5 Other works include banners and scrolls with Xu Bing’s own hand-written or printed calligraphy, which, most famously, include Chairman Mao’s slogan Art for the People on the banner displayed on the building of the Museum of Modern Art in New York as the motto for the 1999 exhibition Project 70: Shirin Neshat, Simon Patterson, Xu Bing in the Museum of Modern Art in New York (Figure 8). Other texts include Chinese poetry in English translation (Figure 9) and poems by English-language poets, nursery rhymes, and so forth. Erickson characterizes Square Word Calligraphy as Xu Bing’s efort “to demystify Chinese culture and to share the pleasure of calligraphy” (Erickson, 2001, p. 55). his egalitarian stance, it appears, is underpinned by what might be referred to as Xu Bing’s dialogic language ideology. In his aim to create a ‘dialogue’ between ‘cultures’ he develops a linguistic tool premised on Bakhtinian dialogism, which Woolard, alongside Lüdi’s (1987) notion of translingualism, takes as her starting point for the discussion of linguistic simultaneity in bilingual communication. She considers three linguistic forms of Figure 8. Xu Bing, Art for the People, 1999. Silk banner; 36t x 9t. Installation view at the entrance of Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1999. ©Xu Bing Studio. FigureSample_Chap01.indd 14 4/26/2017 3:59:47 PM Adam Jaworski 15 Figure 9. Xu Bing, Square Word Calligraphy, excerpts from Zhuangzi’s Discussion of Making All hings Equal, 2014. Exhibition view at “It Begins with Metamorphosis”, Asia Society Hong Kong Center, 2014. ©Xu Bing Studio. simultaneity: bivalency, “the use by a bilingual of words or segments that could ‘belong’ equally, descriptively and even prescriptively, to both codes” (Woolard, 1998, p. 7); interference, by which she means “what Haugen calls ‘interference in the strict sense’… a linguistic overlap arising from language contact, in which ‘two systems are simultaneously applied to a linguistic item’ (1956, p. 50)” (Woolard, 1998, p. 14); and code-switching, where the apparent use of two discrete languages cannot be easily teased apart on objective or ideological grounds (Gardner-Chloros, 1995). he bivalent character of Square Word Calligraphy is most apparent with regard to interference. he execution of English (or other alphabetic) texts in this typeface by hand requires at least some basic familiarity with the technique of Chinese calligraphy and its application results in the production of orthographically ‘accented’ writing. hese are decidedly linguistic forms, where elements from two distinctive linguistic traditions can be discerned. In fact, the whole raison d’être of the project is to bring them together into a dialogic tension, which, according to Holquist, can be seen as the purposeful enactment of three elements – hybridity, heteroglossia and polyglossia: FigureSample_Chap01.indd 15 4/26/2017 3:59:47 PM 16 Language ideologies in the text-based art of Xu Bing Within the overall concern that Holquist [1990] dubs dialogism, Bakhtinian simultaneities in language include: hybridity, “the mixing, within a single concrete utterance, of two or more diferent linguistic consciousnesses” (1981, p. 429); heteroglossia, “that locus where centripetal and centrifugal forces collide,... that which systematic linguistics must always suppress” (1981, p. 428); and polyglossia, “the simultaneous presence of two or more national languages interacting within a single cultural system” ([Bakhtin] 1981, p. 431). (cited in Woolard, 1998, p. 4) Square Word Calligraphy exempliies all the three elements. Lee (2015) considers the project as an instance of translanguaging (e.g. García & Li Wei, 2014) embodying a transcultural sensibility (hybridity). he novices learning and practicing square word calligraphy engage in acts of aesthetically driven, unidirectional double-voicing of codecrossing (Rampton, 1998), appropriating, imitating and distorting Chinese orthography rather than using it (heteroglossia) (Jaworski, 2014b). Finally, and most evidently, Square Word Calligraphy introduces formal elements of Chinese writing into the texts and spaces typically functioning in other linguistic systems (polyglossia). Although Xu Bing’s Square Word Calligraphy is arguably one of the most sophisticated instances of the use of two distinct scripts in one text, it is certainly not a unique example of contemporary heterography (Blommaert, 2008) or digraphia (e.g. Angermeyer, 2012), and it is not limited to art. Contemporary commercial signage abounds in examples of similar mixing of scripts – for example in the use of stylized, exoticizing features of diferent Asian scripts (Chinese, Hindi, or Arabic) in, say, English-language restaurant signs in the UK and other parts of the world (Jaworski, 2014a). In these instances, the texts become ‘accented’ according to the simulated scripts in which they are written. Square Word Calligraphy has a similar moiré language efect found in the metrolingual (Pennycook & Otsuji, 2015) practices of individuals self-styling as cosmopolitans or transnationals, and in commercial signage creating symbolic added value of products and services positioned as translocal or global. Such displays of translingualism subvert the ideologies of homogeneous, bounded, and reiied languages as formal systems. hey bring home the idea that many people do not live in stable and uniform speech communities, instead moving across diferent geographical and social spaces, entering ever luctuating and leeting communities of contact (Pratt, 1987; Rampton, 2009). Book from the Ground (Dishu) (2003–) – Universal Language Ideology he inal example from Xu Bing’s practice to be discussed briely here is his project Book from the Ground (2003 –), an “ongoing project that explores visual communication through archival material, an animation ilm, a pop-up concept store, original artworks, and a computer program that translates Chinese and English into the intermediate language of pictograms” (Borysevicz, 2012, p. 23). Inspired by the pictorial signage of international airports, airplane laminated safety manuals and wrapper instructions for the FigureSample_Chap01.indd 16 4/26/2017 3:59:47 PM Adam Jaworski 17 disposal of chewing gum, Xu Bing has amassed and catalogued a wealth of visual symbols, icons, logos, emoticons and punctuation marks from print and electronic sources. he culminating point of the project so far has been the publication of a novel, a 24-chapter story of a man’s life – Mr. Black – over the course of one day, Point to Point, Book from the Ground, or to give it its proper title, ‘• →→ •’ (Xu Bing, 2012b) (Figure 10). Xu Bing’s motivation for creating a universal pictographic language is no diferent than that of the inventors of inumerable verbal, ‘universal’ languages over the past centuries (Okrent, 2009). Xu Bing explains: Our existing languages are based on geography, ethnicity, and culture (including allpowerful English), and all fall short. Written languages now face an entirely unprecedented challenge. Today, the age-old human desire for a “single script” has become a tangible need. his predicament requires a new form of communication better adapted to the circumstances of globalization. Only today can the implications of the Tower of Babel truly be revived. (Xu Bing, 2007, p. 71) he ideology of a universal language driving this project is shared with all the other attempts at constructing a means of unimpeded, international communication. Figure 10. Xu Bing, Book from the Ground, 2003-ongoing. Mixed media. Page 2 and 3 from Xu Bing, Book from the Ground, Taipei: Cheng Pin Gallery, 2012. ©Xu Bing Studio. FigureSample_Chap01.indd 17 4/26/2017 3:59:48 PM 18 Language ideologies in the text-based art of Xu Bing Silverstein (2001) discusses one historical example of a related endeavour, Charles Ogden’s (1889–1957) Basic English, which, with just 850 ‘lexical primes’ or ‘word units’, was meant to ameliorate language of the emotive burden that had led to war, destruction and social pathology. In other words, it promised a “denotational utopia, marked by clear, unambiguous, and easily communicated thoughts” (Silverstein, 2001, p. 71). Basic English was also meant to be learnt quickly (three months, exactly) and used with ease by speakers of all and any language. Yet, as Silverstein argues, the project of Basic was premised on the untenable assumption of ‘freeing’ people from the inadequacies of their own language and the possibility of a time- and culture-neutral communication system (despite some of the ‘primes’ selected for inclusion in Basic including such dated, from today’s perspective, words as ink and porter). In his commentary on Xu Bing’s pictorial language, Hutton also draws parallels with Ogden’s Basic as wells as Otto Neurath’s (1882–1945) International System of Typographic Picture Education System (ISOTYPE), which had similar ambitions of “promoting international cooperation and preventing war” (Hutton, 2014, p. 136). Hutton is sceptical about the intended universality of all these languages. With regard to Xu Bing’s attempt, he comments that it is likely to be accessible only to “an already highly literate and technologically integrated member of urban globalized society” (ibid.). Yet, even members of well-educated globals may encounter problems in interpreting Xu Bing’s pictorial language unequivocally. For example, Lee (2015, p. 125) reports issues of ambiguity when ‘reading’ some of the icons, for which, in order to be disambiguated by the reader, an intersemiotic, visual–verbal dictionary would be needed, practically undercutting the autonomy of the pictorial language. However, the success of Xu Bing’s pictorial language as a universal language is only of secondary importance here. Even by his own admission, “[p]erhaps the idea behind this project is too ambitious, but its signiicance rests in making the attempt” (Xu Bing, 2007, p. 75). As long as it remains a conceptual art project, its value may lie precisely in testing the boundaries of the afordances of a pictorial language. Besides, not unlike numerous other artists (Jaworski, 2017), Book from the Ground demonstrates yet again Xu Bing’s commitment to a democratizing stance of his ‘language policy’ across a number of his projects, whether turning everyone into illiterates or super-literates capable of transcending linguistic boundaries. In my inal section, below, I return to the link between language policy and/as language ideology and discuss some implications of engaging with text-based art in language policy and planning. Conclusion At the start of this chapter I linked the idea of language policy and planning with social actors’ language ideologies and with their individual agency. his idea is not entirely new. While there are various tensions between ‘macro’- and ‘micro’-level language FigureSample_Chap01.indd 18 4/26/2017 3:59:48 PM Adam Jaworski 19 policies, especially at the interface between policy and implementation (Baldauf, 2006), various authors have commented on the possibility, a need even, to recognize language planning initiatives operating at diferent scale levels. For example, Mac Giolla Chríost (2006) discusses how the government-level attempts at maintaining the Irish language in the Gaeltacht and reviving it in other parts of Ireland are aided by community-based language-planning initiatives that are both economically relevant and socially inclusive. Micro-level language planning can foster positive attitudes to the minoritized language and normalize its use across a wider range of social and institutional domains. he link between the agency of individual speakers in relation to broader eforts of language planners to standardize (Lane, 2015) or revitalise (Moriarty & Pietikäinen, 2011) minority languages is now well-documented. Moriarty and Pietikäinen (2011, p. 365) go as far as to suggest that such localized language planning initiatives “can be seen to be tailored to the speciic needs of the community”. Roth-Gordon’s (2009) work demonstrates poignantly how individual language choices are, de facto, microlevel policy decisions ensuring personal security and signalling speakers’ allegiances to diferent versions of citizenship within a nation state. Busch (2009) shows how localized, thoughtful and liberal language policies valuing linguistic diversity can transform public institutions (in this case, the central library in Vienna) into non-restrictive, heteroglossic spaces, free from the hegemony of national language ideology and marketdriven language hierarchies. With regard to the display of languages in public space, Ben-Rafael et al. (2006) make a distinction between ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ lows of decisions, i.e., from public bodies and from undiferentiated individuals, respectively. he latter manifestations of language planning lie beyond policy documents. hey are located in individuals’ decisions, for example, as to which languages should be publically displayed, or erased from public view (Shohamy, 2006), or what place-names are chosen to designate urban spaces (Mac Giolla Chríost, 2007). Commenting on bilingual language display in Wales, Coupland (2010) discusses the rigidity and prescriptivism of key governmental institutions such as Bwrdd Yr Iaith (he Welsh Language Board) insisting on absolute language parallelism. Coupland notes how the linguistic landscape of Wales shaped ‘from below’ (Coupland’s preferred term in place of ‘bottom up’) demonstrates much variation, creativity and blending of the two languages, escaping the easy parallelism formula couched in the Welsh government’s consumerist and neoliberal discourse of (language) ‘choice’. As argued by Coupland, the policy of parallelism is itself rooted in the standard language ideology which typically disregards linguistic creativity and innovation. Coupland contrasts the aesthetically bland and regimented language parallelism with commodiied texts displayed on t-shirts sold by a small Welsh company Cowbois. Cowbois design texts on their t-shirts with irony and obliqueness, play with non-equivalence between Welsh and English, and deploy dense metacultural resources in articulating the (Welsh) culture that generates them. According to Coupland (2010, p. 98), for social actors who operate “in the much less strongly institutionalized periphery […] conformity can give way to creativity and indirect indexicality”. FigureSample_Chap01.indd 19 4/26/2017 3:59:48 PM 20 Language ideologies in the text-based art of Xu Bing here is only a ine line dividing commercially-driven language display (such as on t-shirts) and conceptual text-based art, itself a commercial activity, frequently disseminated in the form of afordable, consumer language objects (Jaworski, 2015). However, as I tried to demonstrate in this chapter, despite operating within the powerful institutional frameworks of galleries and museums, individual text-based artists, like Xu Bing, create their own private or personal domains of language planning and language engineering. In so doing they respond to and comment on language planning at the level of the nation state, or they transcend the nationalist agenda by developing an internationalist dream or a democratizing stance of planning a universal language for all humanity. With current emphasis in the studies of language policy on political economy, diversity, social justice and social inclusion (e.g. Ricento, 2015), turning to text-based art may ofer sociolinguists a useful lens through which to explore how hegemonic, unorthodox, non-normative, challenging, inclusive, or ‘merely’ playful language ideologies may exist side by side. In this sense, and following Wee’s (2016) outlook on interventionist language policy, artists can be seen as both theorists (or ideologues) of language policy and planning and as the agents implementing the very policies (or ideologies) that underpin their works. Commanding language in all its multidimensional complexity (Wee, 2016, p. 345), oten on a spectacular scale, in an aesthetically arresting manner, attracting large, diverse and international publics, Xu Bing’s ability to re-inscribe (he Character of Characters), subvert (Book from the Sky), invert (Square Word Calligraphy) and transcend (Book from the Ground) the modernist, national language ideology can raise our awareness of the potentialities and the limitations of language, its value, and its role in shaping social relations. And that is why, I believe, the ield of language policy and planning, and sociolinguistics more broadly, may beneit from paying more attention to the creative, aesthetic and ideological dimensions of text-based art. Acknowledgements I thank Chris Hutton, Brook Bolander, Joe Gualtieri and the editors of the Handbook for their extremely helpful comments on earlier drats of this chapter. he research for this chapter was supported by an HKSAR Government Funded Research Project (GRF) 2016–2019 titled “Word as Image: he Sociolinguistics of Art” (RGC ref. no. 17600415). All caveats apply. Notes 1. his is not to say that ‘language use’ is ever devoid of the ‘meta’ level signiication (Coupland & Jaworski, 2004), especially in the case of linguistic performance as always a “relexive activity” (Bell & Gibson, 2011, p. 562) involving “heightened awareness of the act of expression” (Bauman, 1975, p. 293). 2. In a personal note, Christopher Hutton comments that the policy itself dates from the early 1950s, but there was a major initiative in 1964. FigureSample_Chap01.indd 20 4/26/2017 3:59:48 PM Adam Jaworski 21 3. Due to limitations of space I do not discuss here the evolution of the work’s title (see, for example, Abe, 1998; Erickson, 2001 for discussion). 4. his interpretation of the Book from the Sky focuses on its reception by Chinese reading audiences. Other interpretations of the installation have dominated in the West, particularly in the USA (Abe, 1998). For example, the irst exhibition of A Book from the Sky in the USA at the Elvejhem Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin–Madison was interpreted largely in light of the 4 June 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. In the context of largely non-Chinese reading audiences, the emphasis has gradually shited towards the form and aesthetic merits of the work placing the viewers outside of the initial conceit of the piece to frustrate their attempts to ‘ind’ meaning in the text. he 1995 installation of A Book from the Sky at the Massachusetts College of Art did so literally by the absence of vertical scrolls on the gallery walls surrounding the central piece and the viewers. Furthermore, Abe frames his discussion of the reception of the Book from the Sky in the West in the Orientalist treatment of Chinese writing as emblematic of ‘Chineseness’ (see Hutton, 2006, 2008a). 5. For information about the programme, see http://www.xubing.com/index.php/site/projects/year/1998/your_surname_please; accessed 20 July 2016). he same installation in different formats was subsequently staged in other locations. References Abe, S. (1998). 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