STEFAN ARTENI

Self-interaction Of The Mark

Revised version of Shodo, a paper presented at
the Chinese Society for Aesthetics Congress
[Aesthetics and Culture: East and West], Beijing,
October 2002

SolInvictus Press 2006

The reality of the artwork generates
the possibility of the possible.

Martin Heidegger
Old
European
Script
 ‘Pure black’, powerful color of total solitude, plenitude
of nothingness, perfection of the void.

Paul Valery
The hand creates marks - recursive compositional constructs, the patterned
scratchings [grammata] that forked both into art and writing - which are signs
that do not depend directly on the development of language,

e.g. Heidegger’s pictographic where the crossing out/through symbolizes the

fourfold.

The hand has its language in which expression refers to sight (Leroi Gourhan), acts and
motions whereby a certain structure can be produced, a world of gesture and not of the
written word. Art is in execution.

Any system of writing is affected in its external form by the writing material used: the formal
vocation of the material (Focillon) used according to its nature. The brush is not an
instrument as such but one’s own extension.

The artist’s intensified interest is projected onto the tools and process of writing, beyond the
semantic message itself, e.g. the use of ink, brush, and paper in sinitic and japanese
calligraphy, or the use of a stylus held at an angle and of clay tablets in cuneiform writing,
the simplest mark being usually a wedge-shaped groove, not unlike the knife marks of side
inscriptions used in Far Eastern seal cutting.
Now make a mark, a distinction...
As soon as that happens, there is a
polarity. Where before there was
only a void, a no-thing, now there is
the distinction (the mark) and that
which is not the distinction. Now we
can speak of “nothing” as some-
thing, since it is defined by being
other than the distinction.

Louis H.Kauffman
Oracle Bone Inscription
(China)
Pre-cuneiform script

Mycenaean Linear B Script

Bai Joteki Zhao Zhiquian
 The brushmark lays on the paper the internal tension of form,
never its enveloping enclosure.
Jean Pierre Jouffroy

Formal syntactic organization de-signs: visual focussing (emphasis through the creation
of deliberate or undeliberate attention centers), attention games through the variegated
manipulations of the power of the icon (size, proportions, signs transposed to give a more
pleasing Gestalt) and of the materiality of the sign (Assmann), iconic associations where
perceptual devices are intertwined.

Where most signs are clearly pictographic in origin, the writing system is a mnemonic
device, it does not fully represent the spoken language, much that would be obvious to a
native is not implicitly supplied or indicated in the writing (Hayes): a skeletal notation
(Chadwick), e.g. Sumerian cuneiform.

While hieroglyphs have strong iconicity (although cursive hieroglyphs, hieratic and
demotic are progressively more abstract), sinitic characters have a summarized Gestalt.
Still, even in the most schematic cases, one is in the realm of the iconic.
Every graphematic sign carries an a priori iconic sense, regardless of its word role and
phonetic/sound value. Writing and reading are handled separately by the brain.
Reading involves recognition (Caramazza). Writing involves retrieving and generating
the parts from memory, recurrent construction (Lee). The artist tends to reverse the
inverse relation of presence and absence, where, to appear semantically, a sign must
disappear materially – the phonetic metaphor where the iconicity of the sign is
neutralized -, as the artist is seduced by the signifier, instead of by the message (Jean
Abelanet’s "signs without words"). In fact, the word usually anchors the meaning of the
graphic sign, countering the terror of the uncertain signifier (Barthes), iterability being a
prerequisite for any symbolic order (Manfred Frank).
Egyptian hieroglyphs
 There is writing when signs combine to form a
graphic code.

Georges Jean

Pictorial knowledge of the world is represented mentally in terms of fine-grained structures

that are distinct from linguistic representations, although interfaced with them (Paivio).

Pictorial elements per se, in Far Eastern literati painting, and pictorial elements in
pictographic/picto-ideographic script, are often interchangeable. Traditionally, the same
brushstrokes are used, so that a similarity of marks offers itself despite the different formal
context: the iconic pole, the pictorial representation of the prototypical member of the
category represented by the word in the cultural code, dominates the vision of the
calligrapher.

The attraction of the pictorial makes calligraphy an open system - a system whose design
permits the construction from a limited number of elements, the strokes, of infinitely many
complexes (Vaihinger) - where the iconicity is much reduced and the character may be
unreadable (a creative abduction producing a gestaltically elegant universe), and/or there is
a personal script-idiolectal universe (Goldwasser), and/or stylistic cross-references, e.g. to
Zao Wu Ki’s ink abstractions or De Stael’s ink drawings.
Zao Wou-ki

the mark as
mark of itself
 Sengai Gibon
the figurative mark
 Zhang Zhengyu

The character is
"mountain“ – paradox
becomes embodied in
the form, the mark
oscillates between
writing and painting
Jiun Onko

Daruma
Shi Lu
Nicolas
De Staël
 Play proceeds within limits of time and space in a visible order,
according to rules freely accepted, and outside the sphere of
necessity or utility. It can usually be repeated… Once played…it
endures as a new-found creation…it becomes tradition…
repetition and alternation are like the warp and woof of a fabric.

Johan Huizinga

Poiesis (to make, to do, imagination projecting order into reality) is fingere (to fashion,
form, invent): the icon uses the user (Miller). Ambiguities toy with and are conjured up by
the pictorial. Graphic rhetoric creates new beings, free variations come to life, a sign
appears as two, two signs appear as one: the playing field of the icon.

Connections and consequences that were neither intended nor expected emerge from the
association of signs (Castoriadis): the controlled accident. The iconic sign has
randomness and chance built into it (Angenot): an introversive semiosis, which signifies
itself, and is indissolubly linked with the artistic function of sign-systems (Jacobson).

The basic rule provides a minimal framework stressing the primacy of play rather than the
activity of the player (Gadamer): conspicuousness and occultation of the sign.

The play is in us: we are the play and we are impatient to show it
to you. You see,we’ve been neglected.

Luigi Pirandello
Qi Baishi
Zheng Dao-Zhao
Wang Duo
 When chaos unfolds, the method of the
single brushstroke, used by the Gods,
is born.The setting up of this method
creates a method from non-method…
the universe in one, perfectly executed,
Shi Tao
brushstroke.

Shi Tao
Fu Shan
Zhang Ruitu
 If you will beckon, in graylike
Open tremble corrupted
All vestiges
That the void does not swallow.

Annulled is thence gesture,

Jin Nong All voices fall silent,
Returns to its wellspring
The barren existence.

Eugenio Montale
 Zheng Xie
(Zheng Banqiao)
He Shaoji
Yu Youren
Zhao Zhiqian
 Drawing a white space where absolutely nothing
is drawn- that is the most difficult thing…

Ike no Taiga

Past and future are present by not being present. The artist structures difference according
to a rule of disparity – a paradoxical coincidentia oppositorum which exhibits the dynamic
tension between the Far Eastern and European traditions, a priori frameworks, each with its
distinct presuppositions: an intercivilizational encounter and interresonance, an absolute
present that is existentially eschatological, Nishida’s place of nothingness.

The artist creates a whole which satisfies his standard/framework of appreciation. The
viewer should dwell in the artwork by the same standards, as there may be a logical gap
when the viewer ignores the work’s own rules. Calligraphy becomes an object diverted from
utilitarian use, an object to be looked at rather than read (Le Goff).
Hidai Tenrai
Hakuin Ekaku

Julius Bissier
Mark Tobey
Julius Bissier
Kamijo
Shinzan
Tanaka
Setsuzan
 Geizan
(Stefan Arteni)
The drop of ink, kinsman of sublime night.

Stephane Mallarme