Distillations from an ongoing study, a lofty memorandum of narrow inlet not too obscure, gleaned from a cluster of filtered evocations on a freely given data screen of elegant inquiry
I begin this set of scientific postcards from a site that I continue to scrutinize for its links to a range of kinship myths that endue its coastal caravanserai with a fadedness of anonymous hulls and their humble consignments of edible seaweeds, betel-nut, birds nest, raw palm sugar and fermented bean paste, all unloaded now... Moored to the pilings beneath the quiet moon, the squeaking of her wood as she gently rocks on the shallow inlet of the Endau River where years-back Japanese forces came ashore and marched down the road to establish Shonan.
One of quite a number of un-decreed quasi postcolonial Sinitic sites one finds elapsing in muted contiguity of a writing from elsewhere, a mingling of loci demurred by the gap, but allured by the fact that this deepest southern reach of the Malaya Peninsula constitutes the sole amphiscian zone across the entire Eurasian super-continent here in this tropical sun-drenched tract one encounters scores of basal registries strewn as arcs in chance arrangement, scuttled boats half-buried on riverbanks, driftwood drying on curves of beach with scattered whitecaps flagging the gaze to hazy forms of offshore islands floating like clouds on a distant horizon soaked in torrid midday sun that relentlessly elutriates baleful intimations of these proximal devices smudged together through supplication of quiet tides one senses a plunge of sky-blue screens as lambent veils of spatial buoyancy nimbly abide to better intervene upon, lighten to extend emotive schema that discerns exquisite tragic text in polished hue of a lithic dross awash in variegated surge of enchantment splashing pure on shorelines of perception.
But in the gap and before this reaches your eyes, we will have spread our sails to monsoon winds over metal blue seas tacking south though squalls to slept a night at Singapura—gold light seeping through morning window mingles with the greys of camphor and punk smoke. Again set sail through the Straits of Malacca and beyond many days en voyage upon the wind to Arabian Sea waves lapping on shores, secure safe havens in North Malabar. This tropical littoral that holds great importance in segmentation of ongoing tasks like combing pristine stretches of beach for a secret cove of hermeneutic vantage, gathering sponges of gentle ideation callously blurred as events or things, re-imbuing them with values of persuasive mutability, fortuitous misreading, primmediacy. A lofty memorandum of narrow inlet not too obscured sees writing and painting, their performative foundations, embedded conduits running in a background comprised of operant triadic blends perceivable in terms of combing a beach as guided by a mode of predisposed enchantment that constitutes a form of aesthetic yoga, the principle of "li" at work across these current strong seas, an easterly tack in countervailing cycles of tidal rinse that parallel or second as post-Nuagiste disquisition on Rene Laubies as a coasting vessel foraging through eddies of neglected backwaters, mediating vistas, ink drenched skies as seasonal transhumance shapes the current, billowed sails over open seas along a multiculti string of pearl-like entrepôts replenishing stores.
A shift in tropes to explicate a way for painting poetry, their methodological apparati that form when merged a triadic (not dyadic) permutation describable in terms of archaeological excavation that progresses equiliberally accommodating structures ascertained along planes of co-extensive being. So the edge, though never quite sure where it is because it's always grazing downward into new emerging surface aroused from a sense of being in field, from traction gained from decoding or amalgamating random areas of layered abandonment, strewn while fragmented, that hold no ambition to be built, presumed or relied on.
In handling calligraphy, or handsome writing we acknowledge that it holds very different social statuses in Oriental and Western art historical cultures. Not only that, in Asiatic legacy, and particularly in Far East literati practice, there is neither compelling nor valid distinction drawn between the elements of poetry, painting and calligraphy as such, nor interestingly between the notions of image and reflection, idea and word, between presentation and representation. Thus in our current transcultural epoch, painting may not even be considered "painting" but rather an extension of writing (écriture), which covers simultaneously images and letters and therefore rhetoric, and furthermore renders such terms as image and letter remarkably 'irrelevant in a very strict sense' (Inaga).
Research in this area is scarce and in its infancy. It seeks collaboration with an aim of exploring a variety of Far East Asiatic loci, geo- or logo-based attempts to engage absorbing rich sentiments conducive to reading of spirits of place near that elegant verge of decrepitude, to ingeniously mooch among relegated elements, sculpt installations of poetic passage elapsing midst crumbling facades, veneers of illustrious sea- land- town- mind-scapes to detect synchronizations, omitted fragmentation that corroborate compliment preliminary findings in a way that makes this study stand out as unique in the panorama of literati research.
It attempts to trace the global rise of non-figuration historically, theoretically, stylistically—to use as our conveyance at hand in a critical analysis of Rene Laubies' painted writing, with particular focus on haute époque painters Ma Yuan [馬遠] (1190) and Bada Shanren [八大山人] (1630), both of whom Laubies esteemed as "the pure abstract ones, because the stain held their interest, not the rock or the boat that the stain perhaps suggested" (Laubies). But is it really so? By displaying very credible abstract tendencies that render Ma and Bada obvious precursory candidates, the two must necessarily be seen as figurative artists.
In tracing non-figuration's global rise we additionally scrutinize pre-war European "geometric abstraction"—"Mondrian, Kandinsky, Circle and Square" (Laubies)—and set that apart from "lyrical abstraction" that began to appear around 1950 in relatively formal modes of Art Informelle, Tachisme, Nuagisme. For it is lyrical abstraction that brings recognition 'but at the same time it begins to be attacked' (Laubies). No remote lines of descent are detected from pre- to post-war "abstract" tendencies. On this alone one logically assumes non-figuration arises not from pre-war European geometric painting. Now for Laubaies this eposes a necessity for painting "to return to nature (abstract in-itself) and be renewed by that."
Our attempted transvaluation of literati currents of distinctly manifest formulaic heritage sites calls for a number of new suppositions or conceptual perspectives that largely pivot on Laubies' statement, "nature is abstract," a premise we hold and therewith confront a generally accepted abstract vs. real oppositional paradigm. This requires disabling and quarantine. Deprived of standard oppositional assignation. Abstraction is a vague and deceptive term with scant analytical utility, a pointless and dissimulative contradistinction placed near either radical aniconicistic non-figuration or that pre-photographic era taxonomic compulsion [to represent], to which Sinitic language likely has no term for.
We contravene any niggling sense of cower or infringement, an inappropriateness of disrepresentation in scholarly art-historical discourse and seting our critiquing filters high against every form of figurative manga incursion together with their propagandistic cum pornographic corollaries. This complete separation of manga practice from set analytical fundaments of Nuagiste poiesis fiercely oversees depriving archaeology its unimpeded sanction to fashion the findings of its own excavations prompted by institutional payola.
In its current edition, this intensely naturalist approach to poiesis, its hermeneutic outcomes and their presentations, comprise methodological documentation on a range of adjunct interventions. Through collaborative reliance, appropriative attention on artifactuality in sub-prime notionality, their constituent encasements of impending actuation, methodology holds primacy in irrepressible urge to amend inner logic of its mirroring apparatus mired in quarries of color field allusiveness where painting as an archaeological intercession stretches out in need of tantalizing tropes through field after field of tropic inadequacy, bearing stain of data mine probity, predicated pleas for off-site storage, consensual poetics of interred elutriation to answer for itself via artifacts, facts and extenuating treatments imbued in a sediment of what remains of painting as an archaeological recovery.
Having started to discuss the work at hand one is immediately confounded by a dearth of terms insufficient to expound a poetic painting born midst crevasses of cultural hybridity nourished in the no man's lands of ascetic transmutation. Cloudist, or Post-Nuagiste methodology while displaying hermeneutic ramifications scored by besmirched naturalistic geniis in hidden margins of deconstructive practice, procedural conventions that plainly evince stylistic elements completely their own, initially function as a prudent probe. But its actions go far beyond problem proposal: it marks, defaces, flattens, distorts, under-rides, demeans its own creative push to eradicate entirely then leave in the lurch a rude mistrust that snubs 'all reliance on technique and virtuosity' (Laubies), its gravity is felt as aesthetic quandary, unpredictable pocks appearing on the surface of composure and release. These are not perused through mythical inventions but as spatial spheres, that they elutriate while holding momentous 'recourse to divinity' (Zoetmulder) with an inbuilt ease, resolution, resolve, Laubiesan practice leaves much to chance.
How to accept this exhilarating challenge and crack the artist's liminal appeal when standard terminology so deeply disappoints us? Let us offer a hint. Try to acknowledge a pre-existent Cloudist dictum and see what is given to explain your subject in a manner that eludes all convoluted reading of the stain of sliding cloud at sea...
References
Cahill, James. 1994. The Painter's Practice, How artists lived and worked in Traditional China.
Cantos et poèmes choisis / Ezra Pound. 1958. Traduction de Rene Laubies, Paris: P.J. Oswald. Harambourg, Lydia. 1998.
"Rene Laubies: L’Ecole de Paris, 1945-1965," Dictionnaire des peintres. http://www.bj-fineart.fr/documentation/laubies/peintres.php
Harris, Troy. 2005. Grafting Plato's Shadow Play: a spray can version of metaleptic mimesis. Ashé Journal, Vol 5, Issue 1, 3-33. http://ashejournal.com/index.php?id=42
Harris, Troy. 1990. On Laubiès' Work. René Laubiès, Octobre-Novembre 1990, Galerie Michel Broomhead, Paris; Achevé d'imprimer sur les presses de Mira Impression à Libourne, Conception: Canovas Belchi.
Inaga, Shigemi. 2007. "Is Art History Globalizable? A critical commentary from a Far Eastern Point of view." In Elkins (ed.), Is Art History Global?: 249-279.
Laubiès, René. 2001. Titratti e Aforismi / Portraits et Aphorismes (bilingual, Italian and French), Morgana Edizioni, Firenze.
Verges, Francoise. 2003. Writing on Water: Peripheries, Flows, Capital, and Struggles in the Indian Ocean / Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique / Vol. 11, No. 1, spring. Duke University Press.
Zoetmulder, P.J. 1974. Kalangwan: A Survey of Old Javanese Literature. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
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