Shi Zhiying

Essay: Colm Tóibín

 

There is no need any more for description since we can photograph at will, and since we can share the photograph widely then it will be seen by infinite numbers of people for all eternity, or until the technology changes, whichever comes first.

 

Thus, if you work with words, there is something strange and solitary about attempting to set a scene, to create an atmosphere, to say where the door was, for example, or what sort of light came from the window, or what was in the room. Even writing the simple, imagined words ‘the full moon was luminous with a fierce, radiant whiteness’ seems oddly strange, like a quotation from something that someone needed to write in the past, a past before you could photograph or film the full moon and send it, freshly packaged, around the world.

 

And even experience itself seems to belong to a time that has transformed. Imagine if you wrote: ‘They both sat reading, not speaking or moving, for some hours.’ The reader would have a right to feel that this non-event took place in some strange part of the past, and that the people in question were old, or middle-aged, and that it must have been before television and the internet and the smartphone and the I-pad, a time before people began to get up constantly from what they were doing to do something else, and that these two silent, bookish immobile readers must be long-dead and long-forgotten, if they ever really existed.

 

In his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), Walter Benjamin quotes Paul Valéry: ‘For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.’

 

In his essay, Benjamin wrote: ‘Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes.’

 

This meant that the idea of pure loneliness in the making and sending out into the world of a single work of art came to an end, or at least could be questioned and undermined. And also the idea of a painting taking its power from the work’s solitary status, its aura of unique presence, was doomed.

 

And also the notion that the viewer looking at a painting is involved in a communion that is haloed, quite spiritual, is something that has lost full confidence in itself.

 

Yet this experience of looking urgently and voraciously, as though you might never see the object again, is often missed, sometimes desperately longed for. Some people still need to feel that the work of art they are looking at arose from an inspired moment in a radiant soul with a special talent, even if others view that feeling as quite inauthentic, almost ridiculous, to be undermined as much as possible by the very way in which art is made and photographed and written about and bought and sold.

 

Sometimes, a sentence occurs to me, a sentence with its own buried rhythm, and I write it down. Often, I don’t know where it comes from, or why it has appeared in that shape. All I know is that is I need to be alone so that I can work. I need time and silence. As I add other sentences, making erasures and revisions, I realize that I am in close touch with some region of myself that I manage normally to keep at bay. But also, I am using knowledge, irony, experience, choice and will. I am not in a trance.

 

What I am making can be printed and re-printed, but it came from one mysterious source, a source available to no one else. Thus the work – the novel, the story, the play, the poem – maintains its mystery and its autonomy and its purity. I was the only one who was there when it was being made. It must be filled with traces and clues and links from that time, from the time when it was almost unmade, when it was half-made, when it came into being. The finished work must be illuminated, animated, by its original time in loneliness, by its early resistance to noise.

 

There are some painters who specialize in making work which combines a sense of stillness with a minimum of means, emphasizing the idea that the painting or drawing or watercolor was made in time in silence and had best be contemplated in time and in silence.

 

There is a strange sense of loneliness and scarce light in the work, say, of Giorgio Morandi or William Scott or Agnes Martin. And each one of them seemed unworried about repeating an image, or coming again and again to the same set of contours, colors and shapes. They worked much in the very spirit of how each day works: days begin with dawn and end with twilight as the sun seems to rise and go down. There are, of course, always variations, such as seasons and clouds, but the spirit of lovely monotony is essentially there.

 

And there are also some contemporary painters who work with repetition not in order to perfect anything but because of a purity in their own way of imagining and seeing. Watch how stillness, emptiness, silence seem to pervade their work like a powerful minimalist music! It is interesting that Vija Celmins, in the United States, for example, works with the sea and the sky, as Maria Simonds-Gooding, in Ireland, works with sea and costal light, and both of them find color almost unnecessary in most of their work. And how color and line in the work of Callum Innes, in Scotland, is so pure and carefully chosen, as though making these lines and working with color were an exacting and sacred calling.

 

In the work of Shi Zhiying, there also is a great purity and sense of stillness. There is a feeling that the eye of the artist has been involved not merely in seeing but in distilling and then dissolving and remaking as much as is tactfully possible. The idea of line and light in her work is hard-won. She is deeply concerned with element and spirit, with the loneliness of working slowly, calmly, to create a single object, the very making of which suggests isolation, distance, guarded feeing.

 

In her paintings of the sea, with all their reticence and clarity, much that is powerful is withheld, much that is fragile and liminal is implied. She manages to suggest the very ‘seaness’ of the sea, as much as depict the water or make an exact image of it.

 

Since the hand, when it works at creating the images, must repeat, hold back, and repeat again as the eye supervises, then things that do not come singly interest Zhiying – beads, stones, waves, repetitive carvings, shapes in crystal. This does not mean that she is interested in pattern. It is the singleness of things that fascinates her, just as she is seriously engaged with the singleness of each brushstroke, the singleness of each line and mark, the singleness of each layer of paint. There is nothing in the world she works with that does not stand alone and require close attention.

 

Her work is engaged with the conflict between what is open and almost broken, chipped away at or in permanent movement, and the idea of the pictorial space as fully solid and sure and confined. Thus both sunlight, in all its darting softness, and stone, in all its solidity and shapeliness, fascinate her, as much as the liquidity of water and the power to make waves and force them to gather. So too, the gap or the connection between the materials she works with and the ground, the surface, she creates.

 

Her work is as alert to photography as any novelist, say, is alert to how a story can be told or a character shown or an atmosphere created on film. Film and photography are part of the weather of any artist’s inner world. But in that moment of hushed making when you are building a scene with sentences or trying to show the texture of surfaces that are bathed in light or held in shadow, almost nothing else matters except what you imagine and then see and then let others see, as though no one had ever seen them before, unwashed in the waters of art history, as pure as they can be, and shiveringly still, open to the play and movement of light, and solid, open always to the altering eye of the viewer.

 

 

 

石至莹
by 科尔姆·托宾

石至莹

 

如今我们已不必详加描述,因为可以随意拍照,还能把照片广为分享,在无限的时间内让无数的人看到,除非发生技术改革或别的什么。

 

因此当你用文字创作,尝试描述一个场景,塑造一种氛围——比如描述一扇门的方位,窗口进来的光线,或者房间里的东西——便会有种奇特而孤独的感觉。即使描写简单的事物,构思“满月之光皎洁明亮”这种句子也挺奇怪的,好像是从老文章中摘引出来,放在以前才不得不这样写,以前你没法把满月拍成新鲜出炉的照片和视频,然后满世界发送。 

 

就连体验也似乎已属于一个旧时代了。如果你写“他俩坐着阅读,几个小时没说话也没动”,读者难免会奇怪,觉得这种无聊事一定是发生在过去,这两人是中老年人,这场景是发生在电视、网络、智能手机和Ipad出现之前,那时候人们还不会手中有活就时不时站起来干别的,而这两个沉默不动的书呆子也一定已过世很久,早已为人忘怀,如果他们确实曾经存在。

 

瓦尔特·本杰明在他1936年的《机械复制时代的艺术作品》中引用了保罗·瓦勒里的话:“在过去二十年中,事件、空间和时间都不复是亘古以来的样子。我们必须期待重大的革新来改变艺术的整体技术,这将影响艺术创新本身,或许还会为我们的艺术概念带来惊人的变革。”

 

在这篇文章中,本杰明写道:“在1900年代,技术复制已经达到了这一水准,不仅能复制所有可被传播的艺术作品,使其公众影响发生深远变化,并且还能在艺术创作中赢得一席之地。” 

 

这意味着在创作单幅艺术作品并将其传播于世的过程中,纯粹孤独的理念已经到了尽头,或至少开始受到质疑和轻忽。同时,在作品孤一的状态下,从其独特的存在中汲取力量的绘画理念,也迎来了末日。

 

以及,评论者观赏画作时犹如处身于圣光环绕的灵性氛围的理念,也彻底失去了自信。

 

这种如饥似渴,仿佛一别难再见的观赏体验,如今大多已感受不到,但有时还特别需要。有些人仍然需要有这样一种感觉:他们正在观赏的艺术品,是一颗光辉的心灵凭借其特殊才能,在灵感迸发的一刻创作出来的,但在其诞生,而后被拍摄、传阅、售买的过程中,艺术价值被极大破坏了。即便其他人认为这种感觉并不靠谱,几乎可说是荒谬。 

 

有时我想到一个句子,一个有其自身节奏的句子,我就把它写下来。大多时候我不知道这个句子从何而来,为何会以这种形态出现。我只知道我唯有在孤独的环境中才能写作。我需要时间和沉默。我会继续添加其他句子,修修改改,这时我意识到我正在与自己内心的某些部分亲密接触,而这些我通常是不愿触动的。但我也会运用知识、反讽、经历、选择和意志,并没有心神恍惚。

 

我的作品可以一再被印刷,但它来自于一个谁都无法了解的神秘所在。正因为此,这些作品——长篇小说、短篇小说、戏剧、诗歌——维持了自身的神秘、自主与纯粹性。它被创作之时,我是唯一在场的人。从作品的创作之始,到半成品,到成品,它一定带有当时留下的种种痕迹、线索和关联。最终完成的作品光彩鲜丽,但这源自它最初的孤独时光,源自它最初对杂音的拒绝。

 

有些画家擅长在创作过程中将静止感与最少的含义结合起来,强调的是这样一种观点:这些油画、素描或水粉是在沉默中被逐步创作出来的,因此也最适合在沉默中被逐步思考。

 

有些画家——比如乔治·莫兰迪(Giorgio Morandi)、威廉·斯科特(William Scott)和艾格尼丝·马丁(Agnes Martin)——的作品有种奇特的孤独感与罕见的光感。他们似乎都不介意反复描绘同一种意象,或者反复使用同一组线条、色彩和形状。他们的作画犹如每日常态:日出日落,天亮天黑。当然也有变化,比如季节和云的变化,但这种可爱的单调感总是存在。

 

也有些当代画家,他们重复作画并非为了追求完美,而是因为他们所思所见的方式是如此纯粹。观赏他们作品所散发的静止、空白与沉默,犹如倾听一支有力的极简乐曲。有趣的是有些画家,如美国的维哈·塞尔敏(Vija Celmins)画海与天空,如爱尔兰的玛丽安·西蒙德-古丁(Maria Simonds-Gooding)画海与海岸的光线,在他们大多数作品中色彩几乎都是不必要的。在苏格兰画家卡勒姆·因内斯(Callum Innes)的作品中,色彩与线条经过精心遴选,极为纯净,仿佛创作这些线条,使用这些色彩,是一项精准的天职。

 

在石至莹的作品中,也有极度的纯粹感与静止感。能够感觉到,参与其中的艺术家的眼睛不仅在观看层面上深度参与,同时也巧妙委婉,竭尽所能地进行着提炼、分解和重造。她作品中的线条和光感来之不易。她很注重元素与精神,注重平静、缓慢创作一幅作品的孤独心境,而这一过程显示了独立感、距离感和审慎感。

 

 她的海的作品,节制、明晰,既充满力量,又蕴含某种易变和临界的状态。她悉心表达出的正是海的“海性“,不亚于她为描绘或创作海水的精确图像所投入的精力。

 

当手在创作这些图象时,一定是在目光的监管下重复、停顿,再重复,于是结伴出现的事物吸引了至莹的兴趣,如珠子、石头、波浪、重复的石刻造像,晶体的形状,这并不意味着她对样式感兴趣。她喜欢的是事物的单一性,正如她热衷于每一笔的单一性,每一线条和点迹的单一性,每一层次的单一性。她笔下的一切,都有其独立性,需要十分用心。

 

她的作品中充满了开放与断连、碎屑和永恒的运动,同时画面空间又十分坚实、确定、稳固。柔和的光感与坚硬有形的石头,水的流动感与波浪翻腾的力量,同样吸引着她。还有她画面中的物质和她创造的画布及颜料间的不同与联系,这些都在冲突中形成张力。 

 

她的作品对摄影人和小说家都很有启迪,比如说,对如何讲述一个故事,呈现一个人物,在电影中制造一种氛围,这些方面都能有所启发。电影和摄影都是艺术家内心世界的气象。但在安静创作之时,你用句子勾织一个场景,或者试图展现某些或明或暗的表面肌理时,一切都不再重要,唯有你的所思,你的所见,然后让他人看见,仿佛这些景象之前无人见过,未曾被艺术史的浪潮所淘洗,极为纯粹,在静止中微微颤动,敞开在光的游戏和运动中,同时又坚实地敞开在观者流动的目光中。