季大纯的绘画之书

鲍栋

季大纯的所有绘画都出自于对我们习惯的图像表征系统的不信任，他怀疑那些图像——主要包括艺术史图像、流行形象与科学图谱——所表征的世界真的就是唯一的、终极的、人们不得不接受的世界。

为了说明问题，这里要举一个语言领域中的例子。博尔赫斯曾经虚构了“中国某部百科全书”，书中对动物的分类是这样的：“⑴属皇帝所有，⑵有芬芳的香味，⑶驯顺的，⑷乳猪，⑸鳗螈，⑹传说中的，⑺自由走动的狗，⑻包括在目前分类中的，⑼发疯似地烦躁不安的，⑽数不清的，⑾浑身有十分精致的骆驼毛刷的毛，⑿等等，⒀刚刚打破水罐的，⒁远看像苍蝇的”。博尔赫斯想像着一种与我们常用的动物分类法——比如动物学的类、科、纲、目，或者野生的/家养的、水生的/陆生的——远远不同的另一种分类的可能，暗示着既定的表征系统只是无数可能的表征方式中的一种而已，或者另一种知识型的存在。

对世界的表征即是对事物的归类与排列，使事物按照某一种知识型规规矩矩地呆在我们的表征系统中。但这好比是用一种表格样式去应付所有的事务，即使不会带来错误或困惑，也会引起乏味。事实上，一旦某种表征方式——不管是语言的还是图像的——被我们熟悉、习惯乃至默认成一种天经地义的自然状态，就必然会带来乏味，因为表征的运作被隐藏了，具体的事物自动转化成了抽象的概念，就像是食物不经过咀嚼、吞咽和消化而直接变成营养，还有什么比这更令人乏味吗？

季大纯绘制的一些莫名其妙的形象，那些奇怪的像植物和盆景一样的事物，可以被视为对乏味的抵制。之所以说它们“像……一样”，是因为它们并不处于我们的事物次序表之中，而只能用别的我们熟悉的事物去比喻它们。

这些形象是惊异的，而惊异正好是超现实主义的情感效果，因此我们有理由说季大纯是一个超现实主义者。另一个理由是，他的画中经常有着事物之间的奇遇，“像一架缝纫机和一把雨伞在解剖台上偶然相遇”（洛特雷阿蒙：〈马尔多罗之歌〉）一样，器官、骨头、曲线、笔触、肌理、颜料和各种玩意儿在植物的形态中相遇，有时是一枝，有时是一朵。

当然，是不是超现实主义对于季大纯和他的绘画来说都是无关紧要的，不过如果我们要描述他的绘画风格，“超现实”这个词肯定比“童趣”这个词要妥当的多。或者说，所谓童趣只是处于正常的（大人们认为的）表征系统之外的另一种可能，也就是说，用“童趣”去指代一种趣味类型，实际上是对不可归纳（即不被既定表征系统接受）之事物的临时安置。

这也意味着仅仅从趣味的角度去谈论季大纯的绘画注定是贫乏的，虽然他的作品的确有趣（可能也正是这种有趣暂时限制了他），但这种有趣却并不是他的出发点，而是一个结局。我想顺便强调的是，超现实主义最初并不是一种趣味、风格或者美学，而是一种创造动力学，为此，阿波利奈尔说，“人当初企图模仿行走，所创造的车轮子却不象一条腿。”也就是说，他们不是为了惊异而惊异，而是世界的不可理喻性的现实导致了这个结果，超现实主义只不过是尊重了这个现实——在这个意义上，他们回应了柏拉图的观点“哲学源于惊异”。

到这里，我不得不明确我的观点，季大纯的绘画来自于这样一种世界观：从来没有什么事物的本来面目与次序，这也意味着，从来没有什么最恰当的表征方式，我们可以也必须对事物的理所当然的样子——日常的形象、庸常的趣味、传统、流行以及所有我们被拘役其中的表征系统——做出怀疑。

怀疑并非一个空洞的姿态，对于季大纯来说，而是一种机动的绘画实践。作为一个画家，他埋伏于那个叫做“绘画”的政权中，伺机行动，四面出击，指东打西，艺术史图像、流行形象与科学图谱这些都是他绘画游击的地盘。

把他的绘画实践比喻为游击是为了暗示其恶作剧式的方式：一张人体盆腔的解剖图的直肠处被画上了一只令人尴尬的食指，并被画上了某种不洁之物。在科学话语（如医学）的表征系统（如一本医书）中，图像只是科学知识（科学的世界图景）展现自身的一个工具，但是作为一种知识型的科学话语已经把世界划分成为了可表征的（即知识）与不可表征的（非知识），并已把后者排除在其表征系统之外。正如我们在医学图谱上看到的那样，身体被分区的（如颅腔、胸腔、腹腔、盆腔……）、片面的（如神经系统、消化系统、循环系统……）描绘，但身体的整体性与具体性被视而不见，何况在此之前，身体的社会性也已经被排除在科学话语的范围之外了。

在《点到为止》中，季大纯的那张画点出了科学图像在一定程度上的“虚假”（真理意义上）与“虚伪”（伦理意义上），他“指出”的是以下事实：直肠中可能会有粪便，会弄脏——身体的社会性在此出现——指检者的手指。因此，这张画是幽默的，会让我们发笑，但并不是因为这张画的内容很滑稽，而是作者的绘画修辞，即对这张解剖图的处理方法，引发了我们知性的落空。

他的绘画修辞有着极强的能动性，所以我们很难全面地归纳出他的修辞格，季大纯涉猎的图像也极为丰富，不受主题、内容、风格与趣味的约束。一旦他直觉上对某张图像产生了兴趣，他就会思考该如何处理它，然后就在画布上实现出来。每一张图像都不一样，所以每一幅画的修辞手法都不相同，以至于每一件作品都是一场修辞事件。

他会把迷彩的肤表与头骨的形体凑到一起，对明暗色调式的绘画观念开了一个玩笑；也会把邓丽君的裸体形象描绘成一副粗壮结实的农妇身材，并画上陶偶的龟裂纹理，以此调侃着所谓的“明星样”；他也没有放过卡通形象，给它们画出性器官，或者画出它们被解剖的样子，把它们天真无邪、无忧无虑的拟人形象还原成动物性的存在；甚至，他的修辞也会出现在作品标题上，如“毛斯列恩马”、“六神花露血”……

总之，他打乱着既定世界的次序，使事物从庸常、乏味的日常形象中滑出来，再把它放置到他自己的那种不确定的、开放而不断延展的修辞系谱中。在这个意义上，季大纯仿佛就是在编撰着博尔赫斯虚构的那部百科全书，不是用文字，而是用绘画。

Ji Dachun’s Book of Painting

Bao Dong

All of Ji Dachun’s paintings come forth from a lack of belief in the image representation system we are all accustomed to. He doubts that the world represented by these images – mainly including art history images, popular imagery and scientific illustrations – is the only, ultimate world that must be accepted by man.

To illustrate the problem, here is an example from the field of language. Jorge Luis Borges once fabricated an encyclopedia of China entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge that divides all animals into the following categories: “(a) those that belong to the emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.” Borges imagined the possibility of an animal classification system that was vastly different from our common classification system – that of kingdom, phylum, genus and species, or that of wild, domestic, hydrophytic and terricolous – to imply that the set representation system was just one among infinite possible systems, or to imply the existence of another episteme.

The representation of the world is the classification and organization of things, so that the things will sit in our representation system in an orderly fashion according to a certain episteme. This is comparable to using a single table to deal with all things; even if it won’t lead to errors or puzzlement, it will be boring. In fact, once a certain representation method – whether of language or images – becomes familiar, habitual and accepted by us, it becomes a perfectly proper natural state, and inevitably leads to boredom, because the representational operations have been hidden, and specific things have been automatically transformed into abstract concepts. That’s just like food turning directly into nutrients without being chewed, swallowed or digested. What could be more boring than that?

The baffling forms that Ji Dachun has painted, those strange things that look like plants and bonsai trees, can be seen as a boycott against boredom. I say they “look like” because they are not situated in our ordered list of things, and they can only be alluded to through things with which we are familiar.

These images give a sense of wonder, and wonder just happens to be the emotional effect of surrealism, so we would be justified in calling Ji Dachun a surrealist. Another reason to do so is that there are often strange encounters between objects in his paintings, like “the chance encounter of a sewing-machine and an umbrella on a dissecting-table” (Lautréamont：Songs of Maldoror), with organs, bones, curved lines, brushstrokes, muscles, colors and all kinds of random things encountering each other within the plant forms, sometimes they are a branch, sometimes a blossom.

Of course, it does not matter to Ji Dachun or his paintings whether or not they are surrealist, but if we wish to describe his painting style, “surrealist” is definitely more appropriate than “childish”. Or we could say that so called “childish” is a different possibility lying outside of the normal (in the eyes of adults) representation system, in other words, the act of using “childish” to represent a type of taste is in fact a temporary setup for things that are ungeneralizable (not accepted by the established indicator system).

This implies that we’re doomed to come up short by discussing Ji Dachun’s paintings merely from the perspective of taste. Even though his paintings are funny (which might just be something that is temporary limiting him), this funniness is not the starting point, but the ending point. Here I’d like to emphasize that surrealism at first was definitely not a taste, style or aesthetic, but a form of creative kinetics. Guillaume Apollinaire said, “When man wanted to make a machine that would walk he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg.”. That is to say, they weren’t astounding for the sake of being astounding; the result was caused by the reality of the world which was so impervious to reason. Surrealism is just respect for this reality – in this sense, they have answered Plato’s assertion that “the sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher”.

At this point I must make my own view, which is that Ji Dachun’s paintings come from this kind of worldview: there’s never been an original appearance or order of things, which implies that there has never been a representation method that is the most appropriate, and that we can also cast doubt on the natural forms of things – daily images, common tastes, traditions, trends and every representation system that has entrapped us.

To Ji Dachun, doubt is not empty posturing but a flexible practice of painting. As a painter, he hides within the political force that is “painting”, waiting to make his move and hit out in all directions; art history images, popular images and scientific illustrations are all his guerilla territory.

The comparison to guerrilla warfare is to allude to his mischievous methods: an anatomical illustration of the pelvis with an embarrassing finger painted on the rectum and something unsavory painted on that. In the indicator systems (such as a medicinal book) of scientific discourse (such as medical science), images are nothing but a tool for presenting medical knowledge (the mental picture of science), but a scientific discourse as a episteme has already split the world into the indicated (knowledge) and that which can’t be indicated (non-knowledge), and the latter has been placed outside of the indicator system. It is just like what we see in those medical illustrations, with the body split into depictions of sections (such as the cranium, chest, abdomen, pelvis…) and cross sections (such as the nerve system, the digestive system, the circulatory system…), but the wholeness and concreteness of the body is nowhere to be seen. Moreover, the social nature of the body was long ago pushed outside the realm of scientific speech…

In Go through the Motions, Ji Dachun has marked in the painting a certain extent the “falsity” (in the sense of truth) and “hypocrisy” (in the sense of ethics) of scientific illustrations. What he “points out” is the following truth: the rectum may have excrement and may contaminate – here the social nature of the body emerges – the finger of the rectal examiner. For this reason, this painting is comical and might make us laugh, but not because the content is funny, but because of the artist’s rhetoric, his composition of this anatomical illustration, which leads to an intellectual falling-out.

His painting rhetoric has a powerful dynamic, making it difficult to be mapped out, and the images he draws from are extremely rich, unfettered by theme, content, style or taste. As soon as his intuition picks up on a certain image, he immediately starts pondering how to compose it and moves right to realizing it on the canvas. Each image is different, so the rhetoric of each painting is also different. Each artwork is a rhetorical event.

He is able to bring camouflage skin and the cranial form together, playing a joke on the painting concept of light and dark color tones; he is also able to turn the naked form of bygone pop star Deng Lijun into that of a hardy peasant, and cover it in the spider web cracks of a porcelain doll, mocking the idea of the “star look”; not even cartoon forms are safe – he has given them sexual organs, or painted them as they would appear when dissected, restoring them from the carefree anthropomorphic forms back into an animal existence; his rhetoric even appears in the titles of his works, such as “Rolls Royce” and “Liu Shen Hua Lan IV”…

Overall, he is messing up the order of the world, slipping things out of their mundane and ordinary forms and placing them in his own indefinite, open and continuously expanding rhetorical system. In this sense, Ji Dachun seems to be writing Borges’ encyclopedia, but with painting, not words.

(Translated by Crosby Jeffrey Daniel)

如何用绘画嘲笑绘画

鲍栋

段建宇绘画的魅力首先来自于对不同因素之间的微妙平衡。自然而然的虚构、不动声色的叙事、大张旗鼓的戏拟、卓尔不群的庸俗、精心控制的草率，这些都统一在她的绘画中，她的绘画因此获得了巨大的容量。

她虚构了一个角色，姐姐，一个空姐打扮的人，总是在世界各地的各色场景中忙着各种事情，仿佛永远在旅行。与之相关的是一个个行李箱，从巴黎到纽约再到驻马店，它们是“姐姐”的行李箱？。姐姐—空姐—飞行—旅行—行李箱，这是一个典型的转喻性的修辞，因为有了行李箱，就仿佛确有姐姐其人一般，因为有了姐姐，于是姐姐的每一件事情都好像确实发生过一般。

段建宇把这种巧妙的叙述修辞暗藏在她的创作中，这甚至使她所有的作品都可以归入到一个漫长的故事系列，这也要求我们把她的所有作品都看成一个相互关联的整体，因为她的创作总是处于不断转喻的状态下。

这种转喻的关系，不仅出现于作品与作品之间，也是发生在作品与现实之间。在她这里，艺术与现实的关系不再是那种反映与被反映、隐喻与被隐喻的关系，而是一种相邻的、转喻的关系。在这种关系中，艺术与现实就像是一个句子中的两个邻接的词语，或者小说中两个相关的章节。于是段建宇的绘画不再是一个被画框封死的世界，它可以不断的延展，绘画也不再被用来隐喻现实，而是用来搅乱现实，像讲故事时的插入句一样——顺便说一句——毫不费力的，原来的情节中断了，叙述者开始了另一个故事。

这使我想起了布鲁艾尔的电影，从一件正在发生的事轻易地转移到另一件事，或是因为一个人，或是因为一个物品，然而这种叙述搅乱着我们的经验（一种被我们习惯的了叙述模式），使我们产生了怀疑，不是怀疑他的电影而是怀疑我们的经验——难道每一件事情都必须有一个像样的结尾？

这种叙述的延展性与开放性使得段建宇的绘画几乎可以容纳一切资源，从艺术经典到草根故事，从城市生活到田园牧歌，甚至从绘画内到绘画外。在这个意义，称她为画家只是因为我们的偏见，她其实是一个经常利用绘画来编故事的人，正如她在《生活指南》中所扮演的角色。

实际上，绘画对她而言只是一个可以随意涂画的地方，她从来没有应该如何画画的诉求，也没有必须如何画画的压力。对于“如何……”这样的句式，段建宇总是一副嘲讽的姿态，进而戏拟出“如何在高原放松自己”、“如何在草原上度过夜晚”、“如何热爱生活，如何陶冶人的情操”等很多说法，她对任何标准话语都满不在乎，包括关于绘画标准的话语。

于是，绘画在自嘲中获得了解脱，对，在绘画中想尽各种办法——包括鸡、西瓜、坏趣味、脏颜料、插科打诨、俗、行画、装腔作势、廉价、幼稚的模仿、小女人气等等——来嘲笑绘画，这正是段建宇使绘画获得自由的办法。

总之，转喻是她的不动声色的修辞手段，自嘲是她大大咧咧的姿态，而所谓的绘画，只不过是一种让我们沉迷其中的理由，一个她发自内心的策略。

How to Use Painting to Mock Painting

Bao Dong

       The attraction of Duan Jianyu’s paintings lies in the subtle balance between different elements. Naturally forming fabrications, dry narratives, magnanimous play, excellent vulgarity, painstakingly controlled rashness; all of these are unified in her painting, which gives her paintings enormous capacity.

She has fabricated a character, Big Sis, dressed up as a flight attendant, always busy with all kinds of stuff in all kinds of settings around the world, as if she’s always on the road. Connected to this is a set of luggage, moving from Paris to New York to Zhumadian; are they “Big Sis’s”? Big Sis – Flight Attendant – Fly – Travel – Luggage; this is a typical rhetorical metonymy, because where there’s luggage, then there must be Big Sis, and because there is Big Sis, it seems as if everything connected to Big Sis actually happened.

       Duan Jianyu has concealed this elegant narrative rhetoric into her creative works, and this goes as far as to link all of her works together into a single, long story, and it also beckons us to see her works as a connected, unified whole, because her creations are always in a state of metonymy.

This metonymical relationship does not emerge merely between artworks; it also takes place between artwork and reality. With her, the relationship between art and reality is no longer about reflection and the reflected or vehicle and tenor, but about proximity and metonymy. In this kind of relationship, art and reality appear as two linked phrases in a sentence, or two related chapters in a novel. In this light, Duan Jianyu’s paintings are no longer a world bound by a frame; they can extend endlessly. Nor is painting used as metaphor for reality, instead it is used to mix up reality, like an aside in a story – just a little tangent – effortlessly, the original plot is broken and the narrator begins another story.

This calls to mind the films of Luis Bunuel, which move lithely from one event taking place to another event, maybe because of a person or an object, and this narrative mixes up our experience (a narrative mode we are used to), leads us to doubt, not about the movie but about our own experience – does every event necessarily require a sound ending?

This narrative expansiveness and openness makes Duan Jianyu’s paintings virtually capable of containing all resources, from art classics to grassroots stories, from urban life to pastoral songs, even from the inside of painting to the outside. In this sense, we call her a painting because of our bias. She is actually someone who often uses paintings to weave stories, just like the role she played in Life Guide.

In fact, for her, painting is a place where she can freely scribble pictures. She has never had appealed about how paintings should be painted, and she doesn’t feel the pressure of needing to paint in a certain way. As far as sentences that begin with “how” are concerned, Duan Jianyu has always maintained a mocking posture. Taking it a step further, she doesn’t care one bit about any standard constructs such as “how to relax oneself in the highlands”, “how to spend the night in the grassland”, “how to love life with a passion” or “how to shape one’s sentiments”, including constructs about painting.

For this reason, painting gains liberation in self mockery. In painting she tries all kinds of methods – including chickens, watermelons, bad taste, dirty paint, wisecracks, the mundane, commercial paintings, pretense, cheapness, clumsy imitation, girlishness, etc – to make a mockery of painting. This is the method Duan Jianyu uses to grant freedom to painting.

Overall, metonymy is her collected rhetorical technique, and self mockery is her grandiose and careless posture. So called painting is but a reason for us to be entranced with it, a strategy that springs from the depths of her heart.

       （Translated by Crosby Jeffrey Daniel）