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Responses A language-based work such as Simon Biggs's The Great Wall of China opens up for me two overlapping issues: in what way has the new digital realm altered what the French critic Roland Barthes called "the pleasures of the text," and shifting slightly what is the proper critical approach by which to analyze such work? To short-circuit the latter question, Biggs, himself, invokes a Chomskian model in detailing one of the prime generative procedures that drives the work and its limitless range of transformations, and in so doing signals what I feel is the work's resistance to the dominant mode of structuralist and post-structuralist analysis, derived as it is from a fundamentally different (and shamelessly archaic) linguistic model. Standard structural approaches ÐÐ seeking codes, exposing social constructions, critiquing complex ideological forms ÐÐ all seem to run straight into a brick (make that stone) wall when deployed in deciphering The Great Wall of China. It is the excess of language and language games at play in The Great Wall of China that renders these critical tools useless. Much as the speed at which Biggs's "language machine" shuffles and reshuffles its database of words he sampled from a Kafka short story challenges legibility, the Escher-like linguistic doublings and concatenations of the resulting texts (even at rest) typically exceed any conventional mode of intelligibility. Biggs's perpetual rewriting of Kafka succeeds in passing into the register of the Chomskian (e.g., the latter's classically grammatical and meaningless specimen sentence, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.") Now to turn to the question of the pleasures offered by such work. Despite its ostensible setting in the East, there is clearly a more than passing glance toward the West ranging from the use of the Kafka text and the homage inherent in the functioning of the "language machine" to the Surrealist concept of automatic writing, to the kinetic graphic shifts between image and meaning articulated by the great Soviet filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein in his writings on montage and the ideogram. Moving closer to the art of our time, the speed of the work and the pleasures that issue from it are consonant with the experimental cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, and in particular to the work of artists like the Austrian Peter Kubelka and the American Paul Sharits (whose writings such as "Words Per Page" should be required reading for anyone working in new media). The Great Wall of China, like its model, is a work made in impressive segments yet with visible gaps in its structure. There are thoroughly engaging word games such as the "Dialogue on the Wall" segment in which a phrase such as "I seduce my..." can be variously completed with a large inventory of objects ranging from "school," "counterweight," and "Tibetan" to "thought," "symbol," and "self." In the "Whispers" segment, Biggs seems briefly to be channeling the video artist Gary Hill or least Hill's engagement in mediating the body. Here a disembodied hand (of the artist we must assume) appears larger-than-life pressing against the surface of the screen on which a spare inventory of words occasionally appear ("tax-list" capturing especial notice given the dateÐÐ April 15th). The hand moves (in flight from the movement of the cursor) and reveals itself as detached from a body (severed at the wrist), and in so doing offers itself up as a fitting metaphor for the work's geographical and aesthetic ambitions, which hark back to artist Vito Acconci's now classic observation about television as "a rehearsal for the time when human beings no longer need to have bodies."
Bruce Jenkins
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