Xu Bing’s Rocket Crash: The Ultimate Anthropocene Metaphor

For legendary Chinese artist Xu Bing's most monumental work yet, he printed an older work of his, Book of the Sky (1988), onto a rocket. The launch of this rocket represented for Xu Bing an attempt to 'launch desire, crisis, and the unknown into outer space.'

Tianshu Rocket (2021)

If this attempt had been successful, it would have satisfied two contradictory Anthropocene impulses: the impulse to eject oneself and one’s desires from a doomed and overwhelming world, and the conflicting impulse to fix the world in time, to save it for and from itself. The desire to flee fuels Xu Bing’s desire to propel his artistic work into space, far from the dangerous interference of humanity. The desire to fix is bundled into the attempt to somehow launch crisis and the unknown, the things being fled from, into space too.

Given this contradiction, how appropriate it was that the launch failed. As it crashed back to the earth, Tianshu Rocket’s unintended counterpart Rocket Crater (2021) was created. Rocket Crater is, I think, the ultimate Anthropocene metaphor, a claim that may or may not have any importance, but that regardless I have attempted to launch below.

Xu Bing and the Definition of Art as Methodology

Xu Bing defines art as something that ‘originates from the social scene, but is higher than it.’ What Xu Bing calls the ‘artistic system’ remains unchanged even as the material and ideas that inspire it change with the times. But why does it matter to define what art is? Can’t we just agree that, like love, it recedes before precise definitions? Attempts to define art may not only be futile, but harmful, because they confuse our intuitive recognition of it. This intuition involves more complex and subtle human faculties—memory, feeling, thought, movement—of which language is only one. It can bring to bear the memory of infancy, the feeling of air, the thought of the sky, the movement towards, the touch of symbol and the other into the experience of art. But this intuition is fragile; like a nest, it ought to remain undisturbed. Like a pool of water, it clarifies in stillness, and words are like boots in a puddle.

‘We murder to dissect,’ wrote Wordsworth, who understood that to deconstruct art and its origin into its composite parts would be to destroy the living whole—both art and the individual encountering it—that produced it. But Wordsworth’s Romantic metaphor commits the very act it criticises. If art is a dissected body, then it is a living creature. A natural thing, native to the wild, sometimes domesticated but never fully understood, ambushed and killed by the worst parts of human nature; those which seek to dominate and those which seek to understand are made one in Wordsworth’s image; the projects of science and of power conflated. This resonates with Wordsworth’s personal politics and his response to the ‘social scene’ of his day. Wordsworth may have wished to remain pure of the human impulse to define and control, but he commits the same act of definition in the breath he denies it in.

Xu Bing’s definition of art is different from most. In its capacity to absorb the ever-changing nature of society into a cohesive understanding of the function of art, Xu Bing’s definition is not final in a morbid sense, but is constantly refiguring itself, as the artistic system takes inspiration from an ever-changing social scene. It is useful not because it is didactic but because it is productive. It helps us answer important questions about what an artist can do when navigating the rapidly changing world. Armed with these two diagnostic criteria, the modern artist can wade into the many dilemmas that the overwhelming profusion of new possibilities for expression and creation afforded by modern technologies.

Into the Anthropocene

Since Xu Bing’s birth in 1955, a combination of innovation and globalised market economies has changed the lives of billions beyond recognition in the span of a few generations. Beginning in the 1950s, the Anthropocene was defined as that age in which human behaviour has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.

In the Anthropocene it is suddenly less possible or even necessary to claim, as Wordsworth did, that art is natural, wild, and only temporarily domesticated by humans. For Xu Bing, art is absolutely social, originating from society itself. This more modern idea of the origin of art strikes me as more appropriate for dealing with a society in which we experience in our day-to-day lives the highest proportion of human-made stimuli of any generation ever. Constructed environments, digital content, bureaucratic processes, visual and textual information proliferate before our eyes and on our phones. For urbanised populations, looking at a natural scene is the exception, not the norm. It is something that time has to be carved out for; something you escape to, rather than exist within. In Beijing, light pollution gives the sky the quality of a cavern; a star shining through feels like a vestige, the unlikely survivor of the day, some remnant of consolation.

Perhaps it is this desire to escape the overstimulation of modern life, as well as to anchor ourselves into the past and history that underpinned Xu Bing’s monumental work: Xu Bing Tianshu Rocket (2021). In this work, he printed the nonsensical characters from his old work Book of the Sky (天書) (1988) onto a rocket, which was intended to be launched into space. This act satisfies two impulses: the piercing of the cavern, an escape or ejection into an outer realm, a breath of freezing space sky on stale skin and an attempt to hold onto the past, to ensure its relevance even in the age of space exploration. By printing an analogue piece of work onto a rocket, Xu aims to concretise its relevance for all time, as if its permanence might be ensured by ejecting it from the earth where suddenly nothing seems permanent anymore. The act of sending it to space seems like an attempt to save it from the economic, technological, and political forces changing the world. In the Anthropocene, the extent of our impact has begun to influence our planet’s climatic system itself, the very composition of chemicals and properties from which we evolved. We have grown so tall as to alter the soil. In the face of this startling, ungrounding truth, there is an unlikely combination of the impulse to preserve and to expel, to commemorate, and to exile in Xu Bing’s work.

For me, this underscores a characteristically 21st-century existential predicament: a deep uncertainty in our ability to look after ourselves. It’s as if we can no longer be trusted with our own self-preservation. This intuition is produced by a complex matrix of inputs that varies from person to person. The climate issue in particular has, for me, dramatised the conflict between the best and worst parts of human nature; between reason and ignorance, long-term and short-term thinking, complacency and agency, between earnest and out-of-touch criticisms of those in power, and cynical yes-man-ism of those within. 

Tianshu Rocket (2021)

Tianshu Rocket and Rocket Crater

Although in the past few years there have been signs of positive progress on climate, growing up amid this seemingly losing battle, being spoonfed nonsense and doomsaying on social media, has made a deep impression on me. Perhaps this is why I read a strongly apocalyptic undertone in Xu Bing’s Tianshu Rocket. The Book of the Sky (天書) always had a strong dimension of social criticism, designed as it was to reflect the world from which the work had arisen back on itself. Xu Bing’s work benefits from the multivalent character ‘天’, which can mean ‘sky’, or ‘heaven’, or ‘divine’. Like art in Xu Bing’s definition, ‘天’ is that which is elevated beyond society, the cohering capstone of the hierarchy of social things. But Xu Bing’s holy book is filled with nonsense, reflecting a loss of moral clarity, a sense that the highest things have become unintelligible to us. Like at Babel, we find ourselves unable to understand the divine writing, even as we can recognise it and its necessity.

Where does this lead? To failure, and extinction, a possibility that was memorably dramatised in the crashing of Tianshu Rocket, following its ritualistic preparation to pierce the cavern, and the unexpected creation of Xu Bing’s Rocket Crater. This is the final form of Tianshu Rocket and Book of the Sky, a crater which reminds us of the possibility of failure, and even of extinction, as our civilisation’s beauty, flaws, and industrialised economies lurch heavily into the Anthropocene. Unlike naturally occurring craters, this one is human-made, a self-inflicted wound. Unlike other apocalyptic climatic shifts, this one too is human-made, a self-inflicted wound. The crater is an apocalyptic sign. It has a strange resonance with that story of extinction we were all told as children, of the apocalyptic meteor strike that ended the reign of the reptiles, triggering the winter from which mammals emerged to eventually conquer the earth. 

Rocket Crater also reminds me of another sculpture left in the desert, another vestige of human ambitions to the divine: Ozymandias. In Ozymandias, Shelley marvels at the sculptor’s art which ‘yet survives’ despite the passage of time and the fall of Ozymandias’ empire. Xu Bing’s sculpture in the desert is the Ozymandias of the Anthropocene, a pertinent reminder of the folly of thinking yourself impervious to the passing of time, and of nature’s inevitable if gradual victory. This re-figuration of Shelley’s iconic poem on the hubris of kings is a reminder that, like the dinosaurs, we might one day disappear from this earth, leaving only the slightest traces behind. A reminder that, in a sense, we’re making our own meteor.

Rocket Crater (2021)

The views expressed in this article belong to the author(s) alone and do not necessarily reflect those of European Guanxi.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Isaac Christopher Castella McDonald studied English Literature at the University of Cambridge. He is a contributor to various publications, including The London Review of Books. As a recipient of the Tom Parkinson Travelwriting Grant, he extensively traveled through China, writing about the history of ghost cities in Western media and his own experiences in China's semi-inhabited areas. At Yenching Academy, he researches attitudes in China towards the reform of multilateral development banks (MDBs) and is currently writing a report on innovation in Southeast Asia for the Asian Development Bank. In his spare time, Isaac enjoys writing poetry and practicing calligraphy

This article was edited by Robin Millet and Rory O'Connor.

Featured Image:  Light Trail of a Spaceship in the Sky / Dirk Schuneman  / Free for use  / Pexels