For much of the twentieth century, the narrative of Western art relied on the temporal and stylistic succession of modernism, which described the history of modern art in positivistic, teleological terms. Whether through plots regarding the development of abstraction or the incorporation of elements from everyday life, one finds evidence of the great shibboleth of progress. Yet by the 1980s, abetted by the writings of thinkers from Michel Foucault to Fredric Jameson, Johannes Fabian to Gayatri Spivak, many critics and artists began to question the applicability of such conceptions of history, much less the ideological biases that subtend them. This generation of commentators critiqued the notion of the canon, the master narrative, and the status of the artist as a unique actor whose art is original in some fundamental manner.
As Julian Stallabrass recounts in his “Elite Art in an Age of Populism,” a strand of populism emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. This was coincident with and exemplary of postmodernism, which helped to engender debates regarding an aesthetic pluralism marked by a disorienting relativism of positions. This shift had a profound effect on opening the art world, which largely had been confined to Western Europe and North America, to a number of other sites of production. Of course, as Monica Amor reminds us in “‘Of Adversity we Live!’,” alternate conceptions of modernism and postmodernism developed alongside those emanating from the United States. Nevertheless, the change in critical outlook also evacuated the interpretive apparatuses once used to make sense of one’s surrounding context, while further pointing to the regions of the world where ideas of modernism and postmodernism were received quite differently and not necessarily sequentially, or with an understanding of modernism—or postmodernism as it shades into the contemporary—as a fait accompli.
This is the case with China, for example, as Pauline J. Yao deftly demonstrates in her essay “Making it Work: Artists and Contemporary Art in China.” Indeed, one of the telling characteristics of art and its discourses after 1989 is the waning purchase of modernist and postmodernist accounts alike. New theories about post-postmodernism or the contemporary have emerged. At the same time, a younger generation of artists might actively recover specific aspects of modernism, as their art historical peers reconsider ideas of postmodernism. To a certain extent the historical specificity of modernism and postmodernism has been collapsed in our present situation in which large areas of the past have been flattened into a field of information ready to be retrieved and put to use on a case-by-case basis.
The art world is going through truly bizarre times. Many art historians, critics, and theorists assure us that it is virtually impossible to see beyond the horizons of the neoliberal present and its trivial, celebrity-obsessed culture of pure surface, yet much art strikingly deals with the global reach of exploitation, deep histories and memories of oppression, the prevalence of gender inequality, geopolitics, and the “war on terror.” Of the two major strands of current art—crudely drawn: art that deals with the intersection of documentary and political issues, as opposed to spectacular, expensive art objects, destined for the museum wall and the billionaire’s mansion—one has had its legs kicked from under it by the financial crisis. The most fashionable artists of the contemporary art boom—among them, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and Banksy—were the worst hit; Hirst’s auction income fell fourteen times from its (admittedly stellar) 2008 height.1 Broadly coincident with these boom years was the remarkable rise in social networking and the online publication of many kinds of cultural creation which became known as Web 2.0. Amateurs had, of course, long made art but until the price of server space and fast data transmission dropped to the level at which it no longer made sense to meter, they had little access to global audiences.2 When uploading material became almost free, and millions of people aired their creations online, there was a strange technological answer to Walter Benjamin’s difficult demand of radical art: that art should be judged by the extent to which it promoted the “socialization of the intellectual means of production.”3 Equally, the commercialized spaces of the most successful Web 2.0 sites—Facebook, for example, and Flickr—may be seen as mass-marketed, controlled, and shut-down versions of the thoroughgoing user empowerment promised by the pioneers of tactical media in the 1990s.4
For all of this, the term “postmodern” no longer seems adequate. Yet the difficulty of seeing forwards to cultural, social, or political transformation, despite the striking novelties of the present, is certainly a postmodern matter; indeed Jameson opened his foundational essay on the subject with remarks about the “inverted millenarianism” of the era, in which there were plenty of endings but no beginnings.5 The difficulty can be glimpsed in the failed attempts to positively characterize the new: Hal Foster’s The Return of the Real, while identifying elements of contemporary art that sat in tension with postmodern theory, remained pessimistic about the horizons of possibility for its firmly neoliberal times; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s great overarching analysis, Empire, ran into events of September 11 and the reassertion of imperial power of the old kind; Nicolas Bourriaud’s attempt to synthesize elements of modernism and postmodernism to build the “altermodern” generally failed to convince.6
While this essay will be focused far more on the art world than Jameson’s essay on postmodernism, it is worth returning to, so as to analyze the present in terms of this successful characterization of the past, and vice versa. As is well known, Jameson’s concern is to try to periodize postmodernism, aligning it with postindustrial capitalism, and to describe its main elements in sharp contrast to modernism. He alights upon the depthlessness of the new, contrasting Andy Warhol’s silkscreen, Diamond Dust Shoes (1980), with boots painted by Van Gogh. The worn surfaces of the latter are products of manual toil, while the former stand for a deathly but affectless superficiality.7 Shallowness is accompanied by a waning of history’s power, and a schizophrenic relation to signification, which leaves a “rubble” of unrelated elements, and with it the ruin of any coherent sense of self.8 The vast flow of culture is taken in by viewers with an aesthetic of overload and rapid switching from one source to another, which is evoked by the alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) watching fifty-seven television screens at once.9 Spectacle is passively consumed, and the eternal present admits of no action or agency.
Jameson also notes that postmodernism was an “aesthetic populism,” referring to the manifesto-like book Learning from Las Vegas.10 In the fall of 1968, shortly after the summer of revolutionary dissent in many countries, teachers at the Yale School of Art and Architecture, including Robert Venturi, took a group of students on a field trip, not to see the wonders of Rome or the modernist towers of Chicago, but to Las Vegas to examine the architecture of the Strip. The students dubbed the course “The Great Proletarian Cultural Locomotive,” and this gives a clue to one of its most important aspects, which was a defense of popular culture against the taste of the cultural elite.
The casino architecture of the Strip was designed to entertain popular tastes: in this way, argued the authors, it was more democratic than modernist buildings whose makers insisted that an absence of decoration and a concentration upon unadorned form imbued them with moral rectitude. They celebrated the extraordinary mix of styles and pastiched histories to be found on the Strip:
Miami Moroccan, International Jet Set Style; Arte Moderne Hollywood Orgasmic, Organic Behind; Yamasaki Bernini cum Roman Orgiastic; Niemeyer Moorish; Moorish Tudor (Arabian Knights); Bauhaus Hawaiian.11
They also recommended an architecture and an urban scene that was “almost all right.”12 That is: far from perfect in utopian modernist terms which would want everything to be forever fixed, but which was, for all its messiness and contingency, imbued with an emergent order that was full of incident and entertainment. What was defended here, on the grounds of its popularity, was the taste of the white middle class, and just as the Strip was “almost all right,” so were the then much-denigrated suburbs.
Jameson’s own architectural exemplar for postmodernism was the mirrored and disorienting spaces of John Portman’s atrium hotel, the Bonaventure, in downtown Los Angeles. This was taken as an architectural analogue of the decentered global communication networks that formed the basis of the postindustrial economy. This, too, was a populist work that did not attempt to insert an alien, utopian presence into the urban scene but to be a striking addition to it, and the building was indeed popular with locals and tourists.13
In looking back on Jameson’s essay, there seem to be features of postmodernism that have been amply borne out, and even to have intensified. The “depthlessness” of culture has been furthered by the sheer extent and speed of digital culture, with its brief wildfires of popularity, endless novelties, and the ease with which it encourages clicking between diverse forms of information and entertainment (news, games, gossip, video novelties, pornography, and social networking, to name but a few). The depth and extent of information about many topics provided online may be vast, and may rival all but the greatest libraries (though it is also fissured by the agendas that determine what gets digitized and under what legal arrangements) but this undoubted richness is often countered by the flux of novelty and distraction. Confronted with the extraordinary proliferation of information and social dialogue, the effects of the data sublime are felt everywhere, in both the mathematical sublime of the digital expanse and the dynamic sublime of its rapid transformation. The cascades of data that confronted Roeg’s alien appear to wash over all of those who dwell in mediatized environments, and the art world regularly responds with its own versions: From the most direct, such as Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin’s Listening Post (2004), which turns the flow of online texts into an immersive digital waterfall; to Candida Höfer’s carefully recorded library and archive rooms (technologically advanced renditions of the ancient data sublime); or the numerous large-scale museum photographs that overwhelm the viewer with the richness of their detail, while providing few means with which to interpret it; or the many ways of visualizing the complexity of internet structure, of which one of the pioneers was Matthew Fuller’s web browser, I/O/D 4 (1997), which gave the user direct access to a dynamic map of the linking grid.
The populism that Jameson identified in postmodernism also seems to have grown stronger. Art-world suspicion of populism is well summed up in the introduction to a catalogue on the subject, where it is described as a refusal of complexity which pretends to appeal to the common individual, often about the consequences of globalization (whether it is growing insecurity of employment or clashes over religion).14 While some sections of the art world revel in and exemplify complexity, a forced simplicity is the populist response to the speed and ambit of change.
Yet at the same time, the speculative contemporary art boom saw the rise of a great deal of populist art—that is, an art of simple character, wide popular appeal, and an enthusiastic engagement with commercial mass culture delivered through branded artistic persona. The heights of the market, at any rate, were peppered by such work, with the figures of Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Takashi Murakami, and Damien Hirst standing at the head. Warhol, who it should be remembered was for long a despised and isolated figure for his commercialism and celebrity-chasing, has arguably replaced Marcel Duchamp as the founding father of contemporary art.15 Banksy is the most interesting of these figures, since his art-world career is purely a result of the fever of the boom (the others all had reputations that predate it), his work was at first made in contention with the art world, and above all because it was not approbation within the art world that drove his market success but the weight of media hype and popularity.16 Most extraordinary of all is the extreme populism of Banksy’s art: Its messages are very simple, clichéd, and instantaneously grasped, relying on highly familiar advertising techniques; his signature style is likewise little troubled by complexity; and as with most street art, popularity, speed of production, and ubiquity are prized above much else.
The fact that such crass work has been drawn into so many important contemporary art collections, hanging alongside pieces by significant modernist and contemporary artists, indicates a deep shift in the art world. First, it points to the changing profile of collecting itself, as new buyers swept into the remarkable investment opportunity held out by contemporary art up to 2008; many knew little about art history and bought on the power of famous names, readily identifiable trends, and fashionable national schools. It also shows that the art world, which has outgrown its once small and enclosed Euro-American domain, is less insulated than it was from the wider culture, having become a global social club for the mega-rich—among whom are numbered, of course, the entrepreneurs of the great media conglomerates. Where there was once a deep divide between popular taste and museum art (think for instance of the condescension with which L. S. Lowry was treated by the British art world), now the track between popular approbation and high cultural “excellence” seems, if not smooth, then less impassable.17
While Banksy is the most extreme example of this shift, the general rise of street art is no less remarkable a populist phenomenon. There have been previous art-world dalliances with this art, particularly in the 1980s with the concerted attempt to commercialize the work in the transfer from wall to canvas, and the rise of a few stars who leveraged their street reputations in adapting to the gallery scene (above all, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat). Yet what has changed profoundly in street art, apparently a creature of old(ish) media such as the spraycan and the photocopier, is the power of the Web: where once it was short-lived and documented by a few highly dedicated photographers who would spend hours waiting for decorated trains to pass, knowing that the works that they recorded would be destroyed by cleaning crews that very night, now with the ubiquity of easy-to-use digital cameras and of publishing on the Web, vulnerable street works gain long lives, and their artists considerable reputations.18 Graffiti, an often arcane practice of tagging that spoke to a competitive in-crowd who could read the codes of writing, numbering, overwriting, and one-upmanship, has been overlaid with an accessible, illustrative street art that courts popular attention, competing with advertisements in a self-conscious struggle for the right to the city.19
The museum is pulled in two incompatible directions. In its elite and educative role it is supposed to demonstrate that capitalism can sustain cultural and creative autonomy by displaying work that cannot be found in standard mass culture. At the same time, the demands of branding, marketing, and “partnerships” with big business dictate that the museums open themselves to popular taste. The great global brand that is “Tate” has responded by devoting a large section of its flagship bookshop to street art and graffiti publications, and publishing its own; selling graffiti-style stencils, stickers, and badges; and offering a Flash game that allows users to decorate a wall of Tate Modern.20 It also commissioned well-known street artists, including Blu and JR, to make large works on the Tate Modern facade in 2008. In 2011, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art held the first major retrospective exhibition of street art.21
The heights of elite culture are infected by the popular. Koons, Murakami, and Hirst all deal with mass culture but filter it through highly individual sensibilities, and re-present it safely under the assured forms of neo-conceptualism, most obviously through appropriation. Banksy does not appear to put anything in inverted commas, and his style, whilst distinct, is also anodyne, and his concerns—political, social, and satirical—are commonly shared. What Web 2.0 provides is rapid and constant feedback; street art is continually tested against it, and contemporary art as a whole becomes more and more open to it, especially as its increasingly digital products find their way onto media-sharing and social networking sites.
Looking back from the present to postmodernism, its populism may now appear to be its most radical feature, since it laid the ground for the erosion of elite culture. Yet the “populism” of Learning from Las Vegas, as with so much in postmodernism, conflated the operations of big business with popular taste, in a familiar move to which populist sentiment is often subject.22 What Venturi and his collaborators asked us to accept as “almost all right” was not popular taste, but popular taste as imagined by casino owners. It was tested only against the democracy of the dollar, which yields only the crude contrast of on/off, of buy/not buy. This is also the “democracy” of Warhol, in which the President and the “bum” drink the same Coca-Cola, and which is understood to be not about power and dialogue but about buying stuff.23 Such a view has little purchase on the experience of the entire Strip—the polluted, environmentally catastrophic, surveilled and controlled urban fabric—which is not subject to consumer choice. Web 2.0 opens up the possibility for detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis and manipulation of popular feedback—and what commercial organization (museums, for example) can resist that? So populism intensified in the art world, produced by the exposure of its flagship institutions to market forces, and by the gradual modernization of the art market to the regular calculations that underlie investment. In its intensification, it also changed its nature. The threat to elite art comes from the lack of pretence in populist art: it does not pretend not to be a commodity, or to be uninterested in publicity; it does not refuse to bear the marks of its reception; it is relatively open about its methods, and encourages participation; it is generally uninterested in expert opinion. It is a product, in short, of participatory, rather than broadcast culture.
There are other features that this cultural-technological scene opens up that are unrecognizable in Jameson’s account of postmodernism. For example, there is the ability of a much larger and wider section of the populace to make and publish their own work (whether street art, music, or photography). In offering a more positive description of the current phase of capitalism than the reactive “post-industrial,” Hardt and Negri point to the development of informationalized capitalism, in which cooperation is more important than capital.24 In grasping this, Perry Anderson’s discussion of the contrast between modernism and postmodernism is useful:25 The former was immersed in the romance of technological innovation in production (the cars, planes, and ocean liners that Le Corbusier lauded, for example); while in the latter, it was the technologies of reproduction that took the lead (thus video art may be seen as an archetypal postmodern form). In data capitalism, we see a classic dialectical synthesis of the two, as the new technologies bind production and reproduction together. If the archetypal location of modernism was the business towers of New York and Chicago, and of postmodernism the playground of the Vegas Strip, or the mirrored and decentered atrium hotel, the locale of the new age (only a decade old) must be in the exchange of products along with melded business and private persona on Facebook, and in city streets transformed by the augmentation of data overlays.
The point of the synthesis of production and reproduction is that data can be worked upon, not merely viewed; it can be worked upon by others, providing tailored perspectives on datasets, guided by the user’s own input. More radically, computational power is increasingly available for users over the Web, who are able to interrogate data with specific queries, and use it to perform calculations.26 This hands powerful analytical tools to anyone with an internet connection. Analyses of datasets, most commonly carried out on numerical data, may also be applied to culture, as Franco Moretti has been showing in a remarkable series of works on global literature.27
As pointed out in the Populism catalogue, art also holds out (as an elite game) allusions to forms of popular activism and direct democracy—a form demonstrated regularly in reality television shows.28 Vast numbers of people are now making things that look a bit like art, and are finding that it is not hard to do. At the same time, the number of contemporary art museums, essential tools in gentrification and regional development, grows rapidly across the globe, making the museum experience a more common part of everyday life. Here Jameson’s demand that we dialectically see the positive as negative may be put into place:29 the overpopulation of arty products and places to show them serving the salutary demands of demystification. This remarkable set of developments puts pressure on an elite culture that has long served as a mask for neoliberalism, while the economic system itself falls into crisis.
This cultural scene is accompanied by a political one in which the corruption, incompetence, and powerlessness of the political class is illuminated: in the banking crisis and its consequences which deny a conventional, consumerist future to entire generations; and in the lack of any vision of the future beyond slowly increasing enrichment, in which the inability to see beyond the present becomes, with global warming, a threat to our very existence.
The problem of seeing beyond the horizon of the present was always one of agency and powerlessness. Jacques Rancière’s book, Hatred of Democracy, argues that the elite want democracy to run in such a way that they can exercise complete technocratic control over decision-making without interference from the public, but equally that they despise the decadence that they themselves make by blocking people off from political life and power.30 “Populism” is the elite term used to condemn any move to break the sealing off of the majority from decision-making.31 Such passivity was always a First World view, a product of those nations that had the most successful technocratic governments, and that sat at the top of the pyramid of global economic oppression. Elsewhere, the years since Jameson’s book was published have been an era of revolutions. Following those that deposed the communist dictatorships in Europe, there followed the crumbling of other authoritarian regimes that had been propped up under the Cold War—in South Africa, in many former Soviet states, in South America, and most recently in the revolts of the Arab Spring.
To invoke revolution is to point to the extraordinary dangers and opportunities tied up in the popularization of culture and politics together. The elite condemnation of cultural populism has traditionally been founded on believing that it lacks and even threatens to destroy the qualities that should be most valued in art—ambiguity, complexity and freedom from overt use. Likewise, the political elite condemn populist movements for their lack of expertise, and their belief that complex problems will yield to simple solutions. It is certainly true that populist art has a parallel with populist politics: as Laclau points out, populist politics commonly presents itself, in underdog fashion, as representing the whole of the community.32 We can find similar statements in Hirst or Banksy, who purport to represent the common people against the elite art world. This comes down to a class divide between the culturally active multitude and the elite who control the heights of the contemporary art world and the biennial scene. Anderson again makes a salient point here: that in postmodernism there was a divide between what he calls the “citra” and “ultra” wings, the former sunk in the spectacular and the latter seeking to elude it, a divide which corresponds to the class of consumers and those who command the market.33 Anderson links this to a remarkable analysis that compares the change from modern to postmodern to that of Renaissance to Reformation. While the intellectual achievements of the Renaissance were superior, it was an elite affair, whereas the Reformation was in part a popularization of Renaissance ideas that took in “half the common people of Europe.” Anderson continues, writing of postmodernism:
“Plebianization” in this sense does mean a vast broadening of the social basis of modern culture; but by the same token a great thinning of its critical substance, to yield the flat postmodern potion. Quality has once again been exchanged for quantity, in a process that can be looked at alternatively as a welcome emancipation from class confinement or as a dire contraction of inventive energies.34
While it is true that the representatives of populist art in the art world have suffered in the economic crisis, this is a matter of uncertainty about investment in certain art stars, rather than a fundamental undercutting of the populist urge. If postmodernism is popularized modernism, then populist art is popularized postmodernism, a result of the technological stripping of command from the manufacturers of culture, whose role is now to frame the popular.
Yet the present also opens the possibility of a more self-conscious and self-critical populism, one driven not only by continuous and instantaneous feedback, but also by the wide availability of tools to analyze its own cultural products and the responses to them. In this development, we may glimpse the synthesis of elite critique and common populism.
Notes
1 Contemporary Art Market 2009/10: ArtPrice Annual Report (Lyon, 2010), p. 85.
2 On the remarkable social and economic consequences of this development, see Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price: The Economics of Abundance and Why Zero Pricing is Changing the Face of Business (London: Random House, 2009).
3 Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, eds., Selected Writings. Volume 2. 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 780.
4 I am indebted to David Garcia for this point. See also David Garcia and Geert Lovink, “The ABC of Tactical Media,” Nettime (1997), www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9705/msg00096.html. Accessed June 3, 2011.
5 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. 1.
6 Hal Foster, “Whatever Happened to Postmodernism?” in The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Nicolas Bourriaud, Altermodern (London: Tate Publishing, 2009).
7 Jameson, op. cit., pp. 6–10.
8 Ibid., pp. 26–27.
9 Ibid., p. 31; his artistic model here is Nam June Paik. The Man Who Fell to Earth was directed by Nicolas Roeg.
10 Ibid., p. 2; Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977).
11 Venturi et al., op. cit., p. 80.
12 Ibid., p. 6.
13 Jameson, op. cit., p. 39.
14 Lars Bang Larsen, Cristina Ricupero, and Nicolaus Schafhausen, “Introduction,” The Populism Catalogue (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2005), p. 15.
15 For an analysis of the change in Warhol’s reputation, linked to the character of the current art scene, see Isabelle Graw, High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009).
16 For Banksy’s views on the art world, see Wall and Piece (London: Century, 2005), p. 128.
17 See Martin Wainwright, “Ian McKellen Leads Challenge to Tate over L.S. Lowry ‘exclusion’,” The Guardian (April 17, 2011).
18 For the work of the graffiti photographers, see Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, Subway Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984).
19 The point is made in Cedar Lewisohn and Henry Chalfont, Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution (London: Tate Publishing, 2009); see also Henri Lefebvre, “Right to the City,” in Eleonore Kofman, ed., and Elizabeth Lebas, trans., Writings on Cities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
20 Tate was the most popular brand followed on Twitter in 2010, a position only achieved by responding to users’ views. See www.freshnetworks.com/blog/2010/06/tate-museum-uk-top-brand-twitter/. Accessed June 2, 2011. The Lewisohn and Chalfont book referred to earlier is published by Tate. For the game, see http://kids.tate.org.uk/games/street-art/. Accessed June 2, 2011.
21 Nikki Columbus, ed., Art in the Streets, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (Rizzoli, 2011).
22 This point is made by Ernesto Laclau, “Populism: What’s in a Name,” in Larsen et al., op. cit., p. 107.
23 Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again) (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1975), pp. 100–101.
24 Hardt and Negri, op. cit., p. xx.
25 Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1998).
26 This is the model offered by Wolfram Alpha which takes Mathematica procedures and applies them to selected datasets. See www.wolframalpha.com. Accessed June 2, 2011.
27 See Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review, new series, no. 1 (2000); “More Conjectures,” New Left Review, no. 20 (2003); “Network Theory, Plot Analysis,” New Left Review, no. 68 (2011).
28 Lars Bang Larsen et al., “Introduction,” op. cit., p. 15.
29 Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 427 f.
30 Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2006).
31 Ibid., p. 80.
32 Ernesto Laclau, “Populism: What’s in a Name,” in Larsen et al., op. cit., p. 110.
33 Anderson, op. cit., pp. 105–106.
34 Ibid., p. 113.
In the late 1950s, critic Mario Pedrosa often said that Brazilians were condemned to be modern—a maxim employed in his writings on Brazilian architecture and Brasilia, the country’s new capital, to allude to what seemed an endless capacity to embrace the new.2 But Pedrosa, one of Latin America’s towering art critics, also made current the term postmodern in reference to the art and conditions of the mid-1960s, arguing that the radical technological transformations and the rise of mass media thrust the subject into a reality of information and consumption to which the perceptual apparatus had to urgently respond. So, too, art, which had to produce new images and forms of mediation. I want to use the elasticity of Pedrosa’s localized thinking to reflect on our own attempts to chart recent artistic and intellectual constellations: a “now-ness” fraught with contradictions and frictions germane to Pedrosa’s “modern.” Indeed, in his writings, the modern did not define a period but a constant search for what suited the progressive aspirations of the country. This operational use of the modern depletes past and recent historical attempts at concisely defining and classifying the intellectual, material, and political trajectories of an epoch and a place; it remains a localized tool. To be sure, modern was not for Pedrosa a period defined in contradistinction to a past; instead, it delineated a condition which renders these definitional projects fallacious (something amply demonstrated by the mutational processes and dynamics of cultural exchange unleashed by colonization and globalization).
Pedrosa’s notes on modernism and postmodernism undermine the common assumption that these are totalizing accounts emanating from one source: be that Western Europe or the United States. In contradistinction, my micro-narrative incorporates “peripheral” geographic loci undoubtedly constitutive of the modern, as these were the product, above all else, of a process of modern colonization, which echoes that of the United States. Following this logic, “normative” Western art identified with an Anglo-European tradition was not perceived by the Brazilian artists and critics that concern me here as some inviolable, immutable, hegemonic paradigm that was foreign to them; instead, they considered various modernist legacies as rich material to navigate within the context of Brazil’s cultural makeup, which in tandem with the more materially powerful places of the West, engaged ideas of progress, development, and experimentation while resisting the categorical proclivities of canonical modernism.
***
The acclaimed international recognition of Brazilian architecture in the 1950s triggered much of Pedrosa’s thought on the still current issues of the national and the international, the original and the copy, erratic industrialization, democracy, and modernity. For Pedrosa, the colonial history of Brazil, a narrative defined by transplantation, facilitated the revolutionary desire to create something new in a territory, which, without any traces of ancient civilization, provided modernism’s ideal tabula rasa—a place of endless new beginnings.3 It was thus in the history of colonial domination that Pedrosa paradoxically founds Brazil’s a-historicity and delivered a modernus without a classicus against which to stand. It is this fundamental paradox that informs the unique insertion of Brazil in the cultural history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and that undermines the definitional aspect of the modern (and the postmodern) in favor of an operational quality, a tool-like deployment that informed Pedrosa’s understanding of the country’s position vis-à-vis the epochal dynamics.
Other paradoxes plague Pedrosa’s modernism; for example, a tradition of novelty smoothes contradictions and fuels experimentation. Likewise, the Brazilian tabula rasa facilitated the rise of modern architecture in the midst of dictatorship, a situation accelerated by the self-aggrandizing nature of the government and the favorable economic situation that followed. It also delivered the artificiality of Brasilia, more than 600 miles away from the metropolitan hubs of Rio and São Paulo, along with the utopian plan of its architect, Lúcio Costa, who believed in the self-sufficiency of the region while remaining keenly aware of the incongruence of the program. The result: urbanism, architecture, and art as a societal model, an intertwined vision of modernism and modernity predicated on political vagaries, geographic dispersion, spatial contradictions, and discontinuous temporalities. This utopian élan called for the public reinstitution of the aesthetic dimension, which perhaps explains why, for example, the neo-concrete project, a constructivist program turned against itself and, preoccupied with the participation of the spectator, is intimately related to the urban chimera of Pedrosa—for whom Brasilia was the ultimate collective work of art.
Indeed, it was only a few months after the publication of the “Neo-concrete Manifesto” in March of 1959, and only three before that of the “Theory of the Non-Object” (both texts authored by poet Ferreira Gullar, the spokesperson of the movement4) that Pedrosa articulated the young artists’ position when he wrote about the ideal modern city as wanting to “restore the lost social cohesion.”5 It is obvious that the closely knitted group of intellectuals and artists were invested in a notion of collective agency that optimistically looked away from the merciless dynamics of capitalism (a key concern of Pedrosa’s) and toward the possibilities of radicalizing international avant-garde culture. The latter was done in ignorance of “Greenbergian” modernism, toward which American postmodernism, as it developed in the 1970s, was profoundly hostile. Indeed, neo-concretism’s theoretical foundations, as influenced by Pedrosa and voiced by Gullar, were predicated on the underbelly of a certain canonical modernism: a synthesis of the arts that, for Pedrosa, had to go beyond the integration of mediums and which in the Brazilian context led to the dissolution of the conventions of painting and sculpture. These aesthetic investigations were performed from within a unique modern preoccupation with space whose antecedents were Vladimir Tatlin’s Counter-reliefs, Kazimir Malevich’s Arkitektons, and Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau. Thus the non-objects, as Gullar called the works produced and conceptualized during the brief lifespan of neo-concretism (1959–61 approximately) unleashed a phase of intense experimentation that advanced issues later explored by manifestations that bracket much of our discussions on contemporary art: Donald Judd’s essay “Specific Objects” (1965) and the concept of relational aesthetics coined by the curator Nicolas Bourriaud in 1998. Notwithstanding the chronological primacy of Gullar’s reformulation of the art object or Pedrosa’s usage of the term postmodern art to refer to the art of the mid-1960s6 I want to underline how the unique structure and lineage of modernity that summoned these artists, delivered, as a consequence of their localized thinking, an environmental and participatory art threaded by the contradictions and antinomies of modernity on the “periphery”—in this case, fraught with productive material inconsistencies and symbolic misreadings that eventually led to the dissolution of the art object and toward experimental practices with which we are just now coming to terms.
But what of postmodernism? In the mid-1960s Pedrosa’s steadfast belief in a correspondence between contemporary art and society forced him to assess the radical break of modern art with the self-sufficient space of pictorial representation and subsequent engagement with the immediate reality in terms of postmodernism. Underlining contemporary art’s focus on the “immediate objectivity of the everyday,”7 Pedrosa, roughly ten years before the term gained currency in the United States, saw postmodernism as an art of the real. Information assumed a primacy via its effective transmission through mass communication, and it affected our experience of the world, the real, which we now apprehended through “mechanical technological processes.”8 The literalism of American art seemed to confirm the above. In a review of the 33rd Venice Biennale Pedrosa wrote: “As the great vanguard American artists say: One does not idealize reality, does not interpret reality, reality does not transcend, reality is what it is, in front of our nose.”9 Although Frank Stella’s infamous “what you see is what you see” might resonate, Pedrosa had pop art—the crude objectivity of its images and the society of consumption that it invoked—in mind. Reality in Pedrosa’s usage encompassed the epochal changes that the 1960s imposed on modes of perception and communication: from new technologies to rampant capitalism, from full-fledged mass consumption to Marshall McLuhan’s global village.
Something else was happening by the mid-1960s: the Brasilia that had triggered so much reflection on the modern in Pedrosa’s writings had proven to be the result of a capricious bureaucracy whose urban agenda of civil collectivization had been blatantly disrespected. As a result, it lay in the most aberrant isolation, apart from the “cultural drama,” eminently urban in character, that boiled in the main cities of the country as an immediate, irreverent response to the dictatorial regime installed in power in April of 1964.10 This was a defiant art, or anti-art, as Pedrosa was calling the disruptive manifestations that he was trying to diagnose, was intimately linked to the disintegration of the pictorial plane performed by the neo-concrete artists Helio Oiticica and Lygia Clark. And this categorical attack on the conventions of art had changed its physiognomy forever, thrusting artist and art into the unprotected space of the real, the environment, and action. Pedrosa’s optimistic tendencies (usually undermined by his acute analysis of the market) led to a position in which he called for an art that might restore a lost multi-sensorial synthesis of communal dimensions. A unique theorization of the postmodern to be sure, it was conditioned by (and was responding primarily to) recent developments in Brazilian art, the latter transformed by political developments that had culminated with the military coup of 1964, which cut short talk of agrarian reform, as well as the proliferation of trade unions, national liberties, anti-imperialism, and national initiatives that favored the working class. The paradoxical result of the coup was not an immediate silencing of the left intelligentsia (that would come later), but instead the manifestation of what has been called the “festive left” to define an artistic effervescence of clear social and political overtones where collective participation was a paramount precept.
Three years later and on the eve of a fierce restriction of civil liberties that unleashed the brutality of the dictatorship, both Pedrosa and Oiticica, still clinging to the idea of collective participation, assessed the status of the Brazilian avant-garde under the sign of the postmodern. For Pedrosa, the São Paulo biennial of 1967 distinguished itself by appealing to a broader non-specialized public—the people (“o povo”)—which was actually invited to manipulate some of the works (many kinetic in nature, others related to the post-neo-concrete work of Oiticica, Clark, and Lygia Pape). “The ‘participation of the spectator’,” wrote Pedrosa in this review of the biennial, “increasingly revealed itself as a revolutionary concept to oppose—almost as the specific trait of our epoch’s sensitivity—the, without a doubt, decisive aesthetic concept of previous periods, or of ‘psychic distance.’”11 This deployment of festive interaction with the works was not without contradictions as works suffered and were totally dismantled; as manual methods of construction made the works highly vulnerable; as the exhibition space and its rules of conduct were not conceived to host the large number of works devoted to such experiential investigations. Most importantly, after reminding his readers once again how different were these manifestations from the modern conception of autonomous art, Pedrosa introduced the ultimate contradiction, a contradiction that he wanted to undo but couldn’t: the fact that as a consequence of mass consumption works of art had become objects of transitory consumption like cars.12
A subsequent article from that year, appropriately entitled “World in Crisis, Man in Crisis, Art in Crisis,” attempted once again an optimistic path for these unsettled questions: In the fields of science, technology, and aesthetics, there was no other option but to project environmentally. By this Pedrosa meant the channeling of the creative activities of the time toward regional planning, urbanism, architecture, industrial design, and in the realm of art “sculpture and the diverse constructions and arrangements of objects in space.” (A description that arguably corresponds to what we have come to call installation art.) This verdict was followed by an important question: “The decisive problem is to define the environments; for whom, where, and for what or why?” Dismissing the intentionality and skills of the artist, even the celebrated publicness of art’s setting which is not valid in itself, what matters, Pedrosa insisted, was the correlation of arts and activities in the context of the environment, their integration and realization in the social complex.13 No doubt Pedrosa was looking back to his earlier interest in a synthesis of the arts but also looking forward to what we might call today interdisciplinary. Overwhelmed by an all-over present exchange of communications and information, the arts of space were destined to an obsessive interest in research that signaled the most audacious artists of the time who were not object makers but were engaged in expanding our perceptive structures.
The year 1967 proved to be crucial in the theorization of the postmodern: An exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro entitled New Brazilian Objectivity marked the publication of Oiticica’s essay “General Scheme of the New Objectivity,” in which he delineated the main traits of the Brazilian artistic situation. It diagnosed the dismissal of the conventions of painting and sculpture that unleashed material experimentations toward the real (the concordance with Pedrosa was here obvious). This owed much to Gullar’s “non-object,” an attempt to define a beyond painting and sculpture that broke with a “transcendental order” to propose a participatory art that was intimately related to the politicization of culture that had followed the coup. An ethical and social engagement with the real, “a return to the world,” manifested in artists such as Antonio Dias, Pedro Escosteguy, Rubens Gerchman, Clark, and Oiticica himself. These explorations, argued the artist, ranged from structural (a favorite term of Oiticica) reinventions of the art object to a conceptual concern with the semantics of the works many of which incorporated text. For Oiticica, these tendencies coalesced toward objective structures that solicited modes of participation in accord with the open character of the works. The notion of a collective art was subsequently mobilized as a key aspect of the Brazilian avant-garde, and here too we hear echoes of Pedrosa’s unrelenting hope in aesthetic agency and Gullar’s (post-neo-concrete) engagement with popular culture. Indeed, in the wealth and richness of popular manifestations such as Samba, carnival, fairs, and “holidays of all kind,” Oiticica saw a model of collectivization and participation for aesthetic practice.
The last item of the essay—“the resurgence of the problem of anti-art”—collapsed anti-art with Pedrosa’s postmodern and posited, too, the ontological question of how to, in an underdeveloped country, “explain the advent of an avant-garde and justify it, not as symptomatic alienation but as a decisive factor of its collective process?”14 The tentative answer was given in terms of a paradigmatic shift regarding art’s quest: anti-art here and now not as a reaction to the past or a concern with new art but as the facilitation of experimental conditions. One could argue that Oiticica thus broke the spell, the curse of the modern to which Pedrosa had condemned his country in the 1950s. But how not to recognize in the artist’s call for rupture and search for “a typical Brazilian condition,” that should not be confused with a banal nationalism, echoes of Pedrosa’s localized thinking? At the same time, how not to see in the younger artist’s insightful synthesis of the critical and aesthetic conditions of his context the foundations of so much international contemporary art? For both, as stated at the outset, modernism was neither hegemonic nor inviolate, but the deltaic source from which their culture sprang. In other words, their response to the modernist legacy was not conceived as a supplement to it, but as a contribution so that Pedrosa’s new and Oiticica’s experimental were part and parcel of the same project, Brazil’s interjection in the wider cultural horizon of their time. This, of course, did not preclude the fact of a subaltern condition of which they were clearly aware and that informed too their cultural practices, an adversity that, to Oiticica, was foundational to their distinctive artistic formulations and unfinished cultural negotiations.
I’ve attempted here to delineate an argument in the name of a productive dialogue on the widespread assumption that Western art, the modern, modernity, postmodern, postmodernity, and contemporaneity (the list can go on) is a delimited concept or paradigm whose locus is a center of political and economic power whose institutions coalesce around certain narratives of canon formation. I’ve spoken specifically of a situation that is generally contemporary with what American critics liked to called in the 1960s “advanced” art. But what interests me here, more than the chronology, is the complexity of an operation that is construed in relation to a universal horizon, say the modern, the experimental, the avant-garde, but closely tied to specific necessities and local concerns and thus, largely because of a very different institutional and political makeup, much less compartmentalized or prone to congealed narratives: Instead we find a fluidity and pliancy of discourses and practices that had to cope with a sense of urgency derived from all-over present contradictory and hybrid conditions. As Oiticica firmly concluded in his New Objectivity essay: “Of adversity we live,” and the result of his and Pedrosa’s acting upon this adversity was not a borrowed modernism or postmodernism tweaked here and there to update the cultural production of the country but a profound reflection on the means and sites of artistic production, the circulation and reception of aesthetic practices, the institutions of art, and the relation of all of this to the social, political, and economic situation of the country.
Of course, contradictory conditions are not unique to the decentered locales of the world (just pervasive), and thus one of Brazil’s cultural lessons has been to derive pleasure and knowledge from those conditions. An artist such as Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, who grew up in la Villeneuve, a neighborhood in Grenoble designed in the early 1970s by L’AUA under the aegis of progressive urban ideals and with ambiguous results, has found in Brazilian culture and history plenty of material to engage critically the ideological and material conflicts of modernity. A series of works developed under the exploratory concept of “Tropical Modernity” deploys props and objects, images and sounds, which attempt to evoke unique environmental situations and ponder on the identity of a place. No doubt Oiticica’s Tropicalia, presented in 1967 at the aforementioned exhibition, is for Gonzalez-Foerster a key influence. Another European artist, Marine Huggonier, explores, in her parsimonious film Traveling Amazonia (2006), the unfinished modernity of Brazil. Here, a crew of local workers constructs a dolly to make the camera roll in a last and unrevealing shot of the road that was to become in the 1970s the unrealized trans-Amazonian highway, the vastness of the landscape challenging any possibility of its representation. Francis Alÿs’s recurrent and metaphorical returns to the question of modernity, as so vividly manifest in his absurdist films and videos in which the old and the new, craft and technology, reality and dream juxtapose, also deal with a desire to think the relationship of an imaginary “periphery” to an imaginary “center,” to unpack and repack the objects and discourses of a landscape that is perceived as failure but that he finds pregnant with poetic and affective matter.
But the relationship between the specific modern/postmodern Brazilian configuration that I’ve delineated above and contemporary art, as increasingly acknowledged, can also be diagnosed in a tendency toward collective and participatory practices for which agency, subjectivity, and affect have become areas of paramount concern. The public projects of Marjetica Potrc dedicated to exploring and recreating low-tech, informal, and self-sustainable urban solutions and the bartering exchanges that open up the possibility of alternative aesthetic and economic intersections in the work of Carolina Caycedo owe much to the predictions and conceptualizations of Pedrosa and Oiticica in the 1960s. The same can be said about the careful usage of site, the productive reflections on the legacies of constructivism, and the historical archive of distinct artists such as the duo Dolores Zinny and Juan Maidagan and the younger Alessandro Balteo. These artists are committed to investigating the entangled trajectories of aesthetic form and institutional history to tease the past, our memories of the past, and its currency in the present. No doubt the rich Brazilian artistic landscape, including veterans such as Ernesto Neto and Fernanda Gomes, but also less known artists such as Cabelo and Renata Lucas, is unthinkable without the layered and complex legacies that I’ve sketched above.
This is just to state the obvious but it bears reminding that in our desire to define the present we risk forgetting the reticular and unfinished trails of history. As Pamela Lee observed in a parallel query about the contemporary: “It is precisely due to the seeming ‘presentness’ of our archive—and the mythic transparency of its materials as well—that the historian of contemporary art must be that much more vigilant about questions of historiography and periodization, that much more attuned to the formative influence of the models we enlist and the tone we take in our confrontation with and analysis of recent practices.” Most importantly, as she wrote in the same text: “how we pursue our study of recent art—the methodological side of things—coincides with the larger issue of what gets left behind in the process.”15 I am suggesting then that we think the contemporary in relationship to a pliant and contingent usage of concepts, terms, models, and projects while evidently paying close attention to the micro-histories and contexts, “peripheral” as they might be, that have always belonged to the architectonics of the modern, that think the modern and the postmodern in their own terms, and whose erratic but groundbreaking cultural contributions diffuse canonical Euro-American narratives and the fallacy of a correspondence between modernism and total modernity. More than calling attention to the firstness of certain Brazilian artistic propositions and concepts, what is important is that in this felicitous moment in Brazilian art’s commitment to a localized thinking that saw as its goal creativity and experimentation, we can recognize not the finality of meaning but the unfinished task of critical questioning that characterizes the best of contemporary art.
Notes
1 Helio Oiticica, “Esquema Geral da Nova Objetividade,” in Aspiro ao Grande Labirinto (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Rocco, 1986).
2 See for example: “Reflexiões em Torno da Nova Capital,” Brasil, Arquitetura Contemporânea, No. 10 (Rio de Janeiro, 1957); “Introdução à Arquitetura Brasileira—I,” Jornal do Brasil (May 23–24, 1959); “Brasília, a Cidade Nova” (presentation at the AICA Congress of 1959), Jornal do Brasil (September 19, 1959). All reprinted in Mario Pedrosa, Dos Murais de Portinari aos Espaços de Brasília (São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 1981), pp. 303–316, 321–327, 345–353.
3 See Pedrosa, “Reflexões em Torno da Nova Capital,” op. cit.
4 Amilcar de Castro, Ferreira Gullar, Franz Weissmann, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Reynaldo Jardim, and Theon Spanúdis, “Manifesto Neoconcreto,” published originally in the Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil (March 21–22, 1959), pp. 4–5. Reprinted in English as “1959: Neo-concretist Manifesto,” October 69 (Summer 1994), pp. 91–95. And Ferreira Gullar, “Teoria do não-objeto,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil (December 19–20, 1959). Published in English in Kobena Mercer, ed., Cosmopolitan Modernisms, trans. Michael Asbury (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 170–173.
5 Mario Pedrosa, “Crescimento da Cidade,” Jornal do Brasil (September 16, 1959). Reprinted in Dos Murais, op. cit., p. 299.
6 Pondering with acuity on the loss of the base in sculpture and the relevance of the location for his Penetrables, Oiticica argued for an integration of work and site that would avoid gratuitousness: “What would the work gain in possessing a ‘unity’ if that unity was jettisoned in a locality where it did not only not fit as an idea, but also where there would be no possibility of its full experience and comprehension?” See Aspiro ao Grande Labirinto (June 3, 1962), p. 43.
7 Mario Pedrosa, “Veneza: Feira e Política das Artes,” Correio da Manhã (July 10, 1966). Reprinted in Aracy A. Amaral, ed., Mundo, Homem, Arte em Crise (São Paulo: Editora Perespectiva, 1986), p. 85.
8 Mario Pedrosa, “A Passagem do Verbal ao Visual,” Correio da Manhã (January 23, 1967). Reprinted in Amaral, op. cit., p. 149.
9 Ibid.
10 Mario Pedrosa, “Arte e Burocracia,” Correio da Manhã (June 4, 1967). Reprinted in Amaral, op. cit., p. 106.
11 Mario Pedrosa, “Bienal e Participação…do Povo,” Correio da Manhã (October 8, 1967). Reprinted in Amaral, op. cit., p. 188.
12 Ibid., p. 191.
13 Mario Pedrosa, “Mundo em Crise, Homem em Crise, Arte em Crise,” Correio da Manhã (December 7, 1967). Reprinted in Amaral, op. cit., p. 216.
14 Helio Oiticica, op. cit., p. 97.
15 Pamela M. Lee, “Questionnaire on the Contemporary,” October 130 (Fall 2009), p. 25.
There is little question that contemporary art in China has developed in response to the cultural, political, intellectual, economic, and social conditions of its particular environment.1 Yet the extent to which one should view art practices in China as merely contextual or reactionary, rather than endowed with the capacity to transcend difference and enact change, has been a topic of discussion among artists and art historians since the advent of Western art forms in China in the early twentieth century. It is this contradiction—between art’s capacity to reveal certain social determinants and its ability to effect them—that underlies much of contemporary art production today both inside and outside China. The modernist tendency to dissolve the gap between art and everyday life by challenging prescribed systems and art institutions, cross the boundaries of art, or the question of how we define art in the first place comes up against significant hurdles in the Chinese context. In fact, we must question the very application of such modernist tendencies, since Euro-American transferral theories, which view modernity in art in non-Euro-American contexts as imported discourse, suggest an ignorant appropriation of concepts and, consequently, periodizations. Favoring a progressive development model that begins with the pre-modern, followed by the modern, and the postmodern, not only negates the possibility of synchronous occurrence, but also necessarily overlooks the plurality of phenomena that results in modernities existing outside the grasp of Euro-America.
In China, the relatively short history of contemporary art forms and the messy overlap of disparate art trends and philosophies within a severely compressed timeframe obscure any clear periodization of the “modern” and “postmodern.” If anything, the dominant strain of postmodernism in China breeds a willfully unstable application of the term itself, and of its implications for discourse on art.2 Yet most scholars would agree that the triumph of the ideology of consumerism following the break with a revolutionary past has yielded a dizzying acceleration of change and fragmentation—a central theme within postmodern theory. The embrace of new patterns of production and consumption accompanying the integration of China into a global capitalist system has also led to radical instabilities in everyday life and culture. As global contemporary art increasingly moves beyond the walls of the studio or gallery into public spaces, questions arise over how such practices can develop in China, a context in which art remains subject to inscriptions by an authoritarian system.
The Chinese contemporary art world is in a peculiar position vis-à-vis the global art world. It has experienced great commercial success but few have meaningfully questioned its internal logic, and more importantly, what lies beyond the Chinese art world’s tendencies toward professionalization and systemization. While the global art world struggles to define the role of art institutions, and countless artists and curators appear eager to jettison modernist frameworks and container aesthetics, in China these conditions are given preference through the establishment of countless private museums, oversized galleries, and dedicated art zones. The legacy of anti-institutional practices that we readily associate with modern and postmodern contemporary art in the West barely exists in the Chinese context. The most visible institutions are State-run and subject to the nation-state occupying a dominating position vis-à-vis interpretations of the past as well as social representations of the present. Under such conditions, art is not an autonomous realm from which one critiques reality. Therefore understanding and identifying with critical art traditions from the West represents a conundrum for artists in China who may wish to adopt a critical stance but find themselves unable to escape the inevitable limitations of authoritative structures of “officialdom.”
The bifurcation of the Chinese art world along “official” and “unofficial” lines that began in the 1980s and grew more polarized in the 1990s might be viewed in far less radical terms than is often portrayed.3 It is true that over the years artists struggled with the ideologies and prescribed stylistic conventions of the dominant government-sanctioned art forms, and at times fought hard for acknowledgment by the “official” system. But even though they felt begrudged by being denied certain opportunities, their dissatisfaction did little to openly challenge the inequalities of the officialdom itself. Rather than carving out spaces for free and open critique or advocating abolishment of certain key practices that sanctified artists—approved national fine art exhibitions or the academic system—artists of this era trained outside the official ranks or working in “avant-garde” styles sought to find ways to harmoniously coexist with other accepted art forms and be welcomed into the fold.
The formation of the self-organized Stars Group during the late 1970s is an example of a frustrating moment in which only academically trained artists were afforded recognition by the “official” art system. Indeed, their decision to stage a group exhibition in an outdoor park adjacent to the National Art Gallery in Beijing in 1979 might be seen as a symbolic gesture aimed at making this frustration public. Needless to say, their gesture of waging an unsanctioned art display in a public space helped them gain exposure, and shortly after they were granted an exhibition inside the National Gallery. Another example might be the Xiamen Dada group, which in 1986 decided to rent the Fujian Art Museum for a an exhibition of paintings and sculptures. When the time came to mount the show, the artists decided to move various construction materials from an adjacent courtyard into the museum and proclaim these as works of art. These two approaches express critical attitudes toward the space of the all-important state institution, yet the former revolves around the status of the artists (most of them were self-trained or working outside the approved art system) rather than the style or content of the work itself, whereas the latter sought to question the definition of art.
Today, the current process of reconciling these two goals—of gaining entry into hitherto closed institutions locally while at the same time maintaining an “anti-establishment” position for the global art community—produces a tension that underlies artistic production throughout China. This tension manifests itself in a variety of ways—politically and stylistically—and ultimately influence the ability of these artists to adopt a true position of criticality toward the political and social context from which it emerges. The most recognizable forms of “contemporary Chinese art”—oil paintings or sculptures by well-known artists who command record prices at auction—are often viewed as being deconstructive. However, these artists rely upon modes of appropriation that are largely consistent with aspects of Western modernism, and while superficially appearing to overturn given symbols or styles, they in fact uphold them.
As the world faces a shrinking global economy and the collapse of the financial markets, questions surrounding art’s autonomy have become more pressing. And as ties to commerce and markets in the field of art grow, one wonders where the boundary between art and the market lies. But rather than look to the market as the culprit for the ineffectiveness of art criticism in its wake or for the lavish spending and self-aggrandizement it has abetted, we might turn instead to factors that sustain rather than misappropriate artistic production.4 If we recognize the art market as a subset of concerns contained within a larger entity (the art world), then what can be said of the concerns of the art world itself? More importantly, in the context of China, where can the concerns of the art world be said to begin and end? Assessing art’s relationship to autonomy in the midst of China’s pronounced lack of freedom in other spheres of life—namely constraints imposed upon political and social rights we associate with civil society—is an ongoing task endlessly complicated by inabilities to enunciate certain sentiments openly critical of the ruling regime in the face of progressive modernization.
In his essay “Politics of Installation,” Boris Groys reminds us that although artworks cannot escape their commodity status, they are also not expressly made for buyers and collectors; in other words, the multitude of art biennials, art fairs, and major blockbuster exhibitions has generated an “art public” in which the typical viewer is someone who rarely views the work as a commodity.5 For Groys, this is evidence that the art system is “on its way to becoming part of the very mass culture that it has for so long sought to observe and analyze from a distance.”6 Such an assessment may hold true for the bulk of the Western art world, but carries less weight in China or in many non-Western regions where contemporary art is still far from being a constitutive element of mass culture. Despite growing numbers of visitors to museums and arts districts in China, contemporary art remains mostly unrecognized by mainstream culture, haltingly accepted in government-run institutions, and absent from the average university art department. These truths are often forgotten, especially when one’s time is spent sealed within the gallery-filled espresso culture of the urban contemporary art world. One need only venture outside the gates of Beijing’s 798 Arts District or past the threshold of certain doorways in Cao Chang Di to witness the vast gulf that separates the well-heeled art enthusiasts and average citizens. Lumped together into the amorphous designation of “creative industries” and isolated within “creative industry zones,” contemporary art in China has found itself walled off in art zones that instill a sense of hermeticism among artists or Disneyland-like curiosity for visiting tourists. This radicalization of space serves as a constant reminder of the contested nature of public space in China, and of a lurking authoritarian presence that seeks to control artistic as well as personal participation in the creation of everyday culture.
While the Western appetite for “resistance” has a tendency to cast all art production in China as oppositional or “anti-regime,” this is rarely the case. It may be true that in the absence of a meaningful civil society, political society encompasses everything. By the same token, this situation stimulates an utter indifference with regard to politics itself. Since reaching significant economic achievement, contemporary art in China is plagued by both the absence of politics and the banalization of politics. What is needed are models that do more than critique the commercial atmosphere surrounding art: that is, models that engage meaningfully with the social determinants of production that shape and form art in the first place, asking not what is made, but who makes it, how it is made, for whom it is made, and under what conditions.7 It is also perhaps more significant to continue asking, in the Chinese context, what it means to be an artist today. Because the state plays a preeminent role of power in Chinese society and actively determines representations of “the national,” artists and artistic practices are increasingly defined by their own personal histories and their relationship to “the national” as they go about their daily lives.8 Aesthetics aside, are there ways that artists are envisioning or imagining their role as artists today? To what degree can we view these practices as being mindful of their own conflicted position or ability to effect change on their current relationships or surroundings?
According to Charles Esche, attempting to untangle the knot of aesthetic autonomy has traditionally magnified art’s two radical directions: toward either autonomous irrelevance or engaged complicity.9 The model of “engaged autonomy” that Esche proposes is thus an intriguing one, suggesting a way to think of autonomy not as something that is invested in the object itself but rather as an action or a way of working.10 It advocates not only an active and participatory attitude, but replaces traditional top-down methods of assigning value and worth with more homespun measures of self-declared legitimacy and collective gain. Moreover, it makes it difficult to put aside the role of the artist in the act of making and the way criticality can be educed through this process rather than sitting on the surface in the form of an artwork that eventually gets “read” by outsiders. The artists mentioned below—the Xijing Men and Zheng Guogu—are but two examples of artistic practices that reflect taking a proactive role toward carving out critical spaces for art.
The work of the Xijing Men proposes new ways to look at modern and postmodern frameworks that privilege notions of nationhood, cultural specificity, and the separation of art and daily life. Composed of three artists from three nations with long and entangled pasts, the Xijing Men—Chinese artist Chen Shaoxiong, Japanese artist Tsuyoshi Ozawa, and Korean artist Gimhongsok—is a collaborative effort that conjures complex notions of Asian-ness while offering a discourse centered less on the homogenizing forces of globalization than on the celebration of difference. Utilizing various media such as installation, video, and performance, their work is presented as an incomplete narrative that hinges upon the attributes of a fictional city/state known as Xijing. In reality there exists a northern capital (Beijing), a southern capital (Nanjing), and an eastern capital (Dongjing or Tokyo), but as yet there is no western capital (Xijing); therefore the artists have taken it upon themselves to create one.
Constructed as a continuous yet episodic narrative, the work of the Xijing Men engages in a process of mythmaking that consciously references the grand agenda of nation-building through humorous absurdities and references to everyday objects and activities. The creation myth of Xijing is not only indicative of a desire to carve out a “third space” somewhere between and among the three nations the artists inhabit in real life, but suggests an enunciation that embraces a multiplicity of languages and voices. In spite of the didactic tone, imagining Xijing also evokes the process of imagining through different references and vantage points, ultimately putting forward an agonistic model acknowledging pluralistic tensions and conflicts alongside utopian ones. Chapter 1: Do you know Xijing? involves each of the three artists, Chen Shaoxiong, Gimhongsok, and Ozawa Tsuyoshi, traveling to a remote island in their home country (Hainan, Youngjong, and Okinawa, respectively) and interviewing locals about whether or not they had heard of or been to a place called Xijing. Designed to establish Xijing as a place that exists within one’s mind, the trio then embarked on Chapter 2: Xijing Theater: This is Xijing—Journey to the West, which involved revisiting and retelling the story of Journey to the West, an allegorical tale of a pilgrimage or spiritual journey, via traditional hand puppet theater. Developing the script on-site with local audiences, This is Xijing—Journey to the West completes the symbolic journey to a new land through performative means, and with added measures of improvisation to incorporate different perspectives dependent upon locale.
Staged in August 2008 during the official Beijing Olympic Games, Welcome to Xijing—Xijing Olympics presented a humorous yet provocative take on the unabashedly spectacular Olympics mania that gripped China during the summer of that year. It marked the pseudo act of establishing nationhood by devising a Xijing Olympics flag, singing the national anthem, and designing various t-shirts, hats and logos, not to mention competing athletes and requisite ceremonies. Concocting their own series of events and casting themselves as “athletes” and their family and friends as the “populace,” the competitions (if you can call them that) consisted of kicking watermelons instead of soccer balls, marathon napping, boxing in the form of body massage, and other absurdities such as a three-way table tennis match using shoes as paddles. Their version mocked the seriousness and solemnity with which the Chinese government (and by association, the Chinese public) treated the glitzy theatrics of the real Beijing Games and replaced themes of winning, success, and public entertainment with modesty, simplicity, and failure. If the Olympic Games themselves constituted the supreme performance of Chinese national pride under the auspices of international diplomacy (never mind the subtext of China’s own eager aspirations to secure its position among the global superpowers), then Welcome to Xijing—Xijing Olympics represented a caricature of these attitudes in which humor, playfulness, and aimlessness are injected into the highly scripted and ceremonial tone of the official games. Their antics worked to present a kind of informal locality to offset the trope of national spectacle, and in the process identified more directly with the concerns of average citizens, whose struggles to negotiate the massive transformations enveloping their way of life go largely unnoticed. The low-tech DIY approach of Welcome to Xijing—Xijing Olympics reflected a form of practice that is refreshingly human-scaled and attuned to the proximity of individuals rather than standard groupings overly conditioned by notions of the “mass” and the “people.”
The prescribed categories of what makes an artist, what constitutes an artwork, or how we judge the practice of art-making are designations that the Xijing Men seek to disrupt and disavow. Similarly, Zheng Guogu works under collaborative auspices, through his work with the Yangjiang Group (a collaboration with other artists, Chen Zaiyan and Sun Qinglin) and his individually authored projects that are created with the assistance of family, friends, experiences, social interactions, and recreation activities. In short, nearly everything in his life and surroundings has a way of embedding itself in and leaving traces upon his work. Zheng’s art is as much a negotiation of his own life working as an artist in the contemporary art world, as it is about an artist’s life within his hometown of Yangjiang—a small coastal city in southern China. The unique relationship Zheng has with his city—which rarely appears itself in any definitive or representational way in his work—forces us to consider the production of art in relation to place and environment, and how the so-called “real” intertwines seamlessly with the fictional.
Zheng is as active as any artist on the international circuit—participating in the 2003 Venice Biennale, 2007 Documenta, and many other solo and group shows in China and Europe—yet he continues to live and work in his hometown of Yangjiang, a third-tier city in southern China several hours’ drive from Guangzhou. If the current leitmotif of contemporary Chinese art produced over the last ten years has been guided by notions of massive social change and transformation, then Zheng’s motto might be one of sameness, in the sense that it is the lack of difference which makes a difference, and the ebb of change is prone always to local interpretation and inflection. Zheng’s art presents us with a sort of hypothesis—if real life can become art once it enters into the world of art (galleries, museums, exhibitions) then what are the ways in which art can be turned into a part of one’s everyday existence?
In his hometown of Yangjiang, Zheng acts at once as embedded local hero and distant weary-eyed observer; according to him, “I think I still live in this world of a game.” The “game” Zheng refers to is “real life” and the “game of life”—namely filled with conflicts, struggles, and underlying strategies. His ambitious Age of Empire (2001–present) is borne out of this thinking, and while it employs the logic of gaming, role-playing, virtuality, and simulation it is also emphatically real. Inspired by the computer game series Age of Empires, in which players control historical world civilizations, Zheng has been gradually transforming an agricultural area on the outskirts of Yangjiang city into a real-world replica of the game’s virtual environment.11 The project began in 2000, when a friend gave Zheng a tip on some cheap land in the outlying undeveloped parts of the city. He soon bought up 5,000 square meters of land and by 2005 he had acquired neighboring plots to arrive at 20,000 square meters. Today his spread has grown to 40,000 square meters (approximately 10 acres) and counting.
Zheng’s Age of Empire is a project that does not concern itself with achieving a finished artwork—rather, it functions as an exercise in turning the fictional into reality, or, more accurately, as an experiment in the social process of making itself. As Zheng recreates his made-up game on real land, he faces real-time constraints when it comes to securing money, building rights, land permits, and the location of materials and labor. Thus the sleepy coastal town of Yangjiang comes to stand as a microcosm for daily survival in Zheng’s practice. The language of waging war, launching campaigns, and formulating strategies present in the original Age of Empire game is applicable also to Zheng’s conception of his home environment of Yangjiang as a contested space filled with underground systems and that taint and seep into everyday life. As Zheng knowingly acquired his land through illegal means, Zheng’s daily activities have quickly become consumed by wining, dining, and bribing the local officials in efforts to curry favor, maintain good relations, and negotiate with the proper channels for smooth future acquisitions. In making Age of Empire, he cooperates with the system in order to transcend it, becoming complicit yet independent at the same time. In a spirit attentive to regionalism and locality, Zheng’s steadfast ties to his family, friends, objects, experiences, social interactions, and recreational activities in Yangjiang embed themselves and leave traces in his art.
Projects like Age of Empire and the work of the Xijing Men are ongoing and continue to operate spontaneously with no fixed timeframe, set limits, or defined outcome. Zheng has calculated a means of living his art through his daily actions, calling into question our awareness of our own practices as artists, critics, curators, historians, and audience members—practices that define the boundaries of the art world in the first place. Like Zheng talking to the man eating abalone, or to the fishmonger, we are witnessing the art world’s traditional borders becoming indivisible from those of the social order it is inclined to merely portray. Zheng’s transformation of the virtual into the real with Age of Empire also brings the role-play of world dominance and territorial expansion into contact with the actual domain he has built in his outpost of Yangjiang. The unassuming qualities of Zheng’s practice are offset by notions of calculated strategy and hard-nosed manipulation that—despite dark moments—hint at a utopian vision that transcends regional, national, and imaginary borders.
The Xijing Men similarly tug at real and imagined conceptions of nationhood, though, carried out within an entirely fictional tone, their antics lend an absurdist light to notions of hybridity and the prospect of locating a “third space.” If we are to take these practices as reflective of new strategies of making and imagining that insert new realities into our contemporary world, then it is crucial to see how these frontiers in China are marked also by a tendency to create spheres of autonomy. Perhaps it is in these gestures of mythmaking, creating, and inventing spaces that align with contemporary social-political conditions that we can locate the utopian processes attributed to art.
Notes
1 This essay represents an altered version of my earlier essay “A Game Played Without Rules Has No Losers,” which appeared in the online publication e-flux journal, Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood and Anton Vidokle, eds. Issue 7 (June 2009), www.e-flux.com/journal/view/74.
2 Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang, “Introduction,” Postmodernism in China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 9. The authors point out that in China, postmodernism as a discourse preceded postmodernism as a reality, and that the convoluted debate over China’s qualification as a postmodern society is caught up in an insistence upon the “authenticity” of an indigenous Chinese-style postmodernism, overlooking the fact that authenticity itself is a term called into question by postmodernism. See also pp. 1–16.
3 As John Clark points out, “Even in China where for political reasons a kind of anti-establishment ‘unofficial’ art developed in the 1990s, the artists involved were overwhelmingly trained in the art establishment or were reacting to its educational curricula, exhibitions practices and stylistic codes.” See his essay “Modernities in Art: How are they ‘Other’?” in Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried Van Damme, eds., World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008), p. 414.
4 For more on the state of contemporary art criticism in China, see my text “Critical Horizons: On Art Criticism in China,” Diaaalogues, Asia Art Archive Online Newsletter (December 2008), www.aaa.org.hk.
5 Boris Groys, “Politics of Installation,” e-flux 2 (January 2009), www.e-flux.com/journal/view/31.
6 Ibid.
7 For more on issues of production, see my book, In Production Mode: Contemporary Art in China (Hong Kong: Timezone 8 Books, in cooperation with CCAA, 2008).
8 See John Clark, op. cit., pp. 410–411.
9 Charles Esche, “Foreword,” Afterall Journal 11 (2006).
10 Ibid.
11 Age of Empires is a video game series published by Microsoft Game Studios. The first edition was released in 1997.