Part and parcel of a response to questions from someone else a while back, part and parcel of what it feels to be rejected, what it feels to be angry, frustrated, unwanted… but maybe, oh maybe, motivated. An all-in-one.

As far as how I frame these projects… it is, to be quite honest, a rather tricky question. When my neighbours know that I am an artist, does anything that I initiate count as “art”? Or, if they have an understanding of “art” to mean oil paintings and wealthy galleries in the 798 arts distict of Beijing, are the things that I do as artist “not really art”? This is an age-old question already, fired off long before Duchamp, before the modernists, before the anything “next”, the non-traditional, the “new”.

Hmm… pretentious? 虚伪？

Last week, her question of the week: “Does ‘alternative’ also mean ‘minority’?”

In regards to such categorization, presentation, or address, I think we can embrace and understand the need for multiplicities of thought and approach. On one hand, this is for me an artistic endeavor, and if asked to explain it theoretically, it seems natural for me to do so, in all my impracticality, from an artistic standpoint. But amidst the sharing of something with someone during the moment of exchange/creation, it also lies beside the point to think about how we should label it. While such labels are important, too, it is in actuality that these are crucial in all places outside of the work itself, e.g., in terms of its marketing, presentation, and documentation.

So where does the ART of the artwork lie? This is a question we can ask of any artist, a la art school 101, but given the current contexts it comes again that one should justify oneself against the concreteness of the “product”. Is this really the case? Amidst the artfulness of the downfall of financial capital, what materialisms must we still rely upon? You might say that domestic interactions in China are less affected by such crisis, but we cannot neglect a reconsideration of where the artfulness of the thing is. (Do we get into a question of virtuosity here?)

Can we talk about transaction anymore these days? If the very nature of the exchange itself should determine the material and form of the artwork, are we talking about economies or aesthetics? What is social work? Is human interaction a question for within a museum, within the public sphere, or within politics? In which one do we participate?

Of an art which is created of such interaction and participation, we look to it as a “third thing”, possibly a positive externality outside of you and I both, but created by you and I. This is not necessarily a clarity of approach. What is 含蓄 is outside and inside, a weaving——containing and embodied yet implicit, veiled. “We give appearance,” he says.

We start to learn and recognize things in one another that we had not noticed before. In our own neighbourhood first, but also by reflecting a global position back onto the local. By adding value to such things that where we had not before, we could consider transaction beyond the monetary, but also not merely as a nostalgia. This is a creative process. There is a social capital and a cultural capital involved here. And maybe——just maybe——we could begin here, at the level of community, to understand the possibilities of a micropolitical capital.

Michael writes to Hu Fang: “We enjoy the space between being ‘in the know’ and simply being attentive to one’s social environment where the unexpected may occur, setting up an interaction that will provide a meaningful communication, ‘loading the decks’.”

I can’t remember if I posted this paper already or not, but since I was reading it again for course I’m teaching, I thought you might find it interesting as well. You probably know Zhang Dali’s work already, but I think this paper has some interesting interpretations of his work and raises impoortant issues on the relationship between artist/city/public sphere.

Here is the abstract:

Walls of Dialogue in the Chinese Space
M. Marinelli
Since the early 1980s, Beijing has been undergoing a period of phenomenal structural transformation and immense growth, as a consequence of the open door policy. The dramatic change of the Chinese capital has progressively forced its inhabitants to face the challenge of managing the fabric and culture of the urban environment in order to adapt to a new city, while burgeoning nationalism and the development of local and international tourism have constructed Beijing as a showcase for national identity. Day after day the traditional houses (siheyuan) and tiny alleyways (hutong) of Beijing are destroyed, neutralized, and rebuilt to turn the capital into an international metropolis. This article focuses on the graffiti and performance artworks of Beijing-based Zhang Dali — one of the artists most concerned with the transformation of the city. The human head profile that invaded the Beijing cityscape in the 1990s — often found inscribed on the walls and buildings demarcated for destruction (chai) — is called “Dialogue” (duihua). It is a figurative symbol that cannot escape attention.
Investigating Zhang’s work through the lens of Foucault’s and Benjamin’s theoretical approaches to history, this article deals with the relationship between subjective representation and spatial transformation, and raises the critical question of artistic agency in public space.

[Bea, just came across this press release, thought it looked very interesting and relevant for us…]

Experimental Geography
A traveling exhibition organized by iCI, New York
Touring September 2008 through August 2010
Curated by Nato Thompson

iCI announces the tour of Experimental Geography, an exhibition that explores the distinctions between geographical study and artistic experience of the earth, as well as the juncture where the two realms collide and possibly make a new field altogether. The exhibition presents a panoptic view of this new practice through a wide range of mediums including interactive computer units, sound and video installations, photography, sculpture, and experimental cartography created by 18 artists or artist teams from six countries.

Experimental Geography, curated by Nato Thompson and organized and circulated by iCI, will premiere at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center, DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana, on September 19 where it will be on view through December 12, 2008. The exhibition will travel through August 2010 with presentations at the Rochester Art Center, Rochester, Minnesota, February 7 – April 18, 2009; The Albuquerque Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico, June 28 – September 20, 2009; and the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine, February 21 – May 30, 2010. Additional venues will be announced.

Geography can involve the study of specific histories, sites, and memories. Every estuary, landfill, and cul-de-sac has a story to tell. The task of the geographer is to alert us to what is directly in front of us, while the task of the experimental geographer—an amalgam of scientist, artist, and explorer——is to do so in a manner that deploys aesthetics, ambiguity, poetry, and a dash of empiricism.

The manifestations of “experimental geography” (a term coined by geographer Trevor Paglen in 2002) run the gamut of contemporary art practice: sewn cloth cities that spill out of suitcases, bus tours through water treatment centers, performers climbing up the sides of buildings, and sound art of the breaths exhaled in running the evacuation route of Boston. In the hands of contemporary artists, the study of humanity’s engagement with the earth’s topography becomes a riddle best solved in experimental fashion.

The approaches used by the artists featured in Experimental Geography range from a poetic conflation of humanity and the earth to more empirical studies of our planet. Ilana Halperin melds immediate physical and personal actions with geologic contexts; she offers poetic conflations of differing fields of interest. Creating projects that are more empirically minded, the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), a research organization, explores the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth’s surface, embracing a multidisciplinary approach to fulfilling its mission. Using skill sets culled from the toolbox of geography, the work re-familiarizes the viewer with the overlooked American landscape including man-made islands, submerged cities, traffic in Los Angeles, and the broadcast antennas in the San Gabriel Mountains, and other details drawn from everyday experience.

——–
Artists in exhibition (good list of some people maybe we can look into, and a few notes from me about the few people whose works I’ve seen before…)

Francis Alÿs (i like very much!! work kind of psychogeographic in a way, lots of walking in the city…)
AREA Chicago
The Center for Land Use Interpretation
The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP)
kanarinka (Catherine D’Ignazio)
e-Xplo
Ilana Halperin
Lize Mogel
Multiplicity
Trevor Paglen
Raqs Media Collective (based in Delhi, an amazing installation I saw in Brussels once dealing with archiving the objects of stateless people, or people in transit…very very good work)
Ellen Rothenberg
Spurse
Deborah Stratman
Julia Meltzer and David Thorne
Daniel Tucker (project organizer) The We Are Here Map Archive
Alex Villar
Yin Xiuzhen (just saw images of her work from a fair in Berlin, and then one sculpture at the Shanghai Art Fair, which I wouldn’t have imagined as being relevant to this show but the piece in Berlin had a very nice idea of the building up of space by means of production and labour in a clothing factory-like setting)

[translocal, yes! this is an amazing example of something going on here in switzerland that re-invests public spaces with private cultural-political meanings, and i found it incredibly interesting, this monumentalising of text in the form of political sculpture/advertising beacon… below reprinted from Felix Stalder and the Newborn — Undeliverable? project]

A truck is circulating through Zürich. Seven extra-large letters stand on its open holding area. They form the word NEWBORN. At different locations, the trucks pulls up. A rapper, EKI NOX, performs. But the truck has to leave again after a very short time. Will its cargo remain undeliverable?

This intervention examines how multiple, translocal networks constitute themselves in the common local space of Zürich and how they develop specific forms of visibility and invisibility within the public space. The truck with the NEWBORN sign serves as focal point triggering responses which will render these presences visible to all.

The original meaning of the NEWBORN sign will be evident primarily to migrants from the Balkans. Many of them were either present in person, or via the media, when an almost identical sculpture was unveiled at the Mother Theresa Square in Pristina when the independence of the Kosovo was declared (02.17.2008). For the Kosovo-Albanians, that sculpture symbolizes a new phase of their self-constitution. Not just in the Kosovo, but also in Zürich. Since the establishment of the state, the Kosovo-Albanian community in Switzerland is beginning to (re)present itself in the public sphere on their own terms. Kosovo-Albanians will also understand the rapper whose lyrics are partly in Albanian and how he interprets the NEWBORN sign from his individual perspective.

The issue of a ‘new beginning’ is also present in the Swiss political public, not the least through recurring debates over and votes on the conditions under which foreigners can become Swiss citizens. At the same time, a discourse on ‘shifting identities’ seems to offer — if not a new beginning — then at least an alternative conception of ‘post-national’ political identity.

The third layer which circulation of the NEWBORN through the city of Zürich investigates in the capturing of the public space through commercial actors and their interest. The EURO2008, which starts while the intervention is taking place, pushes this development to new dimensions. Across the city highly controlled areas of intensive advertisement (fan zones) are being erected. For those who do not behave according to protocol special temporary detention facilities are being erected so that they can be removed swiftly from the public space. The degree to which the public and imaginary space as already been captured by commercialism will lead most people who see the NEWBORN circulating through the streets to interpret it as just another advertisement signage to be set up somewhere in the city.

The Project NEWBORN — Undeliverable? conducts research into the constitution and interaction of multiple, parallel publics within the local space of Zurich shaped by the dynamics of translocal migration, national identity and globalized commercialism. Such a research endeavor needs to take place in the public space itself. Only by intervening directly the latent, often invisible dynamics can be brought to the surface. Activating existing and triggering new dynamics is an essential
part of the approach. The interventions are being documented and material
will be made available online and offline.

NEWBORN — Undeliverable? will take place June 5-7 in Zürich. The precise locations of the interventions will not be announced in advance. Stay tuned.

did you give me this text? not sure anymore… but it’s a beautiful one about asia art identity modernity

yesterday I have watched a nice movie about cities in china… “metropolis-report from china” a kind of remake of metropolis (1922). i met the two authors, they are very “fresh”.

Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2007 20:42:16 -0800
From: Brian Holmes
Subject: Re: <nettime> Lin Yilin
To: nettime-l@kein.org
Message-ID: <474CF1A8.5090401@wanadoo.fr>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

It’s excellent to read more about Lin Yilin, whose Documenta piece, “Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road” (1995) was a great discovery for me, one of the best pieces in the show. I’m just returning from Southern China, and I visited the Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou where Lin recently did an exhibition, more or less hidden away amidst a vegetable market in an outlying district not far from the “Love-In Mall” (just another typical shopping center overflowing with consumerism). I’m extremely curious about the Chinese art scene and I don’t quite know what to make of it. David Garcia’s remarks are a good starting point:

> What is not much commented on however is the way that
> the ‘vector’ of the visual arts has functioned in ways that
> seem to short circuit some of the restrictions on
> expression in the general Chinese media. Once again we
> see how the fragile claims to political relevance of
> contemporary art is based on the way that it is able to
> articulate certain conceptions of human freedom. In the
> case of Chinese art these freedoms have been able to arise
> in the context of small locally embedded audiences
> without the benefit of accompanying institutional              > structures, galleries, critics, journals, curators, museums.

Those who went to Thermocline of Art: New Asian Waves at the ZKM a few months ago could see an amazing example of this short-circuiting by an artist named Liu Wei, who braved the absolute prohibition of contemporary Chinese society by going out to the campus of Beijing University on j-u-n-e f-o-u-r, t-w-o t-h-o-u-s-a-n-d a-n-d f-i-v-e — the 16th anniversary of the T-A-M S-q-u-a-r-e m-a-s-s-a-c-r-e — and asking people, “What day is it today?” What the video shows over and over, with only one real exception, is people breaking off, falling silent, dodging away, usually with a panic look in their eyes as the process of self-censorship kicks in, plus a confused embarrassment at having it filmed. To get how impressive this is, you have to realize that one of the most famous images in the world, the one of a man stopping a column of tanks on their way to Tiananmen square, is largely unknown in mainland China and of course, strictly censored from the Internet. Upon seeing this video I assumed that the author of “A Day to Remember” was living in exile, but no, he lives and works in Beijing (even if, not surprisingly, the piece does not show up among the videos listed on his website, www.lwstudio.com). It is as though critical art, which for almost twenty years could only exist in Western exile, were finally returning to China. In my travels and research I have come across a rather short list of currently active artists, mostly from the 1990s, who powerfully and corrosively explore the kind of limited freedom that Lin Yinlin talks about in David’s interview. The work that interests me corresponds very much to the description that Lin gives of contemporary Chinese art in general, and of the Big Tail Elephant group in particular: “It appeared as a nondescript monster which, like present day cities in China, abruptly came into existence. Driven by the insane and irrational consumerism and hedonism permeating China’s cities, people have been continuously in a state of unaccountable enjoyment, utter ignorance of the future and an excitement aroused by fierce competition. Within such a scenario, the Big Tail Elephant’s art, covering urban issues such as urban development, consumerism, traffic, population and sex culture, is inevitably imprinted with marks of the times.” The video of the artist maneuvering across Lin He Road, sheltering from the traffic behind a temporary wall of breeze blocks which he displaces brick by brick to make the crossing, takes on an incredibly vivid and paradoxical meaning when you see the tremendous sprawl of the new cities, choked with traffic and polluted, bordering on insanity but at the same time gleaming with luxury. The work could be a metaphor of an entire society moving decisively ahead under the cover of the very force of over-development that is about to become life-threatening, but at the same time, that is still the only game in town, the one you’ve got to play to be part of anything. There is a kind of wild and violent lucidity to the best of contemporary Chinese art, that asks for a response, for a dialogue, for a pragmatically critical engagement with the present.

That’s not all that’s going on, however, and if interesting art was definitely able to arise during the 90s in locally embedded situations without all the usual art paraphernalia, those days are gone today. What you see now is an explosion of art, everywhere in the Chinese cities, far beyond the biennials and the attention of the Western curators. In Beijing and Shanghai, a new museum is being built everywhere you look, there are more galleries than artists, and amidst the hustle and bustle of sales it is extremely difficult to get at the meaning of anything. Everyone will tell you that there is no difference between artists and businessmen in China: Ai Wei Wei, famous for his bicycle installations and for bringing a thousand Chinese visitors to the Documenta, is basically operating as a land developer on the outskirts of Beijing, and he is no exception, art and real estate are very closely linked, while the buzzword of “creative industries” becomes omnipresent in the coastal cities. The fate of Beijing’s Factory 798 / Dashanzi Art District is emblematic: after less than five years of tremendously interesting “locally embedded” activity, it has escaped being razed for new apartment complexes only to become a tourist attraction and luxury consumption environment under the watchful eye of the state, which is trying to figure out how to tolerate some contemporary art and prove to the rest of the world that Olympic China is no longer a land that exiles its dissidents. At the same time, it’s obviously a highly authoritarian state that censors the Internet very severely and clamps down immediately on any kind of protest, except the ones that somebody decides should be tolerated for reasons that can change tomorrow or in the next five minutes. So the degree of schizophrenia is impressive, and the apparent lack of any overt critical or even searching discussion in public is rather depressive — even if we are also getting used to that here in the USA…

As Lin himself says:

> the rapidly popular art market also brings the trial to the
> artists. Chinese contemporary artists take the risk to
> change the isolated status suddenly to become brand
> name stars. If Chinese contemporary art cannot develop a
> particular theory, then ultimately they would only be
> expensive craftwork for this period of history.

The kind of theory that Lin is talking about will be written in Chinese, to address the complexities of a national/imperial situation involving 1.3 billion people. Nobody but the Chinese artists and intellectuals can do that, and I suspect that as the construction and consumption boom tops out, enough people will become disgusted with the prevailing euphoria and greed to start forming the kinds of marginal circles and semi-secret languages that are needed. However, what gets translated on the transnational level still matters, particularly in an age when communication across borders has become so much more fluid. The blockbuster concept shows and facile biennials fit perfectly into the ambient meaninglessness. Careful work with specific artists, filmmakers and intellectuals who are given enough time and space to develop their perceptions and ideas can probably make a real contribution, both to a wider understanding of China’s situation in the world, and to the more intense and detailed debates unfolding within the country. Thanks to David and the people at Visual Foreign Correspondent for this material from Lin Yinlin, shackled to himself amidst the overwhelming cacophony of urban China.

best, Brian

[apologies to Brian and all, oh the irony, but this text has been encoded a bit here because i don’t want our website to get X’d in China… we’re in Beijing, too… a response to this mail is posted here.]