I write this having just been performing in the play Earthquake in Chile by Christchurch’s Free Theatre based on Kleist’s novella Das Erdbeben in Chili (1807) Kleist’s story tells of a brief utopian breaking down of cruel social hierarchies following the Chilean earthquake of 1647. Sadly, eventually the bent branch of peace and friendship eventually springs back, the Angel lowers his fiery sword once more before the gate of Eden, and it’s business as usual with the retribution and hate. The resonance for me, of course, is that Christchurch, my city, has been devistated by earthquakes of September 2010 and February 2011 – her stone heart broken. Immediately following that destruction the city drew together with an amazing unity and sense of Comunitas, often complete strangers helping each other. In particular, the actions of volunteers from my university, Canterbury, the Student Army rose to the occasion in helping people, uniting Gown and Town. Kleist warns us how quickly we forget our lessons and the needle slips back into the groove.

Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas (1811) is also particularly relevant right now. It is a historically based story of a man of principle driven to seek satisfaction by the greed and cruelty of others. Eventually he raises an army that ravages the land in pursuit of justice, though it all ends in his execution. Kafka was a fan of the story, E L Doctorow based his 1975 novel Ragtime on it, and a number of movie adaptations made, but right now it makes me think of the http://upthearts.artbash.co.nz/?p=565 “Painting and sculpture are silent arts, and deserve silence (not phoney reverence, just quiet) from those who look at them. Let it be inscribed on the portals of the world’s museums: What you will see in here is not meant to be a social experience. Shut up and use your eyes. Groups with guides etc., admitted Wednesdays only, 11 a.m. – 4 p.m. Otherwise, just shut the fuck up, please pretty please, if you can, if you don’t mind, if you won’t burst. We have come a long way to look at these objects too. We have not done so to listen to your golden words. Capisce?”

COCA has been closed since the earthquake.
We now have an empty building, no staff and no programme.

We do have a draft vision and we need your input to make sure that, when we do reopen, the gallery is relevant, challenging and exciting.

What would you like to see happen at the Centre of Contemporary Art? How do you think the Centre of Contemporary Art could best encourage art making and exhibition in Christchurch over the next decade?

Come to COCA on Wednesday 15 June and have your say in shaping the future of the gallery. We’ll be serving some drinks and snacks to nibble on. This event is aimed (more or less) at people aged under 35 – so if you are a student at one of the art schools, a recent graduate, an emerging artist or a younger, established artist, or a younger writer, supporter or part of the local active audience for art in Christchurch, please come along and share your views.

Wednesday 15 June 5.30-7.30pm.
COCA Gallery, 66 Gloucester St

RSVP: halliday.jessica@gmail.com

On your knees, peasants and give thanks to Germany for Nena (“99 Luftballons” in which the colour red features nowhere), Horst Jankowski (“A Walk in the Black Forest”), and Harold Faltermeyer (“Axel F”). David Bowie didn’t even get interesting until he’d done a lot of heroin in Berlin.

It was 1984, a time of big shoulder pads and even bigger hair. It was the era of synthpop virtuosi like Gary Numan, Human League, Eurhythmics, Soft Cell, Thomas Dolby, and somewhere out there on the border with punk, Devo. Alphaville, named for the Godard film – how arty, released their two juggernaut blitzkrieg singles “Big in Japan” and “Forever Young”. These were dark, passionate and yearning songs after the New Romantic fashion, and yet at the same time were taken up (ironically, inappropriately) by preppy proto-Yuppies as anthems that dealt with their two greatest ambitions in life. It was scorching cold music, it seethed with the German Romantic tradition. I was besotted. “Sounds like a Melody” strummed my nerves like steel strings with its peculiar and eerily beautiful hooks. In 2008 when I was finally able to experience “Summer in Berlin” I realised that the song was perfectly accurate in its description. Berlin in summer is indeed sticky, dusty, sweaty, throbbing and generally fabulous.

In the vast span of Capricorn at the pole

The wind bellows, roars, whistles, rattles and howls,

And leaps across the Atlantic’s furious

White slime. It dashes and scrapes

The wan water that it chases and dissipates into mist;

It bites, rips, tears and slices the clouds

Into convulsive fragments where sudden flashes bleed;

It seizes, envelopes and tumbles in the air

A whirling confusion of shrill cries and feathers

That he shakes and that he drags with crests of foam,

Hammering the breasts of the massive sperm whales,

Mingled with their monstrous howling sobs.

Only the king of space and shoreless seas

Flies against the onslaught of wild gusts.

From a powerful and safe way, without haste or delay,

The eye darted across the livid fog

Its wings stretched rigidly like iron

It splits the whirlwind of raucous extended

And quiet amidst the terrible,

Comes, passes and disappears majestically.

THE JAGUAR’S DREAM

Under dark mahogany trees, blossoming vines,

In the heavy air, motionless and saturated with flies

Hang, winding down among the strains,

Lull the parrot splendid and quarrelsome,

The yellow-backed spider monkeys wild.

It is there that the killer of cattle and horses,

Along the old dead tree trunks bark mossy

Claim and tired, returns to equal.

She goes, rubbing her muscular loins;

And the gaping muzzle heavy with thirst,

A breath short and raspy, with a sudden jerk,

Trouble large lizards, hot afternoon fires

Whose flight spark across the tawny grass.

In a low dark wood forbidding the sun

She slumps, lying on a flat rock;

With a broad lick she slicks her leg;

She blinks his golden eyes dazed with sleep;

And, in the illusion of her inert force

By moving her tail and shivering flanks,

She dreams that in the middle of green plantations,

She leaps and sticks nails dripping

In the flesh of bellowing and frightened bulls.

well versed in canons and histories,

everyone calls him a teacher,

or addresses him as a scholar,

but he fails to obtain an official position,

and he does not know how to farm.

He wears only a shabby gown in winter,

totally ruined by books.

-          Han Shan, Tang Dynasty, (Trns & Ed) Tony Barnstone & Chou Ping (2005), The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry, New York: RandomHouse/Anchor, p202.

-           

Contemporary Chinese art is a mixed proposition that ranges from safely apolitical neo-pop art, through a mélange of more intellectual attempts to marry western conceptualism with Chinese aesthetic traditions – some surreptitiously slipping in earnest, but usually heavily disguised questions about social justice and human rights – through to the downright macabre like Bodies: The Exhibition  though not so bizarre given the pickled European hospital museums  of  the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the stomach-churning Viennese Actionist happenings of the 1960s. It is far too easy for the westerner to express aesthetic and cultural prejudices without examining our own cultural traditions. Indeed, one may compare the “respectfully presented” Bodies with the very similar Body Worlds out of Germany.

Contrarily, much of what can currently be seen in the dealer galleries of Beijing and Shanghai is factory line bland at one extreme, and diabetes-inducing saccharine at the other, with a difficult tightrope to walk in-between. Xiaogang Zhang, for example, is a marvellous painter in a mode that combines pop with the unheimlich, but walls and walls of them would quickly become boring, whereas Ah Xian’s porcelain busts are always breathtaking, combining many clever allusions to Chinese history and identity. There is a point at which the westerner can feel relatively secure in making critical aesthetic judgements where the western tradition is the common language even if the ideas and context are entirely foreign.

This is not to say that some of it isn’t very good indeed, it just gets seen more widely outside of China than in; after all, for the last thirty years or so the Chinese art world has been going through something of a second cultural revolution. Who could overlook the achievements of the Red Gate Gallery and Beijing East Village? The calibre of some of the artists emerging from Shanghai from the 1990s onward once more cause us to reconsider its long extinct title of “Paris of the East”, to the point that it now attracts artists back like my friend Zhanghao Chen, a very talented painter and a graduate of the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts, Christchurch, New Zealand. Neither does China require patronising by external art critics of the west when it boasts such perceptive commentators as Wang Gungwu, Huang Zhuan and Gao Mingiu, and curators like Zu Huan, Wu Meichun and Huang Du. Nor do government-imposed restrictions on the internet – the so-called Great Firewall of China – necessarily block access to the vast majority of international on-line artistic and cultural resources.

Post-Tiananmen Chinese art first started impacting on the western art world back in 1998 in New York, the de facto capital of contemporary western art, with the Inside Out: New Chinese Art shows at the Asia Society and PS1 Contemporary Art Centre, and the University of California at Berkeley on the opposite coast. My first taste took place in 2000 when I was working at The Physics Room art space in Christchurch – Xu Bing’s (by then living in the United States) “Autonomous Action”, a video work in which a boar and a sow, both covered with Chinese calligraphy, the boar enthusiastically mounting the sow, the noisy squeals regularly forcing me to shut the office door. Magazines like Art AsiaPacifica further helped make Chinese artists familiar, particularly around the Pacific Rim (where the Far East was actually the near west). Events like the Asia-Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, Australia (the first taking place in 1993) have helped foster a view of an art scene independent of the London-Paris-Berlin-New York axis. Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China at New York’s International Centre of Photography in 2004, and then another major cluster of high profile New York exhibitions in Asia Week, March 2006, further enhanced the People’s Republic’s reputation as an artistic milieu. Since then there have been numerous publications and group exhibitions around the world.

Chinese art in the 1990s was only partially a continuation of the modernism of the 1980s, but a background ideological conflict meant that the Chinese avant-garde was forced to be part public, part underground. In the western context, Chinese art struggled to break through lingering Cold War perceptions. A Chinese avant-garde first emerged with the Xing Xing group circa 1979. In amongst much experimentation with modernist vocabularies there was a kind of Chinese New Wave in 1985-6. A line could be drawn under the utopian and collectivist spirit of Chinese modernism with the China/Avant-garde exhibition at the state-run China Art Gallery, Beijing in 1989, and thenceforth Chinese art became infused with a world-weary cynicism, nihilism and absurdity. Artists began to ridicule mainstream ideology, resulting in two main styles: “Political Pop” and “Cynical Realism” popularised by artists like Wang Guangyi, Zhang Peili, and Fang Lijun, which still retained a humanist socio-critical sensibility. It was, however, the more cynical artists who more easily broke into the western art markets. By the mid 1990s the artists had become noticeably less politically antagonistic and even introduced some erotic imagery. Increasingly artists like Wang Jianwei, Wang Luyan, Li Yongbin, Wang Youshen, Song Dong, Zhang Xiaogang, Wang Guangyi, Xu Tan, and Lin Yilin adopted the international (read “western”) vernacular to speak of Chinese issues.

It is worth noting that China/Avant-garde was forcibly closed by the authorities when Hangzhou artists Xiao Lu and Tang Song fired a gun as part of their installation – which I do not read as authoritarian censorship; it is no different to the intervention for the sake of safety to halt Marina Abramovi?’s Rhythm O at the Studio Morra, Naples, Italy in 1974 when the artist passively allowed herself to be threatened with a gun as part of the work. As Bruce Nauman once said, “Art is a matter of life and death” – but sometimes artists need mother to slap their wrist and say “no”. There are, I think, physical realities, if not intellectual proprieties that occasionally need to be observed.

By the end of the 1990s Beijing had begun to lose its pre-eminence as a distinctive and independent artistic surge occurred in Southern China fostered by the wealthy coastal cities, including the Big-Tail Elephant group (Lin Yilin, Chen Shaoxiong, Xu Tan, and Liang Juhui) from Guangzhou; Shi Nan, Hu Jianping, Qian Weikang, Ni Weihua, Zhou Tiehai and many others from Shanghai; the 719 Artists Workroom League and performance practitioner Luo Zidan from Chengdu. Guangzhou, Shanghai, Fujian and Chengdu have become artistic centres to reckon with. Hong Kong, which was a British protectorate up until the lease ran out and it rejoined the PRC, is another planet altogether, orders of magnitude more westernised and “sophisticated” than the mainland (the latter at least in the minds of Hong Kong’s residents, though socially it is perhaps even more conservative than, say, Shanghai) as a Special Administrative Region, producing artists like Wilson Shieh, Shi Yong, and others. This is not the place to consider contemporary art in Taiwan, despite growing diplomatic detente with PRC. Any attempt to break into the rapidly evolving art market by western artists other than name brand superst/artists is doomed to failure because the Chinese scene is sufficiently diverse and buoyant not to care – New Zealand dealers take note.

The best of this new Chinese art blew away stale preconceptions based on memories of kitschy, but highly accomplished propaganda art, and suddenly western viewers were confronted with an extraordinary diverse postmodern yum cha of paintings executed in gunpowder or woven from human hair, Dada crossbred with the Beijing Opera, of traditional foods and medicines deployed in installation, of repurposed porcelain and terracotta, of scroll installations creating spaces like a marquee and covered with calligraphy repeated ad infinitum until it cancelled out its own existence.

The video art and photography seemed particularly fresh and exciting, though the heavy-handed tendency to recycle only a small group of names in the European-American-Australasian gallery circuit, especially in group shows redolent of vestigial Orientalism, bred over-familiarity and fatigue among some critics –a sweet and sour menu touristique. Conceptualists like Liu Wei, Ma Liuming, Wang Jin, Song Dong, Zhao Bandi, Zhang Dali (also known as AK-47 and 18K, a pioneer of graffiti art in China) opened jaded western eyes to some of the most interesting but largely unknown art of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in amongst the fluff and one-liners.

The increasing visibility of women artists like Yin Xiuzhen with her Claes Oldenburg-inspired cityscapes and surrealist photographic idylls strewn with pairs of shoes, and Chen Qiulin’s curiously animistic photographic self-portraits were a revelation. Some women artists dealing specifically with feminist themes who have risen to prominence in the 1990s include Lin Tianmiao, Li Xiuquin, Yin Xiuzhen, Chen Yanyin, Jiang Jie, and Liao Haiying. The Thirteen: Chinese Video Now at PS1 in 2006 introduced striking and exquisite work equally at home in east and west by Cao Fei, Cui Xiuwhen and Hu Jieming.

Video art also allowed some artists a muted political voice, for example the subversive rebel Xu Zhen, Li Songhua, and Jiang Haiqing and Fu Yu who together form the Beijing collaboration 8gg. Zhang Dali and Yin Xiuzhen both make art that reference the demolition of old Beijing to make way for the modern city. There are even the occasional artist like Xu Bing, born in 1955, and Xu Tan, born in 1957, who lived through the Cultural Revolution, who brought a maturity and depth to the discourse of contemporary Chinese art. More oblique critiques of the Mao period can be found in Muchen and Shao Yinong’s staged photographic recalling the aesthetic and decor of propagandised Maoist interiors.

Some artists like Xu Bing, Meng Jin and Lu Chunsheng have become international figures. The transcendent abstract grid paintings of Ding Yi and the gently satirical neo-pop paintings of Zhou Tiehai are immensely popular in European galleries. Western critics have found the edgy self-conscious nihilism of emerging Chinese artists like video artist Dong Wensheng particularly appealing. Expatriate artists, whether by choice or necessity, like Huang Yong Ping, Yan Pei-Ming, Ah Xian, Guan Wei, Xu Bing, Cai Guo Qiang, Gu Wenda, Yang Jiechang, Wang Du, Shen Yuan, and Chen Zhen invigorate the international scene. Chen Zhen in an interview with Zhu Xian at the CCA, Kitakiushu, Japan in 1997 said that they refer to themselves as “Spiritual Runaways”.

We have yet to see the kind of propagandistic high-kulturkampf we saw between the USA and USSR during the Cold War – but one gets the impression it’s a redundant concept where China is openly pursuing international engagement (though on its own terms) and the USA still sees itself as an insurmountable centre of western culture. The Chinese authorities had shown considerable largesse to contemporary artists of the last twenty or thirty years, provided those artists didn’t rock the political boat in a way that attracted too much attention within China. Artists, after all, are outsider creatures that occasionally do and say controversial things that no one takes much notice of. Artists are not the same as crusading journalists or agitating activists, and therefore not a threat in the same way, because they speak a language incomprehensible to the masses. Chinese policy is not unfamiliar to we New Zealanders old enough to remember the  Robert Muldoon era: essentially a social contract whereby the public will be looked after provided they do not presume to interfere or criticise the Powers That Be (which takes on a decidedly Confucianist cast in PRC). “Poetry,” wrote WH Auden, “makes nothing happen”. This is why the furore surrounding the detention of Ai Weiwei so startling. We all complain that we wish the government would pay closer attention to the arts, but in authoritarian societies this is a double-edged blade, and why fame outside your own country can sometimes be a dangerous thing. There is an old (occicentric) saw that a culture’s level of civilisation can be gauged by its treatment of prisoners, homosexuals, and artists.

Multimedia artist Ai Weiwei is very present throughout the western media because of his resounding absence, and he is a fascinating case. For one thing, he has a huge profile outside of China, for example his work with Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron on the Beijing National Stadium for the 2008 Olympics, and his appointment as Visiting Professor to the University of the Arts in Berlin. As an artist with social concerns, he has consistently used his art to investigate corruption and cover-ups by the Chinese government, such as the scandals surrounding the collapse of Sichuan schools in their 2008 earthquake. Ai comes has impeccable artistic credentials, attending the Beijing Film Academy with film directors Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, and a member of the Xing Xing group. During the ‘80s he lived in New York and studied at the Parsons School of Design, and when his father became ill he returned to China and helped found the Beijing East Village and later China Art Archives and Warehouse. He participated in the 2007 Documenta, and has exhibited widely internationally including the celebrated Sunflower Seeds in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall in London, 2010. ArtReview ranked him 13 of the world’s 100 most powerful art world figures.

This prominence led to suffering. Ai reportedly suffered a brain haemorrhage resulting from a police beating he received when in Chengdu in 2009 testifying in a case relating to the Sichuan school collapses. His internet accounts have reportedly been hacked numerous times. In 2010 he was placed under house arrest and his new studio in Shanghai demolished in 2011. He was accused of building an illegal structure. Ai involved himself in many controversial artworks that could be considered protests against the Chinese government, including the one that seems to have gotten the most up official noses: ?????? which has multiple meanings, but can be interpreted as “Fuck your mother”, ‘mother’ being an image that the Communist Party Central Committee has carefully cultivated for itself.

On April 3, 2011, Ai was arrested for alleged financial crimes before he could take a flight to Hong Kong. This is somewhat difficult to confirm independently as his accountant and studio partner Liu Zhenggang, driver Zhang Jinsong, and assistant Wen Tao have both disappeared. Ai’s family has been visited by police, and his wife interrogated. Chinese police accused him of tax evasion, and if that wasn’t enough, bigamy and spreading indecent images on the internet. Clearly the Central Committee has a tin ear when it comes to looking ridiculous, which is why it no doubt inadvertently furnished Ai with so much material in the first place. Ai is still under arrest, his whereabouts unknown. It came as a shock to the global media, as up until this point he had been considered untouchable because of his high international profile. Many countries including the US and the EU have officially protested Ai’s detention. i haven’t been able to locate any official statement from the New Zealand government on-line, but no surprises there. There have been protests in Hong Kong – about the only place in China where such things can happen, and in Taiwan – which is hardly likely to pass up an opportunity to stick it to the PRC.

Given that organising a large number of artists to do anything is like herding cats, the way that the international arts community has, of its own accord, rallied to protest Ai’s detention is nothing less than extraordinary, but largely attributable to Ai’s high profile, the ubiquity of social networking websites (which artists worldwide were quick to warm to as a way of empowering their otherwise marginalised status) and the tsunami of news reports, petitions, and protests shared and forwarded thereon. The campaigns have even spawned their own protest iconography such as the tally marks representing measuring his continued arrest, and the image of an empty chair – perhaps an allusion to an early symbol of the transcended Buddha. This was part of “1001 Chairs for Ai Weiwei” organised by Creative Time of New York in which artists brought chairs to Chinese embassies and consulates around the world on 17 April 2011, at 1 pm local time. Petitions organised by the Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation and the International Council of Museums have collected more than 90,000 signatures.

So, perhaps art does have power to make things happen. It is encouraging that the art world is taking an interest in its own and a political stand. It remains to be seen whether this will be sufficient to move the Chinese authorities in Beijing as, according to Greek legend, Orpheus’ music once moved the hearts of the King and Queen of the Underworld to pity. No one doubts the incredible reservoirs of creativity in China, nor the contribution of Chinese artists to contemporary art, but sooner or later the Chinese government will have to come to terms with the fact that the price of international relevance is appropriate reaction to internal and external criticism. Their overkill and abuse of power is infinitely more embarrassing and damaging than the criticism they seek to control. Even their PR spin has been painfully naive, suggesting that they could learn a thing or two from international operators like Ai. As the history of Russia, France, and the United States demonstrate, clamping down on a political irritation just provokes attention, reaction, and organisation, even if it takes decades. Is the authority of the Central Committee so fragile that they must make an example of an artist for doing their job for them?

However, a Douche Bag of the Universe award must be given to Martin Roth, director of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Roth was quoted in German weekly Zeit as saying Ai “is so popular [with the western/international media] because he is constantly pounding on the table.” and “There are hundreds of artists like him, but no one talks about them, because they are not pop stars.” Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresen, the Dresden state museum, was one of the institutions that organised the Art of the Enlightenment exhibition in Beijing’s newly-renovated National Museum – no prizes for spotting the many ironies there. Sir, you are a colossal dickhead. You bring shame on your institution, Germany and the international museums community. That’s all well and good for you to say given that your freedom of speech is protected by the laws of Germany and the EU. Who were the “pop stars” of the Holocaust, Herr Roth? Who cared about them?