(Localization and Catabolic Practices)
The Art Question is introduced by its author Niegel Warburton as a book of deliberate briefness in attempting to unveil useful intuitions around the classification of art in the xx century by concluding on the philosophical indefinableness of its character as related to both exhibited and relational properties.
Forms v/s Structure: The Art Question. And China
Beatrice Leanza
Chen Shaoxiong, Homescape, photo-cut collage, 2002. Courtesy of the artist.
Hypomnemata Art
(Localization and Catabolic Practices)
The Art Question is introduced by its author Niegel Warburton as a book of deliberate briefness in attempting to unveil useful intuitions around the classification of art in the 20th century by concluding on the philosophical indefinability of its character as related to both exhibited and relational properties. The dynamic discontinuity and nomadic fickleness of the macrostate of art is patterned onto the entropic distribution of all the ordered microstates negotiating their balance on diverse cultural and historical platforms. The singularity of their standpoint resides where the aesthetic experience and the everyday one mingle to produce autonomous “interior objects” and where the creative process is assumed as “a fertile metamorphosis incorporating the proofs of its own reality by means of forms. (Where) The form of time therefore turns into style, so to become the visible proof of life transformation” (A.B. Oliva).
In this sense, the rapid and uncontrolled changes that we witness in our era—an increasing global interdependence and maximalization of phenomena—produce a multiplicity of structural themes in accordance with the diverse cognitive models and praxis used by cultures to forge reality and act therein. Present China is seemingly phagocytizing all of the contemporary permutations triggered by the global investment in the future, in facing market floridity and social polarization together with deregulated urban growth, massive population displacement, exploding technological capacity and architectonic fanfare, as well as environmental degradation sided by new/old poverties and spiritual disarray. Into this syncopated ensemble, patched with disarticulated models of space reconceptualization, the growing megalopolis are dictating a dissolution of referentials, accustoming people to a border-line life, with continuous trespassing and incursions. The city becomes the main interface for cultural dynamics to be viewed, and for individuality to find a representational dimension.
The recent Guangzhou Photo Biennial, held at Guangdong Museum of Art (one of the main local institutions engaged in monitoring the state of contemporary art practices) clearly claim to commit this conduct: Re(-)viewing the City, title of the international kermes, is intended to display the “deep interrogation of self-explanation against the backdrop of urbanization” (Wang Huangsheng, director of the GMoA). The large selection of Chinese and foreign artists, engaged with different uses of the photographic syntax, is mapped onto five sections where the dialogue between the onlooker and the subject-matter sets forth how the conceptual, social and documentary language of the media detect the altered lifestyles, ethics and psychologies of the city dwellers. Most of Chinese conceptual photography demands for a transparent and homogenous take on the striated space of the city, where human texture is often dispersed due to the invading dominance of verticalized building spaces and construction craters; the visible industrial production vaporizes perspective, shifting their grammar to that of invisible information consumption.
Alike are works by A Niu (So far So Close), Chen Shaoxiong (Multi Landscape), Luo Yongjin, artist duo Shao Yinong and Muchen, Miao Xiaochun, Shi Guorui and Xing Danwen. Her new series, “Urban Fiction,” clearly appeals to this captivated forum of human drama: “Models of living spaces are perfect and clean, (but) physical proximity instead of leading to a greater closeness and intimacy, can often create psychological distance and loneliness.” To this extent, the surface-boundary has already become an osmotic membrane, and the “third space” both the abode of the creative process and the translated dimension of intellectual thinking and critical participation to social and cultural speculations.
In this under-construction pandemonium of retreat and adaptation between incorporated forms of compelling modernism and structural policy, where is art standing? The words of Massimiliano Fuksas related on the topographic emergences of industrializing environments in the new millennium still fit perfectly to the Chinese landscape: “the progressive abandonment of public structure and collective utility find an almost molecular form of life, work and organization […] autonomous and anarchic forms in which the detachment from the form State finds its natural scenario into the individualities and energies that the system/non system emits.”
27 years after the ’78 Stars Group show held in Beijing that marked the beginning of mainland avant-garde movement, the local cultural body still strives to make the art system a legitimate function of the national cultural discourse. Huang Rui, one of the early beholders of spiritual subjectivism driven on by the Stars and today the art director of DIAF (Dashanzi International Art Festival – one of the few public events bridging the city of Beijing to a multifaceted audience and participants) recently stated concern: in a still unpublished paper he points again at the importance of independent thinking and self-evaluation within the semantic process of historical definition, where art expression is still recurrently forced to self-organization and scarce networking up to international standards. Still the restricted number of operative institutions, professional and adequate practices of integration receiving mild and intermittent governmental support, delegate the survival of art to individual and private initiative.
Beijing’s 798 Factory, the art district of the capital hosting an increasing number of foreign galleries (among them, two Italian opening between March and May; i.e. Galleria Continua from San Giminiano and Marella Arte Contemporanea from Milan), the new space of the Long March Foundation (to side the former one which will remain open to artists’ experimental projects) and artists studios, promise for a catabolic mobilization to repattern the asset of the cyclically silent Bauhaus artistic compounds.
Forms unfold within and structures are temporarily fabricated. The intermediate space where existence and authenticity have to conquer their position draws metaphor to a new group show assembled by Feng Boyi, active curator often plotting for the main artistic local voices to team up in working-across-cultures initiatives. In & Out. Or In-between, opening event for the new location of the Soka Gallery in Beijing, engages nine artists (eight Chinese and one Taiwanese) with multi-dimensional interpretations of space displacement, where themed variations around “translated spaces” and their significance are processed by the confrontational transactions of space typologies (public/private) and modes of fruition. As the single projects perform the artists’ personal participation into the process of stepping beyond “borders,” the exhibition ultimately aims at a larger paradigm by questioning the transitional character of Chinese contemporary society, still limping in-between former socialist orders and emerging capitalist ones. “Entrance,” installation work by female artist Yin Xiuzhen, is a direct intervention into the gallery space, where the audience’s access to the show is monitored by a security check machine as in airports transfer areas. The significance of entrance and exit as interchangeable concepts gives rise to issues of social control and public surveillance restructuring self-awareness and identity.
Recurrence of discourse soliciting self-evaluation as an indispensable action to the local establishment of a coherent system of rules and verification (where citational practices under the seal of age and authority are explicitly overcome) presents art from China as often based on descriptive poetics, especially as regarding the mutual loans between photographic and painting languages.
Wang Xingwei, Xie Nanxing, Yan Lei, Li Dafang, Li Songsong, Chen Wenbo, together with He Sen, Shi Xinning, Zhang Xiaotao, Fu Hong (many of whom featured in last year China?s Photographic Painting, held in Beijing in late April) are few of the representatives of Chinese contemporary ?art on canvas? using various media interpolations in the remodelling of reality snapshots and raptures into pictorial frames.
Sourcing subjects and material directly from concrete memory of things heard, seen, read or thought from learning and experiencing reality poses art in a middle terrain between polar fields: history (the collective and personal one) is recounted by recollection of the "fragmentary logos transmitted by listening, teaching or reading," and everyday life accounted for an administrative use of self-regulation. Similarly, as Foucault explains, "hyponemnata" were not intimate diaries or accounts of spiritual occurrence, but more like personal registers, individual notebooks serving as memoranda. "Their objective is not to bring the arcana conscientiae to light [?] The point is not to pursue the indescribable, but, on the contrary, to collect the already-said, to reassemble that which one could hear or read, and this to an end which is nothing less than the constitution of oneself." In this sense the uncatchable forms of accelerated life transformation are grasped, sized and controlled to the extent of turning art itself into an instrument of localization within social, political, cultural as well as intellectual structures.
