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Re: Good Night and Good Luck: What does it mean to be an American now?
Posted:
Dec 6, 2005 7:09 PM
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A take on the Yong Ping show. Please note, it won't be reviewed on mnartists.org because it's not work by a Minnesota artist. But it's great to discuss it here.
I'm interested in the show for a lot of reasons. I've been for many years associated with the mode of work that's called Fluxus--people interested in bringing art into life, sometimes as tricksters, sometimes as hucksters, and sometimes just as makers. The Yong Ping work has a close relationship to this stuff, as it's work done not to be beautiful. or to be read like a book, but work that messes around with the relation between the lifeworld, the world of culture (both aesthetic and political), and humanness.
Politics looks different from inside China than from outside China, especially right now. Some themes in Chinese film--the use of minority culture as a theme, the depiction of ancient kingdoms, the depiction of animals and wild places--are clearly understood as political metaphors in today's China--we would not tend to see them that way. Chinese people are fully conscious of how terrible the Mao years were--I was in China in 1979, just after the Gang of Four arrests, and I can tell you that no Chinese person needed an artist to tell him or her about the tragedy of those years. So that tends not to be a theme of Chinese art--how much art in latter half of the 19th century was about the Civil War and its horrors? Not much--people wanted to forget about it. They didn't need to be told. But there is a new nationalism in China today--they want to find ways to love their country without shame. There are ways in which Yong Ping is relevant to this development.
So Bob, get off your damned righteous pony. You might learn something.
There's some really interesting parallels between the work of Joseph Beuys and that of Yong Ping.
Beuys' work, like Yong Ping's, reached almost casually through the scrim of artworld concerns, ripping them to shreds, and seized upon the potential of artifice--of making, of making stuff up--in the interest of other kinds of power. Both men faced the need to revive a culture that had been fouled by history: Beuys' Germany by fascism and Yong Ping's China by colonialism and then Maoist ideology. They found that they had both the ability and the mandate to create a new ground for making.
For both men, the authentic ground on which to stand, to make anything true, had been obscured by years of lies and evil. They both have been doing work, almost private work, that is meant to return them, as makers, to some kind of good faith with the cultural and natural means which are their birthright. By doing this work, they leave traces behind, which are the things in the gallery. These things are not quite what you'd call "sculptures" or "paintings" ordinarily. They are the carapaces of actions, or the signs that a struggle has taken place.
They do these things to restore a right relation to their own cultural means. Both men did uncover the ground they needed, I think, to stand on.
The ground they found themselves on was the kind that's made out of dirt. They both searched earlier technologies of understanding the human relation to the larger lifeworld, technologies that grew out of the soil on which they grew up. Beuys explored shamanism and the paganism that predated the Christian "colonialism", and Yong Ping explored traditional means of divination and geomancy, which also predated the "colonialism" of Western science and Western art. Both men used animals in their work, sometimes as almost cartoonish icons of ideas (like Ping's elephant and tiger) and sometimes as stand-ins for the human animal, the being that possesses and is possessed by both body and mind, the being that lives and dies. They also used dead animals instrumentally, testing the ways in which people instrumentalize other living beings--even other living human beings.
Both men are also often funny, very free in their thoughts, and willing to pursue both serious hunches about the importance of this or that theme or material and their own amusement. They are full men, people who act out of their own affection for the world around them, out of curiosity about it, and out of a knowledge of pain and estrangement from it.
I'm happy to see that Beuys had a sort of brother on the other side of the world; I don't fully understand what Yong Ping is doing, because I'm not Chinese, and his work is very involved with Chinese history and culture, but I understand it through the good that I know Beuys did for Northern European culture. I think that this is good work, bent on a rich search.
I think it's a little ironic that it's found in an art museum, but then where else could it be, where else could it live? Beuys had the same dilemma, but it's the dilemma that all artists everywhere have to wrestle with. It's expensive to do art--expensive in time and materials and means. Artists have only their bodies. They need to find patrons of some sort, whether clients or institutions or galleries or merchants or buyers, to enable those bodies to create what they want or need to create. So artists everywhere, always, make deals with all kinds of devils--pretty kind and benign ones, who really only do harm through their very size, imperviousness, and resistance to real change, like the Walker; or real devils, like the Sforza family, for whom Petrarch, the father of Western humanism, wrote PR. (The Sforzas were arms merchants, tyrants, and incredibly inventive torturers and murderers. Petrarch knew what they did--everyone did--but when he was asked why he took their money and did their bidding, he said, because it was the only way he could fund his own work.)
So Yong Ping's work that casually rips through Western art history in a simple gesture of the arm is in a big palace of Western culture, ironically, because at the moment that is what allows him to continue his work. The Bat Plane piece is a sort of document of documents on how that kind of bureaucracy affects the processes of working in Ping's manner--the thing turned into a monument of Forms and Paperwork, to peruse which would take days. No one will do it. But there it stands. It's pretty funny, and absolutely an authentic Document. It does work in its own way as well.
Well. There's an article in the Rake as well about this show, written by Julie Caniglia, still the best art critic in town. Enjoy.
AK
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