2013
Speech at the academic symposium held during the “Hanart 100: Idiosyncrasies” exhibition at the Hong Kong Arts Centre on 16 January 2014.
1.
The horses painted on the walls of the caves at Lascaux prove that works of art can be preserved forever, beyond the life span of historical pedigrees, and much longer than any art museum, kunsthallemuseum, paper, canvas, leather, ink or colours can survive.
Making art is itself a form of preservation. Making art is the best way to preserve art; it is much better than any other form of human intervention. The best way to collect art is to do so in the manner of an artistic activity, and to allow the ‘art’ contained in works of art to preserve itself. At the highest level of collecting, art collects itself in its own unique way: collecting itself becomes art, without human participation, thus enabling art to preserve itself unto the end of time.
The fundamental attitude of collecting is: to yield, to relinquish....
In their discussion of ‘affects’ and ‘percepts’, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri say that art is the only thing in the world that can preserve itself; and emphasise the point that art is the only thing in the world ‘that is preserved in itself’. Art preserves, and preserves itself within itself. Even collecting can play no role here: it is not enough. If a work of art is going to endure, collecting itself has to become a form of artistic creation.1 Must collecting itself, then, become a form of art, in order for it to last forever without human intervention, just like art itself? (The answer is yes.)
In addition to drawing on specialised routines, formats and technologies, collecting has to become an art form, preserving both itself and art. The sole purpose of collecting is to become an artistic form of preservation. First collect, then preserve, then circulate, until finally only art survives, without collectors, or artists, frames or canvas: ‘The young girl maintains the pose that she has had for five thousand years, a gesture that no longer depends on whoever made it.’2
Preserving works of art is a way of preserving the ‘other’ in the work of art (‘works’ are merely frames and canvas). What is this ‘other’? It is simply that which has the ability to preserve itself: ‘What is preserved – the thing and the work of art – is a bloc of sensations, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects.’3 Art preserves itself by the way we extract percepts and affects from our sensory field, perceptions and perspectives. Only these percepts and affects can preserve themselves, and enter into circulation.
Making art is preserving art; collecting first has to become art itself by means of art, before it can preserve itself artistically, and before it can preserve what can be preserved. What remains, what stays behind, and that which can truly be transmitted or circulated, are those ‘percepts and affects,’ which have no need for art museums and kunsthalles. Percepts and affects will outlive our socio-political, cultural-economic systems, and will endure truly and forever like the percepts and affects of the paintings on the walls of the caves of Lascaux.
Finally, viewed macroscopically, collecting art and making art are the same thing: preservation, in the broader sense of the term (in the discussion below, we will use Heidegger’s existential notion of ‘preservation’). Preserving art embraces a longer time frame than the needs of the community, society or the present age; art preservation has to outlive the community, society and the present age, as well as outlive itself, in order to preserve those percepts and affects...
In other words, the highest level of collecting treats collecting like making art, preserving art the way art preserves itself, and has to transform collecting into an art in a more trustworthy way than our present art museums do, making use of art’s ability to preserve itself, to preserve works of art, to circulate them, to extend their lives, preserve them in fragments, let them linger...
2.
In his ‘On the Concept of History’, Walter Benjamin wrote ‘The true picture (das wahre Bild) of the past flits by. (Is the past only a series of images? A series
of images from the past? Is the past itself nothing more than a series of pictures?). We can only grasp the past as an image that flashes into view at the instant of recognition, and then it vanishes.... If images of the past cannot be embraced by the present, and rush by unrecognized, then they disappear irretrievably. Pictures are things that existed in the past; they encounter the present for an instant, forming a constellation composed of the past and the present’.4
All past works of art can be considered contemporary works of art; the mission of exhibitions is to turn all the art of the past into contemporary art, to bring together ancient paintings, modern and contemporary paintings in a moment of coincidence. Collecting images of the past is to bring about their convergence in the time frame of the present. What is collecting? Living in the present while accepting images from the past with a contemporary art approach.
Collecting is a way of showing respect for images in their own right, and of appropriating the past into the present. Appropriation allows people from many past generations to have spiritual encounters with people of the present. But according to Benjamin, appropriation is not a form of preservation, but rather a destructive act. By calling attention to itself, and by bringing texts and pictures before our eyes, appropriation destructively extracts the texts and the picture from their original contexts. But by so doing, appropriation also returns them to their source; while appropriation is a form of rescue, it is also a form of punishment. In his essay ‘What is Epic Theater?’, Benjamin wrote, ‘Appropriation destroys the context.’5 But only by destroying the context, can appropriation succeed. Appropriation is redemption. Appropriation can liberate words and pictures from the shackles of the past. Only appropriation without quotation marks can offer true redemption. Only when appropriation succeeds, will the coming of the Messiah take place. Collecting art is failed appropriation.
Why do we collect? Because we get worse and worse at appropriating. Benjamin wrote: ‘Like every generation before us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.’6 This is not pessimistic. Benjamin goes on to say that illness, exhaustion, blame, compulsion, oppression and despair will only make the coming of the Messiah take place sooner. Our collecting behaviour grows weaker and weaker, and less confident. But this can only make our appropriation all the more urgent and more redemptive. Collecting is a form of desperate, fanatic appropriation.
Appropriation or collecting (writers and artists are both excellent appropriators and collectors) is like a thief hiding by the roadside, who threatens passersby with a knife to rob them of their confidence. Does people’s lack of confidence today make them rob the confidence of authors of the past? Is collecting simply a form of confiscating the ‘confidence’ of people from earlier generations? According to Benjamin, the past is something that has to be destroyed, and removed from its original context, before being placed before us. For us the past only becomes visible once it has been plundered by an alienating force, such as our present-day collecting. That past only shows its face after it has been alienated and destroyed. It is like a memory suddenly reappearing in the midst of crisis. Thus words and pictures from the past can only reveal themselves after being appropriated, quoted and collected. Here Benjamin reveals his approach to collecting as being one of historical materialism. Only through collecting, can the art of the past reveal itself, and have an opportunity to receive helpful criticism; otherwise it will sink and disappear, or descend into the servitude of commodity circulation.
To Benjamin, a collector is a person who drags out works of art from the past and destroys their contexts. By appropriating works of art, the collector deprives the work or the commodity of its practical value, or its social-theoretical significance. The authenticity of a work of art is judged by the degree of alienation the work or commodity suffers after having been appropriated. The more authentic a work is judged to be, the more alienated it will be. The more it is collected, the greater the alienation. When we evaluate a collected work of art, we judge its value and meaning by the degree to which it accords with or differs from our present-day historical circumstances. Are works of art considered greater because of the degree to which they don’t fit into our present age? By displaying works of art from the past, are we marginalising or devaluing works from the present?
Collectors and revolutionaries work hand in hand. For revolutionaries, the appearance of new things presumes the destruction of the old. Thus in a stable and orderly traditional society, appropriation and collecting are unlikely to take place. Only during the dissolution of tradition and the renaissance that follows can collecting and appropriation flourish. The most hideous kind of collecting was like that carried out by Communist official Kang Sheng, which of course took place during the Cultural Revolution. Today, with the radical separation of past and present, global and local, destruction and revival, collecting is alive and well. Collecting stimulates every kind of ‘product turnover’, but do these kinds of product turnover then stimulate collecting?
Chang Tsong-zung’s art collection, accumulated from three parallel art worlds of three different periods, forms a matrix.
For collectors in China, the twentieth century was a time of monumental shifts. The Cold War’s fluctuating landscape of the separation and convergence of Communism and Capitalism, and the disruption in its wake of the temporal and spatial continuity of all forms of human history – this all took place in that century.
Like a butterfly in a field of flowers, Chang Tsong- Zung happily collected all the finest pollen from his base in Hong Kong. His major exhibition, ‘Hanart 100: Idiosyncrasies’, which opened on 18 January 2014, was no less than his collection of ‘Twentieth- Century China’ ! As co-curator Gao Shiming has noted, the exhibition comprised ‘three different means of art production and art mechanisms: the traditional Chinese art world; the Chinese Socialist art world; and the art world of global capitalism.’ Also included were classical Chinese art, art of the Republican period, art of the revolutionary age and art from the post-1989 avant-garde movements in China. Liu Dahong’s Sacrificial Altar, Fang Zengxian’s Arouse Millions of Workers and Peasants and Lu Yanshao’s Landscape hung together in the same space and time, in the same exhibition installation. It was like being offered a toast from a newly opened barrel of wine. This was an unprecedented gathering of artworks.
3.
To become works of art, objects must be cut off from their cultural continuum, and be sacrificed on the altar of exhibition spaces. When making ‘art for art’s sake’, the artist must not appropriate the present age. Contemporary art severs our connections with the past. The more the past accumulates in a heap of ruins, the deeper we descend into the abyss of the present. Only through an act of salvation, can the past and tradition be rescued from this ever-growing heap of rubble. But before the coming of the Messiah takes place, this task is hopeless. We don’t want culture; as for the past, all that remains are cultural values. We use art to seek and engage elsewhere. Like the angel that fainted from hunger in front of a pile of grain, while awaiting our salvation we have nothing to rely on, our only tool is the art we carry in our hands. Everything slips through our fingertips. What we are left holding is art, a means of preservation. It is impossible for us to preserve the entire past. Appropriation and collecting are both forms of destructive violence. They seek to cut off all connections between art and the past and tradition, and recklessly appropriate it for present-day use. Tradition and the past are nothing but accumulated rubbish; works of art can find no authority or support in the narrative of the garbage dump. This is when collectors stand up and intervene, and make a final appeal for the authority of the idea of works of art. With so many works of art crumbling into fragments with no place to put them, the collector, in the guise of an authoritative protector, and in an age without history, without tradition, or in which history and tradition are stranded or stagnant, will provide them with an artificial archival source.
This is the whole point of collecting. Before we know clearly what that thing is that has been preserved, or circulated for all eternity, we must act. In the short term, this risky endeavour is called art. In the long term, it is called collecting. The collector must stand above and beyond art history and the history of civilisation and take on the role of a preserver.
In his 1937 essay ‘Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian’, Walter Benjamin stated that Fuchs’ greatest achievement was, ‘as a trailblazer who liberated art history from the fetishism of great masters and great works’. Great collectors must ‘observe those perverse things that people most disdain; therein lies their true strength’.7 The collector must be tolerant and broadminded, and suffer like Sisyphus; by owning things, he can rid them of their commercial nature. But the collector’s hard work only results in investing the objects with value in the eyes of the connoisseur. The collector is unable to restore any practical value to them. The collector’s dream is to inhabit an ancient, lost world, a world better than the present. They seek a world in which people are blessed with having only the things that they need in the everyday world, and nothing more; these things are then relieved from the arduous task of being practical.
This is the very kind of collector who is most severely taken to task by Giorgio Agamben: one who liberates (art) commodities from the task of circulation, and gives them an entirely new function as part of a collective. After all, the collector liberates works
of art from performing hard labour, and liberates man from consumption. In the context of the market, collecting works of art is like rescuing an art commodity caught like a spinning top between commerce and exchange, remaking it into a work of art and exhibiting it, thus endowing it with a new image, and presenting it before the public.
When we appropriate, we take advantage of the authority of works of art. But because our appropriation may destroy the context of the object of our appropriation, appropriation also damages its source, and the authority of its status. Today, works of art have lost their authority in terms of belonging to a particular tradition, geography or point of origin. Today, the authenticity of a work of art depends on whether or not it is a good copy. The originality, or authenticity of a work of art, is determined by the market and the media. The technique of ‘ageing’ works of art will someday replace the authority of an expert appraisal. These perfect copies, or ‘knockoffs’, would seem to spell the demise of collecting. But according to Benjamin, all of this is a good thing:
i) Mechanical reproductions are more reliable and authentic than handmade originals.
ii) Mechanical reproductions enable works of art to co-exist in many different places at once, and thus greatly increase their chances for survival. Photography is a classic example of this. The better the reproduction, the better the collecting.8 From this point on, works of art no longer need to rely on tradition or authority for their significance, and they can seek sanctuary with collectors. Art history then becomes a moveable border. Culture becomes a vast refuse dump. Collectors will be in charge. All works
of art will end up in the hands of collectors. They will also want to preserve any artworks that survive, and to squeeze meaning out of them. Collectors are the future legal custodians of art. We still don’t completely understand the significance of the art museum for art and artworks. Before we gain that understanding, let collectors first perform their future functions.
4.
The situation described above, is not a philosophical notion, but rather something that actually took place in the 1980s and 1990s in China. And how fortunate we are that Chang Tsong-zung was there to experience it all.
We can envy his experience from the 1980s to the present. Like a hyperactive child, his hands shaking, he tells us: ‘I saw it, I saw everything clearly, there was so much variety, I couldn’t leave any of it behind, so I kept everything!’
Hanart TZ Gallery is a memorial hall of China in the twentieth century. Its unique significance lies in the fact that the Chinese historical narrative was derailed – in other words, China in the twentieth century needs three or more historical narratives: we treat history as propaganda; we are addicted to falsifying history; we have made so many reproductions of the twentieth century, it’s no longer possible to identify the original. This is what makes the Hanart 100 collection such a valuable and unique means for preserving the Chinese collective memory.
5.
This year, 2014, marks the thirtieth anniversary of Hanart TZ Gallery. Chang Tsong-zung’s place in the world of art collecting has yet to be reevaluated. He is very much like a first-year university student, running hither and thither, whose plans can’t keep pace with his speed. He is also of two minds about his role as a collector. He has mixed feelings about the historical period represented by the major works in his collection – China in the twentieth century. Yet he maintains his objectivity. He received an elite education in the United States; he observed revolutionary and post- revolutionary China from the sidelines; and today he is still juggling Communist ideology, Christianity and Confucian thought. The more he understands the West, the more he realises: If you want to be Chinese, you have to reinvent yourself. He wants to ‘restore the Confucian li’ system of rites, that is, to promote the simple, profound yet practical traditional Chinese forms of etiquette, assumptions and ‘following the will of Heaven’.
In my view, ‘art’ for Chang Tsong-zung is a broad, collaborative symbolic activity, a mix of ritual vessels and ritual ceremonies. He wants to revive the basic relationship between ritual vessels and life, between art and the community. He is awaiting the coming of a new man, not our past life, or the art of the kind of life in which we were immersed in the past. To Chang, works of art must refute themselves, and become like daily necessities. Only then will the people of the future appear, no longer pressed, no longer full of angst. His attitude, to borrow the language of Kant, Schiller and Mallarmé, can be expressed as follows: art should be the ‘art of living’, should help us transition to a communitarian ‘new sensorium’. Art should transcend the antagonism between the precious refinements of the educated classes, and the natural spontaneity and naivety of the uneducated classes. Works of art that lead to the new life of the individual and the community, hold the promise for a new kind of humanity. I hope that the ‘Hanart 100: Idiosyncrasies’ exhibition will convince Chang Tsong- Zung, the collector, that works of art can not only preserve the spectrum of a century filled with twists and turns, but can encourage the creation of ‘ritual vessels’ for the art of life of the people.
Art is better than politics when it comes to inspiring the establishment of a new human community; something that will not come about by passing laws, but by immortalising lived experience. New equality and freedom need to be based on lived experience. From the time of Kant and Schiller, we have been looking forward to a free society, in which art forms no longer create religious, political or artistic divisions.9 Perhaps this convergence of religion, politics and art is why Chang Tsong-zung places his hopes on ‘rites’, ‘rituals’ and ‘teachings’.
6.
For the above reasons, I suppose that Chang Tsong- Zung only feels he is the temporary custodian of the works of art in his collection. In this regard he is just the opposite of the fanatical art collector Sylvain Pons in Balzac’s novel Le Cousin Pons: a chronic worrier who feels he must monopolise all culture, who slinks around Paris on rainy nights dressed in black, concealing paintings beneath his cloak, his face frozen in seriousness, as if he alone were responsible for all French culture. I am ready to hand it all over at any time.
The question is, just what aspect of twentieth-century China are all the paintings in Chang’s collection – including works by Yu Youren, Huang Binhong, Fang Zengxian, Zhang Xiaogang and Wang Guangyi – preserving, or serving as custodian for?
Perhaps we can say that this fraternity of paintings is a third kind of memory for twentieth-century China, a third version of history, in addition to the Party line, and the version in our own minds. In wall paintings in ancient tombs, emperors and generals are often depicted walking with an object clasped to their chests. Indeed, people always have to embrace something in order to give themselves the confidence to keep moving ahead. But people cannot hear their voices, nor can they understand their voices, and thus can receive no encouragement from them. This is why works of art serve as sounding boards; they remind people, interpret their own voices to them, and so allow them to move forward, accompanied by the sound of those voices. What the ‘Hanart 100’ collection preserves is the‘echo’ of the Chinese people’s voice in the twentieth century. And is what is being exhibited here also this same echo from that century?
What these 100 works present are the ‘landscape formations’ that lie far beyond the twentieth century’s political movements, emotions, revolutions, memories and memorial tablets: our affects and percepts, and our becoming. Is this not the ‘Hanart 100’?
7.
In the twentieth century, Chinese art self-destructed twice. After Yan’an or 1949, artists self-consciously became the builders of the people’s new lifestyle, and illustrated the entire process of the creation of this new lifestyle. This process was their collaborative work of art. In the post-1989 art movements, Chinese contemporary artists, following in the footsteps of their Western counterparts, once again sought to recreate a form of daily life by using commodities to add beauty to capitalist daily life and pave theway for the lifestyle of global capitalism. These two projects, one of them tragic, the other downright silly, were frequently at loggerheads. But Chinese art has dragged this contradiction into the twenty-first century. Chinese artists today are still fighting it out: Should we embrace art, or revolution? Shall we turn the revolution into a memorial tablet, or rally around the memorial tablet and make revolution? The Gao Brothers and Ai Weiwei, F4 and G8 respectively, are the living embodiments of these two contradictory trends.
Walking amidst the works in the ‘Hanart 100’, the pointed aesthetic contradictions of twentieth-century art in China explode in our faces, signaling the triumph of the Western narrative of twentieth-century Chinese art history to the present. This raises the question: Are these contradictions the symptoms of a disease? Or is this a great achievement? If they are symptoms, then they are symptoms of past experiences that we have already come to accept. Or are they mines laid on the future path of Chinese art?
The late twentieth century endured three maelstroms: the Cold War, the Cultural Revolution, and globalisation. ‘Without this evil, which is also archive fever, the desire and the disorder, there would be neither assignation nor consignation. Because assignation is a consignation.’ 10 In the overheated capitalist sauna of contemporary China, faced with an infinite variety of past archives all with different beginnings, can we do no better than to become a new breed of historian, who only researches promises, or what is taking place in the present? Indeed, these archives have more to do with the future than with the past or the present.
But to what version of the future is the ‘Hanart 100’ relevant? This is a question we should ask ourselves as we walk out of the exhibition hall.
8.
Whether we realise it or not, we are already trapped in some kind of future. This is like wanting to become an artist, designing a single-passenger airplane or traveling solo in outer space. The goal of twentieth- century avant-garde Communist artists, such as the Futurist artist and writer Vladimir Mayakovsky, were as follows: Act as you please, but do it by yourself, stay away from the crowd, go out on your own, take a ride in a glass container. Works of art are very good at bringing us back intensely to the futures we imagine in the present. They are both drafts, and advertisements, for the future.
Works of art must bring the present into the presence of the future. They torture the present in the presence of the future. They call on the present to defend and acquit itself before the future. You must be responsible to the future! This is the attitude of the revolutionary avant-garde. Using the future to censure the present adds meaning to every kind of plan. After this, we go back to our old time, and walk in step with our original realities. When we walk away from the works of art and leave the museum, we get a vague feeling that we have suddenly returned from the future to the present.
We are too addicted to our own plans. We can never carry them out, and starting them means we never intend to complete them. When Mao Zedong launched the Chinese revolution, he had no intention of bringing it to a close: this was ‘continuous revolution’. Major artists all make the same claims: This is only a small part of my work. I had to set aside ninety per cent of my plan because I ran out of money, or time, or manpower... The Chinese revolution is like an artist announcing his project, then isolating himself for thirty years, and spending all his time and energy attempting to finish it. Every project necessitates a struggle for a sacred, restrictive loneliness. Sigh! I’m still not finished, I’m still working on it. Lin Fengmian’s aesthetic-political project and Mao Zedong’s political-aesthetic project, art movements and the Cultural Revolution, all took place simultaneously in twentieth-century China. China’s Socialist Five Year Plans are a lot like artists’ projects, writing a book, preparing an exhibition, or labouring over a scientific discovery. The same way artists treat their projects, and the way they work on them as something sacred, the Chinese people also, in carrying out the construction of New China, embraced the creative ‘madness’ of a great artist. They listened to no one, and kept on flirting and whining to the bitter end.
What were the Chinese people actually doing from 1949 to 1978? They were carrying out a great responsibility that they had announced for themselves. The entire population might have sealed themselves off in an artist’s studio, like in the Cultural Revolution, when the entire Chinese population collabourated on a gesamptkunstwerk, a total work of art, in a communal space. After 1978, the people went back to a normal form of social interaction, no? Aren’t our lives all part of a plan now?
Art is a series of plans, carried out by an individual or a group, for multiple futures. In the end, it is art that will gather up and preserve those failed plans. In the twentieth century, so many plans were left unfinished; they need to be preserved. This is the kind of preservation that takes place in the ‘Hanart 100: Idiosyncrasies’ exhibition.
The Chinese Communist Revolution and the Cultural Revolution both forced us into a make-believe future; from there we made a U-turn, and came back with greater concern for the present. The artists who emerged post-1989 have been riding this bandwagon. Although the post-1989 generation has not accepted the projects of the revolution or the art of the revolutionary period, they continue to mock them while at the same time they are impotently, discreetly using the art of the revolution for their own ends, reselling and marketing it, and secretly collecting and preserving it.
The life of an artistic project is directed towards results, just like the lives of the Chinese people in the Cultural Revolution were seen as the means to an end: We must learn from Lei Feng, sacrifice ourselves to his revolutionary cause, as if life were a tool for a common cause. Art must use oil paintings, drawings, photography, video and installation to record the life in the art or utopian project, in a state dominated by bio-power. Art must use documentation to denote the life of a plan. This is not mere cruelty, but rather a manifestation of bio-political control.
What we call post-Cultural Revolution history is an inseparable mix of memory and plans, a mixed up ‘second generation’ of past and future. This is also an age of revival, in which the past and the future are exchangeable. Blueprints from the Republican period, the Ming dynasty, even the Han dynasty, can all be reactivated...and serve as our advertisements for the future.
There are too many plans in China today, too many for us to attend to. We can only show one at a time. But to show them is to remove them. Each plan can appear for 15 minutes, while the rest remain off limits. Art treats all of these plans as equal. Human history should be a museum that collects all the plans that have failed, succeeded, or been rejected by their originators. What the ‘Hanart 100’ shows us is far more than our helplessness in the face of so many plans. It offers no explanations for these plans, but it takes them all in.
There have been any number of revolutionary and utopian plans in twentieth-century China, and any number of revolutions and utopias. Many of the unrealised plans can be found in the ‘Hanart 100’. We can say that these works of art bring together and conserve many landscapes that lie outside the complex historical movements of twentieth-century China.
9.
Conservation is greater than preservation or possession. Heidegger said that works must be protected by a conservator, in order to be great. The true conservators of works of art are the entire culture and the people, not individual collectors; collectors are only representatives of the people. The modern world has no place for art, and works of art cannot find people to conserve them; that is why we need collectors. This idea is shared by Benjamin and Agamben: Art should be accumulated and preserved by collectors, and await a reevaluation. Once tradition is shattered, the spirit of tradition will live on in works of art.
According to Heidegger, works that have yet to find a conservator are latent works, works with unrealised potential.11 The finest kind of collecting begins with the collector giving his collection to the people, who will conserve it collectively. The people can conserve what those works create, as part of their communal life. At the highest level, museum-style preserving resembles ancient Greek temples, the Olympics and musical events, in that they ‘bring about public truth’, with the works revealing new worlds, and allowing people to enter this yet unexplored territory. The ‘Hanart 100’ collection will leave behind a weighty legacy for the people of the future.
Conservation is to experience the world as sacred and sublime, and to preserve this experience. Human beings offer themselves to this world. At that moment, everything around them begins to glow. Human beings worry and protect, and when the revealers, that is, the entire earth, attains transparency – this is conservation. Following Heraclitus, Heidegger states that polemos, or struggle – between eras, traditions, cultures and political systems – is the true conservator of the world. Art is what is conserved in these struggles.12
The highest purpose of the art museum is to preserve. The individual can only conserve himself by being part of a community. For the individual, solitude, living alone as a hermit, is a way of preserving a cherished individual way of life. At first, the hermit is cared for by others. But then he must find a quiet, safe place in which to settle. He then begins, and once he revitalises himself, he can start to show concern for the things around him. The hermit is obliged to restore everything in the natural world around him to its natural state. But even hermits are mortal, so during their lifetimes it is their task to nourish and protect the heavens, the earth, mankind and the spirits.13 When man finds himself in a crisis, he should seek solitude; this will enable him to begin to prepare for his own death. What he has been seeking in life all along is to make his ‘self sacrifice’ as authentic as possible. The things around him become his sacrificial vessels, and only when every detail is in place, can he proceed towards the end in peace. Actually when he is about to lose control, he still hopes his plans can be brought off without a hitch.
When a person sacrifices himself, at the moment of death, everything around him will be conserved, and like works of art, will be exhibited. People can do things that are even better than preserving.
The communal life of the community, especially the freedom of the people of the future, is where the art of today must place its trust.
10.
Conservation, preservation, upholding, sheltering, rescuing and appropriation; these are all different aspects of ‘collecting’.
11.
Art collecting places bets on the following outcomes: Whose works will circulate the most? Whose works are most representative? Whose works get to the heart of things? Whose works make the biggest splash? The happiness of the collector comes from an early realization that the affects and percepts of the people’s experience of ‘my’ works will in the end be preserved forever and ever.
Everything that is preserved, everything that is preserved in art, will circulate the furthest, will outlive social and political systems and cultural artefacts, and will outlive the circulation of ritual vessels and rituals, but will lose none of its truthfulness. This should come as a great consolation to Chang Tsong-zung, while he is still fully devoted to his career.
12.
‘The young man will smile on the canvas for as long as the canvas lasts. Blood throbs under the skin of this woman’s face, the wind shakes a branch, a group of men prepares to leave. In a novel or film, the young man will stop smiling, but he will start to smile again when we turn to this page or that moment.’14
Translation by Don J. Cohn
Notes:
1. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) p.163.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid, p. 164.
4. Walter Benjamin. ‘On the Concept of History’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969). 5. Walter Benjamin, ‘What is Epic Theater?’, op. cit., pp. 147-54.
6. Benjamin. ‘On the Concept of History’, pp. 254.
7. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, eds. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008) p. 104.
8. Ibid,p.21.
9. See Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, Steven Corcoran, trans. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010), p. 177
10. Jacques Derrida, ‘Archive Fever’, Diacritics. Vol. 25, No. 3, Summer 1995 (Johns Hopkins University Press.)
11. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought. trans. by Alfred Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) pp. 66-67.
12. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. by Ralph Mannheim ( New Haven : Yale University Press, 1959 ) pp. 61-62.
13. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought. pp. 150-151
14. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? , trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 ) p. 163.
Speech at the academic symposium held during the “Hanart 100: Idiosyncrasies” exhibition at the Hong Kong Arts Centre on 16 January 2014.
1.
The horses painted on the walls of the caves at Lascaux prove that works of art can be preserved forever, beyond the life span of historical pedigrees, and much longer than any art museum, kunsthallemuseum, paper, canvas, leather, ink or colours can survive.
Making art is itself a form of preservation. Making art is the best way to preserve art; it is much better than any other form of human intervention. The best way to collect art is to do so in the manner of an artistic activity, and to allow the ‘art’ contained in works of art to preserve itself. At the highest level of collecting, art collects itself in its own unique way: collecting itself becomes art, without human participation, thus enabling art to preserve itself unto the end of time.
The fundamental attitude of collecting is: to yield, to relinquish....
In their discussion of ‘affects’ and ‘percepts’, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri say that art is the only thing in the world that can preserve itself; and emphasise the point that art is the only thing in the world ‘that is preserved in itself’. Art preserves, and preserves itself within itself. Even collecting can play no role here: it is not enough. If a work of art is going to endure, collecting itself has to become a form of artistic creation.1 Must collecting itself, then, become a form of art, in order for it to last forever without human intervention, just like art itself? (The answer is yes.)
In addition to drawing on specialised routines, formats and technologies, collecting has to become an art form, preserving both itself and art. The sole purpose of collecting is to become an artistic form of preservation. First collect, then preserve, then circulate, until finally only art survives, without collectors, or artists, frames or canvas: ‘The young girl maintains the pose that she has had for five thousand years, a gesture that no longer depends on whoever made it.’2
Preserving works of art is a way of preserving the ‘other’ in the work of art (‘works’ are merely frames and canvas). What is this ‘other’? It is simply that which has the ability to preserve itself: ‘What is preserved – the thing and the work of art – is a bloc of sensations, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects.’3 Art preserves itself by the way we extract percepts and affects from our sensory field, perceptions and perspectives. Only these percepts and affects can preserve themselves, and enter into circulation.
Making art is preserving art; collecting first has to become art itself by means of art, before it can preserve itself artistically, and before it can preserve what can be preserved. What remains, what stays behind, and that which can truly be transmitted or circulated, are those ‘percepts and affects,’ which have no need for art museums and kunsthalles. Percepts and affects will outlive our socio-political, cultural-economic systems, and will endure truly and forever like the percepts and affects of the paintings on the walls of the caves of Lascaux.
Finally, viewed macroscopically, collecting art and making art are the same thing: preservation, in the broader sense of the term (in the discussion below, we will use Heidegger’s existential notion of ‘preservation’). Preserving art embraces a longer time frame than the needs of the community, society or the present age; art preservation has to outlive the community, society and the present age, as well as outlive itself, in order to preserve those percepts and affects...
In other words, the highest level of collecting treats collecting like making art, preserving art the way art preserves itself, and has to transform collecting into an art in a more trustworthy way than our present art museums do, making use of art’s ability to preserve itself, to preserve works of art, to circulate them, to extend their lives, preserve them in fragments, let them linger...
2.
In his ‘On the Concept of History’, Walter Benjamin wrote ‘The true picture (das wahre Bild) of the past flits by. (Is the past only a series of images? A series
of images from the past? Is the past itself nothing more than a series of pictures?). We can only grasp the past as an image that flashes into view at the instant of recognition, and then it vanishes.... If images of the past cannot be embraced by the present, and rush by unrecognized, then they disappear irretrievably. Pictures are things that existed in the past; they encounter the present for an instant, forming a constellation composed of the past and the present’.4
All past works of art can be considered contemporary works of art; the mission of exhibitions is to turn all the art of the past into contemporary art, to bring together ancient paintings, modern and contemporary paintings in a moment of coincidence. Collecting images of the past is to bring about their convergence in the time frame of the present. What is collecting? Living in the present while accepting images from the past with a contemporary art approach.
Collecting is a way of showing respect for images in their own right, and of appropriating the past into the present. Appropriation allows people from many past generations to have spiritual encounters with people of the present. But according to Benjamin, appropriation is not a form of preservation, but rather a destructive act. By calling attention to itself, and by bringing texts and pictures before our eyes, appropriation destructively extracts the texts and the picture from their original contexts. But by so doing, appropriation also returns them to their source; while appropriation is a form of rescue, it is also a form of punishment. In his essay ‘What is Epic Theater?’, Benjamin wrote, ‘Appropriation destroys the context.’5 But only by destroying the context, can appropriation succeed. Appropriation is redemption. Appropriation can liberate words and pictures from the shackles of the past. Only appropriation without quotation marks can offer true redemption. Only when appropriation succeeds, will the coming of the Messiah take place. Collecting art is failed appropriation.
Why do we collect? Because we get worse and worse at appropriating. Benjamin wrote: ‘Like every generation before us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.’6 This is not pessimistic. Benjamin goes on to say that illness, exhaustion, blame, compulsion, oppression and despair will only make the coming of the Messiah take place sooner. Our collecting behaviour grows weaker and weaker, and less confident. But this can only make our appropriation all the more urgent and more redemptive. Collecting is a form of desperate, fanatic appropriation.
Appropriation or collecting (writers and artists are both excellent appropriators and collectors) is like a thief hiding by the roadside, who threatens passersby with a knife to rob them of their confidence. Does people’s lack of confidence today make them rob the confidence of authors of the past? Is collecting simply a form of confiscating the ‘confidence’ of people from earlier generations? According to Benjamin, the past is something that has to be destroyed, and removed from its original context, before being placed before us. For us the past only becomes visible once it has been plundered by an alienating force, such as our present-day collecting. That past only shows its face after it has been alienated and destroyed. It is like a memory suddenly reappearing in the midst of crisis. Thus words and pictures from the past can only reveal themselves after being appropriated, quoted and collected. Here Benjamin reveals his approach to collecting as being one of historical materialism. Only through collecting, can the art of the past reveal itself, and have an opportunity to receive helpful criticism; otherwise it will sink and disappear, or descend into the servitude of commodity circulation.
To Benjamin, a collector is a person who drags out works of art from the past and destroys their contexts. By appropriating works of art, the collector deprives the work or the commodity of its practical value, or its social-theoretical significance. The authenticity of a work of art is judged by the degree of alienation the work or commodity suffers after having been appropriated. The more authentic a work is judged to be, the more alienated it will be. The more it is collected, the greater the alienation. When we evaluate a collected work of art, we judge its value and meaning by the degree to which it accords with or differs from our present-day historical circumstances. Are works of art considered greater because of the degree to which they don’t fit into our present age? By displaying works of art from the past, are we marginalising or devaluing works from the present?
Collectors and revolutionaries work hand in hand. For revolutionaries, the appearance of new things presumes the destruction of the old. Thus in a stable and orderly traditional society, appropriation and collecting are unlikely to take place. Only during the dissolution of tradition and the renaissance that follows can collecting and appropriation flourish. The most hideous kind of collecting was like that carried out by Communist official Kang Sheng, which of course took place during the Cultural Revolution. Today, with the radical separation of past and present, global and local, destruction and revival, collecting is alive and well. Collecting stimulates every kind of ‘product turnover’, but do these kinds of product turnover then stimulate collecting?
Chang Tsong-zung’s art collection, accumulated from three parallel art worlds of three different periods, forms a matrix.
For collectors in China, the twentieth century was a time of monumental shifts. The Cold War’s fluctuating landscape of the separation and convergence of Communism and Capitalism, and the disruption in its wake of the temporal and spatial continuity of all forms of human history – this all took place in that century.
Like a butterfly in a field of flowers, Chang Tsong- Zung happily collected all the finest pollen from his base in Hong Kong. His major exhibition, ‘Hanart 100: Idiosyncrasies’, which opened on 18 January 2014, was no less than his collection of ‘Twentieth- Century China’ ! As co-curator Gao Shiming has noted, the exhibition comprised ‘three different means of art production and art mechanisms: the traditional Chinese art world; the Chinese Socialist art world; and the art world of global capitalism.’ Also included were classical Chinese art, art of the Republican period, art of the revolutionary age and art from the post-1989 avant-garde movements in China. Liu Dahong’s Sacrificial Altar, Fang Zengxian’s Arouse Millions of Workers and Peasants and Lu Yanshao’s Landscape hung together in the same space and time, in the same exhibition installation. It was like being offered a toast from a newly opened barrel of wine. This was an unprecedented gathering of artworks.
3.
To become works of art, objects must be cut off from their cultural continuum, and be sacrificed on the altar of exhibition spaces. When making ‘art for art’s sake’, the artist must not appropriate the present age. Contemporary art severs our connections with the past. The more the past accumulates in a heap of ruins, the deeper we descend into the abyss of the present. Only through an act of salvation, can the past and tradition be rescued from this ever-growing heap of rubble. But before the coming of the Messiah takes place, this task is hopeless. We don’t want culture; as for the past, all that remains are cultural values. We use art to seek and engage elsewhere. Like the angel that fainted from hunger in front of a pile of grain, while awaiting our salvation we have nothing to rely on, our only tool is the art we carry in our hands. Everything slips through our fingertips. What we are left holding is art, a means of preservation. It is impossible for us to preserve the entire past. Appropriation and collecting are both forms of destructive violence. They seek to cut off all connections between art and the past and tradition, and recklessly appropriate it for present-day use. Tradition and the past are nothing but accumulated rubbish; works of art can find no authority or support in the narrative of the garbage dump. This is when collectors stand up and intervene, and make a final appeal for the authority of the idea of works of art. With so many works of art crumbling into fragments with no place to put them, the collector, in the guise of an authoritative protector, and in an age without history, without tradition, or in which history and tradition are stranded or stagnant, will provide them with an artificial archival source.
This is the whole point of collecting. Before we know clearly what that thing is that has been preserved, or circulated for all eternity, we must act. In the short term, this risky endeavour is called art. In the long term, it is called collecting. The collector must stand above and beyond art history and the history of civilisation and take on the role of a preserver.
In his 1937 essay ‘Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian’, Walter Benjamin stated that Fuchs’ greatest achievement was, ‘as a trailblazer who liberated art history from the fetishism of great masters and great works’. Great collectors must ‘observe those perverse things that people most disdain; therein lies their true strength’.7 The collector must be tolerant and broadminded, and suffer like Sisyphus; by owning things, he can rid them of their commercial nature. But the collector’s hard work only results in investing the objects with value in the eyes of the connoisseur. The collector is unable to restore any practical value to them. The collector’s dream is to inhabit an ancient, lost world, a world better than the present. They seek a world in which people are blessed with having only the things that they need in the everyday world, and nothing more; these things are then relieved from the arduous task of being practical.
This is the very kind of collector who is most severely taken to task by Giorgio Agamben: one who liberates (art) commodities from the task of circulation, and gives them an entirely new function as part of a collective. After all, the collector liberates works
of art from performing hard labour, and liberates man from consumption. In the context of the market, collecting works of art is like rescuing an art commodity caught like a spinning top between commerce and exchange, remaking it into a work of art and exhibiting it, thus endowing it with a new image, and presenting it before the public.
When we appropriate, we take advantage of the authority of works of art. But because our appropriation may destroy the context of the object of our appropriation, appropriation also damages its source, and the authority of its status. Today, works of art have lost their authority in terms of belonging to a particular tradition, geography or point of origin. Today, the authenticity of a work of art depends on whether or not it is a good copy. The originality, or authenticity of a work of art, is determined by the market and the media. The technique of ‘ageing’ works of art will someday replace the authority of an expert appraisal. These perfect copies, or ‘knockoffs’, would seem to spell the demise of collecting. But according to Benjamin, all of this is a good thing:
i) Mechanical reproductions are more reliable and authentic than handmade originals.
ii) Mechanical reproductions enable works of art to co-exist in many different places at once, and thus greatly increase their chances for survival. Photography is a classic example of this. The better the reproduction, the better the collecting.8 From this point on, works of art no longer need to rely on tradition or authority for their significance, and they can seek sanctuary with collectors. Art history then becomes a moveable border. Culture becomes a vast refuse dump. Collectors will be in charge. All works
of art will end up in the hands of collectors. They will also want to preserve any artworks that survive, and to squeeze meaning out of them. Collectors are the future legal custodians of art. We still don’t completely understand the significance of the art museum for art and artworks. Before we gain that understanding, let collectors first perform their future functions.
4.
The situation described above, is not a philosophical notion, but rather something that actually took place in the 1980s and 1990s in China. And how fortunate we are that Chang Tsong-zung was there to experience it all.
We can envy his experience from the 1980s to the present. Like a hyperactive child, his hands shaking, he tells us: ‘I saw it, I saw everything clearly, there was so much variety, I couldn’t leave any of it behind, so I kept everything!’
Hanart TZ Gallery is a memorial hall of China in the twentieth century. Its unique significance lies in the fact that the Chinese historical narrative was derailed – in other words, China in the twentieth century needs three or more historical narratives: we treat history as propaganda; we are addicted to falsifying history; we have made so many reproductions of the twentieth century, it’s no longer possible to identify the original. This is what makes the Hanart 100 collection such a valuable and unique means for preserving the Chinese collective memory.
5.
This year, 2014, marks the thirtieth anniversary of Hanart TZ Gallery. Chang Tsong-zung’s place in the world of art collecting has yet to be reevaluated. He is very much like a first-year university student, running hither and thither, whose plans can’t keep pace with his speed. He is also of two minds about his role as a collector. He has mixed feelings about the historical period represented by the major works in his collection – China in the twentieth century. Yet he maintains his objectivity. He received an elite education in the United States; he observed revolutionary and post- revolutionary China from the sidelines; and today he is still juggling Communist ideology, Christianity and Confucian thought. The more he understands the West, the more he realises: If you want to be Chinese, you have to reinvent yourself. He wants to ‘restore the Confucian li’ system of rites, that is, to promote the simple, profound yet practical traditional Chinese forms of etiquette, assumptions and ‘following the will of Heaven’.
In my view, ‘art’ for Chang Tsong-zung is a broad, collaborative symbolic activity, a mix of ritual vessels and ritual ceremonies. He wants to revive the basic relationship between ritual vessels and life, between art and the community. He is awaiting the coming of a new man, not our past life, or the art of the kind of life in which we were immersed in the past. To Chang, works of art must refute themselves, and become like daily necessities. Only then will the people of the future appear, no longer pressed, no longer full of angst. His attitude, to borrow the language of Kant, Schiller and Mallarmé, can be expressed as follows: art should be the ‘art of living’, should help us transition to a communitarian ‘new sensorium’. Art should transcend the antagonism between the precious refinements of the educated classes, and the natural spontaneity and naivety of the uneducated classes. Works of art that lead to the new life of the individual and the community, hold the promise for a new kind of humanity. I hope that the ‘Hanart 100: Idiosyncrasies’ exhibition will convince Chang Tsong- Zung, the collector, that works of art can not only preserve the spectrum of a century filled with twists and turns, but can encourage the creation of ‘ritual vessels’ for the art of life of the people.
Art is better than politics when it comes to inspiring the establishment of a new human community; something that will not come about by passing laws, but by immortalising lived experience. New equality and freedom need to be based on lived experience. From the time of Kant and Schiller, we have been looking forward to a free society, in which art forms no longer create religious, political or artistic divisions.9 Perhaps this convergence of religion, politics and art is why Chang Tsong-zung places his hopes on ‘rites’, ‘rituals’ and ‘teachings’.
6.
For the above reasons, I suppose that Chang Tsong- Zung only feels he is the temporary custodian of the works of art in his collection. In this regard he is just the opposite of the fanatical art collector Sylvain Pons in Balzac’s novel Le Cousin Pons: a chronic worrier who feels he must monopolise all culture, who slinks around Paris on rainy nights dressed in black, concealing paintings beneath his cloak, his face frozen in seriousness, as if he alone were responsible for all French culture. I am ready to hand it all over at any time.
The question is, just what aspect of twentieth-century China are all the paintings in Chang’s collection – including works by Yu Youren, Huang Binhong, Fang Zengxian, Zhang Xiaogang and Wang Guangyi – preserving, or serving as custodian for?
Perhaps we can say that this fraternity of paintings is a third kind of memory for twentieth-century China, a third version of history, in addition to the Party line, and the version in our own minds. In wall paintings in ancient tombs, emperors and generals are often depicted walking with an object clasped to their chests. Indeed, people always have to embrace something in order to give themselves the confidence to keep moving ahead. But people cannot hear their voices, nor can they understand their voices, and thus can receive no encouragement from them. This is why works of art serve as sounding boards; they remind people, interpret their own voices to them, and so allow them to move forward, accompanied by the sound of those voices. What the ‘Hanart 100’ collection preserves is the‘echo’ of the Chinese people’s voice in the twentieth century. And is what is being exhibited here also this same echo from that century?
What these 100 works present are the ‘landscape formations’ that lie far beyond the twentieth century’s political movements, emotions, revolutions, memories and memorial tablets: our affects and percepts, and our becoming. Is this not the ‘Hanart 100’?
7.
In the twentieth century, Chinese art self-destructed twice. After Yan’an or 1949, artists self-consciously became the builders of the people’s new lifestyle, and illustrated the entire process of the creation of this new lifestyle. This process was their collaborative work of art. In the post-1989 art movements, Chinese contemporary artists, following in the footsteps of their Western counterparts, once again sought to recreate a form of daily life by using commodities to add beauty to capitalist daily life and pave theway for the lifestyle of global capitalism. These two projects, one of them tragic, the other downright silly, were frequently at loggerheads. But Chinese art has dragged this contradiction into the twenty-first century. Chinese artists today are still fighting it out: Should we embrace art, or revolution? Shall we turn the revolution into a memorial tablet, or rally around the memorial tablet and make revolution? The Gao Brothers and Ai Weiwei, F4 and G8 respectively, are the living embodiments of these two contradictory trends.
Walking amidst the works in the ‘Hanart 100’, the pointed aesthetic contradictions of twentieth-century art in China explode in our faces, signaling the triumph of the Western narrative of twentieth-century Chinese art history to the present. This raises the question: Are these contradictions the symptoms of a disease? Or is this a great achievement? If they are symptoms, then they are symptoms of past experiences that we have already come to accept. Or are they mines laid on the future path of Chinese art?
The late twentieth century endured three maelstroms: the Cold War, the Cultural Revolution, and globalisation. ‘Without this evil, which is also archive fever, the desire and the disorder, there would be neither assignation nor consignation. Because assignation is a consignation.’ 10 In the overheated capitalist sauna of contemporary China, faced with an infinite variety of past archives all with different beginnings, can we do no better than to become a new breed of historian, who only researches promises, or what is taking place in the present? Indeed, these archives have more to do with the future than with the past or the present.
But to what version of the future is the ‘Hanart 100’ relevant? This is a question we should ask ourselves as we walk out of the exhibition hall.
8.
Whether we realise it or not, we are already trapped in some kind of future. This is like wanting to become an artist, designing a single-passenger airplane or traveling solo in outer space. The goal of twentieth- century avant-garde Communist artists, such as the Futurist artist and writer Vladimir Mayakovsky, were as follows: Act as you please, but do it by yourself, stay away from the crowd, go out on your own, take a ride in a glass container. Works of art are very good at bringing us back intensely to the futures we imagine in the present. They are both drafts, and advertisements, for the future.
Works of art must bring the present into the presence of the future. They torture the present in the presence of the future. They call on the present to defend and acquit itself before the future. You must be responsible to the future! This is the attitude of the revolutionary avant-garde. Using the future to censure the present adds meaning to every kind of plan. After this, we go back to our old time, and walk in step with our original realities. When we walk away from the works of art and leave the museum, we get a vague feeling that we have suddenly returned from the future to the present.
We are too addicted to our own plans. We can never carry them out, and starting them means we never intend to complete them. When Mao Zedong launched the Chinese revolution, he had no intention of bringing it to a close: this was ‘continuous revolution’. Major artists all make the same claims: This is only a small part of my work. I had to set aside ninety per cent of my plan because I ran out of money, or time, or manpower... The Chinese revolution is like an artist announcing his project, then isolating himself for thirty years, and spending all his time and energy attempting to finish it. Every project necessitates a struggle for a sacred, restrictive loneliness. Sigh! I’m still not finished, I’m still working on it. Lin Fengmian’s aesthetic-political project and Mao Zedong’s political-aesthetic project, art movements and the Cultural Revolution, all took place simultaneously in twentieth-century China. China’s Socialist Five Year Plans are a lot like artists’ projects, writing a book, preparing an exhibition, or labouring over a scientific discovery. The same way artists treat their projects, and the way they work on them as something sacred, the Chinese people also, in carrying out the construction of New China, embraced the creative ‘madness’ of a great artist. They listened to no one, and kept on flirting and whining to the bitter end.
What were the Chinese people actually doing from 1949 to 1978? They were carrying out a great responsibility that they had announced for themselves. The entire population might have sealed themselves off in an artist’s studio, like in the Cultural Revolution, when the entire Chinese population collabourated on a gesamptkunstwerk, a total work of art, in a communal space. After 1978, the people went back to a normal form of social interaction, no? Aren’t our lives all part of a plan now?
Art is a series of plans, carried out by an individual or a group, for multiple futures. In the end, it is art that will gather up and preserve those failed plans. In the twentieth century, so many plans were left unfinished; they need to be preserved. This is the kind of preservation that takes place in the ‘Hanart 100: Idiosyncrasies’ exhibition.
The Chinese Communist Revolution and the Cultural Revolution both forced us into a make-believe future; from there we made a U-turn, and came back with greater concern for the present. The artists who emerged post-1989 have been riding this bandwagon. Although the post-1989 generation has not accepted the projects of the revolution or the art of the revolutionary period, they continue to mock them while at the same time they are impotently, discreetly using the art of the revolution for their own ends, reselling and marketing it, and secretly collecting and preserving it.
The life of an artistic project is directed towards results, just like the lives of the Chinese people in the Cultural Revolution were seen as the means to an end: We must learn from Lei Feng, sacrifice ourselves to his revolutionary cause, as if life were a tool for a common cause. Art must use oil paintings, drawings, photography, video and installation to record the life in the art or utopian project, in a state dominated by bio-power. Art must use documentation to denote the life of a plan. This is not mere cruelty, but rather a manifestation of bio-political control.
What we call post-Cultural Revolution history is an inseparable mix of memory and plans, a mixed up ‘second generation’ of past and future. This is also an age of revival, in which the past and the future are exchangeable. Blueprints from the Republican period, the Ming dynasty, even the Han dynasty, can all be reactivated...and serve as our advertisements for the future.
There are too many plans in China today, too many for us to attend to. We can only show one at a time. But to show them is to remove them. Each plan can appear for 15 minutes, while the rest remain off limits. Art treats all of these plans as equal. Human history should be a museum that collects all the plans that have failed, succeeded, or been rejected by their originators. What the ‘Hanart 100’ shows us is far more than our helplessness in the face of so many plans. It offers no explanations for these plans, but it takes them all in.
There have been any number of revolutionary and utopian plans in twentieth-century China, and any number of revolutions and utopias. Many of the unrealised plans can be found in the ‘Hanart 100’. We can say that these works of art bring together and conserve many landscapes that lie outside the complex historical movements of twentieth-century China.
9.
Conservation is greater than preservation or possession. Heidegger said that works must be protected by a conservator, in order to be great. The true conservators of works of art are the entire culture and the people, not individual collectors; collectors are only representatives of the people. The modern world has no place for art, and works of art cannot find people to conserve them; that is why we need collectors. This idea is shared by Benjamin and Agamben: Art should be accumulated and preserved by collectors, and await a reevaluation. Once tradition is shattered, the spirit of tradition will live on in works of art.
According to Heidegger, works that have yet to find a conservator are latent works, works with unrealised potential.11 The finest kind of collecting begins with the collector giving his collection to the people, who will conserve it collectively. The people can conserve what those works create, as part of their communal life. At the highest level, museum-style preserving resembles ancient Greek temples, the Olympics and musical events, in that they ‘bring about public truth’, with the works revealing new worlds, and allowing people to enter this yet unexplored territory. The ‘Hanart 100’ collection will leave behind a weighty legacy for the people of the future.
Conservation is to experience the world as sacred and sublime, and to preserve this experience. Human beings offer themselves to this world. At that moment, everything around them begins to glow. Human beings worry and protect, and when the revealers, that is, the entire earth, attains transparency – this is conservation. Following Heraclitus, Heidegger states that polemos, or struggle – between eras, traditions, cultures and political systems – is the true conservator of the world. Art is what is conserved in these struggles.12
The highest purpose of the art museum is to preserve. The individual can only conserve himself by being part of a community. For the individual, solitude, living alone as a hermit, is a way of preserving a cherished individual way of life. At first, the hermit is cared for by others. But then he must find a quiet, safe place in which to settle. He then begins, and once he revitalises himself, he can start to show concern for the things around him. The hermit is obliged to restore everything in the natural world around him to its natural state. But even hermits are mortal, so during their lifetimes it is their task to nourish and protect the heavens, the earth, mankind and the spirits.13 When man finds himself in a crisis, he should seek solitude; this will enable him to begin to prepare for his own death. What he has been seeking in life all along is to make his ‘self sacrifice’ as authentic as possible. The things around him become his sacrificial vessels, and only when every detail is in place, can he proceed towards the end in peace. Actually when he is about to lose control, he still hopes his plans can be brought off without a hitch.
When a person sacrifices himself, at the moment of death, everything around him will be conserved, and like works of art, will be exhibited. People can do things that are even better than preserving.
The communal life of the community, especially the freedom of the people of the future, is where the art of today must place its trust.
10.
Conservation, preservation, upholding, sheltering, rescuing and appropriation; these are all different aspects of ‘collecting’.
11.
Art collecting places bets on the following outcomes: Whose works will circulate the most? Whose works are most representative? Whose works get to the heart of things? Whose works make the biggest splash? The happiness of the collector comes from an early realization that the affects and percepts of the people’s experience of ‘my’ works will in the end be preserved forever and ever.
Everything that is preserved, everything that is preserved in art, will circulate the furthest, will outlive social and political systems and cultural artefacts, and will outlive the circulation of ritual vessels and rituals, but will lose none of its truthfulness. This should come as a great consolation to Chang Tsong-zung, while he is still fully devoted to his career.
12.
‘The young man will smile on the canvas for as long as the canvas lasts. Blood throbs under the skin of this woman’s face, the wind shakes a branch, a group of men prepares to leave. In a novel or film, the young man will stop smiling, but he will start to smile again when we turn to this page or that moment.’14
Translation by Don J. Cohn
Notes:
1. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) p.163.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid, p. 164.
4. Walter Benjamin. ‘On the Concept of History’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969). 5. Walter Benjamin, ‘What is Epic Theater?’, op. cit., pp. 147-54.
6. Benjamin. ‘On the Concept of History’, pp. 254.
7. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, eds. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008) p. 104.
8. Ibid,p.21.
9. See Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, Steven Corcoran, trans. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010), p. 177
10. Jacques Derrida, ‘Archive Fever’, Diacritics. Vol. 25, No. 3, Summer 1995 (Johns Hopkins University Press.)
11. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought. trans. by Alfred Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) pp. 66-67.
12. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. by Ralph Mannheim ( New Haven : Yale University Press, 1959 ) pp. 61-62.
13. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought. pp. 150-151
14. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? , trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 ) p. 163.
