Censorship in China

On Tuesday, October 21, I will host a discussion about censorship in China at China Institute. My good friend Colin Chinnery, former chief curator at the Ullens Center, is flying in for the event, joined by Zhang Hongtu, an artist based in NY, who encountered problems with his painting of the Bird's Nest this year in Beijing. (It was stopped in customs and not allowed into China.)

It's funny. With all the hype around the Chinese art scene, little attention is given to this issue, which still hovers over everything that takes place. As Exhibit A, I am passing along this email I just received from Defne Ayas in Shanghai who has run into problems curating the E-arts festival, a city run event.

hi dear barbara,
how are you?
shanghai is busy and continues to be sceptic and more inward-looking than ever.
i am now up to my nose in e-arts, a first attempt to work with a gov't foundation.
dealing with not so much political censorship (so far it has all been smooth), but more so an aesthetic one. after submitting proposal 6 month ago, giving materials for cship review 3 months ago, the young staff tells me that they do not like the way shih chieh huang's work look, how it is ugly and should be replaced, can we remove it?!
they ask me to screen an artist video twice on different screens, when the artist has given me the mandate to screen the work only in one screen.
when i say, i cannot, they say well the artist wouldn't know, it looks so nice on two screens. !!
it is a learning curve for all of us.
hope to see you here again.
love,
defne

here is the link to the video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBRXn4ahblw

I dont get it

Elizabeth Peyton's show opened at the New Museum this week. Roberta Smith says in today's New York Times, "The best collapse the distances between realist painting, modernist abstraction, personal snapshot and magazine, and are accessible, devotional and visually alive. Their gem-rich colors are applied with brazen abandon, like miniature action paintings."

I've obviously been looking at Chinese art too long, since these small scale, awkward paintings barely register with me and I find the references to rock stars and art stars far too insular. Not that anyone cares what I think, but the world feels like a far bigger place than conveyed by these works. Still, I know they sell for millions and Peter Schjeldahl once described Peyton as the "moral center" of the Whitney Biennial. I don't get it. Do you?

G&G and Meckseper

Gilbert & George at the Brooklyn Museum press preview

Josephine Meckseper at MoMA

More Art, Some Politics

Sarah Palin makes me crazy. I hate that anyone finds her appealing since she so embodies a goyishe version of what my mother wanted me to be--success as a Donna Reed looking mom in a man's world. Last night watching the debate, I kept thinking of works by Marilyn Minter and Lutz Bacher, the way they were once accused of adopting the male gaze and dressing it up as a feminist statement. Sarah Palin is exactly that, the centerfold posited as feminist in the midst of a male arena. It never becomes feminist, but it's powerfully alluring, at least to those who never revised their gaze to begin with. In other words, it works - if you are unself-conscious in your sexist outlook on the world.

In any case, the debate made everything posited as political outside the political sphere look out of date and old-fashioned. At least, that's what I thought at the preview for Gilbert & George, a retrospective resolutely stuck in the 1990s. G&G make these mural-sized collaged statements that look a lot like stained-glass windows, but in spirit are the Disneyed rendition of queer theory. Lots of AIDS, sperm, cocks and youths turned into punchy logos for the G&G brand. The duo have always posed as prim, grey suited, dandies, a bit nerdy, that sets them apart from the all-black art world. And their billboards are populist though I'm not sure if they are popular.

Over at MOMA, there was a different style of political art, but one equally rooted in past tactics. Rmember deconstruction? That's Josephine Meckseper's installation using fashion shoots plus ads from the 1970s that could have been made by Victor Burgin circa 1977. This work really cried out for a picture of Palin--let's deconstruct that--instead of women in lingerie, an easy target. There's one small corner piece where Meckseper mentions the war, but the rest of her attack on consumerism and power was already being taken care of by Wall Street which has unilaterally rid of us of our spending power this week. Oh, well, since this hasn't yet effected the art world--Christie's is putting up a Matisse for $160,000,000 in November--we can think about that tomorrow.

Vik Muniz in China

So, I'm at the party for the show, Untitled (Vicarious): Photographing the Constructed Image, on view at Gagosian Gallery and who do I meet but Vik Muniz who currently has a great show up at Sikkema Jenkins. This conceptual artist always gives you a lot to see and think about--this time he has meticulously reconstructed the underside of masterpieces, so all you seen is the back of the frames and the provenance labels--and I would never doubt his tastes which are impeccable. So, he tells me he's working on a project in Beijing. He will garb 600 students at the Central Academy in grey, black and white sweatsuits, then arrange them into a tableaux vivant of a pixalated photographic image. He's doing this as a project with Coca Cola and China is the perfect place to do to get together a choreographed mass of people.

But Muniz made it quite clear that he was less than impressed with the Chinese art scene. "There's certainly alot of it, but I only like maybe two artists, Ai Weiwei and the guy with the silver boulders", he told me, referring to Zhang Wan, who I think is terribly superficial. As much as I was tempted to argue with Muniz--after all, he made me feel like a fool to have devoted so much of my time to a bad art scene--I felt he was on to something important. Japan impresses someone like Muniz, an avid traveler, but China, especially Beijing, is downright declasse and cheap in comparison. The way the art seems mass-produced only adds to the impression of a city with a scintilla of grace or design, despite the latest architectural Olympic additions. I can't argue with that. I just said, China is difficult. But, it wasn't the difficulties that rubbed this artist the wrong way, it was the lack of taste. The thing that confounded him is how this art scene had grown so large and so successful without the elements that he views as essential to culture--style, grace, thoughtfulness, ideas. But, for me, that's the fascinating thing about the Beijing art scene: it is a total extravaganza of bad-ness (bad ideas and bad art) that represents the epitome of art at this moment in the 21st century. After all, if Damien Hirst can raise $170 million in two days for highly commercial Hirst knock-offs, whose to say that China isn't entitled to produce an entire art market doing the same thing. In fact, one can argue, Hirst learned from China. In that light, even artists as talented as Vik Muniz come off as second-tier wannabes, who can't quite understand how their good intentions and self-discipline is getting in their way.

Cultural Revolution

Creative Time's Democracy in America extravaganza at the Armory got me thinking about political art again. And what better follow-up than the Art of the Cultural Revolution show at Asia. Now, that's when art was political, leading to arrests and executions for those who did not follow the party line. It's a fascinating show--like every Cold War-age American, I am a sucker for this kitsch--though I am not sure it makes clear the dark side of state-run art production. Instead, it emphasizes how much this period has influenced contemporary Chinese art by introducing western painting to the Chinese academy. That's one way of looking at it, though sometimes these days, I wish it had more lasting influences. At least these pictures of peasants, soldiers and workers depicted peasants, soldiers and workers as opposed to alot of today's Chinese art which only reflects the blatant consumerism of the society. Two shows up now in New York demonstrate exactly what I mean: He Sen at Jack Tilton, near pornography of China dolls, and Xu Zhen at James Cohan, a replica of a Shanghai minimart. Though I found the supermarket charming--it made me miss China a bit--it really wasn't much of a concept. (It did appeal to the tourist in most art lovers, who clammered to buy a stick of gum or a bottle of water with Chinese on the label.) He Sen, I'm sure appeals to another brand of tourism, the white guy shopping for an Asian girlfriend, which is also prevalent in China. In contrast, the women in the cultural revolution material looked far more forward-thinking and active. And the tschtokes on view at the Asia Society--Mao plates, mugs, match books, statues--were more satisfying souveniers than the items on sale at Xu Zhen's shop. Though my skin crawls whenever I hear a Chinese culture official talk about art "uplifting the people," some of these shows now up in New York make me long for an art that is about something more than cashing in on stereotypes.

Creative Time's Democracy in America

This Sunday, Creative Time opened its one week convention titled Democracy in America: The National Campaign, more than 40 projects filling the Park Avenue Armory. Like a mini-biennial, though actually the same size as the one I saw in Taipei, it was a real antidote to all the somber political art videos that I saw in Asia. Here, instead of routinely recycling well-intentioned issue-oriented text-based tropes, anarchy ruled with political icecream, political soup, political karaoke, political reenactments, political queer, political t-shirts and bumperstickers, most of which made fun of the notion that democracy was still up and running in America.

The entire afternoon was an exercise in some kind of public art celebration---the art world with lots of kids on hand. So you found Carlo McCormick, Jeffrey Deitch, Kirby Gookin and Robin Kahn, my favorite editor Barbara Macadam, Nancy Princenthal, and even, the usually shy Holland Cotter, spending their day wandering around the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, while Creative Time director Anne Pasternack and curator Nato Thompson gave face time like professional politicians. My favorite moment--Nato taking the stage at the karaoke station to belt out some tunes--not Bob Dylan, surprisingly. And lots of people licking creamsicles from the icecream truck that also dispensed advice on first amendment rights. Yes, political art can be fun, especially when it both participates and pokes fun at the state of the activism today. The show sure beats the endless emails I get from Artists Against the War and other activist groups that think that waste our time urging us to sign web petitions against Sarah Palin. (Yes, I hate to say it but its true, these group serves are less interesting than art that makes fun of list serves.)