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In Between.
In between…
..several fashionable art
galleries in the 798 art district in Da Shan Zi, Beijing, there stands an enormous
cage, the gaps in its bars allow easy ingress and exit to the curious many of
whom are eager to be photographed in this state of mock incarceration. The
cage, with its mobile content of passing humans, plays with the notion of
transgression as the occupants of such a space would not normally move so
freely across its boundaries. This cage can be read as a symbol, a synecdoche
(part for whole) or a mis-en-abime (microcosm or repetition in miniature) even
an accidental confession -a copy born of dawning self-consciousness- of the
status of the art district itself; simultaneously art’s commercial showcase and
site of permitted transgression. Caught in a frame.
Wings clipped to suit the size of the cage.
In
between…
…the actual event of past provenance and an, as yet
unforeseen, imaginary event (other boundary of the present, putative end of
current impasse) in the future…
Caught in between…
(Caught between a real
past horizon and an invisible horizon up ahead, with open skies beyond,
imagined, but currently inaccessible, as if caught in parentheses, as it will
one day be viewed, with the arrival of the second parenthetical closure, as a
period caught in between…).
Chinese art caught in
between… between the old opening-up and a new opening yet to come. Trapped in a
game; a game whose rules are formed by its limits, by these limits, one certain
(historical, subject to the test of memory, of chronicles) the other
unforeseeable, but endlessly foretold, ‘chronicle of an event foretold…’ but
endlessly postponed, subject to an apparently infinite deferral… Gift of the future, yet like the future tense, always (only) in the
future (and never in the present). So constituting the present as the
time of ambiguity… and of ambiguity as criticism, leading to a light, perhaps
even, irresponsible, use of historical matter, most evident in the use of Cultural Revolution memorabilia, of poster images,
slogans and other ’iconic’ images. A sighting of the
all-to-familiar as an artistic citing. A sight both both ‘in’ and ‘out’,
both complicit and transgressive, a sighting of the possibilities of art as a
‘safe-citing’, siting the art work (itself a work of re-situation, of
re-citing) in a new situation. A cite-uation
which permits dual citing (re-citing) offering a familiar litany of recited
clichés, a seemingly endless reproduction of icons posing as a kind of
stultified criticism (the gag is on show, not the word); the endless parade of
parody and pastiche (here) only leads to a forgetting of the seriousness
bitterness of the past. Memorabilia substituted for memory. Better no politics
in art than a white-wash, washing over the spilt blood of previous generations…
the sacrifice of generations all too easily forgotten, ‘actively forgotten’, as
is the role of the symbolic head on the banknote – a critique deferred in
favour of myth? A procession of endless play with the received; with a knowing
nod to the knowing, but an accommodating smile for the eye of the censor
(apparently unknowing)… a formula repeated often - a dead end.
Occasionally transcended by clever artists, but more
usually maintaining a stifling blanket which pretends politics, pretends to be
surviving as ‘radical’, but is altogether too light to deal with the burden of
history. A proper treatment, or working through as a
form of mourning, calls for a responsible use of memory including the
requirement of a call for justice… this is the job of art. (One example of such
can be found in the photographs of Chen Jiagang, in the sequence entitled, ‘The
Third Front’, where a visual technique has found a topic which rescues it (the
technique) from banality - as exhibited in the many other artists who use this
recent stylistic feature; documentary background with surreal-type figure or
detail).
However to ask the question now would be to show naiveté;
to ask it later (‘afterwards’) would be redundant. But this is now, and perhaps
this is the best that is possible…
©
Peter Nesteruk,
2008.