‘MEGA MODERN’ Residency at 501 Contemporary Art Centre, Huang Je Ping, Chongqing

According to the psychoanalYSL collective “Criticality’ (which is a word that doesn’t even really make grammatical sense) has become the necessary smokescreen for art’s absorption into capital” (‘The High Weiwei To Hell’ 2011)

Concluding that; “Whilst the cult of Ai Weiwei is a uniquely spectacular phenomenon, it represents the quintessence of a central problem of our hyper-financialised art system: that perhaps resistance is futile in the ‘Age of Complicity’ and maybe there is no simple oppositional solution.”

So, with this in mind I read an article ‘Art scene- Control Machine’ by Pascal Gielen in ‘Art and Activism in the Age of Globalisation’ (2011)

Gielen’s argument goes something like this (very abridged):

· *POST FORDISM: fluid working hours, high mobility, hyper-communication, interest in creativity= scene florishes

· **‘alternative scene’ has become quality label in social centre

· ***Local scenes: London/Chongqing provide just enough intimacy for global nomad

· ****Foucauldian panoptic décor: control of seeing and being seen, theatricality

· Can artists subvert this use of creativity?

YES! Creative labour is immaterial, and individualised therefore one may

1) “play with it unseen” (make labour/ art invisible)

2) Work lazily/ slowly

3) Destroy brain with drugs

PsychoanalYSL tick two of the three boxes above. They work too hard.

Gielen’s forth type of subversion is ‘reflection’ and this is the territory which the collective occupy most comfortably.

Geilen gives the literal and astute example of Michealangelo Pistoletto’s Twenty-two, less two at 53^rd Venice Biennial; reflection of media hive. “The attention given by other media decides the “spectacularity” of an event…media are constantly seeking confirmation from other media to decide the importance of an event…the artist uses the channels of the media to expose it’s own mechanisms”. Of course as Geilen points out this action is especially pertinent in Italy where Berlusconi has control of much of the press.

This art has been deemed “the art of over-identification” and I would add to this category the work of Damien Hirst, specifically For the Love of God. Hirst wanted to push the art market to it’s limits by producing the most expensive artwork ever. Pushing a system to it’s limits is the operation of “the art of over-identification”. The artwork cost 10m to produce and Hirst aimed to sell it for 50m. The artist decided to make the work in 2005, before the financial crisis and when the art market was an ever-expanding bubble. By the time he got to selling it, eighteen months later the market had crashed and he ended up buying the artwork himself- a reflection of the need for artists to keep the price of their work stable, so the system is self feeding. This artwork perfectly reflects the system in which it operates.

PsychoanalYSL compare Damien Hirst’s For The Love Of God to Ai Weiwei’s sunflower seeds, claiming “Just like Hirst’s diamond skull, Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds simply re-presents financial might over existing labour and trade relations by employing an excess of materiality to produce money as spectacle.” Whilst I would agree with this statement, I take issue with the following “Neither Hirst nor Weiwei problematise the role of labour in their work, unlike Santiago Sierra, for example, who specifically foregrounds the economic realities within which art functions.” To my mind Sierra, Hirst and Pistoletto’s works all do the same job of reflection.

A future post will look at the ‘scene’ which Geilen talks about, something very close to the hearts of the collective and of course very relevant to the concept of a residency.

References:

‘Art scene- Control Machine’ by Pascal Gielen in ‘Art and Activism in the Age of Globalisation’ (2011 NAi Publishers, Rotterdam)

‘The High Weiwei To Hell’ For the psyschoanalYSL free school press, Christopher Thomas, 2011 (pamphlet for Goldsmiths interim show)

At Goldsmiths where I study my teachers seem constantly to be asking “What is Contemporary?” This was the topic for a series of artist’s talks and discussing this with a former Goldsmiths student I soon worked out this was a repetitive theme for the talk series, year after year, the new never gets old. This obsession of the school reflects the overall emphasis on a zeitgeist which artists and curators must possess in order to gain success. A German word, zeitgeist translates as “spirit of the times” (Zeit=time/tide, Geist=ghost). Where can I find this spirit? Is it an aesthetic? A form? A state? A style? Maybe even a concept? This search is what drives the art market. In some circles the formal spirit has more to do with capital and the conceptual spirit is somehow oppositional to capital, but for me there is no distinction. In fact, I think the answer lies on the surface, everything you want to see is there to see, art is about revelation, looking.

We are now in the midst of the degree show season and my compatriots at Goldsmiths are currently putting the final touches to their final exhibition. I managed to catch some of the early birds; Royal Academy and Slade. I didn’t make it to Royal College of Art but have studied reviews.

What strikes me when I look at the graduate work is how much it emulates the work of more established artists. I can’t post images as I don’t have permissions but type in the following search terms into google and you’ll get a feel for London degrees shows in 2011: David Wojtowycz, George Henry Longly, ART SCHOOL UK (by John Reardon), Seth Price, Nicolas Ceccaldi, Alistair Frost (all men too?). Many of them have studied at London colleges and/ or have exhibited in London recently which seems to challenge the idea that we live in an international village of the artworld. My suspicion is that students are far lazier than that, and I speak from experience. Once in London, it sucks you up into its vacuum and everything on the periphery gets lost. I’ve also found it’s a very locally specific scene in Chongqing. The zietgeist here, from what I can tell so far is a response to the massive architectural project of building colossal numbers high rise apartments to accommodate the exodus from rural to urban climes.

PsychoanalYSL use surface observations to build a critical spectacle of the zeitgeist. The process of observation and re-presentation studies the operation of the zeitgeist, showing it to be capital’s obedient gimp.

“Indeed, practically all metaphors for style amount to placing matter on the inside, style on the outside. It would be more to the point to reverse the metaphor. The matter, the subject, is on the outside; the style is on the Inside. As Cocteau writes: “Decorative style has never existed. Style is the soul, and unfortunately with us the soul assumes the form of the body.” Even if one were to define style as the manner of our appearing, this by no means necessarily entails an opposition between a style that one assumes and one’s “true” being. In fact, such a disjunction is extremely rare. In almost every case, our manner of appearing is our manner of being. The mask is the face.” On Style, Susan Sontag, 1965

I’m defiantly not going to be lonely or stuck for people to talk to, there are always people coming in and out of my studio. So far it’s a real rag-tag bunch of miss fits (rich man, journalist, oil baron, art students, mistresses, ex-pats) and we seem to spend a lot of time eating/drinking/talking which is useful for research.

For my first and Jenny Steele’s (previous resident) last day in Chongqing we were taken out for a big lunch by Yanyan’s friend known simply as “rich man”. Following little eating and much drinking and “Gan bei” (cheers) we lulled into an afternoon of studio visits, then dumpling for dinner and more drinking. I’ll do a post which details the artists in the various studios once I’ve seen more.

“Rich man” is in property development, the main industry after weapons manufacturing in Chongqing. He owns a restaurant, Karaoke bar and massage parlour nearby to Chongqing and became friends with Yanyan as he’s interested in art. His interest is not as I first predicted as a buyer, but as a student (although he does own a couple of Yanyan’s paintings). He applied to the nearby Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts last year and after being rejected Yanyan has taken “rich man” under his wing, giving him lessons from what I’ve observed so far consisting of life drawing, using his mistresses as models. I had been told before arriving in Chongqing that because of the high technical standards students must achieve to enrol at an academy, there are many wannabe art students looking to build their portfolio. My first meeting with “rich man” saw him disconcertingly follow me into my studio with his motley crew and proceed to rifle through Yanyan’s paintings whilst his mistress tickled out a tune on the piano without so much as an introduction.

After getting used to the many comings and goings of my studio I’ve quickly learned not to treat it as my space. Shortly after the motley arrival came Yanyan, with Jenny, Rose, and his usual crew of students in tow. Rose is an old art school friend of Yanyan who currently lives New York working as a writer and journalist previously for CNN and the Economist. While “rich man“received an art lesson from Yanyan and Jenny packed up her exhibition, I had a chat with Rose about the history of art education in Chongqing and how the situation has shifted since she was studying here nearly 30 years ago. Her parents are both artists, now in their seventies, and like her they studied at Sichuan Institute. Rose studied not at the Institute proper, but the ‘attached school’ which runs a four year diploma type course for students younger than university age. She describes the course as “an amazing nursery” for teenagers and it was offered at her time without fees. Since the 1980s a number of crash courses have emerged which take a quarter of the time of Rose’s diploma which was forced to charge fees by this time. Students were given a choice of paying for four years or only one and now the president of Sichuan Institute Zhongli Luo has made the decision to close the lengthier course in the midst of criticism over the quality of his student’s out-put. After working in Hong Kong and Austraila Rose has settled in New York where she has recently discovered and started to take classes at the Art Student’s League.

I’ve come to Chongqing with a double pronged mission. I have my own research into the apparently unified style emerging from Chinese Art Academies, as well as an exhibition to realise with collective psychoanalYSL (Joey Holder, Benjamin Orlow & Christopher Thomas) who will be joining me in a few weeks. These projects are without a doubt allied, as my reason for inviting the collective is palpable in their guiding operation to “take hipness as form”. Having been told by many voices, Chinese, English and American, artists and curators alike, that there is very little ‘content’ to the surplus of oil paintings emerging from Chinese academies, for psychoanalYSL, the separation between form and content is misplaced. Their London exhibition THE EMACIATED SPECTATOR was immediately identified as urgent to current conversations concerning the professionalisation of the art system (‘Rebel Without A Course’, Peter Suchin, Art Monthly, April 2011). This exhibition will export the collective’s hyper-real vision of their ‘scene’ in London to Chongqing, then reflect this back at UK audiences to consider: Where does a style come from? Is critical discourse simply a smoke screen for art’s absorption into capital?

Since my invitation to undertake this project the collective have watched with keen interest the monetization of activism and festival of protest which exploded during Ai Weiwei’s detention by Chinese authorities. I was the butt of a wrong footed response from a prominent ACE funded contemporary art organisation in the UK who pulled out of showcasing this project for fear of being associated with politically problematic cultural exchange with China. So, for UK audiences we currently have two talks set-up for Autumn, one at Chinese Arts Centre (Manchester) who are partners in this project, and another at Arnolfini (Bristol) as part of the Tertulia series. We’re looking for an opportunity to bring the exhibition to the UK after showcasing in Chongqing.

501 Arts Centre is situated in Huang Je Ping, the artistic district of the sprawling city of Chongqing. The first thing you see when you google “Chongqing” is that it is the largest city in the world, with 35 million residents and hundreds moving here from the countryside each day. Upon arrival the drive from the airport speaks of this. The high rise apartments are never ending. The main industry in the city was previously armaments, and although some are still active, many of the bullet and tank factories have been converted into art studios. The Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, established in 1940 is among the oldest and most eminent art academies in China alongside Central Academy of Fine Art (Beijing). It’s the locus of a growing art scene in the Huang Je Ping district of Chongqing which is dominated by over 15,000 art students. Students are catered for with a lively night market and the government have even commissioned street artists to adorn the Soviet architecture with graphic cartoony murals and stencils to rival Shorditch.

501 Contemporary Art Centre (gallery and studios) was established by the director Yanyan in 2006. Yanyan’s the facilitator of this project and I’ll be working with him on a daily basis. A graduate from Sichuan Institute he spent years as an artist in Beijing before returning to Chongqing to take up a teaching post at the art school. He found a critical mass of artists, including himself looking for studio space and initiated the rental of an empty building, a former train factory. Other similar set-ups have emerged since and the cycle of regeneration has already begun to take its toll with rents of the 501 studios rocketing and commercial graphic artists mostly now occupying the trendy creative hub. Artists are being forced out to cheaper districts at a pace faster than I’ve witnessed for their London counterparts. Yanyan describes himself as a sensitive and pessimistic outsider to the academy system, twenty years younger than the president at Sichuan Institute Zhongli Luo. Luo has benefited from a career supported by the Chinese government who famously used his romantic painting of a peasant titled “Father”. Yanyan has a dedicated flock of students at his heals who praise him as an exceptional teacher, one who understands the best conversations happen outside the classroom.