Art and the Politics of Visibility

Contesting the Global, Local and the In-Between

Zeena Feldman, Zeena Feldman

• Éditeur: I.B. Tauris
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786722942
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Art
• Sous-sujet: History of Contemporary Art

How does cultural context affect the interpretation of art? What makes artists' work transnational or national in character, and how will their visibility be impacted by either label? Art and the Politics of Visibility questions these dynamics, asking how the dissemination of visual culture on a global scale affects art and its institutions. Taking Shanghai-based artist Yang Fudong's practice as a point of departure, this volume focuses on how politically charged images produced in contemporary art, cinema, literature, news media and fashion become widely consumed or marginalised. Through case studies of artists including Titus Kaphar, Sara Maple, Shirin Neshat, J.M. Coetzee, Barbara Walker and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the book illuminates the relationship between visibility, politics and identity in contemporary visual culture.

1

Chinese Artist Films in the Transnational Art World: Yang Fudong and the Politics of Precarity

Chris Berry

Introduction

Yang Fudong¹ is a ‘hot property’ Chinese artist, and ‘almost every month at some art-world outpost, one of his films or videos is being screened’.² The inclusion of his epic five-part work Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest in the 2007 Venice Biennale marks his global breakthrough. As attested to by the 2012 launch of Moving Image Review and Art Journal – a forum for debates surrounding all forms of artists’ moving image and media artworks’³ – as moving images are by now well-established in the gallery, and the work of artists like Yang Fudong demonstrates that they are also a staple of Chinese contemporary art. The emergence of the gallery as a space for the moving image is also an important resource for Chinese independent film, because an artist film is also a kind of independent film. The overlap between artist films and independent films goes beyond shared sensibilities and aesthetics that set them apart from commercial filmmaking. What makes a film qualify as independent in China has its own specificity, including not sending the film to be censored by the Film Bureau of the State Administration of Film, Radio and Television (SARFT) for commercial release in movie theatres.⁴ Artist films also fall outside the purview of SARFT, and this is another reason why they are effectively also independent films.

What are the political implications of the emergence of moving image work into the visibility afforded by the art gallery, including the space of the transnational art world? Because art galleries in China are not regulated by the notoriously strict Film Bureau but by other state agencies, local galleries can often exhibit moving-image work that might not otherwise win approval from censors. Furthermore, the local and transnational art worlds have become important sources of funding as well as alternative exhibition sites. If we understand agency as the ability to act shaped by circumstance and therefore distinct from the Cartesian ideas of the sovereign subject and artistic genius,⁵ how have these production conditions enabled, shaped and constrained the agency of Chinese filmmakers and moving-image artists?

I argue that Yang’s work can be characterised by what I call the ‘precarious gesture’. What does it mean to invoke ‘precariousness’, or as it is increasingly called, ‘precarity’? For some writers it marks the vulnerability of the human condition, where the unpredictable demands of others create ethical and political quandaries that test us in various ways.⁶ Drawing on Levinas, Judith Butler writes that, ‘Precariousness implies living socially, that is, the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other’.⁷ For others, precarity has become more common because of neoliberal capitalism and the concomitant retreat of the state, leaving us exposed on the global labour market with fewer legal protections. This new condition has led to the coining of such terms as Paul Virno’s ‘the precariat’,⁸ which Simon During argues has taken over from the subaltern as the figure of those completely excluded from the power structure under contemporary conditions.⁹ However, ‘precarization has really a double face: it is possible to speak of a kind of flexibilization from below […] a contested field […] in which the attempt to start a new cycle of exploitation also meets desires and subjective behaviors which express the refusal of the old, so-called Fordist regime of labour and the search for another, better, we can even say flexible life’.¹⁰ In other words, we must not only pay attention to precarity as a new strategy of exploitation but also to the tactical responses it generates in efforts to turn it to new ends.

Chinese artists lead a more precarious existence today compared to the era of the security of socialist planning that lasted until the market economy took off in the early 1990s, and the experience their precarity in a double sense specific to China. During the command economy of Maoist China, recognition as an artist led to membership in the China Artists Association, which guaranteed salaries and housing but also prescribed the form and content of artistic output. (There were no independent artists.) In the market economy, however, there are few guarantees but also greater latitude as state prescription has given considerable space to market constraint and opportunities.¹¹ Elisabeth Slavkoff has argued that Yang Fudong makes direct reference to this emergence of precarity in Chinese social and labour conditions in the title of his eight-minute multi-channel installation work Close to the Sea (2004), because the Chinese title Xiahai (下海) is also a common colloquial expression for leaving the iron rice bowl of the state system and operating in the market economy.¹² Yang Fudong and the reception of his art are certainly dependent on others, and in particular the unpredictable tides of Chinese politics and fickle fashions of the transnational art market. However, his success and (I presume) wealth mean he cannot be compared with the remittance workers often held up as typical examples of the precariat. Comparing Yang Fudong and the remittance worker, two aspects of precarity are highlighted. First, precarity in human labour conditions sums up peculiar mixes of vulnerability and opportunity that form new conditions of risk.¹³ Second, the resulting experiences of precarity are highly variable: ‘nobody should simplify precarization into a new identity’.¹⁴ Indeed, if we are to understand the politics of precarity under globalised neoliberalism, we must attend to its ‘double face’ and its variety.

Where, then, does precarity inhere in Yang Fudong’s work and working conditions, and perhaps by extension those of other Chinese contemporary artists using moving images in the transnational art world? I propose the ‘precarious gesture’ as a double term to understand both Yang’s conditions of production and the aesthetic characteristics and themes of his work, as well as how they are linked. To that end, I first detail the precarious gesture as a quality of the work. Perched on the watershed of various possibilities, Yang’s films constitute a new cinema of the gesture that is tentative, mysterious and beguiling, but also sometimes frustrating. Second, I argue that these qualities of the work are themselves responses to what suits both the Chinese art market and the transnational art world, or, as I will call it, the ‘artscape’. To operate in the artscape is itself a precarious gesture, where artists, critics, curators and audiences mix under conditions of mutual unfamiliarity, and even more so for non-Western artists because the artscape remains dominated by Western culture. Finally, I return to Yang’s works to ask whether the price of operating in the artscape is self-orientalism and apolitical pastiche. I argue that Yang Fudong’s work refuses to deliver messages but that it does dwell on the gesture. In so doing it, it is shaped by the need to deliver work that can be consumed on the global artscape, but simultaneously it invokes the local Chinese history of those gestures to interrogate what it means today in globally engaged China to be an intellectual – a social category that in China includes artists. This mixture of responding to the unpredictable demands of the other in the artscape and using the possibilities afforded in so doing to further Yang’s own art is precisely his own embodiment of precarity as a contemporary Chinese artist and a response to that condition that reveals the politics of global visibility in the artscape.

The Precarious Gesture in Yang Fudong’s Work

In what sense do Yang Fudong’s artist films come to constitute a new cinema of the precarious gesture? Because artist films in China (and elsewhere) are more inaccessible than most theatrical work, it is both necessary and difficult to convey this quality to the reader. Yang’s multi-channel works could not be circulated by the single-screen medium of DVD anyway, and even his single-channel works are not readily available on DVD or accessible through other platforms. This elusiveness impedes close and specific analysis. Perhaps the fleeting opportunities to view the works are themselves a part of their precarity. What is the status of this and other elements composing precarity in art today?

Nicholas Bourriaud argues in favour of precarious art as responding to a precarious society:

art not only seems to have found the means to resist this new, unstable environment, but has also derived from it […] we need to reconsider culture (and ethics) on the basis of a positive idea of the transitory, instead of holding on to the opposition between the ephemeral and the durable and seeing the latter as the touchstone of true art and the former as a sign of barbarism.¹⁵

Following this affirmation, Bourriaud and others have offered lists of qualities to look out for. Bourriaud himself speaks of ‘transcoding’ (where the ontological status of what we are looking at is undermined), ‘flickering’ (where temporal dimensions are destabilised) and ‘blurring’ (where focus is unclear).¹⁶ In an article on the Canadian exhibition Silent as Glue, Katherine Ritter stresses indeterminability, yielding interpretation to the viewer and leaving the future of the work to fate rather than trying to preserve or fix it as constituting precarity.¹⁷

At first sight, Yang Fudong’s artist films do not seem to fit these definitions. After all, films are fixed and not open to interventions from the public. Furthermore, in Yang’s case, the works appear carefully planned, highly polished and betray few signs of contingency in the production process. Nor are they particularly fragile. However, Bourriaud also warns that, ‘This precarious state […] is largely confused with the immaterial or ephemeral character of the artwork’. He goes on to emphasise that, ‘The precarious represents a fundamental instability, not a longer or shorter material duration; it inscribes itself into the structure of the work itself and reflects a general state of aesthetics’.¹⁸ With these observations in mind, certain characteristics of ‘fundamental instability’ can be observed in Yang’s works.

The first precarious trait of Yang’s work is an unstable temporality produced by the invocation of different times and places in the one setting. Perhaps this is a kind of ‘flickering’, in Bourriaud’s sense. For example, his monumental Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, (2003–7) consists of five parts, respectively lasting 29, 46, 53, 70 and 90 minutes, making a total of almost five hours.¹⁹ Shot in black-and-white on 35mm film, it has been transferred to DVD and, in my experience, is usually projected onto very large screens. The projection of the video sometimes creates a softness to the image that is, perhaps, reminiscent of inkwash landscape paintings associated with pre-modern Chinese art. This might be what Bourriaud calls ‘transcoding’. In the first part, the characters appear in cl...