Abstract
In this two-part essay I shall examine the recent revival of interest in Marxian cultural analysis and radical democracy critically as part of the mapping of a wider history of oppositional crisis thinking in relation to modern and contemporary art. In part one I shall argue that crisis thinking in relation to modern and contemporary art involves what are ultimately unresolvable shuttlings between differing conceptions of art’s optimum critical distancing from or proximity to society; shuttlings still very much at the heart of current neo-Marxian cultural debates, as well as attempts to align contemporary art with radical antagonistic democracy. In part two I shall attempt to look beyond conventional western(ised) conceptions of art’s critical distancing from or proximity to society by examining the rather less clearly defined positioning of contemporary art in the People’s Republic of China. I shall conclude by arguing that contemporary art in the PRC holds out critical possibilities that have not only been overlooked or significantly downplayed in post-Enlightenment westernised contexts but that also have the potential to resonate tellingly with the problematic consensual politics of neo-liberalism as well as the profound relativities of contemporary globalised society .
The term ‘post-crisical’ refers here to the notion of a reflexive art beyond the crisis-driven criticality characteristic of western post-Enlightenment discourses.
An amended version of the two-part article ‘Besiege Wei to Rescue Zhao: a Stratagem towards a Post-Crisical Art pt. I’, Broadsheet : Contemporary Visual Art + Culture 42 (3) (September 2013), pp. 174–179; and ‘Besiege Wei to Rescue Zhao: a Stratagem towards a Post-Crisical Art pt. II’, Broadsheet : Contemporary Visual Art + Culture 42 (4) (December 2013), pp. 241–249.
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Notes
- 1.
Novak (1980, pp. 34–44).
- 2.
Habermas (1981, pp. 3–15).
- 3.
Here, the term ‘modernism’ refers to modern forms of cultural thinking and practice that first emerged with the development of industrialised and urbanised societies in Europe and North America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term ‘postmodernism’ refers to a diverse range of cultural/philosophical discourses and practices that first came together within an international context during the late twentieth century and that seek to problematize rationalist-progressive attitudes associated with Western(ised) modernism. Here, ‘modernity’ refers to economic and social relations associated with the historical shift from traditional agrarian societies to those dominated by industrialisation and urbanisation. ‘Postmodernity’ refers to complex and dynamic economic and social relations perceived to have arisen as a long-term consequence of modernity and in relation to postmodernism.
- 4.
Baudelaire ([1863] 1964, pp. 12–15).
- 5.
Greenberg (1992 [1939], pp. 529–541).
- 6.
Greenberg (1982 [1965], pp. 5–10).
- 7.
Bürger (1984).
- 8.
Ulmer (1985, pp. 83–110).
- 9.
Peter Bürger, op. cit.
- 10.
Benjamin (1992 [1936], pp. 512–520).
- 11.
Trotsky et al. (1992 [1938], pp. 526–529).
- 12.
Meecham and Sheldon (2005, pp. 237–264).
- 13.
Taylor (2005).
- 14.
Bürger, op. cit.
- 15.
Krauss (1985).
- 16.
Foster (1996).
- 17.
Bishop (2005, pp. 120–123).
- 18.
Laclau and Mouffe (1985).
- 19.
Claire Bishop, op. cit.: pp. 120–123.
- 20.
Ross (2007).
- 21.
The first international survey exhibition of contemporary art, Magiciens de la Terre, was held at the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris in 1989. The exhibition, which was curated by Jean-Hubert Martin, included the work of three artists from the PRC: Gu Dexin, Yang Jiechang and Huang Yongping.
- 22.
See Said (1978).
- 23.
See Bhabha (1994).
- 24.
See, for example, Merewether (2006).
- 25.
Hanru (2002, p. 62).
- 26.
Traditional Chinese thought and practice is informed by a ‘non-rationalist’ dialectical way of thinking associated with the Daoist concept of ‘yin-yang’, which refers to the notion that seemingly opposing forces/terms (e.g. light and dark, and male and female) are in actuality both interconnected and interdependent. It is important to note that the similarly non-rationalist view of dialectic thinking associated with the Derridean term ‘différance’ looks towards a persistently disjunctive deferral of absolute meaning, while yin-yang is conventionally understood within a Chinese cultural context to support the possibility of reciprocation between opposites. See Gladston (2008, pp. 63–69).
- 27.
Minglu (2008, pp. 133–134).
- 28.
Gao Minglu, ‘“Particular Time, Specific Space, My Truth”: Total Modernity in Chinese Contemporary Art’, p. 134.
- 29.
Shiming (2011).
- 30.
Shiming (2008, pp. 34–43).
- 31.
Köppel-Yang (2003, pp. 22–23).
- 32.
Koch (2011, p. 106).
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
Hung (2002).
- 35.
Minglu (2005).
- 36.
Chunchen (2010).
- 37.
Zheng (2012, pp. 157–170).
- 38.
See for example, Wang, Art Intervenes in Society.
- 39.
See for example, Badiou (2005) and Ranciére (2010).
- 40.
Bishop (2005, pp. 120–127).
- 41.
Zhai (2011).
- 42.
Zhu (2010 [1985], pp. 42–45).
- 43.
Gladston (2011, p. 32).
- 44.
Köppel-Yang, op. cit., pp. 152–153.
- 45.
Bryson (1998, pp. 57–58).
- 46.
Franziska Koch, op. cit., p. 99.
- 47.
Ibid., p. 99.
- 48.
Since the late eighteenth century, western post-Enlightenment modernity has persistently upheld aesthetic feeling as a crucial site of critical mediation between the spheres of instrumental and moral reasoning, albeit from often radically differing as well as constantly shifting political perspectives. For a concise account of these differing perspectives, see Hobsbawm (2010, pp. 171–186).
- 49.
Debord (1995).
- 50.
Habermas (1981, pp. 3–15).
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Gladston, P. (2016). ‘Besiege Wei to Rescue Zhao’: A Stratagem Towards a Post-crisical Art. In: Deconstructing Contemporary Chinese Art. Chinese Contemporary Art Series. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-46488-5_6
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