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How Does the Phoenix Achieve Nirvana?

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How Does the Phoenix Achieve Nirvana? THE WORK OF ARTS | IMAGES Xu Bing, Phoenix (archive), 2008–10. Mixed media How Does the installation / construction debris and materials. Phoenix Achieve PC: ©Xu Bing Studio. Nirvana? WANG Hui Xu Bing’s first large-scale installation after n the spring of 2007, at the first meeting getting back to China in the late 2000s was a giant of the Asian Council at the Guggenheim, phoenix composed of the detritus of capitalism: Iwhile introducing his works Chinese construction waste and discarded tools left artist Xu Bing mentioned Joseph Beuys and behind by labourers. Originally to be placed in the Mao Zedong. Beuys is an object of emulation lobby of the Beijing Financial Centre, investors for China’s ‘85’ [1985] new art movement. balked at the idea of such an anti-capitalist When Xu first arrived in the United States and monument at the heart of global capitalism. This heard a recording of a Beuys lecture, he felt an essay investigates Xu Bing’s formal innovation immediate familiarity. For Xu, Beuys’s artistic and gesture of refusal in a world in which the experiments break the barriers between art symbols of revolution and political art have and life, aesthetics and politics—and, for him, become fashionable and lucrative commodities. this is a smaller-scale version of Mao Zedong’s theory on the practice of art and politics. In the artist’s own words, ‘I tell [Westerners] their most important teacher is Beuys and my most 94 MADE IN CHINA / 1, 2020 THE WORK OF ARTS | IMAGES important teacher is Mao Tse Tung . Mao is Xu Bing, Book From the Sky, 1987–91. Mixed actually a big contemporary avant-garde artist’ media installation / hand-printed books and (Pearlman 2007). scrolls printed from blocks inscribed with ‘false’ Chinese characters. Installation view at Crossings At the centre of Xu Bing’s most famous /Traversées, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, works, such as Book from the Sky (1987–91), is 1998. PC: ©Xu Bing Studio the materiality of language and experiments in the relationship between signifier and signified. His use of the form of Chinese characters, and invented characters, has helped break down the national limitations of language and writing. In other works—such as Background Story (initiated in 2004) and Phoenix (since 2008)—he likewise foregrounds concrete and abstract, the discarded and the materiality to break down barriers. Both of cherished, Xu treats all of these dichotomies these installations use trash as their artistic as barriers to be overcome. That he pays close material; in Background Story, he arranges junk attention to materiality is natural given to his behind a screen to resemble a Chinese painting sensitivity to signification. I suggest that this when backlit. A Chinese painting and junk: cultural materialism can only be understood which is the signifier, which is the signified? if we place it within Xu Bing’s explorations Here Xu Bing plays on the tensions and porous of the semiotic politics of reproduction. We borders between realism and abstraction, form must also understand Xu’s work within a kind and object. of non-teleological dialectics. The dialectical Throughout all of his projects, he practices a character of his works is easy to see, but their politics of equality: his art does not represent or non-teleological nature is a topic that comes up address any particular group. Object and spirit, in examining the politics of his work. MADE IN CHINA / 1, 2020 95 THE WORK OF ARTS | IMAGES Xu Bing, Phoenix, 2008–10. Mixed media installation / construction debris and materials. Installation view at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), North Adams, 2012. PC: ©Xu Bing Studio. 96 MADE IN CHINA / 1, 2020 THE WORK OF ARTS | IMAGES Reconnecting Art and between art and life, allowing art to directly participate in politics, but also giving import to Everyday Life new political movements. The politics of form and physicality are exposed in the process. After he returned to China in 2008, Xu In line with this tradition, Phoenix calls for a Bing created the massive sculpture named political connection between art and everyday Phoenix. The work is composed of junk life, dismantling the barriers that separate the material and discarded work tools, enacting a two. Although Xu Bing’s work has gradually return to the site of its assembly by workers. transcended the politics and frame of reference Originally it was to be a red-crowned crane, of Beuys and 1960s art, we must therefore use but the idea was rejected by the investors. the latter to understand the expression and There is a message here. When I saw the work implications of the work of the Chinese artist. while it was being produced, I thought of the However, Xu Bing’s work takes place in a 1934 incident of Rivera’s fresco Man at the post-Cold War era in which global capitalism Crossroads at Rockefeller Center, which was dominates the world. Revolution, except for scraped off at the behest of Nelson Rockefeller its appropriation by the market, can no longer for including a portrait of Lenin. One can directly sustain the politics of the artwork, compare Rivera’s homage to communist ideals having become just a brand of ‘political pop’. to Xu Bing’s use of the detritus of capitalism The politics of contemporary revolutionary and labour to create a piece to be displayed works is one of ‘depoliticisation’ (去政治化, at a centre of global capitalism. Although Xu literally ‘expelling politics’), and fulfils the Bing’s work is more metaphorical, in neither logic of accumulation of the international art piece can the form conceal its subversive anti- market. As revolution has become branded, the capitalist character. Was the project initially bitter history of the spread of capitalism has rejected because of the dissonance between the been transformed into a comedy. This process beautiful form of the phoenix and the material announces the impossibility of all revolution of construction waste? Or because the space of or any challenge to capitalism. Xu Bing’s art the financial centre cannot accommodate its not only rejects all art that takes revolution as own excess material? From the perspective of a brand, it also resourcefully and tenaciously art and politics, this piece embodies Xu’s stance seeks out a new politics for art. In contrast to towards inequality in contemporary China and political pop and its saturation of the market, the world, and achieves a unique materialism his art is markedly nonviolent and apolitical. and formalism within the artist’s corpus of He focuses on probing form and language, egalitarian artwork. going deeply into the complexity of processes Phoenix is a continuation of twentieth- of reproduction, working with great care and century art, but also speaks to a new set of precision, as in the meticulously considered conditions. Under the polarised structure and and wrought coarseness of his Phoenix: gloves, shadow of the Cold War, the 1960s were an era hardhats, shovels, work clothes, buckets, pliers in which politics entered directly into art, such . these tools of labour carry the scars of work, as in Rivera’s murals of Lenin, Trotsky, and and congeal the time of labour. The value of Mao, or in Beuys’s collection of trash leftover the commodity is produced in labour time, but after a mass meeting. These works contain a labour time can also be evidenced in discarded certain irony toward revolution, whereas the trash, and the workmanship imprinted in junk. revolution promised a different world from Marxist political economics discovered that the one represented in the artworks, enabling abstract labour determines the value of the a negative dialectics in which the individual commodity expressed through labour time. self could come into view. This period also But Xu Bing’s use of discarded junk raises gave birth to a new political relationship the question of what, exactly, is produced by MADE IN CHINA / 1, 2020 97 THE WORK OF ARTS | IMAGES labour. Production should not be examined China in the early twenty-first century. But only from the standpoint of labour but also amidst this realism, Xu Bing also seeks another in how it relates to capitalist temporalities of image related to traditional art, returning unlimited growth, planned obsolescence, and to the barrier between life and art that we its material form in waste. encountered above. While Beuys produced a political intervention by breaching the barrier, Xu Bing moves in a counter direction through Amid the Ruins of the reestablishment of form which parodies art’s self-commodification. Just like how Labour politics, revolt, and revolution—regardless of political view—can be transformed into As a product of ruins and modern brands in order to increase the price of art, the construction, Phoenix is material junk. Ruins overcoming of barriers between life and art, appear continuously in the history of art; from or art and politics, has become commonplace the Romantic School to modernism, we can in the art market. Under these conditions, Xu trace the shifting meaning of ruins and junk, has restored a sense of form that preserves the but why should junk become so particularly distance between art and life, as a commentary emblematic in our era? Jia Zhangke’s 2006 and revelation of the state of contemporary life. movie Still Life exhibits a different kind of In a world where labour has been fundamentally ruins, i.e. the remainders of a past world. In the de-subjectified (去主体化), the subjectivity words of poet Xi Chuan, Jia Zhangke’s ruins of art can reform the depoliticisation of the are discarded villages, but the disappearance of life world.
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