Anti-Bourgeois
Fetish
ism

Jean Baudrillard: The System of Objects
Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai
29.03.15 – 28.06.15

Translated by: Daniel Szehin Ho

There are many ways to observe ideology, and aesthetics verges on the most unreliable of them all. Let me cite an example: for the last ten years, the artist, Liu Chuang, has been undertaking the same project – asking ordinary people to empty their pockets and hand over their clothes, selling everything they have on them to the artist. For the artist, as philosopher, this project constitutes a certain approach to Marxist concerns, since those willing to sell their whole ‘self’ to him are usually migrant city workers who might work at companies such as Foxconn or Huaqiangbei and have on them things such as a collection of red train tickets and books bought from street stalls. Liu Chuang has done this for ten years; as a member of the audience, I have actually seen this intervention everywhere around the world during this period. Every time I stop and linger, not because of any Marxist interest, but rather because I have been truly astonished, and I have sighed at the way that Liu Chuang could take someone – especially someone poor and unkempt – and re-organise their utterly chaotic lives, indifferent to aesthetic concerns, into something so utterly clean and orderly. My interest was in the way that all the crumpled receipts were ironed out at a fancy laundry, as if the items of cheap and vulgar clothing were placed as if they were real artworks, and as if the dubious novels bought from street stalls, providing a focus of attention in the top left-hand corner of the image, had been a haunting and poetic collection of historical artefacts belonging to Mayakovsky. The aesthetics on display in the series Buying Everything on You constitutes almost a nightmarish misreading of Marxism, of the Stalinist variety; it purposely aestheticises what ought to be miserable lives, ultimately transforming the minute details of the lives of people from all walks of life into a homogeneous form, much like a coffin, above whose pall they are clearly unable to raise their heads. I wonder whether the result would look the same if someone like the billionaire, Mr. Yun, had sold everything on his body to Liu Chuang. Yet such an equivalence would most likely be an illusion, or an expression of the artist’s purely imaginary idea of his own ability to care about others.

It is pointless to demand a seamless link between the intention of an artist and their resulting work; this is not their strength. Hence I am still spellbound by Liu Chuang’s work, in much the same way as one is spellbound by the razzle-dazzle of a capitalist metropolis. As an ‘object’, the work itself is akin to Geng Jianyi’s clean hospital beds and Zhang Enli’s tidy paintings of wires, or the neat carpets of Sui Jianguo – offering an intense, yet simple, visual stimulation and pleasure that encourages the viewer to linger. This exhibition, entitled ‘The System of Objects’, is actually very tidy – tidy enough to make one intoxicated, so tidy that those dazzling Coke bottles by Zheng Guogu – who obsesses over the crude and the rough – would appear to bear distinct outlines, so beautiful that any apparently ‘critical’ or negative anti-bourgeois sentiments would appear to be unfounded. It is not necessary to mention how we Chinese face too much basic visual ugliness every day, so that even a little petit-bourgeois beauty is clearly a luxury. As for the potential that luxury goods present for social critique, let us not discuss it – at least, this exhibition does not seem to discuss it!

In this frugal, materialistic country of ours, only objects possess true ideological weight – anything, from a thermos flask to an electric kettle, can be seen as not merely a technological advance but a revolution in thought. From washing machines and refrigerators to the washing machines and refrigerators dissected, in an alienated manner, by the artist Liu Wei, in As Long as I See It, there is not merely a visual form of historical materialism, but possibly a variety of visual abstract expressionism. After I saw the exhibition, curated by Wang Min’an, who wrote A Discourse on Household Electronics, due to the fact that an ideology that tolerates beauty and fetishises objects abandons the truly distorted logic inherent to them, I also came to respect the fact that the philistine, as well as the non-vulgar, parts of ‘The System of Objects’ move at the same pace. To borrow from Wang Min’an, following Walter Benjamin, ‘machines have their anti-lyrical essence’. It is debatable, however, whether Liu Wei’s washing machines and refrigerators, dissected in the manner of geometric aesthetics, or Wang Yuyang’s retro objects, incorporated into respirators, are all so clean and beautiful, with their fetishistic lyricism. This is not only a mechanistic, anti-bourgeois lyricism, but an utterly new lyricism in art – what Baudrillard would call ‘semiotic’… Hence, in the face of aesthetics, morality possesses no cardinal principles of right and wrong. To quote from Wang Min’an: ‘Exploring knowledge is, in fact, exploring the knowledge of things’ – these words seem to have no particular logic, yet they are full of energy. The goal of aesthetics is none other than to stifle a vulgar system of object-fetishism and to re-establish an entirely new system of fetishism that clearly demarcates ( or attempts to ) a laudable fetishistic system of art from a kitschy, petit-bourgeois kind of fetishism. Qiu Xiaofei’s A Sample Room – Toilet is the best example of this – an old-style flush toilet spotted with rust, at one side of which there is a running tap with rusty water trickling down the side of a ceramic basin, and a couple of well-worn thermos flasks on the floor below. This is clearly a site that epitomises the ugly, old-fashioned Chinese toilets of the 1980s. Yet an audience that is familiar with this kind of thing will not mistake it for a simple reproduction, of anthropological significance. The installation set out by the artist Qiu Xiaofei has aesthetic significance, meticulously positioned everywhere, down to that toothbrush holder, purposely made filthy and tossed into the basin. A Sample Room seeks to express that pithy lustre of coarseness itself – much like the material of painting. If it were not for this, an artist’s existence would no longer be necessary, in theory. Thus, reading this work becomes somewhat difficult, because I do not understand whether the artist is constrained by his aesthetic training, in the process of expressing ugliness, or is constructing a stage, in order to aestheticise ‘backwardness’.

To my mind, the fluent exhibition text by the curator, Wang Min’an, contains a predetermined error, arising from the expediency of translation – he utterly mixes up ‘things’ ( wu ) and ‘all kinds of objects’ ( keti ), generally encompassing ‘all kinds of reality’. Thus, Kant’s noumenon and ‘thing-in-itself’ ( referring to the unknowable essence of objects ) are entirely, conveniently, and concretely, objectified. Such philosophical pragmatism is undoubtedly all too common in the field of contemporary art. As an exhibition, ‘The System of Objects’ has very few connections with this, but as an audience, such a pragmatic use of these concepts would take us into a strange category, like Wang Luyan’s W Electric Fan [ or: 1980s Electric Fan ], whose ‘thing-in-itselfness’ is truly incomprehensible – until we read the label, that is. It turns out that the artist has reversed the rotational direction of a 1980s electric fan from clockwise to anti-clockwise, in order to let one ‘return to the 1980s’. Faced with conceptual artists who continue the tradition of Duchamp’s work in this manner, a philosopher as curator will find it hard to have any better ideas.

Out of the whole exhibition, I liked the young artist Leng Guangmin’s Five Directions of a Screen ( a room-dividing screen ), the most. This simple work, in the category of ‘object research’, left me utterly relieved. In terms of the unexpectedness of colour or details, and in terms of its perspective, too, this work is cool, calm, and ordinary; you could see that it has had no ideological content, aside from the observation of an object – and this was certainly why this exhibition moved me, visually. Eight of the ten works do not have an overt ideological approach; they are without the satire that is so aesthetically tiring, to a greater or lesser degree. They are immersed in the oldest and most instinctive mode of artistic creation: the observation and beautification of everyday objects, the reconstitution and beautification of everyday objects, the reproduction, improvement, and beautification of everyday objects, and – perhaps the most brilliant kind – the alienation and beautification of everyday objects. We must frankly accept that the function of artists, as thinkers, is clearly overestimated; one would be laying a trap for oneself if one thought that complex powers of speculation were embedded be found in this work. What we see is the most utterly anti-bourgeois fetishism – the things or objects here, like any bourgeois things or objects, seem to be the ultimate origin of art as decorative objects. In all honesty and seriousness, they serve their masters, the artists.

反布尔乔亚的恋物癖

《物体系》
上海,民生现代美术馆
2015年3月29日至6月28日

发表于现代传播《Numero大都市》杂志,2015年5月刊

考察意识形态有很多种方式,美学几乎是最不靠谱的那种,打个比方,过去十年来艺术家刘窗一直在做同一个项目—邀请普通人脱光衣服掏空口袋把他们所有的所有全都卖给他。在作为哲学家的艺术家刘窗眼里,这一项目是某种马克思主义关怀的凝视—因为愿意卖‘全身’给他的人通常都是进城民工,他们在富士康或者华强北,身上都是红色的火车票和地摊文学。刘窗做这件事做了十年,作为一名观众,我在世界各地居然也看了十年,且每次我都驻足于前流连忘返,却不是因为任何马克思主义的关怀,而是因为我对刘窗能把一个人—尤其是一个邋遢的穷人—不具备任何美学情趣的混乱不堪的生活整理得如此干净整洁感到由衷的惊诧与唏嘘。理因褶皱的各种收据都被高级洗衣店烫平了一般;原本廉价恶俗的衣裤总像所谓真正的艺术品一般位于左上角,占据视线的主要部分;泛黄的地摊读物好像来自某个历史文物收藏,又伤感又诗意,仿佛马雅可夫斯基附身。‘收购你身上所有的东西’系列的美学本身几乎是个误读马克思主义的噩梦—斯大林式的—它把似乎应该糟糕的生活刻意抬高美化,五湖四海不同人的生活细节在最终呈现为的这个完全一致的棺材般的形式之笼罩之下显然无法抬起头来—我想,倘若马云卖身给刘窗,结果会如出一辙,但这种平等太有可能是种拟象,或者艺术家对自身关怀之能力的纯粹想象。

要求艺术家在意图与结果当中找到滴水不漏的联系是种无谓的要求。这不是他们的长处。因此我仍然对刘窗的作品迷恋,像对灯火通明的资本主义大都市迷恋一样。这件作品本身,作为一件‘物品’,像耿建翌干净的病床和张恩利干净的电线油画或者隋建国干净的地毯一样,提供视觉上激烈而简单的刺激与享受,让人流连忘返。这场叫做《物体系》的展览实在很干净,干净得让人沉醉,干净得连向来讲究粗糙的郑国谷做的那些金灿灿的可乐瓶子轮廓都很清晰,美得让人感到任何所谓具有‘批判性’的反布尔乔亚负面情绪都是种虚妄。不用说,我们中国人每天面对太多根本的视觉上的丑陋,连小布尔乔亚的美显然也是奢侈品,至于对‘奢侈品’的社会性批判,不谈也罢,至少这场展览,不像是谈这些的地方。

在我们这个朴素唯物主义的国家,唯有物具备真正的意识形态重量—从热水瓶到电水壶不仅是科技的进步,也是思想的革命。从洗衣机和冰箱到被艺术家刘韡《看见的就是我的》里异化解剖的洗衣机和冰箱不仅是视角的历史唯物主义,还可能是视角的抽象表现主义。看一场写了《论家用电器》一书的汪民安策划的展览,出于对美的宽容而局限于‘恋物’的意识形态是放弃了里面真正扭曲的逻辑趣味,《物体系》之庸俗的部分与它反庸俗的部分步伐一致—这点让我敬仰—借用汪民安借用本雅明的话,‘机器有着反抒情的本质’,然而无论刘韡用几何美学剖解的洗衣机和冰箱,还是王郁洋装了呼吸机的复古物品,不用我说,都干净得、美得充满恋物癖的抒情,这种抒情不再是机器反对的那种小布尔乔亚的抒情,而是全新的,来自艺术的,鲍德里亚所谓‘符号式’的抒情……因此在美学面前,伦理不具备什么大是大非,引用汪民安的话—‘探讨知识,实际上就是探讨物的知识’,这句套话看起来没什么道理,但充满力量—美学的目的无非是扼杀庸俗的恋物系统,又建立全新的恋物系统,可歌颂的艺术的恋物系统,与媚俗的小布尔乔亚恋物( 试图 )划清界限的恋物系统。仇晓飞的《样板间( 厕所 )》是最好的例子—斑驳生锈的老式抽水马桶、水龙头歪向一边滴淌一排锈水的陶瓷水斗、破旧的热水瓶、红色的澡盆—这当然是一幅象征着1980年代中国厕所之丑陋落后的图景,但熟练的观众面对这样的场景早已不会误认为这是动机简单的人类学意义上的复制,事实上,艺术家仇晓飞布置的场面是具有美学意味的,一直精确到掉在水斗里的那个故意显得脏兮兮的牙刷杯。《样板间》要表达的粗糙本身简洁光滑,如画。倘若不是如此,艺术家的存在理论上就不再有必要了。因此阅读这个作品变得有些困难,因为我不明白艺术家是在表现丑的过程当中受制于自己的美学训练,还是在搭建美化‘落后’的舞台。从我的理解,策展人汪民安洋洋洒洒的策展人大文有个来自翻译的技巧的先决性错误—他把物和大意义上包含各种现实的客体彻底混为了一谈,因此把康德意义上的本体和所谓‘物自体’(Thing-in-itself,指事物之人所不能理解的本质)也统统方便得具象地物化了。这种哲学上的实用主义在当代艺术领域无疑家常便饭。《物体系》作为一场展览与此关系甚少,但作为观众,同样实用主义地运用这些概念会让我们抵达奇怪的范畴,比如王鲁炎的《80年代的电风扇》—它的‘物自体’确实让人无法理解—在没有看标牌之前。原来艺术家把顺时针吹风的80年代电风扇改成了逆时针,为的是让人‘重返80年代’。作为策展人的哲学家面对这样继承杜尚传统的观念艺术家恐怕很难有什么更好的办法。

整场展览让我最喜欢的是年轻艺术家冷广敏的《屏风的五个方向》。这幅简单的‘物体研究’类型作品让我感到十分释然,无论从颜色、细节的突兀性还是透视来看,这幅作品冷静而普通,你可以看出它没有任何除了观察一件物品以外的思想性—显然,这也是这场展览从视觉上打动我的原因,这里百分之八十的作品没有太过主动的思想性,甚至没有多少让人审美疲劳的反讽性,它们沉浸于最古老也最本能的艺术创作方式:对日常物件的观察和美化、对日常物件的再组织与美化、对日常物件的复制、改良与美化、以及可能最为高明的一种,对日常物件的异化和美化。我们必须坦然承认,艺术家作为思想家的功能显然被高估了,想从这些作品里找到复杂的思辨能力实为作茧自缚。我们看到的是最彻底的,反布尔乔亚的恋物癖—这里的物或者客体,好像任何布尔乔亚的物或者客体,好像艺术作为装饰物的最终起源,它们老老实实地服从于它们的艺术家主人。