Today Art Museum, Pingod Community, No.32 Baiziwan Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing

December 9 – 26, 2010

With an artist as well known as Zhang Xiaogang, it’s perhaps difficult to move audience perceptions on from the clichés of “Chinese art” which his work has, for better or worse, become an image for. This problem is equally true for the artist themselves in their quest to develop their work. Zhang’s solo show at the Today Art Museum in Beijing demonstrates a development of his signature stylistic forms into a space which may energise those forms.

Zhang Xiaogang’s canvases since the early-‘90s have been characterized by their figures in the stiff and formalized style of photographic portraiture, emphasizing a flatness of the characters and their surroundings which finds its existential parallel in reflections on memory and the recordings of history. The stiffness is visualised in views, furniture and bodies which are as if pressed flat, with archaic electrical cords which strain across the pictures in stiff, straight lengths and abrupt bends. On top of these settings are interruptions of marks and stains adding another dimension outside of the world view occupied by the figures, while still holding a relation to it as they drape across the forms and follow the structures like a slick of colour through which the painting soaks, saturated by them.

Perhaps in an effort to work against these expectations, as you enter down a short corridor into Today’s main exhibition hall, a mirrored surface sits on the wall in front catching the light, reflections cast down onto the floor over which you step to reach the piece. The mirrored metal is scuffed and scratched in sections, and a diary-like text is handwritten over the surface. The text extends beyond the boundaries of the mirror, beginning on the wall on the left side in silver ink, etched across the metal as dulled sections, dropping back onto the wall to the right, pulling forward and backward as you follow the characters.

This form and its playing with surface and depth is continued in Today’s massive main hall, in the main installation of the show. The hall is beautifully empty apart from a full-size sculpture of a bed in the centre of the room lit by a single bulb hanging from the ceiling far above. The bed is painted with the splashed and mottled forms which will be seen in many of Zhang’s more recent paintings. Another text is painted onto this installation, beginning on the floor, over the bed and back down the floor on the other side as if projected from above. The bed is a double size with neatly folded quilts and pillows at one end, and the addition of a small quilt and pillow placed in the centre as if for a young child, a form echoed in a painting later in the exhibition.

The remaining feature of the installation is a band of green paint up to about chest height, running around the perimeter of the room, another signature feature from Zhang’s paintings, evoking a sterile, institutional environment into which his figures insert their flattened lives.

In the last room are a large set of paintings and bas-reliefs demonstrating the installation as an extension of Zhang’s painted forms. Overall the subject matter has developed into a somewhat more general view of the artist’s world. In one series of paintings the motif of the train window is used to create the inside/outside relation of layering in pure paint which the relief and mirrors demonstrate in their own ways.

The low reliefs, built up on a painted picture plane which is itself on the mirrored metal, repeat the spaces in the paintings with an attempt to move beyond their flatness without denying it. These pieces’ mirrored surfaces are again scratched and scuffed, in some cases adding the written component already seen, but respecting the frame in these cases. These elements work together with the low relief to pull elements into and out of the picture plane, complicating the spaces represented.

While the artist’s investigations of various ways to expand on his successes are presented well in the generous spaces at TAM and are formally interesting in their own right, ultimately the show disappoints, as little goes beyond what we already know. Indeed the direct and straightforward feelings of the early works, which held some sort of power, have been lost in this move to three-dimensions. These formal and material experiments, in my eyes, have little real meaning or result in any successful development in the works.

Author: Edward Sanderson

• First published 28 December, 2010 on ArtSlant.

Seth Siegelaub: It was my lack of economic means and l’air du temps which created the relationship that existed between the kinds of shows I did and the artists with whom I was involved. It was an attempt to get away from the gallery because my feeling at the time, as it is now in the case of publishing, is that a space becomes sacralised. The economics of the situation is such that you need to fill a space with eight or ten shows a year, and it is inconceivable that you can do that and remain interested in all of the work you show. You didn’t run a gallery, the gallery ran you – it was just another form of alienated work experience. The gallery came to determine the art to the extent that painters would paint paintings to fit the walls of their dealer.*

• Buren, Daniel and Siegelaub, Seth (1988/89). May 68 and all that. Interviewed by: Claura, Michel and Dusinberre, Deke. In Bickers, Patricia and Wilson, Andrew, eds. Talking Art: Interviews with artists since 1976. London: Ridinghouse 2007, p.298.

My work is about the body. My figures are never engaged in dramatic physical battles, it’s about the little gestures between bodies…The imaginary interests me. Eroticism is when something hasn’t yet happened…»

• Dumas, Marlene (1996), Marlene Dumas in dialogue with Gavin Jantjes 1996,
  Iniva – Institute of International Visual Arts. Retrieved 10 June, 2009, from http://www.iniva.org/publications_shop/voices_on_art_amp_culture/a_fruitful_incoherence/marlene_dumas_in_dialogue_with_gavin_jantjes

Paintings and sculptures, Schapiro pointed out, were ‘the last hand-made personal objects’ within a social order dominated by the division of labour. In a world in which the life of most individuals was subordinate to unsatisfying practical activity, ‘the object of art is, therefore, more passionately than ever before, the occasion of spontaneous or intense feeling’. Abstract art met this need best, because it refused ‘communication’ in a world in which communcation had been utterly instrumentalised and reduced to a notion of the most efficient stimulus to produce a given response. More than any other art, it corresponded to ‘the pathos of the reduction or fragility of the self within a culture that has become increasingly organized through industry, economy and the state’. Although it had no specific political message, abstract painting was the ‘domain of culture in which contradiction between the professed ideals and the actuality [of our culture] is most obvious and often becomes tragic’.1,2

1. HEMINGWAY, Andrew (2006), ‘Meyer Schapiro: Marxism, Science and Art’ in HEMINGWAY, Andrew ed., Marxism and Art History: From William Morris to the New Left, London: Pluto Press. p.142
2. Quotes taken from SCHAPIRO, Meyer (1957), ‘Recent Abstract Painting’, in SCHAPIRO, Meyer (1978), Modern Art: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, New York: Braziller. pp.217–8, 222–3, 224.

. . . the [late nineteenth-century] avant-garde saw the necessity of an escape from ideas, which were infecting the arts with the ideological struggles of society.1

What’s interesting to me, upon re-reading that passage, is the denigration of ideas as ‘infecting the arts with the ideological struggles of society’, which is precisely (it seems to me) where certain strands of conceptual art took art in the late ’60′s – looking particularly at Adrian Piper.

On the course we are looking at Greenberg along with Clive Bell’s The Aesthetic Hypothesis (1914) and Roger Fry’s An Essay in Aesthetics (1909) as the developers of formalism in art theory in the early twentieth-century. So I reviewed the texts we are reading by them for other instances of the subordination of ideas, but it seems that for Bell and Fry it goes without saying and so there are only oblique references to it.

Clive Bell:

. . . for the purposes of aesthetics we have no right, neither is there any necessity, to pry behind the object, into the state of mind of him who made it.

For to appreciate a work of art we need bring nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art transports us from the works of man’s activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation.

To appreciate a work of art we need bring nothing but a sense of form and colour and a knowledge of three-dimensional space.

But if in the artist an inclination to play upon the emotions of life is often the sign of a flickering inspiration, in the spectator a tendency to seek, behind form, the emotions of life is a sign of defective sensibility always.2

Roger Fry:

It is only when an object exists in our lives for no other purpose than to be seen that we really look at it . . . and towards such even the most normal person adopts to some extent the artistic attitude of pure vision abstracted from necessity.

We must therefore give up the attempt to judge the work of art by its reaction on life, and consider it as an expression of emotions regarded as ends in themselves.3

Being prior to the development of conceptual art, Fry and Bell’s judgments are historically tied to an understanding of art as object based, so their concept of ‘idea’ seems to be one of subject-matter. Conceptual art on the other hand conceived of the idea as something that isn’t necessarily represented, so the return of the idea, post-Greenberg, was not a return to a previous practice, but a new way of doing art.

1. Greenberg, C.(1940). Towards a Newer Laocoon. In Frascina F., eds. Pollock and After: The Critical Debate. London: Routledge, 1985.
2. Bell, C.(1914). The Aesthetic Hypothesis. In Frascina F. and Harrison C., eds. Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology. London: Paul Chapman Publishing, 1982.
3. Fry, R.(1909). An Essay in Aesthetics. In Frascina F. and Harrison C., eds. Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology. London: Paul Chapman Publishing, 1982.

One was in Rembrandt & Co: Dealing in Masterpieces, the current temporary exhibition at the Gallery and the second was in the permanent collection. It seems a quite bizarre subject to include in a painting. What was the artist trying to say with these dogs? What purpose did they serve?

Looking into the matter further, defecating dogs seem to be a minor theme in Dutch art of Rembrandt’s period. The painting in the Collection is one I mentioned in my previous post as having caught my eye (for a different reason) – Adam Pynacker’s Landscape with Sportsmen and Game.

The catalogue makes no comment on the meaning of the dog, but states that:

The defecating dog seems to derive from the work of Ludolf de Jongh (R.E. Fleischer, Ludolf de Jongh, Doornspijk, 1989, p.57 and fig.48).

Works by Ludolf de Jongh (1616-1679) are present in the Getty Collection and the Royal Collection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. An example of de Jongh’s work with said dogs can be seen here.

In the Rembrandt exhibition the relevant piece is number 43 – The Good Samaritan which apparently is in the Wallace Collection, although they only illustrate an etching taken from the painting on their website. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has another state of the etching. Here the presence of the dog is described in this way:

Among Rembrandt’s additions here to the largely empty foreground that appeared in the painting is the defecating dog that adds a note of everyday reality to the biblical scene.

Robert Hughes, in the Guardian, echoes this interpretation:

Sometimes Rembrandt’s subjects are too connected to the commonplace world for everyone to like them. There is an extremely vulgar side to Rembrandt. This in itself is no surprise, given the bawdry for which 17th-century Holland was notable. It may well be that giving vent to it was Rembrandt’s compensation for the anal obsession with neatness and cleanness that characterised Dutch domestic life. He did etchings of a man peeing and a woman defecating. A dog, tensely extruding a large turd from its backside, appears in the foreground of The Good Samaritan. . . .

There is apparently an essay by Goethe about The Good Samaritan which also talks in detail about the dog. I’m trying to source this text and will update this post when I’ve read it.

So, the dogs bring an element of real life to these idealised scenes and epic activities. I also read somewhere that they can be included to pass comment on the commissioner of the painting, but now cannot find that reference, so again, I’ll update this post when I find that information.