AR&IO: Art as Protest, Language as Art.

the written page you see on your screen
right now is entirely comprised of meaningless characters the artist who created this work of art is in some ways participating in an affirming a set of Chinese cultural conventions and in some ways it's a subversive act of rebellion against those conventions while I suppose working within their strictures the work of art here seen filling a whole room in many ways resembles a traditional set of Buddhist sutras or a traditional set of Confucian texts it evokes thousands of years of Chinese cultural history and yet the whole purpose of it is to rage against that same tradition and that very use of language and perhaps it's an active rebellion against the thousands of hours of focused hardwork care and attention that every student in China is expected to spend memorizing character after character that is ultimately meaningless the very meaninglessness of the Chinese language here becomes I don't know a kind of weapon or at least a way for the artists to howl to howl out his discontent after his experience of the violent and extreme political conditions in China political conditions that called into question that cultural tradition but failed to really challenge transform or replace it I don't think it's sufficient to just say that the cultural context for this work of art is China's Cultural Revolution nor that it's the failure of the Cultural Revolution I think we should look a little bit more specifically at the tradition of the so-called big character poster big character poster is a tradition of shall we say freedom of speech it was formally listed in the The Four Freedoms that Chinese citizens were guaranteed during the Cultural Revolution although they were freedoms that people very much used at their own peril and this tradition burst forth again in the democracy wall movement of 1978-1979 which is more recent it's closer to the time of this artist undertaking this work might be more of a direct influence on it than the Cultural Revolution itself there are people a few people who will sincerely claim that Chinese citizens had more freedom of speech not less during these brief periods when they had the right to make these big character posters anyone and everyone who studies Chinese politics and Chinese history wonders at some point or ask their professor at some point to what extent are the extreme characteristics of Chinese politics linked to the extreme characteristics of the Chinese written language in one obvious sense it's remarkable that anyone would take the time to use handwritten calligraphy to fill a poster or to fill a wall in the Chinese language it is simply much more time-consuming requiring much more disciplined focused effort over many more hours than to write up a poster in English French Spanish almost any other language on earth so that is one difference on a shallow level but I think what's most remarkable here is not the act of authorship it's the intensity of interest of the readership in any other country anywhere in the world people can write up a bunch of complaints about what's wrong with government and those posters will most likely be completely ignored even if they're lavishly Illustrated but they'll certainly be ignored if they're just in one person's shaky handwritten penmanship as all of these posters are from the brief period of the democracy wall movement 1972 1879 when people were claiming and exercising briefly the freedoms that had been promised to them during the earlier period of the Cultural Revolution you had this freedom but it was very much freedom at your own risk when you wrote your opinion you were gambling with your life Wei Jingsheng wrote what became a famous set of complaints against the government's basically calling for democratization of China freedom of speech that sort of thing and he ended up losing 18 years of his life in a prison cell as a result so to say that people had more freedom of speech at this time is I think very specious and insincere and false but it was a remarkable period of history when you could write your opinion on a single piece of paper post it to a wall and first dozens then hundreds then thousands of people ultimately millions of people would read and care about your opinion if you look at this picture carefully there aren't just observers gathered around reading there are also people copying down what was written on the posters by hands taking notes and those notes were in many cases then later published formally or informally but illegally published him as dissident tracks without you know against the will of the government and then those copies were shared from person to person and traveled throughout China why would an artist create a book that nobody can ever read why would an artist spend years working on the calligraphy in lavish beautiful detail until this book becomes a room filling art exhibition for outsiders one of the most surprising reactions to this work of art is to feel insulted by it and this relates to a Chinese cultural concept of a student insulting his teacher by intentionally writing a nonsensical character in an essay the reason why this insult was not treated as just something cheeky or shallow is that in the old days before we had portable computers if there was just one 2 character that a teacher didn't know with an essay or assignment from a student the teacher would have to spend quite some time using a dictionary by hand looking up the character radical by radical to try to ascertain whether or not this was an error or if it were simply a character that the teacher didn't know just as the artist is doing here on a massive scale pupils would whether just out of a sense of cheekiness or I don't know as an actual pointed insult or maybe to cover up just their own lack of knowledge when they don't know the answer to a question pupils in China would invent characters that resembled a real character enough resemble a real word that it would lead the teacher to waste 30 minutes looking through paper dictionaries trying to figure out what this word was supposed to be and then the teacher would they'd be furious and punish the student for having written what's called a ghost character but the artists intent here is not to deceive an examiner I think without knowing the Chinese language and without really knowing the details of Chinese politics we can see in this a kind of response equivalent to data ISM as an artistic movement in as much as dadaism was in large part a reaction against the madness of the First World War and the early surrealism surrealism in as much as it was a reaction against fascism and the early years of of world war ii wanting to respond to the hollowness the self-important and imperious quality of political speech and political works of art not with a direct critique but simply by screaming in its silent way what was this supposed to mean to anyone and what was it supposed to mean to the artist himself as I've said in many ways this particular work of art acts as a sort of subversive and unsettling protest against the political conditions that the artist had lived through in the fifty years leading up to its creation but it also in a profound and unsettling way challenges cultural and political conventions going back in China thousands of years Chinese people like no other people on this earth bear from their early childhood forward the burden of the books hundreds and hundreds of hours thousands of hours spent leaning over a table practicing these characters and most often with an authoritarian teacher who tells you that you're not allowed to ask what they mean you're not allowed to ask why they look that way and that the explanations are given that are often nonsensical and internally contradictory you just have to accept you just have to memorize there isn't time to break down and explain for you piece by piece what the characters ever were supposed to resemble or mean and in many cases the teacher doesn't know in most cases nobody knows [Music] [Music] Oh [Music]