Mao Crazy: Global Art World's Love Affair with Mao
There are times when art should be the last thing on an art critic's mind. The thunderous popularity of a number of contemporary Chinese artists compels a political analysis. Much of the work is powered by a startling and completely delusionary infatuation with Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. This is more sinister than anything we have seen in the already fairly astonishing annals of radical chic. We are witnessing a globalized political whitewash job, with artists and assorted collectors, dealers, and sycophants pouring a thick layer of avant-garde double-talk over the infernal decade of suffering, destruction, and death that Mao unleashed on his country in 1966. And as we are also dealing with the house of mirrors that is the art world, I have no doubt that somebody is ready to explain that I am confusing appropriation with approbation or that fascism is just another way of spelling freedom. I must say, the theory people have a lot to answer for. But here is the bottom line: the global art world's burgeoning love affair with Mao and the Cultural Revolution makes a very neat fit with the current Chinese regime's efforts to sell itself as the authoritarian power that everybody can learn to love.
A few weeks ago it was reported that Christie's International, in the run-up to the Summer Olympics, was privately offering for sale in Hong Kong one of the largest of Andy Warhol's portraits of Chairman Mao, with an asking price of $120 million. It is only natural that Warhol would figure somewhere in this sordid scene. It was in 1972 that he began painting portraits of Mao. The date is significant. By then the American left's infatuation with Mao and his Little Red Book was cooling, as the realities of the Cultural Revolution began to sink in. And it was then that Nixon went to China, thereby inaugurating what would become a dramatic reversal in Mao's reputation among the American mainstream. So Warhol's Maos, although they riffed on the chairman's status for the more demented parts of the American left, were unleashed on the world precisely as Nixon, in the extraordinarily important opening to China, was also for all intents and purposes sanitizing Mao. Thus Warhol set the pattern for the new Chinese art, with its nauseating mix of romantic authoritarianism, ironic leftism, and capitalist realpolitik.
If you have any doubts, take a look at Zhang Hongtu's Long Live Chairman Mao Series #29, a Quaker Oats container on which Zhang has fiddled with a bit of acrylic paint, transforming the old Quaker gent into the chairman. It's an American-supermarket-meetsCultural-Revolution moment, suggesting that all marketing is equal, Andy's and Mao's. Zhang's Quaker Oats container is included in the collection of the Saatchi Gallery in London. I have studied the catalogue of this collection, The Revolution Continues: New Art from China, and I am pretty confident that it is the most hateful art book published in my lifetime. For the revolution that is continuing is none other than the Cultural Revolution. And if you were in danger of missing the point, the binding of the book, at least in the version published by Rizzoli in the United States, is emblazoned front and back with a photograph of hundreds of Red Guard members in Tiananmen Square in 1966, holding up their Little Red Books.
In the introduction to this extraordinary volume we are informed that contemporary Chinese art "can be understood as an extension of Mao's legacy of rebellion." I do not know anything about the person who wrote these words, one Jiang Jiehong, who is said to be the director of the Center for Chinese Visual Arts at the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design. It does not matter. This is radical chic with blood on its hands. Let us not forget that, by the best estimates, at least half a million people perished amid the upheavals of the first three years of the Cultural Revolution.
And let us also not forget that this grotesque book appears under the auspices of Charles Saatchi, the wealthy art collector who, in an earlier incarnation as an advertising wizard, brought Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives to victory in England with the slogan "Labour Isn't Working." Well, in China the workers never stopped working. One almost doesn't know where to begin, but I am reminded of a recent remark by an architect named Mouzhan Majidi, who worked with Norman Foster on the construction of the new Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital International Airport. Majidi was glad to explain to The New York Times how much easier it is to build in China than in England, where there are so many rules and regulations and labor unions. "It evoked what it might have been like to build the pyramids," he commented. The pyramids? They were built by slaves.
Anyway, he might not have said this if he had been speaking a few weeks later, after shoddy construction led to the collapse of some seven thousand classrooms as a result of the earthquake in Sichuan province. But of course the standards used to build schools in a remote province cannot be anything like those used for Beijing's Terminal 3, a project designed to project a new hipper- than-thou authoritarianism, which will be further reinforced during the Olympics by the displays of work by the new Chinese artists...
Read entire article at New Republic
A few weeks ago it was reported that Christie's International, in the run-up to the Summer Olympics, was privately offering for sale in Hong Kong one of the largest of Andy Warhol's portraits of Chairman Mao, with an asking price of $120 million. It is only natural that Warhol would figure somewhere in this sordid scene. It was in 1972 that he began painting portraits of Mao. The date is significant. By then the American left's infatuation with Mao and his Little Red Book was cooling, as the realities of the Cultural Revolution began to sink in. And it was then that Nixon went to China, thereby inaugurating what would become a dramatic reversal in Mao's reputation among the American mainstream. So Warhol's Maos, although they riffed on the chairman's status for the more demented parts of the American left, were unleashed on the world precisely as Nixon, in the extraordinarily important opening to China, was also for all intents and purposes sanitizing Mao. Thus Warhol set the pattern for the new Chinese art, with its nauseating mix of romantic authoritarianism, ironic leftism, and capitalist realpolitik.
If you have any doubts, take a look at Zhang Hongtu's Long Live Chairman Mao Series #29, a Quaker Oats container on which Zhang has fiddled with a bit of acrylic paint, transforming the old Quaker gent into the chairman. It's an American-supermarket-meetsCultural-Revolution moment, suggesting that all marketing is equal, Andy's and Mao's. Zhang's Quaker Oats container is included in the collection of the Saatchi Gallery in London. I have studied the catalogue of this collection, The Revolution Continues: New Art from China, and I am pretty confident that it is the most hateful art book published in my lifetime. For the revolution that is continuing is none other than the Cultural Revolution. And if you were in danger of missing the point, the binding of the book, at least in the version published by Rizzoli in the United States, is emblazoned front and back with a photograph of hundreds of Red Guard members in Tiananmen Square in 1966, holding up their Little Red Books.
In the introduction to this extraordinary volume we are informed that contemporary Chinese art "can be understood as an extension of Mao's legacy of rebellion." I do not know anything about the person who wrote these words, one Jiang Jiehong, who is said to be the director of the Center for Chinese Visual Arts at the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design. It does not matter. This is radical chic with blood on its hands. Let us not forget that, by the best estimates, at least half a million people perished amid the upheavals of the first three years of the Cultural Revolution.
And let us also not forget that this grotesque book appears under the auspices of Charles Saatchi, the wealthy art collector who, in an earlier incarnation as an advertising wizard, brought Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives to victory in England with the slogan "Labour Isn't Working." Well, in China the workers never stopped working. One almost doesn't know where to begin, but I am reminded of a recent remark by an architect named Mouzhan Majidi, who worked with Norman Foster on the construction of the new Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital International Airport. Majidi was glad to explain to The New York Times how much easier it is to build in China than in England, where there are so many rules and regulations and labor unions. "It evoked what it might have been like to build the pyramids," he commented. The pyramids? They were built by slaves.
Anyway, he might not have said this if he had been speaking a few weeks later, after shoddy construction led to the collapse of some seven thousand classrooms as a result of the earthquake in Sichuan province. But of course the standards used to build schools in a remote province cannot be anything like those used for Beijing's Terminal 3, a project designed to project a new hipper- than-thou authoritarianism, which will be further reinforced during the Olympics by the displays of work by the new Chinese artists...