Zhao Zhao: Constellations II at Chambers Fine Art

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The term highbrow isn’t used much anymore but the term used to indicate someone of immense intelligence with the highest cultural standards. The English novelist Alan Patrick Herbert once quipped, “A highbrow is the type of person who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso.” Zhao Zhao, a Chinese artist from Beijing, does something even more impressively imaginative than deriving Picasso from a sausage: after an auto accident in which his head slammed into his windshield, he was amazed by the patterns of cracked glass emanating from the point of impact. Indeed, this led to his series of hyper-realistic paintings called “Constellations” based on bullet impacts into panes of shatter-proof glass (which reminded the artist of interstellar galaxies).

Some folks interpret Zhao’s work in political terms. So in this case, in Zhao’s work, glass can represent something restrictive – as in a glass ceiling or a form of transparency working, in reality, as a means to inhibit movement or progress to an area perceived but inaccessible. The bullet holes help to show the power, strength and resilience of this transparent or invisible force. Even riddled with bullet holes the glass remains intact. Repeated, forceful, aggressive and even violent effort is often fruitless to eliminate the types of resistance (an outward political/social/economic resistance or perhaps an inner psychological resistance) that the glass can represent. The artist therefore might seem to question the efficacy of violence or aggression as a means of removing obstacles, calling for a more creative, clever and pacifistic/humane approach.

One could also say that until an act of force is directed at glass, the existence of the material is not readily perceived. So, thinking in political terms that apply to contemporary America, most of us did not perceive what now appears to have been a lingering and festering problem with inner city police departments and inner city residents. This problem was, to a certain extent, transparent or invisible to American society given the lack of real journalism in America. It took violence in Ferguson and Baltimore and aggression against the force of police corruption and governmental apathy to make the nature of this ‘window’ apparent. And, even with numerous impacts into this window, we still hear of police abuse around the country regularly.

To me the bullet impacts represent a type of helplessness we can feel ex post facto in regard to our more aggressive or violent emotions. Aggression ‘naturally’ follows a sense of frustration or pain. The psychologist Leonard Berkowitz showed that people who are in physical pain are much more likely to react violently to even slightly irritable situations. Given frustration or pain we are predisposed to act aggressively and it is very difficult, if not impossible, to get rid of this type of response system. Looking at the bullet holes is like looking at the results of our anger and outrage after the fact, regretting that we could not prevent our actions, hoping in the future greater restraint or an ability to overcome this ‘natural’ type of response might be possible.

Finally, I love the idea of the artist shooting bullets into glass to create constellations of star clusters or whatever astronomers call that stuff. It recalls the pessimism of the Gnostics or Manicheans who viewed the universe as something created by an evil god and dropped into the lap of a good god. We live in a universe of decay and competition for survival. According to astronomers the universe resulted from a ‘bang’ leading to a violent and uncontrollable expansion which will be infinite even after all energy in the system is expended. Theology tells us the universe was created by a good god for a purpose – but what if the universe was a horrible mistake and we, as the Gnostics believed, are prisoners of and in this universe and, indeed, in our own bodies? Glass then represents a flawless system of perfection corrupted through violence into a creative form, generating a universe dominated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics in lieu of an orderly Newtonian watch-maker.

Everybody seems to be going to the Kusama “Obliteration Room” on 19^th street. Drop by Chambers before hand – it’s right across the street. It would be a shame to miss Zhao Zhao’s amazing show (and the Obliteration Room kind of sucks anyway - to tell you the truth - although Kusama’s paintings are worth seeing).

Zhao Zhao: Constellations II

Chambers Fine Art

522 W. 19^th Street

New York, NY 10011

Ai Wei Wei - Chambers Fine Art and Francis Naumann Fine Art

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Chambers Fine Art and Francis Naumann Fine Art have teamed up to present some of Ai Wei Wei’s latest work, along with a good look at how Ai was deeply influenced by the work of Marcel Duchamp. Naumann also presents a thought-provoking essay on his gallery’s web site, asserting that Ai is more artistic than we normally think and that Duchamp was more political than we normally think.

At Chambers we see several coffin-like objects that, apparently, contain marble sculptures of rebar – a type of reinforced steel that is often placed in concrete structures to give the structures added strength. Ai is referencing the Sichuan earthquake of 2008 in which between 5,000 and 10,000 Chinese school children died because of shoddy school buildings made of cheap material. The coffins are made of huali wood.  In some types of huanghuali wood the patterns often look like ghostly images (often the faces of ghosts), so the artist may have had this in mind while choosing the wood.  Yet, the huali used in this display seems a darker color, but still possesses the complex abstract patterns the wood is famous for.  This type of wood also seems to have had medicinal functions in the past and through over-usage seems to be rare (driving up the price of furniture built of this material in the past).

{{{from Naumann - Ai's selfie of his arrest}}}

So why put marble versions of rebar in coffin-like structures? To me, the implication seems to be that corruption is never challenged until a tragedy occurs. Only then is the evidence collected, the culprits thrown in jail, and the shoddy stuff put away and buried to finally be replaced by the good stuff.  It seems beyond our abilities to think that integrity and good government should just naturally exist – and that something is horribly wrong if it doesn’t exist (and the world would be quantum leaps better if it did exist). Instead we seem to adopt the principle that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Sure my representatives in D.C. and Albany might be as legit as a 3 dollar bill, but the sky isn’t falling, nothing is apparently going wrong, things seem to be going fine according to the newspapers, so things are OK.  But, when the stuff hits the fan and something suddenly goes horribly wrong, because there has been so much corruption and so much inefficiency for so long, then everybody self-righteously points fingers, heads roll, things suddenly change, time goes by and then we go right back to normal.  I like to view Ai’s work as applying to any society, not just Chinese society, where the current government, to try to be as fair and as objective as I can be, has declared a concerted effort against the types of corruption that lead to this horrible tragedy.

{{{from Naumann}}}

Why marble and not the real rebar (which Ai literally purchased and used in other art pieces) and why are the coffins not shaped like real coffins?  I am guessing this shows Duchamp’s influence. Duchamp made functional stuff non-functional to encourage a more figurative or symbolic interpretation of objects and relationships between objects.  A stool implies rest. If you invert a bicycle wheel and screw it to the seat of the stool, you now have a stool you can’t sit on and a wheel that can’t move forward. But by combining the concepts of rest and motion, (a modern version of the contraposto) you create an impression of something intangible, perhaps, inner motion. In the Naumann show we clearly see how Ai was influenced by Duchamp.  He has one bicycle inverted onto another to make both useless, he has little wooden stools joined together at odd angles to prevent anyone from sitting on them, and he has fancy looking cowhide covering part of the blade of a shovel. 

Naumann suggests that Duchamp’s art was embedded within an overarching belief in the freedom of the individual and non-complicity with evil. During World War I, for instance, Duchamp left Europe for America and when the US entered the war he went to a different neutral country (Argentina).  He seems to imply that Ai Wei Wei’s art begins not just with the idea of the ready-made but also with an underlying ideology which might be imputed to the ready-made.  Ai’s work seems more targeted toward his society’s government than Duchamp’s implicit blanket attack against conformity and state aggression, but the big point seems to be that it wasn’t just the 12 years in America that turned Ai’s head around, it was also his discovery of Duchamp over here.

Naumann's essay about Ai and Duchamp http://www.francisnaumann.com/EXHIBITIONS/Weiwei/essay09.html

If I may play devil’s advocate, I think the irony of all the attention being given to Ai Wei Wei is that in a ‘free’ society we have pressing and tragic social problems as well, but no real Ai Wei Weis come to mind in the US art world.  Sure we had the (amazing and creative) giant black lady/sphinx made of sugar, but that documented an evil from the past. People smiled and took cell cam shots with it.  But where’s the contemporary outcry in the art world against the fact that 1/11 black men will probably do jail time in their lives? Our artists don’t see inequality, poverty, conformity, empty consumerism, mindless competition etc.? Or if they do see it, they seem to gently mock it in an amusing manner. Who knows, maybe all the Ai Wei Wei furor will create a nice type of feedback loop. Ai was ‘radicalized’ by discoveries he made in the USA and he took them back to China. Now, perhaps, due to his influence and popularity, more American artists might be influenced to do more ‘in-your-face’ work about the stuff that needs to be changed here.

{{{photos from Naumann - Ai shooting the bird at Beijing and Washington}}}

Xie Xiaoze at Chambers Fine Art in Chelsea

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In his current show at Chambers Fine Art, Xie Xiaoze seems to combine two major trends in contemporary art. He seems to combine super-realist tendencies with tendencies to incorporate text or textual materials into visual art pieces.

In his “Both Sides Now” series, Xie Xiaoze paints newspaper front pages in which you can see the ink from the reverse side of the page literally seeping through into the images and text of the page facing you.  This is a type of super-realism and language-art combination where the readable text is simply meant to elucidate the central, lurid, image, while the seeping ink serves a more symbolic purpose.  The seeping ink could be serving as a type of graffiti, that not just calls into question the quality of the paper stock, but also impugns the purposes and content of the text presented.   There is a divorce between any act or event itself and the articulation or representation of the act, and this divorce and the consequences of this divorce can be represented by the ink seeping through the page.

The reverse text which has bled through the paper definitely becomes a type of abstraction of language representing a characteristic of language.  Another interpretation could be that the text which has bled through, as an abstraction of language, can represent our subjective responses to the types of narratives and factual information presented in newspapers or other factual sources.   In the process of reading about events, especially terrible events, there is a conjunction of the outer and inner worlds.  The story itself is absorbed as factual information, categorized somehow but it also elicits responses, judgments, motivations, fears, and/or various other possible emotions.  The ink which has bled through the paper represents, perhaps, our inner dialogue and the inner change we go through when we are engaged by text or by any type of narrative (instead of a direct experience).

But Xie Xiaoze also enjoys painting library and archive materials themselves.  You have no idea what might be contained in these materials, but you can see that they are well worn repositories of information felt to be important at that time and waiting to reveal their secrets to anyone motivated to find them again.  As a complete and total book worm, I love looking at paintings of old books and old manuscript materials and I relished Xie’s paintings of these objects.

“Chinese Library 51” seems to contain ledgers of some sort – so you can only imagine the conclusions which could be gleaned by pouring through these.  “Chinese Library 55” shows a stack of printed materials which, as the notes for the show point out, borders on abstraction.  Yet, I love how Xie uses the color red in this painting to tinge the borders between manuscript covers.  My friend Wang Jing said it looks as if the books are “screaming” in this painting. Indeed, the reddish tinges kind of look like open wounds.  To me, the reddish color almost looks like the color in paintings of butchered animal carcasses hanging from meat hooks.  He really conveys the idea, through this use of color, that there was a living source, a living experience that left these materials behind and the materials remain ready to engage a living being again. These are the results of experience but also the beginnings of engaging, living experiences for others.

Finally, Xie Xiaoze did something I thought was very clever.  The super-realist tradition stems from artists who painted directly from photographs.  This was felt to be a type of heresy by some artists, but the super-realists wished to be provocative by painting directly from an indirect source.  They took a representation of ‘reality’ and tried to create something that looked super-real from it.  In many super-realist paintings, a sense of reality often oozes from the canvas more spectacularly than in real life.  Instead of using photos, however, Xie uses Weibo – which is a Chinese social networking tool similar to Twitter.  In the show are images from Weibo postings.  We see, for instance, a typically hazy day in Beijing and, in another piece, some type of house which is labeled as a “nail house” (sorry, I don’t know the back story to that one).  In the super-realist tradition, the paintings are not realistic at all. There is an extra sheen and clarity lacking in reality itself.  Yet, Xie plays with this by not just copying an image from Weibo, but by actually providing the Weibo ‘signature’ on the image as well.  So he uses a type of super-realist technique, but instead of hiding the source for his painting, he openly displays it. The “Weibo” signature forces us to view this image differently – Xie tempts us to be attracted to and to engage the image directly (the image is so vibrant) but at the same time he also forces us to acknowledge that we are divorced from the reality of the image due to its origin from the 

internet.

Chambers has been doing an amazing job of bringing the work of Chinese artists to Chelsea.  This show is open well into April – I would encourage you to drop by to take in these amazing paintings directly.  

Bananas and peaches. Amazing drawings by Zhang Dun at Chambers Fine Art

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I must be more pure than I thought (and I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.)  When I walked into Chambers Fine Art with a friend of mine and saw the amazing drawings of bananas and peaches, I was immediately impressed by how the artist captured a sort of perfect ripeness; the drawings were so well executed.  My friend, however, said, "Wow! This is really sexual stuff." Then I realized: Ooops, yeah, this stuff is obviously 'erotic.'  But it's not erotic just for the sake of being erotic.  I think that Zhang Dun is really making an interesting point about how the male and female sexual organs and sexual drives are perceived and even how they are utilized in art and literature.

In allegorical literature the masculine and the feminine often have a symbolic meaning. In the Odyssey or Faust, or any number of older works, you have the wandering, tormented, testosterone driven, struggling male who overcomes obstacles to seek his comfort or solace in the eternal feminine.  The man (Odysseus, for instance) wanders and fights and the woman (Penelope, for instance) stays home and weaves and waits.  The masculine seems to represent something active and searching while the feminine represents a passive ideal of spiritual solace for the man (or what the man represents symbolically).

That symbolic 'paradigm' (for lack of better terminology), of course, doesn't quite work these days, now that society has changed so radically over the generations and women are as active as men.

So what I like about Zhang Dun's work (beyond her amazing draughtsmanship) is her exploration of the male and female sex organs using analogs that allow a differing perspective from common notions of the masculine and feminine sex drives (and how they can be 'allegorized'). 

You no longer have the male penis as something harsh or piercing, for example.  This is no longer the penis of Faust, Dante or Odysseus.  The peach is not the vagina of Gretchen, Beatrice or Penelope. Both sex organs possess, basically, the same type of soft elegance.  Indeed, if we were to look for active and passive analogies here, the peaches would seem to be more "active" than the bananas.  The peaches are, in places, a deep red color, implying passion or desire.  The bananas seem to passively unfold instead of aggressively swell.