Armillary sphere in Terminal 3 of Capital Airport
Low carbon and environmental protection are not only the concept of economic development, but also an important theme of building a community with a shared future for mankind. Since the 18th National Congress, China's ecological civilization construction and green development and high-quality development have made great achievements recognized by the world. These achievements are inseparable from the practice of the architectural community and the support of the academic community. The dialogue between philosophy and architecture can allow us to more deeply understand the beauty of architecture and the meaning of low carbon from the perspective of ideology and aesthetics.
■ Liu Fangxi Jin Huimin Zhang Precious Liu Wu
Liu Fangxi (Researcher of the Institute of Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Director of the Marxist Theory Office): Academia now talks about low carbon, environmental protection, and the theoretical level is often disconnected from social practice and production practice, and from the perspective of materials, we can find a very real and effective path. The "regeneration" of material reminds me of Marx's statement that capitalist production "destroys the material transformation between man and land, that is, the components of the land that man consumes in the form of food and clothing cannot return to the land" (The Complete Works of Marx and Engels, vol. 23, People's Publishing House, 1972 edition, p. 552) – this description is about the "circular economy", and the continuous return of materials from the land (nature) to the land (nature) constitutes a kind of "cycle" and "regeneration" Marx is talking about food and clothing materials, pre-modern building materials are the same, of which there is no "waste", the house is rotten bricks can continue to build a house, do not produce construction waste, wood rotten and then "back to the land" and become fertilizer, it is circular, not only in human life but also between man and nature - modern capitalist production breaks this cycle, so more and more garbage will be generated. Marx, Engels and "matter with poetic perceptual brilliance to the whole human heart smile" and "the full richness of the nature of nature", modern capitalist production has made "matter" lose this "poetic perceptual brilliance" and "all the richness of essence" - from this point of view, compared to "building a house", the recycled material is used for sculpture art creation, the "object" of architectural abandonment has obtained real "regeneration", "resurrection" and "liberation" and re-shines "poetic perceptual brilliance"—— This is also the feeling I have when admiring Mr. Zhang Precious's sculptures, and in this liberation of "things", sculpture artists as "people" have also gained "liberation" - creating a new "material language", in fact, it is also constructing a new type of relationship between "things" and "people", which has important enlightenment for thinking about the future fate of human beings and nature.
Engels pointed out: "If not everyone is liberated, society itself cannot be liberated." (The Complete Works of Marx and Engels, vol. 20, People's Publishing House, 1971, p. 318) In the face of the huge amount of garbage formed by the use of all natural things since modernization, we can also say today: "If not everything is liberated, man himself cannot be liberated" - "The liberation of man" cannot be separated from the liberation of "things", or the liberation of human society cannot be separated from the liberation of nature. An important consequence of modern production is the constant production of huge amounts of waste or garbage and the wreaking havoc on the ecology of the earth – many ecologists today blame this on "anthropocentrism" or human impulse to conquer nature, as if modern production only harms nature or things; while the British-Polish sociologist Sigismund Baumann's Abandoned Life reveals the other side of the problem: modern production has also created more and more "abandoned life"; Harari's A Brief History of the Future Prediction: With the further development of today's artificial intelligence, there will be a huge "useless class" in the future - modern production will not only cause more and more "useless" "things" or "waste", but also cause more and more "useless" "people" or "waste people", and both face the fate of abandonment.
Sculpture of Confucius Museum in Qufu, Shandong - Phoenix
Zhang Precious (President of the Public Art Committee of the China Association for Asian Economic Development and Director of the China Sculpture Enterprise Working Committee): We put the sculptures made of waste at the Capital Airport, and the ceiling of the Concert Hall of the National Centre for the Performing Arts was made by me and the farmers. Society has progressed, otherwise the sculpture of the capital airport would not have chosen the method of turning waste into treasure. The ceiling of the Grand Theater Concert Hall will not be completed by the peasants, and all the progress lies in changing, changing habits, changing consciousness. We caught up with the good times and we were lucky.
As an important corner of the city, the Shougang area also affects and affects the direction of the overall renewal of the city and the social habits of the atmosphere. What if we regard the existence of existing buildings as a blank piece of paper, and consider the existing "thorns" in the city as the origin? How to face and solve these existing beings requires us to expand our horizons and let go of a lot, the so-called let go, more is the heart. "Treating some existing beings as empty", changing existing thinking and positioning, and discovering and learning how to understand, use, transform, approach and awaken the "original" are also part of contemporary design. Through participating in some activities of "Literary and Art Studies", I mastered a method in the process of contacting scholars, a logical thinking method close to the essence, and learned to break through in difficult situations.
If you ask me what is the future trend of "urban renewal"? I think it will be rich in themes, but an important content is: green environmental protection, turning waste into raw materials. Facing 30,000 square meters of exterior wall panels, there is no doubt that this is the contemporary "Shougang Declaration", because green sustainability is a "passport" to international dialogue. This is not pandering, this is cutting through thorns, although there are risks, Shougang is one step ahead. Unfortunately, due to the lack of strength of our own expression, we have not been able to let more designers, owners and even leaders pay attention to the valuableness and importance of this "language", and we need to spread the information and affect more people. In addition to design and construction, buildings should also learn how to communicate, continue to speak out, and use vivid language to attract attention to sustainable and environmentally friendly materials at the relevant level through continuous appeal and research. What needs to be emphasized here is that environmental protection is a design attitude and a new construction language. In the near future, whether it is art or architecture, the concept of green, low-carbon and environmental protection can become the spiritual orientation of society, cities and even countries through the "language of materials". Environmentally friendly materials are no longer just a substance, from the surface and inside, from this to the other, is a method closer to the essence of the times.
Jin Huimin (Jiang Scholar Distinguished Professor of the Ministry of Education, Researcher of Sichuan University): It is true to promote a concept of environmental protection, which is not to cater to the times. Pandering is when you pander to you outside the times, and the precious artist himself represents a certain trend. You are in the initial stage of entrepreneurship, that is to survive, because to make raw materials, if you really use copper, real gold and silver, gold plating is also very expensive, this cost can not afford, so at the beginning to survive. But slowly it was discovered that these waste materials could be used, and the large amount of garbage generated by these industries made them into treasures. You have a resonance, a resonance with the times themselves. The industrial revolution of that year was also a development of the times, you are also in it, your creation and it is a mutual effect, is the sum of "harmony and difference". Confucius's "harmony and difference" has such a distinction, the gentleman and the villain, the gentleman is to maintain his own position, and the object to maintain an equal echo and correspondence between each other; the villain is blindly cater to one thing. If you want to have a relationship of "should be harmonized" rather than "pandered" to the times, you must be involved in the tide of the times, not just a tide-watcher.
Liu Fangxi: We can still quote Marx, "The original form of matter is the inherent, living, essential forces within matter, which give matter individuality and cause special differences... Materialism, in its first founder, Bacon, also contained the germ of all-round development in its naïve form. Matter with a poetic sensual brilliance smiles at the whole body of man. (The Complete Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 2, People's Publishing House, 1957, pp. 163-164) What is "poetic perceptual brilliance"? What is the "original form of matter"? My understanding is that there is an "inherent", living, essential force within matter, and that man can create "a human feeling commensurate with the full richness of man's essence and the nature of nature" (The Complete Works of Marx and Engels, vol. 42, People's Publishing House, 1979, p. 126) – the "poetic perceptual brilliance" of matter also embodies "the full richness of the essence of nature".
Liu Wu (art critic and former director of the economic department of China Youth Daily): This discussion is just a good way to rethink some issues in this regard. Just now I saw an evaluation that said, "The vitality of the precious body is like biogas, and one point is on it", and the word "biogas" has inspired my association. My hometown is in Miluojiang, Hunan, where Quyuan tossed the river, which in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a particularly advanced place for the application of biogas in the country, especially in rural areas. Biogas is the collection of combustible gases produced by the fermentation of manure water, waste utilization, and use to boil water for cooking. At that time, there was no natural gas and gas, many places did not have electricity, and where there was electricity, there was often a power outage, and it was necessary to light kerosene lamps and candles. The countryside could originally cut firewood, but then the mountains were closed to cultivate forests, and they could not be cut, so what if the peasants had nothing to burn? Some people say that biogas can be used, and at that time, every house had a septic tank, covered with plastic film on the top of the septic tank, and then used a plastic pipe to draw out the biogas inside to ignite.
Jin Huimin: There is also a feeling, you have to have materials to do this, to make a thing realistically, but more importantly, you are promoting an idea, which is an act, and it is also an art, which should be called "performance art". I think a valuable work of art should be treated as a kind of public art. Shanghai University originally engaged in public art seminars, and I participated in the discussion and talked about some views on public art. Public art in the public space is very obvious, has a subtle influence on the public, visit, browse or glance is a kind of popularization, you are not conveying a very beautiful image, but conveying a very beautiful concept, deep into the unconscious level. You just mentioned in your speech that you want to popularize science. In fact, we must imperceptibly change customs and customs, and form a sense of environmental protection, environmental awareness, and the integration of man and the environment, and the integration of man and nature in the whole society. However, making people turn to environmental awareness sometimes needs a little guidance, even coercion, and needs to be strongly promoted. To give an example in daily life, Beijing Changping District requires that there must be a person on duty next to each garbage can in the community, 24 hours, but the property can not do this, can only cancel all the garbage cans, after the cancellation of each garbage put the garbage at the door, neither beautiful, but also smell. Now, every family buys a small trash can and fosters a culture of environmental responsibility. The district government uses strong measures, although a little unreasonable, a garbage can next to a person standing, 24 hours a day to be on duty, the property where there are so many people?! So there are some good things that also need to be pushed forward strongly.
Zhang Precious: To solve these two problems, I think the most important thing is to do a good job in science popularization, so that more people can understand "low carbon" and "green" from a professional and technical point of view. "Double carbon" should not be just a slogan, but a practical technical problem, a system problem. Some relevant data can be cited for discussion. As we all know, the building materials industry is the continent's carbon emissions, the cement industry is one of the important members, our country produces more than 2 billion tons of cement every year, the process of producing 1 ton of cement will emit nearly 1 ton of carbon dioxide, from this data point of view, effectively reduce the use of cement, and then reduce the production of cement, will effectively reduce the total amount of carbon emissions in the mainland, which is an important part of the implementation of the "carbon peak carbon neutrality" development requirements.
Jin Huimin: I especially appreciate what Mr. Zhang just said about "there is no waste in the world, waste and no waste are not in things, but in people", it is indeed a thing that you declare as waste from the perspective of people, that is, it is useful to people and useless. Whether a thing is a waste product or not depends on how people see it and how they use it. Shakespeare's Hamlet has a sentence that "man is the essence of the universe, the primate of all things", which is a very famous sentence. Since the Industrial Revolution, man has become the master of nature and the measure of the value of all things. To put it nicely, it is to publicize human subjectivity, but the result is to destroy the environment, and further to destroy human subjectivity, because the subject contains its environment. Man is not an isolated existence, but an "inter-existent" being in relation to all things.
Liu Wu: Speaking of the recycling of waste in the low-carbon era, after I carefully looked at the works in the exhibition hall of the Green Cultural and Creative Science Museum, I had a strong feeling as a whole, which can be summarized into one word, that is, a kind of "return". Why is it called regression? Experts in the study of art know that from the earliest primitive art, many works are honestly the materials used at hand, such as the Spanish Altamira cave paintings, which are European Paleolithic works, when humans wanted to paint, the so-called paper or canvas used was the wall, the painting tool was mud or stone, and the material used for smearing was also random, possibly using cow bones, cow blood or the bone blood of other animals and so on. To say that sculpture is more typical, the earliest existing sculpture works also appeared in the early Neolithic period, including stone carvings, ivory carvings, wood carvings, clay sculptures, etc., and later texts were first carved on cow bones, turtle shells, etc. From these phenomena, we can be sure that the things of art are actually natural things, and it is only later that we have standardized and modeled them to a certain extent.
Like the oil paintings and Chinese painting materials we are familiar with, they were not used now at the beginning. Oil paintings were originally painted on wood panels, walls, cloths, etc., and the pigments were derived from plants, animals or minerals. The same is true of Chinese paintings, painted on walls, silks, cloths, wooden boards, pigments are also extracted from various animals, plants or minerals, completely natural pigments, there is no modern kind of chemical synthetic materials. Later, especially after the industrial revolution, many things were slowly standardized, fixed, and formed a certain mindset, people often think that oil painting can only be created with canvas, Chinese painting can only be painted with rice paper, over time, the creative road will be narrower and narrower, the creative concept is more and more narrow, obviously this limits the development of art.
In recent years, the popular modern art is trying to break this thing, for example, installation art is very typical, artists can take a variety of materials to create works of art, what wood, stone, steel, cloth, waste paper, etc. can be used as artistic raw materials. In fact, these works of Mr. Zhang can also be called installation art, which conforms to all the characteristics of installation art: eclectic materials, three-dimensional space, material structure and so on. What is obvious is that the installation artists recognize the limitations of the original kind of artistic creation, so they choose to use a variety of materials to create, breaking the inherent methods and consciousness, so that art can return to life, history, and cultural traditions of the past. We can also see that including Chinese painting is now breaking the box, some Chinese painters no longer follow the original method to create, they try to paint Chinese painting to other materials, or try to use other materials to paint Chinese painting, which is actually a kind of return of the artist's consciousness. It is very interesting that many theorists claim that the work of these artists is "experimental", saying that they are "experimental artists". In fact, in my opinion, this is not an experiment, in fact, it has been experimented, people have already done it, you just go back to the past and get it over again.
Zhang Precious: "True" and "false" are contradictory and opposite, because waste materials become raw materials, and everyone says that this is false, so I will make a point on this point. The so-called "true" and "false" have always bothered people, and everyone has long been accustomed to emphasizing the realism of the material. To be honest, at our current level of understanding, it is still impossible to distinguish the truth and falsity of many things in the world, and the same is true in the field of materials. We advocate "truth", and it is good to be true, but now we are facing a global resource crisis. There are many discarded materials in the rapid development of cities, and if they are not used, these materials will become garbage. These waste bricks and waste tiles obviously cannot be directly turned into "real bricks and tiles", all we can do is to break them and re-compare them into "fake bricks and fake tiles", "fake rammed earth walls", etc., but the origin of the attributes, which is true or false, how to define? Just looking at the first-use value of the material? Or is it unlimited use value?
In addition to obeying the objective existence and aesthetics of the material, can we take the initiative to make the material constantly change? Change is a reality, change is a beauty, change is a contemporary language.
Liu Wu: Here I am talking about an artist, Sigmar Pol ke of Germany, who was one of the most "greedy" experimental artists of the 20th century. In the 1980s, Polk directly abandoned traditional raw materials such as oil canvas and beeswax, and used scraping, blowing, wiping, rubbing and other techniques to cover the resin-coated dyeing cloth with various agents, so that the whole picture became translucent, and after the temperature, humidity and chemicals reacted with each other, the work produced strange new changes. Previously, his earliest idea was to use dot matrix to sketch daily patterns on the cloth or tacky decorative printed cloth, he first used a paintbrush, and then used a grid plate and an airbrush to create on the daily use of the flower cloth, or made of erasers to print on the paper cloth dot matrix, the picture through the three-dimensional way of layering with decorative nodes to form a flickering, moving. In addition, he also took daily newspapers, pictorial pictures, comic strips, as well as 19th-century woodcut works and printed drawings of some masterpieces of art, etc., and collaged them as materials into his own bizarre works, so that the collages of things have a new meaning that has nothing to do with the original.
It is not difficult to see that Polk's work is aimed at breaking the rigid and fixed patterns and using unexpected materials or techniques to create. On the surface, it seems that he is intoxicated with experimentation, but from the perspective of inner pursuit, he is actually a return, that is, a return to the original state of human beings, using everything around him or waste as a material that can be used to make works of art. In November 2007, his works were exhibited in Beijing, which attracted the attention of many domestic artists. He believes that "only when the artist's creative method is fully open, can the complex, all meanings that can no longer be figured out, and the hidden connotations in reality be stripped from the level of potential infinite meaning", so as to achieve "what is to be expressed must be naturally expressed." The work is not a deadly reproduction of the scheme, but an extension of the constant pursuit of unpredictability."
Liu Fangxi: I hope that in the near future, whether it is art or architecture, the concept of green, low-carbon and environmental protection can become the spiritual orientation of society, the city and even the country through the "language of materials". Remember mr. Zhang said that environmental protection materials are no longer just a substance, from the surface and inside, from this and that, is a method closer to the essence of the times, which is more profound.
Zhang Precious: Most of the previous sculptures were real materials, and they have become a treasure trove of human art. In the future, there may be new possibilities, we will begin to use environmentally friendly materials to do sculpture, and then express a kind of exploration, bronze carved stone carving is a kind of memory left to us by predecessors, environmental protection sculpture may become a new memory we leave to future generations, of course, this requires a long process, in such a process there will be a lot of stories, in addition to sculpture, in addition to environmental protection, maybe the seven fairies will once again go down to the mortal, because there is Dong Yong in the world.
Environmental protection is a slogan that can be shouted. Environmental protection is a concept that can be said. Environmental protection is a topic that can be funded. Environmental protection is also a story that is quietly happening in all directions.
(The pictures in this edition are some of the representative works of Mr. Zhang Precious, courtesy photo: Zhang Precious)
Source: China Reading Daily