Reporter | Cai Shi open
Edit | Jiang Yan
In April this year, the exhibition "Ring Impact: Video 21" opened at the OCT Center for Contemporary Art Shanghai, exhibiting 21 samples of Chinese video art from 2000 to the present. Not long ago, OCAT Shanghai's WeChat public account tweeted about one of the works, artist Song Tuo's 2013 exhibition work "School Flower". In this 7-hour and 5-minute video work, Song Tuo photographed more than 4,000 walking girls on a university campus, and sorted, edited, and ranked according to their personal aesthetics.
Subsequently, the work sparked a fierce protest online. Some netizens launched a discussion on Douban network entitled "OCAT Shanghai Pavilion Exhibition "School Flowers": Secretly photographing thousands of girls and ranking them", and attached a link to the platform where they can complain at the end of the article.
Almost at the same time as the rhetoric fermented, the tweet introducing Song Tuo's work in the OCAT Shanghai Pavilion was deleted. A few hours later, in the early morning of the next day, OCAT Shanghai Pavilion issued a statement on Weibo apologizing for the negligence of the review work, the work was withdrawn the same day, and the exhibition hall was closed for adjustment. The next day, #Song Tuo School Flower # appeared on Weibo hot search, Song Tuo's personal brand Weibo @SONGTA was cancelled due to continuous complaints.
Netizens' reasons for boycotting "School Flower" focused on the harm it caused, including violations of the right to portrait and reputation, abuse of artistic discourse to humiliate and objectify women, and the misogynistic tendencies of artists in interviews. Netizens questioned the artist's "vice" and the art museum's dereliction of duty: "Is this also art? "Can this also be exhibited?" These two types of reactions raise questions about the definition of art and its publicity. Can an act of a hurtful nature also be an artistic act? How does public discourse participate in judging the legitimacy of art? In the face of art, how do we exercise our freedom of expression and resistance?
<h3>Is harm in the name of art? </h3>
In 2017, three works featuring animals sparked massive protests at the Guggenheim Museum's Chinese contemporary art exhibition "Theater of the World" at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, which were removed before they could be launched. The three works are Huang Yongping's "World Theater", Xu Bing's "Cultural Animals", and Peng Yu and Sun Yuan's "Dogs Don't Get Closer", all of which are related to the harm caused by the artwork.
"Theater of the World" is a large wooden box modeled on the "circular prison" proposed by the British philosopher Bentham, in which hundreds of insects compete and eliminate; "Cultural Animals" is a video in which the sow with the Chinese character "Book of Heaven" is put into the pigsty of a boar written in Latin and mated live in a gallery in Beijing; "Dogs Don't Get Close" records eight American pit bulls being chained in pairs on a wooden treadmill, constantly running to the opposing aggressive counterpart, but unable to touch each other's images. The American Kennel Association issued a statement saying the work was "unacceptable" and "should not be displayed in any form, and certainly not as art." ”
When acts of harm occur in art, does that dissolve the legitimacy of art as art? The stakes of art are indeed one of the criteria for judging art. The French philosopher Jacques Rancière proposed three systems of art in his essay entitled "The Various Systems of Art" (included in Rancière: Key Concepts): ethical, reproducible, and aesthetic.
In Plato's day, art did not exist as art itself, but as a craft, as an education, or as a way of governing the city-state by virtue, so that aimless, unethical poets had to be expelled. Another system with a long tradition is judged by the representation of reality by art, considering the relationship between symbols and being symbolized, and this pursuit of "representation" and "visibility" continues into today's identity politics.
The last, and the art system that Lancière believes best marked the emergence of modernity, is aesthetic—the "aesthetic" here refers not to sensual or tasteful pleasure, but to the unconscious rebellion and reshaping of the artwork against itself. Works under this system are devoted to the art of reinventing the past, present, and future. The aesthetic art system embraces many singular pieces of art, as well as heterogeneous ones that have been excluded from the norms of interest and reality. The idea of "conceptual art", embodied in "World Theater", "Cultural Animals" and "InuYasha", coincides with this art system, because conceptual art asks the key question: What is art?
Before conceptual art became a trend of thought in the United States in the 1960s, it was led by the French-American artist Marcel Duchamp. His 1917 attempt to exhibit Dadaist masterpiece Fountain (a ceramic urinal purchased and signed by the artist at a chain store) erased and created the definition of art. According to the editorial "The Case of Richard Matt", written by two duchamp friends, the artist "took a daily necessity and placed it so that its practical meaning disappeared under the new title and perspective—he created a new idea for that object.". The Richard Matt case also counters public criticism that urinals are "immoral" and "too similar to ordinary urinals."
In Rancière's theoretical framework, both critiques are based on ethical or reproducive art systems, and do not hold up under aesthetic systems. The "rebellion and reinvention" of conceptual art lies in its "dematerialization"—the essence of art is the artist's thought, not the object called art. It is also because conceptual art abandons the beauty of things and pursues subversive ideas, and most of the controversial works have the shadow of conceptual art. But can the metaphysics of art, the "dematerialization" of art, and the innovation of the art system justify works that are harmful?
Indeed, controversial artists tend to call attention to the ideas behind the work, rather than how the artist uses specific materials. Huang Yongping, the artist who created "Theater of the World", wrote about the withdrawal of the exhibition: "It is said that more than 700,000 people oppose this work related to living animals, but how many people have seen and understood this work? The serious new servility of modern society (news media, online media) has also produced a cloud of people... Yes, this work re-mentions Thomas Hobbes's 'War of All Against All', or rather "The War of All Worms Against All Worms'. Huang Yongping believes that the public's opposition and their ignorance of its ideas describe the intention of the work in detail in his response, so as to explain the legitimacy of the work.
In actual artistic practice, another influence on our judgment is the process of implementation of artistic behavior. When people define whether a work with a harmful nature is art, the "motive" and "process" of harm also become a factor for artists, galleries and the public. David Davis, professor of philosophy at McGill University in Canada and author of Art as An Exercise: Reconstructing the Ontology of Art, argues that art is no longer fixed and static, but dynamic, behavioral, and uninhibited. The creation of art requires the artist to first have the intention to create art, and secondly, to publish artistic exposition by manipulating a certain carrier, so it is not only a "concept" that is high above, but also the specific operation of implementing artistic behavior is also worthy of our scrutiny.
When the criticism of "School Flower" fermented on the Internet, some netizens compared it with the artist Cao Yu's work "Special Things", believing that "whether there is really subversion is clear at a glance". "Special Objects" was exhibited at Cao Yu's 2019 Swiss solo exhibition of the same name, and photos of three adult men urinating in public were framed in gold-carved oil painting frames. In an interview with Randian magazine, Cao Yu once made a statement to "Special Things": "Men from different classes of society have become 'special things' that are admired by artists (women) at this time. Without exception, they are swallowed up by the expensive picture frames on the outside that emit golden light all the time, and are awkwardly frozen in these outer frames forever. ”
In the interview, the reporter believes that the artist's forcible intervention and display of the intimate behavior of the subject not only makes them a fragile and absurd product, but also deprives them of the right to defend themselves. In this regard, Cao Yu explained that the reason why the photo can appear in the exhibition hall is the result of her fierce negotiations with the subject.
In contrast, when filming and ranking more than 4,000 girls, Song Tuo did not have the intention of creating art, but in his own words, the original intention was "fraternity, that is, to go through it all", "more for fun", "This idea is indeed a bit excessive, but it is very real". When asked by the media, "Do you think you hurt people who are ugly?" "Hurt, but she's like that in my eyes, I have to believe in myself and never compromise." Song Tuo replied.
"BIE Else" reported on Song Tuo's detailed creative process, including inviting women to shoot at the university in order to "appear less perverted", and hiring three assistants with exhibition funds to divide the obtained video clips into dozens of folders such as "beautiful beauty", "beautiful ugly", "forgivable ugly", "unforgivable ugly" and so on. Song Tuo explained, "Everyone knows that we are shooting, but they don't know that we will rank in the order of before and after that. ”
Some netizens believe that even artists can 'say nothing' about their own works, and the behavior of men ranking women according to beauty and ugliness can be seen everywhere, even under the definition of art that has nothing to do with ethics and beauty, this seven-hour video is difficult to be called art. There are also a small number of opposing netizens who believe that the work has aroused so much anger, which shows that the artist's unpackaged concepts of artistic discourse, whether hooligan, obscene, or materialized, have hit the shell of public morality and completed his artistic behavior in the public sphere. More voices believe that at a time when gender equality is still struggling to advance, "School Flower" should not be exhibited as art in the museum from the beginning.
<h3>Freedom of expression and resistance</h3>
Even scholars who remain open to the definition of art—such as the American philosopher Maurice Weiz, who proposed the undefinability of art, and Alan Meskin, a scholar who studied him—do not demand that people abandon defining art and instead accept that "everything is art." Meskin also acknowledges that even though art is an open structure, with countless close relatives and distant neighbors from ancient times to the present, the classification of "art" is still somewhere between two qualities: descriptive and valuable.
Meskin asked us to consider three scenarios: Someone points to something and says, "If you think it's an apple, I don't want to be friends with you anymore." "This is ridiculous in most cases. Or the person says, "If you think it's a good deed, I don't want to be friends with you again." "That seems understandable. If the man says, "If you think it's art, I don't want to be friends with you again." "You may be a little undecided. In this experiment, Meskin concluded that the nature of "art" lies somewhere between the descriptive nature of the "apple" and the value of the "good deed."
The artistic character of a work (whether it is virtue and craftsmanship under the ethical system proposed by Lancie Esso, or the connection between the system and reality under the representation system, or the heterogeneity under the aesthetic system) can be used to judge whether it can be described as art in the same way that "the apple is the apple". But how can a work convince everyone in terms of value and become an art that can enter the public eye? Derek Matlavers, a scholar who supports the theory of art institutions, argues that art institutions play a key role in judging the value of art. For a work of art, the art institution must have a reason for making it art, whether in one or more ways.
A fulfilling reason can not only give a certain legitimacy to works of art institutionally, but also allow art institutions to participate in public discussions around works of art and artistic ideas as intermediaries. Art institutions need to confront not only the artists who speak for them, but also the public that extends from art spaces to the online world. Due to the open or semi-public nature of art institutions, once they are open to the public, they naturally enter a larger public realm that is not limited to exhibition space. In an era of mediatization, artists, art institutions and the public are able to shout at each other in an unprecedentedly transparent public sphere.
When the German philosopher and sociologist Habermas proposed the concept of the "public sphere" in 1962, many scholars revised and perfected their theories about the public sphere. Habermas's promotion of the public sphere in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, also known as the "capitalist public sphere", first appeared in 18th-century Europe. Between the private lives of citizens and state power, intellectuals with capital discussed major social events through salons, literary periodicals, café talks, etc. Habermas believed that public discourse could form public opinion and influence political behavior. Non-state-run art institutions can be understood as a small "capitalist public sphere." Private museums like the Guggenheim, or non-profit private art galleries like OCAT, do not rely on public funding, but rather build consensus through artistic discourse around the museum's funders, curators, curators, artists, art critics, and a small number of art audiences.
However, the American philosopher Nancy Fraser wrote in her 1990 paper "Rethinking the Public Sphere" that Habermas's public is exclusive, and that vulnerable groups such as women, the working class, and people of color are not included in the "public", but instead gather into large and small "counterpublic". The public sphere is not just one kind of public, but a collection of multiple unequal publics; different publics form discourses in their respective public spheres and compete with each other in the wider public sphere. We can think that "School Flower" is through the network media, from the capitalist public sphere of the art museum to a number of sub-anti-public platforms with Weibo and Douban as the platform, causing a female-led public discussion - women are marginalized even in the history of contemporary art. The New York Times pointed out that gender issues are gradually dominating the chinese debate, which is why the work caused an uproar when it was re-exhibited after eight years. In this event, the consensus reached among the sub-anti-public (boycott works) and the consensus in the capitalist public sphere (works on display) form a check and balance.
In the broader public sphere, how to make different public voices reflected, compete, and ultimately influence decision-making is a more ambitious proposition. Faced with the asymmetry between the right of voice between artists and the public, how can art institutions safeguard the freedom of expression between artists and themselves, while responding to public demands? The Guggenheim Museum and OCAT Shanghai Show Different Interpretation Methods in their judgments when curating; after the fermentation of public opinion, the Guggenheim and OCAT have come to different conclusions out of support for "pluralism".
Before the launch of Theater of the World, curator Alexandra Munroe defended the cruelty of the work, giving a reason to show it from the perspective of an art institution: "We want to use this work as the beginning of the exhibition... It introduces the viewer to an intrinsic realism that is evident in the other works of this exhibition. It introduces the artist's mind to the viewer, both advocating a state of chaos, full of questioning, atheism, fearlessness of any dominant thought, sharp and cruel... Because that's the world where these artists live. She was also prepared for controversy, including using animals that would otherwise be fed in pet mode, while working with the best and greatest animal caregivers.
When the decision was made to remove three animal-related works, the Guggenheim Museum issued a statement saying: "It is very regrettable that we have made such a decision due to the numerous and obvious threats of violence received... Freedom of expression has always been, and will always be, the most important value espoused by the Guggenheim Museum. Threats of violence undermined the norms of verbal participation in decision-making in the public sphere, and the Guggenheim, while withdrawing its exhibits, still believed that works of art should not be "seized." Next to the vacated theatre cage of the World Theatre, the museum features the artist's response written on the Air France vomit bag.
When OCAT Shanghai tweeted about School Flowers, the art institution did not write a statement about it like other works, but quoted the artist's own words: "... So if you want to see beautiful women, you basically have to start... It's early to go to the art museum, and in turn, when night falls, it will be a scene of purgatory on earth. "The institution has made almost no success in judging The School Flower, not giving a reason for the work to occupy the authoritative artistic space, or even relaying the artist's disrespectful remarks without evaluation."
OCAT Shanghai made the decision to withdraw the exhibition in the early morning of the day after the introduction: "After receiving criticism from everyone, we immediately re-examined the content of the work and the interpretation of the artist's work... We would like to express our sincerest apologies to all the audience members who have been troubled, unwell and hurt as a result. Netizens' comments on the apology Weibo focused on questioning the museum's negligence in curating and reviewing, and the lack of curatorial reasons and the rapid change of the museum's position made people suspect that its voice in the public domain violated the principles of prudence and sincerity. Song Tuo and the curators have so far not reacted to the accusations.
Although for different reasons, both the Guggenheim and OCAT ultimately decided to take down the boycotted work. Whether it is infringing, offensive, or uncomfortable, art with a harmful nature seems to be increasingly difficult to see in our current world, which is also inseparable from the pan-moralization of literary and artistic works.
In 2019, a wall of dirty words appeared in the exhibition hall of the Central American Sculpture Department, one side of the wall was written by the artist with insulting words against men, and the other side was written with insulting words against women, and the photos were sent by the creators on the Internet, which caused discomfort among many netizens, and the wall was cleaned up and repainted to white on the same day. If boycott is understood as a channel for public participation in decision-making, this channel can consist of a number of options, including non-participation, disapproval, vocal opposition, complaints to institutions or organizations, or reporting to public authorities. Even exercising this adversarial freedom for the sake of social order and progress, we should understand that one-sided "let it disappear" leads to the closure of discussion and the silence of dissidents. In the discussion about Song Tuo, we seem to rarely hear voices other than condemnation, but if you search for "Song Tuo School Flower" on Baidu, the first association will be "Song Tuo School Flower First Place".