WHAT THE DUCK?

‘Rubber Duck’, like its maker Florentjin Hofman’s other work, is daft, kitsch, intellectually undemanding and entirely uncool. Yet its value, I think, lies in precisely these attributes. When was the last time the work of any artist celebrated on the front cover of Art Review or Frieze aroused general excitement, civic pride, despair at the prospect of it going away, or “limitless amounts of joy”? This last comment is from a discussion at the governmental level about the widespread positive fallout from Hofman’s avowed attempt to spread this joy. I certainly don’t think art can be or should be uniformly subjected to tests of popularity or popularism, but I also think that somebody except the artist and their friends should care about and connect with an art work.

Until recently the 16m tall duck was floating between Hong Kong island and Kowloon. Although described by the artist as a contemporary art work, which it is, the duck was brought to Hong Kong by a shopping mall as a promotional stunt. It’s very healthy that absolutely nobody seems at all interested in the sponsors and that the artist and his duck have gained far more publicity and kudos than the mall.

I say “until recently” because the joy came to an abrupt end when this happened:

And it happened amid accusations of cigarette attacks by mainland China’s notoriously uncouth, vulgar tourists, the enmity of “duck haters” (yes, really) and various other conspiracy theories of the kind that run wild on Sina Weibo and its ilk whenever they get going on any subject even tangentially involving relations between Hong Kong and China. The most likely genuine explanation is environmental stress from the wind and waves, although the eventual face-saving Chinese style explanation was planned maintenance, i.e. “no, no, it’s not a PR disaster, we meant to do it.”

People had been coming from hundreds of miles away to see it, with a collateral commercial impact on everyone from street hawkers with yellow bath ducks (almost certainly made in neighbouring Shenzhen, the world’s factory) to hotels offering “duck view” hotel rooms. Rubber Duck’s untimely demise left many locals as jocularly or genuinely distraught as the Weibo user who wrote ”Don’t die! I still haven’t had the chance to make a pilgrimage and come worship you, big yellow duck.”

Now let’s try to imagine anybody apart from their friends who work as curators or at art magazines giving a single, tiny fuck about the joyous arrival or the sad premature departure of absolutely any of the formulaic work done recently by critical young darlings like Haroon Mirza, Karla Black or Elizabeth Price who can apparently do no wrong…

…

…

OK, put down your pens, time is up. Anything? No, me neither.

SHENZHEN

It was slightly surreal to read one of Guy Delisle‘s other books about being a temporary resident among famished, fearful citizens in an oppressive Communist country (Pyongyang) while I was a temporary resident sitting among beautiful, healthy Scandinavians in an extravagantly equipped, wonderfully comfortable and relaxed public library in über liberal and progressive Norway. It was in some ways even more surreal to read more recently his similar graphic memoir about working as an animation director in the Chinese city of Shenzhen and to realise that he’d had almost identical experiences and reactions to the place as myself. I don’t mean I identified with it. I mean he had exactly the same experiences as I did. Delisle was there in the late 1990s and I was there ten years later in 2007-2008, but surprisingly little seems to have changed. Probably a lot more buildings went up, and the metro system wasn’t there, and the population was smaller, but I could still even recognise some of the places from his drawings. I was there as an artist in residence at a gallery in Shenzhen, one of the few state-funded ones in the whole of China.

Delisle mentions the occasional blessed escapes to nearby Hong Kong where it feels like a massive weight has lifted from yourself and from everybody else; the fine Communist art of doing the absolute minimum amount of work (or less if you can get away with it), what’s called in Russian tufta; the pathological Chinese aversion to the sun, “as if it’s radioactive” to use Delisle’s perceptive phrase; the worrying amount of time you spend, with hindsight, laying on your bed in your underwear doing nothing, just for some respite from the dirt and the difficulty and from people randomly shouting HELLOO at you on the street when it’s clearly a kind of racist dig rather than a genuine greeting. I experienced all this too. When I finished this book I just wanted to give him a big hug and tell him with relief that it was OK, somebody understands, I felt exactly the same.

A PARABLE ABOUT ORTHODOXY IN ART

Image by Alistair Gentry.

The Song Dynasty artist, writer, polymath and generally intelligent chap Su Shi (蘇軾, also known as 蘇東坡 Su Dongpo, active in China circa 11th century AD) was discovered at his work one day by the same kind of person who nowadays thinks that an artist must play particular types of conceptual games within certain narrow art-historical (usually modernist) parameters if they’re to be taken seriously by the art world. “Why have you painted the bamboo in red ink?” asked this presumptuous visitor, “Surely everybody uses black ink?”

Su replied that he’d never seen black bamboo either.

A thousand years later, Su Dongpo’s red bamboo painting can still be seen in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Nobody remembers the name of the critic who said that bamboo shouldn’t be red.

THE MOST ADMIRABLE SKILL

“If you play a chess game but after two or three moves you can change the rules, how can people play with you? Of course you will win, but after 60 years you will still be a bad player because you never meet anyone who can challenge you. What kind of game is that? Is that interesting?”

Ai Weiwei interviewed relatively briefly by Time. Time the magazine, not the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole. Some interesting observations in it, including the one above in which he’s referring to the Chinese government although to my mind it could easily also apply to the art world’s elites and authorities, who play a similar game of movable goal posts and neutralising obfuscation with artists. There is a huge value in being challenged, but the art world rarely does anything but toy idly with the idea of being challenged. If the art world really embraced challenging ideas, art and people, then nobody in the art world would be terrified of speaking out of turn or getting a reputation for being critical.

On the contrary, most artists who live in the supposedly free and democratic world (and have much less to fear) wouldn’t say boo to a goose and don’t have a fraction of Ai’s bravery and honesty; bravery and honesty, moreover, that’s been genuinely put to the test and found to be strong enough to have a pretty good stab at defying the Chinese government. But his pusillanimous counterparts in the West don’t dare, because they know that talent and merit are not as important as just keeping your mouth zipped for fear of going on some neurotic, insecure gallerist’s or art world oligarch’s private blacklist.

BLATANT BOOK MARKETING, PART II

Read Part I and the background to this post.

Buy the book.

SHENZHEN: THE EMPIRE OF FUCKDUP

My studio and living space is ridiculously huge even by Western standards. It takes me longer to walk from the sofa to the television than it did to walk through all three rooms of my flat in Edinburgh. In China they’d normally put four apartments in a space that size, then also stack an absurd number of others on top of it, and underneath there would be microscopic shops selling exactly the same things as every other block in the neighbourhood. I have it to myself, which would feel needlessly greedy and a waste of space even in the UK. The Chinese artists have thoughtfully left this studio, the fourth, to me because the number four is associated with death and therefore considered dreadfully unlucky. I never work out whether they think that Chinese superstitions are so ethnically discerning that they’ll pass over someone of European origin, or if they just don’t care about the possibility of me being afflicted with whatever it is they fear will happen. They’re in number five.

The first I see of the people who will be my colleagues for the next few months is when I do the presentation that’s been requested of me. I have a shower that completely floods the kitchen if it’s used for more than thirty seconds, then I change into clothes that immediately get sweaty again. Eventually I extract the location of the artists’ presentation. It’s next door, in the studio of the Chinese artists. I already grasp the fact that anything and everything you learn in China is strictly on a need-to-know, eyes-only basis— if you’re lucky and the person in question likes you. It’s more normal for all information, harmless or otherwise, to be guarded and doled out like rice during a famine.