For those with an innate love of “history”, the mere mention of the word acts as a potent stimulant, irrespective of whether fashionable thinkers regard “history” as “obsolete”, “new”, or fundamentally non-existent.
In the 1980s, historians were derided by philosophers proclaiming that “the autumn of history is upon us”. Within the discipline of art history, it was Hans Belting who as early as 1984 wrote The End of the History of Art? (Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte?), which began to be regarded as significant by Chinese artists, critics, and art historians in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Basing himself on the realities of art in Western countries and the situation in which art history found itself as a discipline, Belting reminded art historians that a linear and seemingly regular mode of historical narrative should have ended because the art realities which people encounter are already interwoven and lack any typological significance: as there are no boundaries, no logic, nor even any temporal sense, there can be no history. In 2006, Hans Belting began to use the concept of “global art” to analyse the condition of art within the post-Cold War global context prevailing after 1989, and he and his sympathizers attempted to observe the art occurring in different countries, regions, times, cultures, economies, and political contexts in a more open and expansive fashion.
However, if the languages we use in common (whether Chinese, English, or some other language) continue to maintain the basic direction of civilization and continue to maintain the temporal contexts of knowledge they provide as well as the cautionary stances regarding those contexts, then at the same time as we are more open in our understanding of new knowledge we are also resolute in our personal judgments and informed writing. In fact, as I see it, views such as those of Belting provide the space for understanding the “openness”, “flow”, and “layered readings” of art history, and do not allow people to remain floating in the white clouds of relativism.
In the age of the Internet and multimedia with information relayed and replicated from one medium to another, we can naturally use all modes and paths to relay our ideas, and the writing of history is similar. I am well aware that those art phenomena which depend on on-the-spot observation are extremely difficult to convey through traditional writing: How are we to describe and analyse a work that is achieved using comprehensive means through a period of time? How do those people who do not have the direct experience as spectators read about and judge something described in conventional writing? New technologies present constantly changing images at microsecond intervals, and so when artists and their collaborators in different spaces and times use different means to activate virtual platforms and technical media to cooperatively produce new art, how are we to describe effectively the processes and outcomes engendered by these new art works?
Every art historian is influenced by his or her own epistemological background and sensory context (social, environmental, and personal experience), and of course by unendingly changing artistic phenomena. Knowledge – if we acknowledge it to exist – is unique and unlimited, but the unfolding of civilization demands that the judgments we make are necessarily limited. This implies that, as a writer of art history, the instant I make the decision to write (given that “history” is my stimulant) I must determine the structure and layout of what I will write, so that an art history that belongs to my personal view can begin to take shape.
Like most scholarly critics and historians, I confront many dilemmas and difficulties in examining the history of the development of Chinese contemporary art from the year 2000 to 2010. I find that the layout I adopted in my earlier books – A History of Chinese Modern Art, 1979-1989 (with Yi Dan, 1992); Nineties Art China: 1990-1999 (2000); and A History of Art in Twentieth-Century China (2006) – was not wholly appropriate for writing about the history of art in the first decade of the new century. I noted that art in the new century simultaneously developed in tandem with the very ecology and environment that influenced the changes and developments in art, and that this degree of close interaction determined that we had to regard the changes and developments of the entire artistic ecology as a part of the art history of this decade. In an age of dramatic change, how are we to write about the work of artists? How are we to write about the relationships between the work of artists who have close relationships with different cities and regions? And of course, how should we treat those specific issues that directly and indirectly influence artists’ work (controls and freedoms extended to artists by the political system; the demand for and changes in art spaces; the exhibition and dispersal of art works; the relationships between artists and galleries or auction houses; etc) and their relationship with history as we understand it? I divided the layout of the book into two parallel sections. The first is titled “The Ecology of Art”, which examines the importance of changes in the artistic ecology over this particular decade for the work of contemporary artists and its impact on the nature of their creativity; the second is titled “Art and Artists”, where I provide a narrative account of the work of these artists. Through this arrangement into two sections, the reader can derive a rounded understanding from multiple perspectives of the development of art during this decade.
The logic of the layout of this book is: “the ecology” embraces contextual concepts, as well as the structures and processes of artistic production over this decade; on the basis of this “ecology” we can observe the complex relationships between artistic phenomena, and so discover why an artist or an artistic phenomenon has its own particularity. At the same time, at variance with those thinkers who are fond of dazzling theory, we can have a more acute sense of temporality, and so while more voluble thinkers might distance themselves from time (temporal concerns) through their use of language, surely they cannot sway us to reject temporal observation and analysis? Art, after all, is time. From the contents of this book, the reader can see that the book is sequentially arranged fundamentally according to when in the decade particular issues emerged, and this description of artistic phenomena is also based on the temporal order in which these phenomena occurred. Apart from obviously placing a phenomenon in a particular chapter, as for example placing “performance art” in Chapter Four (Performance and Violence: Aesthetics in Retreat and Disarray), I am also following temporal logic in doing so. Moreover, in Chapter Five (Conceptual Art and Multiple-material Arts), in which I describe the changes and evolution in “conceptual art” that occur in the decade and touch on those phenomena, I am also following a temporal arrangement in my discussion of the important works of artists. In this way, the reader can grasp the temporal sequence of these artistic phenomena in the process of reading, as well as observe how the work of different artists differs in its accommodation to historical judgements. At the same time, the reader can discover through the process of reading what artists the author regards as more important, and gain some understanding of their personal work in a temporal framework.
I must explain that the majority of the documents cited in this book come from the Internet which might seem at variance with the standard practice in classic historical writing. Yet for contemporary art, there are few sources of documentation as rich, comprehensive, and timely as the Internet. Internet texts obviously call out for analysis and filtering, but in recent years experience has taught me that the Internet is of the greatest assistance in assembling and understanding artistic phenomena as they are happening. I believe that for the writing of history, especially the research and writing of contemporary history, we must increasingly depend on the Internet.
Here I would like to extend my thanks to my student Kai Lili, for devoting a great deal of time to preparing materials for me. I would also like to thank my friend Ye Yongqing, who suggested that I remove myself from the distractions of the city and complete the writing of this book in Dali. I have benefited greatly from the pleasure of being able to drink wine, listen to music, and reminisce in Dali of an evening after each day’s writing is complete, and this is an experience I have not enjoyed for many years.
Tuesday, 13 December 2011