mapping contemporary chinese art
TRANSCRIPT
Mapping Contemporary Chinese Art Freedom? Yue Minjun and Ma Desheng in the light of Antonin Artaud Isabel Jakob "La liberté liberté liberté liberté liberté liberté liberté………… Il y a la liberté Où est la liberté Pourquoi la liberté Comment la liberté La liberté ……..la liberté…………la liberté…………… la liberté………………….la liberté…………………………… Toujours La liberté dans la tête Toujours La liberté dans l’air Toujours La liberté dans le ciel Toujours La liberté dans la terre Toujours La liberté dans la mer Toujours La liberté dans la main Toujours La liberté dans la serrure Toujours La liberté dans la rue Toujours La liberté dans la bouche Toujours La liberté dans l’âme Toujours La liberté dans le rêve Il y a la liberté partout Mais La liberté est souvent perdue Bien sûr La liberté sont toujours là La liberté ………….la liberté…………..la liberté……………la liberté Jamais de liberté Où trouver la liberté Oublier la liberté De quelle couleur est liberté Quel est le son de liberté Pourquoi chercher la liberté La liberté toujours dans mon cœur et dans votre cœur" M. DESHENG, 'Liberté', 2010
(Duperret): "No dear Charlotte here I stay waiting for the promised day
when once again we can utter the word Freedom"
P. WEISS, The persecution and assassination of Jean-Paul Marat: as performed by the inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade, 1965
I.
Yue Minjun is mostly known for his 'smiling' canvases, works of cynical realism that
reached the highest prices in the art market and are often used to illustrate Chinese
contemporary art. There is, however, a canvas of his which is radically different from this
corpus: Death of Marat (2002).
1. Although the artist has very often incorporated traditional Western paintings in his work,
for instance with Execution (based on Edouard Manet and Francisco Goya, 1995), The
Massacre at Chios or Freedom Leading the People (both inspired by Eugène Delacroix,
respectively 1994 and 1996), Death of Marat is significant because of the absence of Jean-
Paul Marat – and, also, the lack of grotesque grinning figures.1
1Cf. http://fondation.cartier.com/for a comprehensive description of the work; funnily enough David's Marat is, actually, grinning, proving an ideal subject for the Chinese artist.
Here, quotation works from absence: Minjun is appropriating the famous Jacques-Louis
David painting of the same subject (1793); yet, despite the accuracy of the replica - one
can notice how the folds of the drapery and the textures on the wooden pedestal are a
quasi-photographic rendering of the original - this is not a copy. The colour scheme is
deliberately made lighter, the red of the blood almost pulp, the background fuzzy in
rather kitsch pastel hues. And of course, there is no Marat - which means there is also no
letter being written, the message of Marat's death being left to one's imagination, or
being removed altogether.
Why, then, maintaining the plinth with David's signature? Was the reference not clear
enough? Is Minjun's acknowledging David's agency upon his canvas? Maybe. I believe
the artist is not as provocative here as Li Chao with I don't Want to Play Cards with Cézanne
(1988).2
2. 2Cf. C. TAN, Playing Cards with Cézanne: How the Contemporary Artists of China Copy and Recreate, ProQuest, 2008; this work is deliberately sketchy, messy, not at all a mimetic copy of Cézanne's original, rather a dismissal of Western painting.
Richard E. Strassberg, the curator of the exhibition of the same name of 1991 in
Pasadena, analysed Li Chao's appropriation of Western Modernism in these terms:
"Whereas the traditional Chinese approach would study a great master by making an exact, reverential copy in order to absorb both his form and spirit, Li's alterations are designed to signify a refusal to be overwhelmed by such influence. In his search for a possible imagery, he asserts an unwillingness to take on the burden of Western art history as a substitute for the burden of Chinese art history."3 Death of Marat seems to fall between these two approaches: it is neither a denial nor a
glorification of Western art. The quotation mode serves another purpose. By removing
the figure of Marat while keeping the universal reference to his death, Minjun creates a
blank space where the viewer can project his own narratives of martyrdom or fight for
freedom.
While Execution instantly evokes the massacres of Tienanmen Square (its background
reminding of the walls of the Forbidden City) and Freedom Leading the People still shows
the artist's chinese-ness, Death of Marat does not refer to either West or East, it is rather a
meeting point of both. This is not a polemical act: to get rid of the figure of Marat is not
disrespecting David or making an obvious visual pun; it is a way to reassert the artist's
freedom of choice, and, by extension, of expression, in a country that is well-known for
its limitations in this regard.4 With this canvas, the painter asserts his anxieties with far
more subtlety than in his cynical realist counterparts. While the 'grinning corpus' has
been labelled as cynical, if not defeatist (giggles and indifference replacing activism), this
3Quoted in C. TAN, Playing Cards with Cézanne: How the Contemporary Artists of China Copy and Recreate, ProQuest, 2008, p. 2. 4The opposite of this is for instance Minjun's You're so Manet (2001), a grotesque reworking of Bar aux Folies-Bergeres with dildos replacing glasses. There is attempt to replicate Manet's style either: this work is a pop quote, far more postmodern than Marat.
canvas cannot be reduced so easily to such schematic concepts. Minjun also questions his
own role by removing his signature figures – the self-portraits reoccurring obsessively
throughout his corpus of work; it should be noted that he also performed the same trick
on Johannes Vermeer's Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window; yet, this painting falls out
of my argument because it does not deal with the thematic of freedom and revolutionary
action that is characteristic of Execution, Freedom Leading the People and Death of Marat. Yue
Minjun's version of Fra Angelico's Annunciation of 2002 also functions in the same way:
in these types of canvases, the message/missive is always erased (when grinning
characters are present on the scene, the message is dislocated, rendered grotesque and
meaningless).
A statement from the website of the contemporary art White Space Beijing can shed
some light on this mode of representation:
"On the basis of the research of Western or Chinese classical masterpieces of oil painting, he creates a new painting language. He has changed subjectively their integrity on the basis of copying the origin. For example he deliberately cut out the central characters in the works such as The Death of Marat of the French painter Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window and The Maidservant Pouring Milk of the painter Jan Vermeer (1632- 1675) in Holland as well as Five Heroes in Langya Mount of Chinese oil painting classic. The paintings without events and plots have created the sense of absence and a new scene. The emptiness of the characters tempts audience to recover the integrity of the pictures in the relationships of history and reality, memory and imagination, reality and fiction, picture and concept. His paintings have the dual meanings of objectivity and subjectivity, extend the new language and change audience’s appreciation habits by borrowing the images of the art history. His works have proved Jean Baudrillard’s statement about Post- modernism that the history has ended and the present is post-history without meaning."5
5Cf. http://www.whitespace-beijing.com/
Beyond discussions of Post-modernism, quotations and simulacra, the crucial issue here
is the interchangeability of objective and subjective. There is actually a word for it, a
word employed three times by Antonin Artaud in his writings and that was famously
analysed by Jacques Derrida in a lengthy essay: the word is subjectile.6
"Subjectile, the word or the thing, can take the place of the subject or of the object - being neither one nor the other."7 "This supposed natural tongue, this tongue you are born with, it will be necessary to force it, to render it completely mad, and in it again the subjectile, this word that is scarcely even French, in order to describe the support of the pictogram that is still resonating with the trace left in it by a projectile. This came to perforate its sensitive but sometimes resistant surface, the surface of a subjectivity appeased and reassured: the precarious outcome of the work."8
3. 6Cf. Derrida's To Unsense the Subjectile in J. DERRIDA, P. THÉVENIN, The secret art of Antonin Artaud, MIT Press, 1998 and, also, Julia Kristeva's interpretation of subjectile: "Through that experience, which is nevertheless managed by the Other, "subject" and "object" push each other away, confront each other, collapse, and start again—inseparable, contaminated, condemned, at the boundary of what is assimilable, thinkable: abject. Great modern literature unfolds over that terrain: Dostoyevsky, Lautreamont, Proust, Artaud, Kafka, Celine.", J. KRISTEVA, Powers of Horror, an Essay on Abjection, Columbia University Press, 1941, p. 25. 7J. DERRIDA, P. THÉVENIN, The secret art of Antonin Artaud, MIT Press, 1998, p. 43. 8J. DERRIDA, P. THÉVENIN, The secret art of Antonin Artaud, MIT Press, 1998, p. 47.
To compare Yue Minjun and Antonin Artaud seems extreme: the first being a well-
loved, incredibly successful if not mundane painter, the latter a tormented figure of
history that always refused painting-per-se and proclaimed his hatred for culture – and
thus, for references. Yet, there is one thing in common: the fight for freedom. Beyond
Minjun's kitsch, 'fun' canvases lay a more violent undercurrent. Freedom Leading the People
substitutes the French allegorical Liberty and the figures of the French Revolution for a
post-cultural revolution Chinese setting. By being a fragmented, kaleidoscopic self-
portrait, it also represents Minjun's personal fight for freedom, nihilistic or not.
"The state I want is to get more things discussed: many things we can’t discuss on this current cultural platform. Maybe discussion will be easier when transformed into consumption. On one hand, it’s a kind of happiness. More importantly, it is a channel. We have to find a new channel."9 It is probably too easy to dismiss this artist just because he is revelling in the
commercialization of his own work: as this quote shows very well, he is seeking for a
new channel - a different kind of missive, where emptiness can trigger relevant social
issues.10
The costumes of his avatars and the eternally frozen grins also suggest a parallel between
Minjun and the mad man - le fou: of course Antonin Artaud spent most of his life in
psychiatric institutions, his art and writings being impossible to understand without this
perspective.11 The obsessive grins of Minjun's characters create an undifferentiated space
9This is Minjun's answer to the question "So, does he support the rampant commercialisation of art?", cf. Yue Minjun, What lies behind that money-making smile?, July 2011, http://www.timeoutbeijing.com/ 10In the case of Fra Angelico's Annunciation for instance, Minjun replaced the very sacred act; the spiritual; the message of Christianity. What remains is an empty, metaphysical set making us face this lack of spirituality; perhaps Minjun's statement about the world. 11There have been countless analyses of Artaud's writings and his life by the most prominent post-structuralist writers and beyond: particularly worth mentioning are Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida, Kristeva,
of expression that is similar to that of the asylum - or, in Li Xianting's words, the "self-
ironic response to the spiritual vacuum and folly of modern-day China."12
Then, Minjun is also, to periphrase Derrida's title, 'unsensing the subjectile', finding a
new language of painting that is neither Western nor Eastern, optimistic nor pessimistic.
Perhaps a mad gaze, or a gaze on madness.
There is another parallel between Minjun and Artaud that is of a more formal nature:
Artaud actually played the part of Jean-Paul Marat in Abel Gance's silent film Napoleon
(1927).
4. Here as well, there is an obvious reference to Jacques-Louis David's painting; it does not
matter if Yue Minjun was aware or not of this Davidian epigone, nor even of other
rewritings of the death of Marat (such as Peter Weiss' play Marat/Sade and the
homonymous filmed version by Peter Brook)13. What matters is the legacy of rebellion:
Artaud as Marat, Artaud as Artaud the martyr, the suffering man - the "homo sacer",
Sontag, and from a more biographical point of view, Paule Thévenin and Florence de Mèredieu. It is telling that Minjun's retrospective at the Fondation Cartier in Paris was called L'ombre du fou rire, hinting at the more sinister attributes of laughter and giggles. It would be interesting to apply a spinozian or a bergsonian reading to Yue Minjun's 'giggles': perhaps one would discover that it is indeed an attitude of freedom rather than a kitsch pessimistic comment on society. 12This is frequently quoted on the internet, although I have not been able to find a source - my guess is that it comes from a film or an interview with the art contemporary theorist. 13Peter Brook has also written extensively on Artaud and Marat/Sade is considered one of the few plays to belong to the artaldian legacy of the Theatre of Cruelty – far more than Artaud's own dramas.
Minjun as Marat (what could be inferred from his obsession with self-portraiture, even
his absence becoming self-referential, albeit in a postmodern fashion).14 What Sarah
Wilson writes of Artaud's role in inter-war France can actually be transferred to a
Chinese context:
"Artaud’s very being posits the deconstruction, if not the destruction, of the neo- classical edifice of interwar France – including the existential implications of his failure."15 Doesn't Yue Minjun's nihilistic approach have the same effect?16 If we think back to
Death of Marat, the absence of Marat could also mean, more negatively, that there is no
Marat in the Chinese context: no hero, no rebel.
II.
5.
14Sarah Wilson applied Giorgio Agamben's concept of the homo sacer to the figure of Antonin Artaud in S. WILSON, Artaud, homo sacer from Antonin Artaud, La Casa Encendida, 2009. 15S. WILSON, Artaud, homo sacer from Antonin Artaud, La Casa Encendida, 2009, p. 1. 16Failure, however, is certainly not a trait of the painter's career – it might, though, be expressed in his canvases as a reflexion of the 'failure' of Chinese society.
However, if we think of Chinese art there was in fact such a figure, even before the
events of Tienanmen Square: Ma Desheng, the leader of the Stars movement. Desheng is
far more Artaldian than Yue Minjun: he is a charismatic figure, a leader, a rebel, a self-
taught artist, a poet; he has also, like Artaud, experienced suffering since an early age, as
he was forced to walk with crutches because of childhood polio.17 The Stars was a
collective of non-professional artists, of workers turning to art to find a way of
expressing their malcontent with society.18 Theirs was a reaction against anonymity – as
Ma Desheng stated:
"Every artist is a star. Even great artists are stars from the cosmic point of view. We called our group "The Stars" in order to emphasize our individuality. This was directed at the drab uniformity of the Cultural Revolution."19 Despite the impact these artists had, there was no place in China for their revolutionary
ideals to be fully expressed; thus, most of them eventually left the country. In 1985, six
years after founding the movement, Ma Desheng moved to Switzerland to then proceed
to Paris in 1986.20 Much like Artaud was exiled to the asylum and was either neglected or
misunderstood by his contemporaries, so was Desheng exiled in another country. A
voluntary exile is not a prison, yet it can foster the same longing for freedom – moving
to a country where freedom of expression is a token also allowing the artist to fully
express his critical views on the motherland.
17Cf. P. CABANNE, Ma Desheng, Kwai Fung Art Publishing House, 2006. The idea of the body and especially the postwar tormented body is essential in understanding Artaud, both as a critic and as an artist. Artaud’s body, first of all, was tormented since his childhood and had obviously been tormented by the electroshock therapies and the hunger in the asylum. 18Cf. K. SMITH, Nine Lives: The Birth of Avant-Garde Art in New China, Timezone 8, 2008, p. 471. 19Ma Desheng's description of the movement; it is telling to compare them with Yue Minjun's significantly different take on individuality, when explaining the eternal return of self-portraits in his paintings: "It’s normal rather than egotistical," he insists. "I think that it’s human nature, because anybody can replace somebody else and is actually worthless. This world will keep on going without any single individual.", cf. Yue Minjun, What lies behind that money-making smile?, July 2011, http://www.timeoutbeijing.com/ 20Cf. P. CABANNE, Ma Desheng, Kwai Fung Art Publishing House, 2006.
6.
In 2010, Ma Desheng held a public reading of his poetry at the Club des Poètes in Paris.
The performance contains one recurrent word: liberté, shouted, deformed by the artist's
Chinese accent, ending up into libreté, perhaps suggesting lib-être, 'free being'.21
One can easily compare it with Artaud's poetry:
"Liberté, liberté, liberté, liberté. Brûler l’être de la liberté. Il n’y en a pas. Car au nom de la liberté toujours d’autres libertés accourent cribler et étouffer la mienne. Et je crois que pour être libre je dois d’abord me déclarer prisonnier. (...)"22 And Ma Desheng:
"Libre / pas / h / h / hache /i / i / / toute la journée / libreté / toujours en trace la liberté / page blanche / la liberté ..."23
21One notices many tics typical of a Chinese accent in Ma Desheng's French: the way r and l are confused or become an intermediate sound, the difficulty in pronouncing successive consonants, the unnatural scansion of syllables, and so on. 22Cf. A. ARTAUD, Œuvre complètes XII, Artaud le Môme, ci-gît, précédé de la culture indienne, NRF, Gallimard, 1974. Italics are mine. 23My 'transcription' from the video; italics are mine.
Ma Desheng's text is characterized by his free use of syntax; his 'minced' grammar
(haché) and minced rhythm. Liberté returns obsessively, as a chant almost. This is again
quite artaldian:
"I am, it seems, a writer. But what do I write? I compose sentences. With no subject, verb, attribute, or complement. I have learned words, They have taught me things. In my turn I teach them a new way to act."24 Ma Desheng's words are like Artaud's 'breath-words' with a 'deviant syntax' (the
expression is by Deleuze).25 The word liberté, especially spoken in Ma Desheng's Chinese
accent with its non-emphasis on the r embodies a characteristic of Artaud's writing that
was analysed by both Derrida and Deleuze: the obsessive recurrence of the consonants R
and T.26 Derrida, for instance, quotes the words la terre [the earth] l'être dans l'absolu [being
in the absolute], la matière [matter], des siècles d'être [centuries of being], l'homme enterré [man
interred], les prêtres [the priests], la fausse êtreté [false beingness], l'êtreté, and so on.27
Reading Artaud's corpus, one notices many other words based on these letters: désastre,
détruire, réalité, mort, déperdition, virtualité, secret, rupture, acteur, cruauté, théâtre,
littérature, irréalité, terrible, portée, perte, vertige, tourment, esprit, lettre, âcreté - all
words that are at the core of Artaud's writing and of his life, a lexical field of false
beingness, of torture. T and R are "force before form", a language which throws itself.28
Derrida calls this a 'literal thunder' - this expression could very well be applied to Ma
Desheng's poem as well.29 Rather than a spoken text, his words sound like an incantation,
a projection of words.
24Cf. A. ARTAUD, Œuvre complètes XIV, quoted in J. DERRIDA, P. THÉVENIN, The secret art of Antonin Artaud, MIT Press, 1998. 25Cf. G. DELEUZE, Essays critical and clinical, University of Minnesota Press, 1997, pp. 126-135. 26See notes 24 and 25. 27J. DERRIDA, P. THÉVENIN, The secret art of Antonin Artaud, MIT Press, 1998. 28J. DERRIDA, P. THÉVENIN, The secret art of Antonin Artaud, MIT Press, 1998. 29J. DERRIDA, P. THÉVENIN, The secret art of Antonin Artaud, MIT Press, 1998.
"Throwing, throwing oneself: in words, as in painting, the intonation projects, it dynamizes a content, the motion expelling it into a space that is nothing other than the elements of this tonal trajectory, the difference between the projectile and the subjectile, the latter sometimes becoming the target of the former. Artaud says it as early as 1931, in "La Mise en scène et la métaphysique" (Mise-en-Scène and Metaphysics), a lecture at the Sorbonne that deals first of all with painting: Words themselves have their own potential as sound, they have various ways of being projected into space, which are called intonations. And there is a great deal that could be said about the concrete value of intonation in the theater, about this quality that words have - apart from their concrete meaning - of creating their own music according to the way in which they are uttered, which can even go against that meaning - of creating beneath language an undercurrent of impressions, correspondences, analogies. . ."30 Desheng's text is similarly intonated; his violent diction turns the words into sound. The
way he shouts liberté seems indeed opposite to the meaning of the word: as if language
was imprisoned and thus antithetical to the concept that is being spoken. Breath,
bombardment, projectiles, and imprisonment: all this à voix haute, in a scream. Desheng's
text is musical, too: one loses the meaning of the words and rather focuses on the
gestures, the face - what Derrida would call body-signs.31
"Pourquoi mentir, pourquoi chercher à mettre sur le plan littéraire une chose qui est le cri même de la vie, pourquoi donner des apparences de fiction à ce qui est fait de la substance indéracinable de l'âme, qui est comme la plainte de la réalité."32
Both Artaud and Ma Desheng go beyond and against stylish art, the art of a perfected
medium; their art is their life: in both cases, a search for freedom. This is attempted
through a suffered speech, either incomprehensible (Artaud's glossolalia, Desheng's
30J. DERRIDA, P. THÉVENIN, The secret art of Antonin Artaud, MIT Press, 1998. 31Cf. S. WILSON, Artaud, homo sacer from Antonin Artaud, La Casa Encendida, 2009, p. 11: "Artaud’s Van Gogh was a passionate and private performance. Partly dictated from his own manuscripts, partly improvised, (using two monographs and the letters to Theo) it offers a striking example of what Thevenin calls an écriture vocale – elle s’imprime à la fois dans l’air et dans l’oreille de l’auditeur, le premier auditeur étant le locuteur lui-même.85 Artaud, seeing Van Gogh, hearing his own writing, later writes over graphic transcriptions of his voice, for a text written to be read aloud, à voix haute, to be shouted, reperformed. Disgust and obscenity offer the pitch at which from the outset, Artaud decides to act, but there are also passages of intense lyricism." 32A. ARTAUD, L'Ombilic des Limbes, suivi de Le Pèse-Nerfs et autres textes, NRF, Gallimard, 1954: from a letter to Jacques Rivière (25 mai 1924).
performances that needed an 'interpreter') or intonated with pain and violence.33 Paule
Thévenin, the late editor of Artaud's Oeuvres Complètes called his a 'rhythmical suffering':
an apt description of the musical, yet harsh diction employed by Artaud - one only needs
to listen Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de Dieu to, literally, endure this suffering.34 Both
Artaud and Desheng vary their intonations to a terrifying extent, some words
pronounced rather softly, some shouted in a metallic or hysterical voice - in Desheng's
case, liberté always seems suffered, a vocal obstacle he has to overcome. Interrogations
are haunting and tormented: "Pourquoi, pourquoi, pour-quoi, pourquoi, pourquoi,
POURQUOI sais-je la liberté?"35 This segment of Ma Desheng's performative reading
can once again be compared to Artaud's writing:
"Les mots que nous employons on me les a passés et je les emploie, mais pas pour me faire comprendre, pas pour achever de m'en vider, Alors pourquoi? C'est qu'en réalité je ne les emploie pas En réalité je ne fais pas autre chose que de me taire et de cogner."36 Indeed, there is no way either performer can 'empty' these words: speaking is,
paradoxically, both a silent and a violent act, a means to fight and punch, verbally.
Finally, in his rather anecdotal video, Ma Desheng's comes very close to realize Artaud's
ideas on theatre. The concepts promoted by Artaud in The Theatre and Its Double –
perhaps his most well-known theoretical text, which inspired countless theatre studies
33Artaud's glossolalia has been studied in length, one can refer to C. BOUTHORS-PAILLART, Antonin Artaud : l’énonciation ou l’épreuve de la cruauté, Droz, 1997 or B. ANDRÉO, 'Exercices d'exorcisme': les sorts et glossolalies artaldiens ou la pragmatique de l'altérité in ed. P. COOKE, Alienation and Alterity: Otherness in Modern and Contemporary Francophone Contexts, Peter Lang, pp. 225-239, for instance - or, again, Deleuze and Derrida. 34The recording with Artaud's own voice can easily be found on Youtube. 35My transcription and my emphasis. 36A. ARTAUD, Suppôts et supplications, II, NRF, Gallimard, 1978.
and practices – suggest an end to the subjugation of theatre to the text; Artaud tried to
recover a unique language half-way between gesture and thought, characterized by
sounds, cries, onomatopoeia.37
"A theatre working like the plague, by intoxication, by infection, by analogy, by magic; a theatre in which the play, the event itself, stands in place of a text."38 Ma Desheng's Liberté might not be a play in the strict sense of the term, yet it is indeed
an attempt to go towards a speaking space: the action overcomes the text. Thévenin
called Artaud's writing "une écriture vocale", which impresses itself both in the air and
the ear of the listener, the first listener being the speaker himself.39 This is precisely what
Ma Desheng does, becoming the living paradigm of the artaldian actor. Uttering replaces
diction; rhythms and intensities keep fluctuating, and the screams are incantations. The
actor works with his body to produce a reading that is both the companion of a 'vocal
writing' and a shamanic act.40 Kimberly Jannarone aptly described Artaud's 'malediction'
drawings (gris-gris) as 'exercises in exorcism' - "Artaud never stopped naming,
denouncing, exorcising, conjuring", writes Derrida.41 In doing so, he was applying his
own ideals of a theatre of cruelty:
37Cf. A. ARTAUD, Œuvre complètes IV, Le Théâtre et son double, Le Théâtre de Séraphin, Les Cenci, NRF, Gallimard, 1974; A. ARTAUD, translated by V. CORTI, The Theatre and Its Double, Oneworld Classics, 2011 (first published in French in 1938, first published in Great Britain in 1970) but also Eric Bentley's and Peter Brook's analyses on the subject, as well as J. DERRIDA, The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation in Writing and Difference, University of Chicago Press, 1978, pp. 232-50. There are of course many more critical texts which could be referred to here. 38P. BROOK, The Empty Space, Penguin Books, 2008. 39J. DERRIDA, P. THÉVENIN, The secret art of Antonin Artaud, MIT Press, 1998 40Speaking of shamanic, Ma Desheng's own look actually suggests some kind of spiritual figure; back to Artaud, there are certain physical resemblances between the two when they speak and gesture: illuminated eyes, almost psychic, trance-like expressions, etc. (cf. slides 5, with Artaud as the monk in Dreyer's Joan of Arc). 41J. DERRIDA, P. THÉVENIN, The secret art of Antonin Artaud, MIT Press, 1998, p. 44 - another interesting interpretation of these curses, visual or verbal, is Grossman's: "Dans le cadre de cette étude des figures de l'aliénation, il y a en outre une dimension linguistique à la malédiction qui dénoterait une relation autre à la langue, à l'énonciation. Evelyne Grossman note: 'si maudire s'entend comme "dire du mal" [...] c'est aussi pour Artaud un "mal dire", une pratique concertée du lapsus, de l'écorchement de la langue communautaire, celle qui structure le lien social. Le probleme de la malédiction équivaut à celui de la révolte: on nous dit mal, on nous fait mal, parce que l'on dit mal." cf. B. ANDRÉO, 'Exercices d'exorcisme': les sorts et glossolalies artaldiens ou la pragmatique de l'altérité in ed. P. COOKE, Alienation and Alterity: Otherness in
"And a playwright who uses nothing but words is not needed and must give way to specialists in objective, animated enchantment."42 "This new language's grammar is undiscovered as yet. Gesture is its substance and mind or, if you like, its alpha and omega. It springs from a NEED for speech rather than performed speech. But finding a deadlock in speech, it spontaneously returns to gesture. [...] I have added another language to speech and am attempting to restore its ancient magic effectiveness, its spellbinding effectiveness, integral to speech and whose mysterious potential is now forgotten. When I say I will not put on written plays, I mean I will not act plays based on writing or words, rather, in the shows I intend to put on, the predominant part will be physical and could not be determined or written in normal word language. Even the written or spoken parts will be performed in a different way."43 "Rhythmic, syllabic repetition, special vocal inflection embracing the exact meaning of words, all arouse a greater number of mental images in the mind, producing a more or less hallucinatory state, obliging our sensibility and our minds to undergo a kind of anatomical deterioration which contributes to eliminating the pointlessness ordinarily distinguishing written poetry, for the whole problem of theatre revolves around this pointlessness."44 Artaldian theatre is a burning projection: it is projectile, the ultimate fusion of language,
thought and the senses into a magical entity, where the seemingly random assemblage of
poetry expressed by physical means creates new types of representation. If we look back
to Ma Desheng's reading, it seems that it is precisely the need for speech rather than the
performed speech that drives his poetry. Derrida wrote that the theatre of cruelty is not a
representation, "it is life itself, in the extent to which life is unrepresentable. Life is the
nonrepresentable origin of representation."45 Beyond his deconstructive paradoxes, he
tackles the central question here: the eternal distinction between art and life. Someone
like Yue Minjun leaves life in the realm of the unrepresented (the emptiness, the lack of
Modern and Contemporary Francophone Contexts, Peter Lang, pp. 229. This 'other relationship to language', 'saying badly'/cursing is also applicable to Ma Desheng, not only because he is 'mal dire' in terms of French prononciation, but also because of the very structure (or rather a-structure, de-structure) of his syntax. 42A. ARTAUD, translated by V. CORTI, The Theatre and Its Double, Oneworld Classics, 2011 (first published in French in 1938, first published in Great Britain in 1970), p. 52. 43A. ARTAUD, translated by V. CORTI, The Theatre and Its Double, Oneworld Classics, 2011 (first published in French in 1938, first published in Great Britain in 1970), p. 79. 44A. ARTAUD, translated by V. CORTI, The Theatre and Its Double, Oneworld Classics, 2011 (first published in French in 1938, first published in Great Britain in 1970), p. 87. 45J. DERRIDA, The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation in Writing and Difference, University of Chicago Press, 1978, pp. 234.
figures) or the representational (grinning alter-egos); Ma Desheng, and Antonin Artaud
for the matter, unrepresent representation (unsense representation), forcing the meaning of
words and concepts (forcener le subjectile), adapting their suffering or craving for freedom to
a form of bodily/written poetry that speaks life rather than speaking literature – and
perhaps there lies the very key to freedom.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQi0iYLpKMY
http://fondation.cartier.com
http://www.whitespace-beijing.com
http://www.timeoutbeijing.com
List of images
1. Y. Minjun, Death of Marat, 2002 from the Fondation Cartier's website; J-L. David, The Death of Marat, 1793 from wikipedia. 2. L. Chao, I Don't Want to Play Cards with Cézanne, 1988, screencapped from C. TAN, Playing Cards with Cézanne: How the Contemporary Artists of China Copy and Recreate, ProQuest, 2008, p. 1. 3. Y. Minjun, Freedom for the People, 1996 from aphelis.net 4. Screen-captures of Antonin Artaud as Marat in A. Gance, Napoleon, 1927 5. Ma Desheng in front of the Democracy Wall, screencapped from T. J. BERGHUIS, Performance Art in China, Timezone 8, 2006; Antonin Artaud as the monk in J. Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). 6. Screen-captures of Ma Desheng performing 'Liberté' from the youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQi0iYLpKMY.