On the “Ho Chi Minh Trail” __Gao Shiming

[lee ambrozy]

The following will be of interest to those who saw 并 enjoyed or were curious about the SH Biennale "Act I" the Ho Chi Minh Trail @ Long March. Those interested in the ideas of Gao Shiming will also find it a worthy read. 

Would love to hear any feedback on this piece, it seems to me to be a manifesto filled with subtle contradictions, along the lines of: "We are not trying to use art to influence politics or use politics to create art. The idea is that art is inherently political."  

It's ambitious, that is for sure. 

 

So, march on, and enjoy! 

Lee

Begin forwarded message:

From: visualcenter <visual...@126.com>

Date: October 6, 2010 11:11:28 PM GMT+08:00

To: "lee ambrozy" <l...@artforum.com>

Subject: Re:鼓励！

 

On the “Ho Chi Minh Trail”

 

Gao Shiming

 

I

 

In today’s world, post-Cold War ideological narratives play like comedy, and global capitalism’s latest ruse – the “glocal” movement – is little more than a soap opera. Fifty years ago when empires were still fighting for supremacy, the Ho Chi Minh Trail represented a particular view of history and set of ideals. In today’s “postcolonial” and “post-revolutionary” world, the Ho Chi Minh trail has become a dust covered relic of the Cold War era. When we revisit the trail in an attempt to rediscover its power to transcend, we find that everything has changed. The travel route constructed during the Cold War has been dismembered, sold off and monopolized by global capital’s landscape politics. Today the Ho Chi Minh Trail is a trail of confusion, misunderstanding, and aphasia connecting China, Vietnam, East Cambodia, and Laos. But these things are not just historical relics, they are still very real.

 

Along today’s Ho Chi Minh Trail one finds the ashes of the Cold War and the ruins of socialism; emasculated history, publicly known ‘secrets’ (ethnic conflicts, the Khmer Rouge, the Vietnam War, the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square), and internal borders (India and Pakistan, North and South Vietnam, Taiwan and the PRC); the procurement activities of MNCs and the ideologies of NGOs; corrupt governments, poverty, shattered sovereignty, and entire societies in thrall to money.

 

Along today’s Ho Chi Minh Trail there is censorship, but it is very bureaucratic; there is governmental oppression, but it is very weak. A delusional or hypocritical conception of the self prevails, a paradox that hides a patch of “limited sovereignty” within the realm of “unitary sovereignty” and the empire of global capital.

 

Along today’s Ho Chi Minh Trail we find the typical story of contemporary art: autocratic governments and ideologies are suppressing “individual artistic freedom”, and contemporary artists/freedom fighters have taken their artistic/political fight underground/to the people. But this creation myth of the free individual fails to explain why it is that contemporary art, imported from the West, is being used in the fight for freedom? Why are we “independent” but still not “free”? Why does it seem that the rise of contemporary art – anywhere in the world - is always explained with reference to some set of “exceptional circumstances”? Is there some hidden discourse? Could it be that just as the independence movements of the mid 20^th century were epiphenomena created by imperialism and the Cold War, the rise of contemporary art is a landscape installed by global capitalism? Is contemporary art simply a consequence of international politics?

 

II

 

For me, the Ho Chi Minh Trail project is a rehearsal, a kind of self-exercise in the historical present. With capitalist culture reaching to every corner of the globe, we no longer produce, we only rehearse. Rehearsal is an activity that is constantly being interrupted and full of missed cues. It’s a time for looking appreciatively at oneself. It’s part assembly, part performance, part observation, part dissemination. Rehearsal isn’t performance or showing off; rather it’s the marshalling and mobilization of thought and expression, it’s action born of form, originating and terminating in a space beyond expression; it’s criticism and self-criticism between and among leftist intellectuals, artists, and curators; it’s a suspension and dissection of these roles; it’s a countermovement to artistic production. Rehearsal is just a form of preparation, preparation to participate in some kind of “event” – it starts from the space in which artists work and art is created and works backwards toward the theater of mass media/society/art. Within the theater of art there is an economy of symbols/power/meaning/value, and outside the theater there is a similar but larger social economy. To enter this “event”, artists have to pass through the huge vortex that surrounds and engulfs the theater, through the densely arrayed meanings fabricated by the art system, not in order to escape them and return to a time before systemization, but to return to its empty middle, and after undergoing judgment and emerging triumphant, to once again become an author – where becoming an author means becoming a co-author in the Greek sense.

 

This forces us to turn our attention from art “works” to art “work”, or rather, to art “activity”. An art activity is a temporary theatre, the eye of one of the storms that sweeps up artists, artwork, and everything else in its path. It’s a product not of the self, but of action. Art “events” break down the dichotomy between art and interpretation, between creation and dissemination. They don’t need special interpretations because once they become part of society they create a “social reading” that is inextricably linked to mass media. Put simply, art “events”, social creation and social readings, begin and end in society. Each art event remolds society, pluralizing it and setting it in motion.

 

Thus artists are constantly caught between entering and leaving the world, between birth and death. In one sense they are infected by the world, terminally implicated with institutions, capital, ideology, and the mass media, with culture and history; yet in art activities they struggle to conquer, expose, and take leave of these things. In this sense, being a “community artist” is consistent with Nietzsche’s call to create “art for artists”.

 

III

 

The Ho Chi Minh Trail project is not a direct social action, nor is it a utopian vision; rather, it attempts to call forth a continual, reflexive revolution in the self. It aims both to clear away the ethnic/national monopolization of identity and politics, history and tradition, and to wash away the capitalism that has permeated into the depths of our being – the media/cultural/landscape installation created by the globalization of management, consumption, and planning.  

 

What does capitalism mean to the artist? Not only institutional productive forces infinitely greater than those of the individual, not just markets, auctions, galleries… but an infatuation with aesthetics and taste, an delusional view of individual and artistic autonomy (a belief in the individual has always been a fundamental principle of capitalist markets; but in the age of mass media, the individual shouldn’t be thought of as a starting point or stronghold – one must become an artist before one can be and individual), a way to cash in on the meaning, form and exchange value of artistic relationships. More importantly, in today’s art world, capitalism is the open market manifestation of the relations of production that runs through the international contemporary art community, and the “global art landscape” that it produces.

 

In the current political climate, in current notions of art history and aesthetic systems, how does art begin? I hope that our work can inspire a reevaluation of artistic politics and political art since the era of modernism. It’s precisely this false sense of artistic autonomy that creates the intricate entanglements between art and politics. We are not looking for new political themes or political space; rather, we are trying to update our political methods. We are wary of any prepackaged political activism in the name of community (what we need to ask is – does community facilitate communication? or obstruct it?); we are wary of identity politics and discourse politics, wary of any sort of politics as therapy or reparation. Politics was originally a “placement”; it has since been formalized into an “installation”, and finally a “regime”. To be political or to be economical? That is the question. We watch as capitalism transforms politics into economics before our eyes, and watch as “economics” replaces value with exchange value, replaces propaganda with marketing, replaces intentions with effects, replaces faith with calculation, tacks copyright onto creation, and creates brands for labor. Even national politics has been quietly replaced with management, a kind of vulgar, heartfelt “economics” (the first “economic man” was Jesus, and Christian blood courses through the veins of the capitalist body, which cannot be liberated due to its narrow conception of history.)

 

So I am opposed to prepackaged politics, and to all ready-made political products. We need to call forth a new kind of politics, and I am confident that the content and mission of this new politics will be to continually create political subjects. What we are talking about is not the politics of art, or political art. We are not trying to use art to influence politics or use politics to create art. The idea is that art is inherently political. Art/politics requires that we use our bodies and our memories to gauge our historical and political situations; to constantly seek to position our own reality in historical context; to constantly ask “who am I? What kind of world do we live in? What am I living for?” In short, it demands that we reestablish faith, that we throw ourselves into the turbulent passions of the artistic life, that we use artistic activity to constantly challenge knowledge and perception, that we refine the operation of social discourse-perception and relations of production, and strive for what is original in art and radical in politics. In this sense, none of us are artists yet, we are only preparing to become artists. We are marching forward toward our future as “artists”.

 

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lee ambrozy

www.artforum.com.cn

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[Fiona He]

Let's deconstruct it when we see each other... I already sense the fiestiness...