Oddly Misguided and Possibly Not Even Art

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There's a game I like to play on Facebook every now and again that I call Art or N'art? I have a fondness for challenging contemporary art and so when I'm visiting an institutional repository of such work, I'll take a photograph of something that might be art -- or, then again, might simply be a pile of crumbling bricks or some construction debris waiting to be hauled away. Then I'll challenge my friends: Is it art? Or n'art?

The answer, much like the Scarlet Pimpernel can be damned elusive.


Today I took a jaunt to 798 Art Zone, an old industrial neighborhood of Beijing that has been taken over by art centers and galleries and a swarm of parasitic cafes and shops. It was quite wonderful and I hope to return someday and spend a lot more time there. The Ullens Center for Contemporary Art had a major retrospective on Xu Bing, an artist I had never even heard of and now one of my favorites. I may write something about him here, if I can find the time.

I also went to see Muse, which is either a gallery or a show at the 798 Building. And here I find myself punked by my own petard. Art or N'art? Postmodern irony or misguided spectacle? I honestly dunno.

The exhibition consists of a series of room in which famous works by several great painters are projected on the walls... and partially animated.

Renoir's dancers slowly incline their heads toward and away from each other, seemingly caught in a nightmare from which they cannot awaken. All move heavily, sluggishly, as if trying (and failing) to escape the embrace of paint. Luncheon of the Boating Party rocks from side to side, people shifting in relation to each other, as if it were set not on a restaurant balcony but on a boat on a heavy sea. Watching it, I felt seasick.

Van Gogh's people, by contrast, only have to contend with the moving rays of a killer sun.

Gustav Klimt's The Kiss, blown up to fill a wall, suffers from daggers and confetti of light that flow down the image, giving it a kind of Hallmark romanticism, while little colored florettes dance about on the floor, doing their damnedest to distract the viewer from the original image.

A cat wanders through several of Matisse's jostling the bric-a-brac and complaining plaintively. As well it might.

Finally, a room titled Henry's Scissors strives to provide Matisse's cut-outs with a playfulness they already had. Bird-shapes flap, fronds sway, and snippets of blue assemble themselves into women.

Each room is accompanied by its own relentlessly chipper music.

So... Art or N'art? It certainly has the nervy chutzpah of much postmodern art. But if I had to guess (I wouldn't bet money), I'd go with N'art. I think it's a misguided attempt to "bring the classics to life," to make them accessible by turning them into spectacle.

But I could be wrong. Over at Grounds for Sculpture in New Jersey, there's a life-sized Seward Johnson sculpture of Luncheon of the Boating Party which is well on its way to the the thing I saw today.

Which is to say, I'm baffled. Maybe somebody reading this knows for sure? If so... you tell me.

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A Bill Gibson Moment

Neil Gaiman has already blogged about this, but what the hell. There were only two moments when the Western guests at the 2007 International Science Fiction and Fantasy Conference in Chengdu baffled our hosts with our inscrutable Occidental ways. One was when Neil and I were on a bus with editor Jenny Bai and our interpreters, Heather and Cecilia. There were only two seats available, and the ladies wanted Neil and myself to have them. "No, no, no," I said, "there is no way I can possibly take that seat and leave you standing. It's simply not going to happen." And Neil amplified, "It's a cultural thing. There's nothing you can do about it" So two of the women sat, although it was clear they had no idea why we insisted on it.

The other moment was when we came upon what looked to be a scavenged videophone carefully set alongside a stack of cardboard and some glass and plastic bottles by a curbside recycler. "It's a Bill Gibson moment!" Neil and I said in unison, and we began dancing about, snapping photographs.

"Why are you taking pictures of that?" somebody asked, almost forlornly. And it was hard to explain. But back in 1984, when Neuromancer came out, Bill's trademark combination of high tech and street scavenging was a vivid snapshot of the future. And now here it was, in Chengdu, an industrial city of eleven million people inside a China whose economy is booming, and suddenly it's not the future anymore.

It's just the present.

The Worst Rendition of "Oh, Susanna!" in Human History

(Photo courtesy of Cecilia Qin)

Nancy Kress has just blogged about being part of what she called "the worst rendition ever of 'Oh, Susanna!'" In fact, Nancy is too kind. It was not only the worst rendition of that song in human history, but the worst rendition of that song in any imaginable universe. A group made up of William Shatner, Tiny Tim, Captain Beefheart, and Florence Foster Jenkins would have sounded dulcet by comparison.

The above photograph shows an unidentified Chinese musician who deserved better, Rob Sawyer, myself, Nancy Kress, and Rob's wife Caroline Clink, at the climax of the song. How did we get into this fix? Well . . .

In the aftermath of the 2007 International Science Fiction and Fantasy Conference in Chengdu, China, all those guests staying afterwards were invited to a Future of Chengdu Leisure forum. Which turned out to be an extraordinary variety of first-rate entertainment (musicians! dancers! snack makers!) punctuated by short extemporized speeches by everybody present. Then Russian cosmonaut Vladimir Bugrov followed up his speech by singing a romantic Russian ballad. He had a wonderful voice and knew how to use it. Suddenly, people appeared at Nancy's side suggesting she get up and sing a song. "No, no," she said, "you don't want to hear me sing."

They turned to me. "No, no," I amplified. "You really don't want to hear me sing."

But they insisted and so Nancy and I stumbled on stage, followed by Rob and Caroline. Who, in my humble opinion, deserve to split a Mensch-of-the-Year Award between them, because they really didn't have to get up on stage. They did it only so as to dilute the blame among more people.

Neil Gaiman said our singing moved him to extremes of compassion. But he also videotaped the whole thing, should he ever need to blackmail any of us.

But, hey. Give us this. If we were going to get up and stage and mangle a song in four separate keys, at least we were going to do it with gusto. I like to think that counts for something.

Chengdu (Part 2)

After the convention, all the guests, translators, and editors went out for yet another feast. Every meal in Chengdu was a feast. And since the default state for food in Sichuan Province is indescribably delicious and every meal had a seemingly infinite amount of food, it almost seemed at times as if our hosts were trying to kill us with kindness:

"And now, Mr. Bond, we shall place you in a restaurant in Chengdu and tell the waiters to keep bringing new food. You will have no choice but to eat until you die."

"You fiend!!"

The above photograph is of Chengdu's famous hot pot. The pot at the center of the table contains stock kept at a rolling boil. Various foods are dipped into the pot and cooked on the spot. You'll notice that there are two parts of the pot. The outer part is filled with hot peppers. Alas, while Sichuan is famous for the spiciness of its foods, this hot pot was seasoned relatively lightly, apparently in deference to Western preferences. So it was merely very, very hot. At one point, however, I did carelessly touch the skin just below my nose with a finger that apparently had a minuscule drop of hot oil on it. Two minutes later, I had to hurry to the men's room to wash my face -- it was afire!

Neil Gaiman started to sit down at our table and then, as he later put it, "suddenly realized that it was like being on a cruise ship -- I'd been eating with the same people every evening." So he switched places with one of the translators and sat down at an all-Chinese table. No, no, they tried to warn him, this table has non-Western food. But Neil was game, and so he spent the evening trying out duck intestines and other delicacies.

I think I have a new role model.

Afterwards, Neil and Rob Sawyer and I (Nancy Kress, unhappily, was so exhausted she had to go back to the hotel halfway through dinner) went to a tea house, where we and several Chinese writers met in a private room.

Here's a picture of science writer Wang Yan (wearing a baseball cap), Neil Gaiman, and Haihong Zhao, Galaxy Award-winning sf writer. Neil and Haihong were the ringleaders of a wide-ranging conversation, but all the rest of us -- Rob and myself most definitely included -- were intensely involved as well.

Mostly what we talked about was the state of science fiction in China. In English-American terms, Chinese science fiction is still what might be called Golden Age sf: Straightforward, mostly adventure fiction, and heavily reliant on scientific fact. If Science Fiction World publishes a story that's light on science, they receive letters of complaint from their readers.

[Right: Haihong Zhao and Yu Lei, who publishes under the pen name Ling Chen,which means "the dawn"]

This is a situation that a lot of American readers wish held true in the States. But there are two problems with it. One is that it excludes a lot of different types of science fiction that Rob and Neil and I happen to love. The other is that Science Fiction World's readership peaks in high school and dwindles through University, falling to almost nothing among graduates.

So of course we discussed directions in which Chinese sf might be expanded, in hopes to retaining its readers in perpetuity. In retrospect, I'm not sure if any of this was helpful or not. But writers thrive on ideas and on the company of other writers. So it can have done no harm.

[Right: Liu Cixin. Earlier in the day, at the Galaxy Awards ceremony, a special sf award went to his "Three-Body"]

The conversation went on late into the night and both Neil and I agreed that it was the high point of our visit -- even better than when we had real, live pandas plonked onto our laps. I didn't ask Rob, so it's possible that for him winning the Galaxy Award for Most Popular Foreign SF Writer was the high point. But I suspect not. You don't become a science fiction writer unless you think writing science fiction is the most important thing you can possibly do and that science fiction writers are the coolest people you can possibly hang out with.

So spending an evening with some of the best science fiction writers in all of China? It was fabulous.