How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Eastern Disenchantment

Today as much as ever, debates rage furiously in the shared living spaces of students all over the world. The subject? The exhausted histrionics of an eternally contentious but ultimately ineffectual conversation on capitalism and communism. You may have visited, or even lived in one of these homes, and been caught in the crossfire between an Ayn Rand acolyte and a staunch Marxist. These arguments are tedious, but what is interesting is the ways in which the aggressive competition between these two very disparate ideologies have informed and constructed cultures and belief systems that are clearly still relevant today.

Without consuming precious word space on the long and tragic histories of Russian or Chinese communism, we can begin at least with the philosophy which lead these two great nations into economic, social and cultural instability. For his part, Marx devised that “class conflict within capitalism arises due to intensifying contradictions between highly-productive mechanized and socialized production performed by the proletariat, and private ownership and private appropriation of the surplus product (a.k.a profit) by a small minority of private owners called the bourgeoisie. As the contradiction becomes apparent to the proletariat, social unrest between the two antagonistic classes intensifies, culminating in a social revolution.”

Not limited to economic, industrial and legal policy, the revolution that ensued permeated every facet of citizen life. Even would-be avant-garde designers committed their talents to the motherland, producing some of the most unforgivable utility wear ever imagined. Certainly the most interesting phenomenon (for a non-communist observer) was the revolution of artistic style.

Less a reformation than a total erasure of everything that had gone before it, the people of Russia (and later China) had invested all their creative efforts in an ideology that took political form. In such a state of radical progress, Russia (and China) could no longer truly be represented by the highly skilled, aristocratic styles of the bourgeoisie, but with the great failure of western avant-garde art to capture the heart and mind of the proletariat, Communism needed to develop its own distinct forms of cultural expression.

By the 1930s, Malevich was trying his hand socialist realism, as were many painters, depicting the simultaneous efficiency and humanity of the soviet system, (around the same time that bloody ‘collectivization’ was taking place on farmland across Russia). In sculpture, Iofan was unambiguously heroicising political figures and generally lauding socialist romanticism in the form of terrifyingly large bronze sculptures that would represent Russia at the Paris World Fair in 1937.

Just over a decade later, Mao Tse-Tung became chairman and Chinese artists were quick to begin replicating Russian exports of socialist realism and socialist romanticism with a distinctly Chinese flavor (imagine Mao’s face where Stalin’s would’ve been).

Interestingly, the Chinese had their own highly skilled style of “literati” art, in the form of Chinese brush painting, known as guó huà. Although the Cultural Revolution had, in many ways, meant a total breakdown of the infrastructure of Chinese cultural tradition, it was not obliterated by merely painting it white and then painting it black. There were somewhat unsuccessful attempts to update the guó huà with western graphic styles, but it was not until 1947, when Mao released the Manifesto of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, that the guó huà was finally beginning transform into the people’s art.

The propaganda of the time authorized the rustication of thousands of Chinese youths, and stipulated the necessity for youth to learn the knowledge of the peasants and respect physical labour. In the following years, the presence of educated youth in rural communities led to an exchange between the styles of the art schools and traditional peasant art. This was primarily evident in Yunnan province where collaborating rusticated youth and peasants became known as the Hsien painters, celebrated for the unification of Socialist realism, romanticism and guó huà. This visual unity was boasted on postage stamps and domestic imagery, and gained international following from appropriation by artists like Wu Hufan. 

Communist art continued to be produced in great quantities for almost thirty years after the rustication, and in this time, western tastes for girl-meets-tractor painting had steadily waned.

It had almost completely fallen off the Western radar until 1974 when the post-facto titled Bulldozer Exhibition took place in Moscow. Infamously named after its forcible destruction by water canons and bulldozers, the exhibition contained the work of several artists expressing seditious content. The since-exiled organizer, Oscar Rabin declared that the show was intended as an explicit protest against an oppressive regime.

The occidental art centre realized that this event highlighted what capitalist Westerners already knew but wanted to hear, that communism had failed. It also drew attention to the fact that there were subversive factions in the East – factions who were creating art like nothing being produced in the West at that time. Western audiences could now indulge in forms of modernism and pop art that had filtered through the iron curtain with a lingering, but not totally convincing, ‘you told us so’.

SOTS artists like Kabakov and Komar & Melamid soon discovered that the West was thirsting for a cocktail of socialism-in-strife meets political over-identification, and promptly generated an immensely profitable market between artists from communist states and buyers in the West. With Gorbichev in the Kremlin, these artists could more openly criticize the native government that had censored them. Moreover, they were able to mock the foreigners that had threatened to subjugate them, by enjoying astronomical fame in the art world and more importantly, by cashing the massive cheques that the West was paying for a taste of Eastern disenchantment. 

With the fiscal directives of Deng Xiaoping in from 1978 onwards, China moved to build a middle class, reinforcing a domestic market that could protect their economy against interactions with weaker economies. In 1993, after 15 years of progress towards a market economy, 14 Chinese artists were shown at the Venice Biennale that was memorably known as the ‘Chinese Biennale’. The presence of contemporary Chinese art had created a stir, exciting Western audiences once again, this time from art beyond the Great Firewall of China. In particular, Wang Guangyi’s poppy imagery offered a home plus for Western audiences in its reference to modernism, but also demonstrated an exact knowledge of the trajectory of SOTS art, launched a decade earlier.

An entire art-making precinct was constructed, known as Precinct 798, where international art buyers could travel to Beijing to purchase work directly from artist studios. The success and economy generated by the Venice Biennale and Precinct 798 led to government recognition of China’s art market, occasioning the first Shanghai Biennale in 1996.

While many consider the opening up of trade and culture in China to be a hopeful progression, political artists like Ai Weiwei revile the notion of government intervention in the arts, perhaps rightly, fearing its use as a vessel for political propaganda. It brings to mind the tragic paradox of the artist, who must choose to be avant-garde, starved and brilliant, protesting against a government that has abandoned the arts, or stifled, unable to procure an original idea, growing fat off the teat of government funding. Although I would say that Ai Weiwei is neither starved nor stifled.

It seems that after a century of communism, we in the West can finally rest assured that the threat of socialism is no more. We have the art to prove it.

New Psychedelia, Data Sweatshops and The Digital Postcolony

I would like to begin this brief consideration of digital, Internet and new media art, not with that first, terrifying suggestion of self-surveillance that Charlie Chaplin mimed into being, nor with the invention of the first Cold War super computers, but at the place where I think technology really became interesting. It would be another 14 years before the first domestic computers filled the homes of America’s privileged, but in Beverly Hills and various other desert, mountain and seaside landscapes, Robert Barry was busy emptying containers of the undetectable gases; xenon, argon and helium into the atmosphere. His series, Inert Gas Piece provokes us to interrogate what is happening when nothing can be sensed. While much of his work lies within the realm of that which is not applicable to language or image, this process of ‘knowing’ that something exists without any tangible proof, found it’s allegorical partner decades later, in the World Wide Web.



In 2011 at the University of Queensland Art Museum, a show titled New Psychedelia presented the work of new media artists exploring novel ways of understanding the term ‘psychedelic’. In a panel discussion that launched the show, Mark Penning, Kate Shaw, Sebastian Moody and Edward Collis began to draw clear parallels between psychedelic sensation and the experience of using and living with the Internet. Notable similarities included the inefficacy of explaining the machinations of both the psychedelic and the Internet to someone who has never experienced it, as well as the total conviction with which one believes that the experience (psychedelic and Internet respectively) is based in reality, despite the lack of any tangible proof beyond the interface or the ‘trip’.



Barry later produced It Has Order, 1969-70, which behaved as a sort of reference guide for much of his work. It reads, ’It has order... it is always changing... it is affected by other things... it affects other things... it is not confined... it is not in any specific place... it can be presented, but go unnoticed... to know of it is to be part of it ...’. A Frieze article from 2004 by Jorg Heiser resolves that Barry could have been talking about art, or he could have been talking about inert gases. He’d never heard of the Internet, but I would argue that it fits this description perfectly.



Andreas Muller-Polhe’s series, Digital Scores, 1995-98 translates the first known photograph into alphanumeric code. The series marks an initial foray into what, in the following decade, would become an obsession with data representation. Today, this obsession manifests in our desire to convert self into image, image into a matrix of images that forms a global society of online entities, each entity so multiple and limitless it is barely recognizable as the original self. Counterpart to this complex is the contradiction that lies in our gross lack of understanding the mechanisms that drive our identity formation. The tragedy of the 21st century could lie within the gap between the technology we consume and our comprehension of it.



We may not be interested in how technology works, but we’re certainly involved in how it can be used to reach desired outcomes. Nancy Burson uses face-mapping technology and the now-common knowledge of the human genome to insist that racism is a scientifically proven absurdity, while Second Life users attend virtual protests against censorship. Technophiles such as Ryan Trecartin will fervently agree that the digital frontier is at the vanguard of social evolution, encouraging multiplicity and collapsing previous notions of identity into freeform creativity.



Yet less noble motivations arise. With the online gaming industry predicted to be worth $83bn by 2016, the growing demand for gaming currency has established the incredible phenomenon wherein wealthy gamers (predominantly in the US) are able to purchase game credits earned by predominantly Chinese gamers, who treat the work as their primary source of income. This lucrative market echoes the more familiar model of Western exploitation of cheap Eastern labour. In the age of contingency, beyond postmodernism, where postpostmodernism would be if there was such a thing, we stretch our minds to think of anything at all that cannot be commodified. Our inquisitive and experimental nature dictates that any ‘thing’ has the potential to offer some good to us, and goods are capital, and exploitation is rarely separable from the acquisition of capital.



María Fernández would probably agree. Her paper presents a very important case for postcolonial media theory, or rather, the lack thereof. After some nebulous references to cyborgs and a fairly dichotomous explanation of the relationship between media theory and postcolonial theory, Fernández eventually arrives at a conclusion worth quoting: “The artistic activity…should function as a call for the elaboration of an electronic media theory which acknowledges contemporary political, cultural and economic complexities.”

It is clear that the postcolonial undercurrents that exist in the global realm of Internet-based art, should be more transparent, but Fernández persistently denies the ultimate potential of this art, at least at this stage, to virtually (and in reality) transform society. Without oversimplifying my argument, the unassuming idea remains in my mind, that though we may never erase the traumas of colonization, surely the ground that is traversed by digital technology; the sharing of ideas, the breaking of taboos, can only help facilitate the changes necessary to repair the psyche of both colonizer and colonized.

Effluence, Kastrationangst and the Hermeneutic Sponge: highlighting the absurdity of abject phobia.

Artwork that studies the abject is something that I have tried to form an interest in, but it seems that the more I learn about it, the less I care. While I can appreciate that there are a number of silly psychological hang-ups on our bodies that abjection in art helps to expose, I seem to be comfortable with my bodily functions and those of others, not because I am a physician or a farmer, nor because I have seen countless artists eat their own shit. I am cool with it because anything less than total indifference would limit me to a life bound by social conditioning and the incapacitating terror of farting in public.

Kristeva's argument tried to do an impossible thing, that is, to suggest the effect of a phenomenon (viz. a fear of the abject) can be traced to one particular cause (viz. leaking into the world and our mothers' leaking into us). As far as I am aware, there are very practical reasons why we have evolved to dislike the taste of piss, the smell of shit and the sight of our own blood. In the millennia before antibiotics, cholera vaccines and band-aids, early humans would do well to avoid any potential carrier of disease, be it rancid meat or a substance of our own bodies.


But I don’t want to appear so arrogant as to say there is nothing I can learn from an analysis of ‘the phobic object’. I found the concept of ‘the abjection of the maternal body’ very stimulating indeed. The ramifications in gender politics seem to correlate: men and, to a tragically similar extent, women are trained from an early age to be fearful of vaginas, acknowledging the horror of their existence only by the mark of reticence that surrounds them. I find it hilariously ironic that, for Creed, the maternal body, as interpreted through patriarchy, is the pervasive source of Kastrationangst, perhaps better known as Freud’s theory of castration anxiety.

In this way, one can see how art that deals with the abject has a particular talent for accentuating the absurdity of hegemonic morality. So long as we continue to divide conversation topics into ‘private’ and ‘personal’, or worse still, social and medical, our apprehension to discuss the human body in all its squirting glory will only serve to prolong our fears of sweat-patches, penis-loss and vaginas in general.

Feminist/queer theory has been in the common Western consciousness for over forty years, yet every facet of our culture today, from our language to the arbitrary identifiers of gender, remains structured in patriarchy. Though one cannot deny the social benefits that have come from feminist/queer ideologies, these changes are unhurried to say the least. If essays, protests and even legislation cannot alleviate us of our prejudices, perhaps an impending, inescapable reality will force us to consider just how substantiated our body-fears really are. Unfortunately it is not until the final paragraph that The Phobic Object addresses the rivalry between the body and technology.

I would like to end my response by offering a ridiculous idea. Perhaps, once we realise we are at risk of being prosthesized to the point of being almost or completely inhuman, we will begin to unconditionally cherish every limb, lobe and lactation of the bodies that make us human.

Cloaca, 2000 by Wim Delvoye