Li Zhanyang - 'Rent' - Rent Collection Yard

 

 

'Rent' - Rent Collection Yard (2007) is the title of the largest and most complex sculptural installation Li Zhanyang (born 1969, Jilin Province, China) has ever created. Taking eighteen months of production after nearly a decade of conceptual incubation, Li Zhanyang's 'Rent' - Rent Collection Yard is a humorous and subjective look at the Chinese contemporary art scene. It is informed by the artist's personal experience. Characters, both local and international, are brought to life. The 34 life-size coloured fiberglass figures of this installation are modeled after the likeness of various people familiar to the artist - among them international celebrities as well as some only known in Chinese contemporary art circles. They include Chinese and Western artists, curators, collectors, gallery owners, gallery assistants, and art students. The gathered subjects were chosen according to their public or professional roles. Displayed on a real stage they were designed to showcase each figure in a striking a pose - dramatic or absurd, some of them with imbuing mordant satire. Following six conceptual themes (Paying Rent, Foot Washing, Raping, Oppressing, Dying a Martyr, and History Observed), the sculptures are spread throughout three exhibition spaces of Galerie Urs Meile in Beijing. The congregation seemingly gathered or juxtaposed is part of a broader and fabricated narrative revealing latent conflicts and power relations - the dirt underneath the high-gloss surface of the art world. The artist places his fiberglass alter ego amidst the other characters, representing himself by gazing intently into the darkness of the spectators. And among the spectators, Li Zhanyang places two exceptional figures in the front row: Joseph Beuys and Mao Zedong (in History Observed). Beuys, one of the most influential figures in the modern contemporary art scene, is expounding on the dynamic and chaotic interplay in front of them with a wild and passionate gesture beside the icon and father figure of revolutionary China.

In one of his essays Li Zhanyang writes "'Rent' - Rent Collection Yard tells a story that is not necessarily true or real. "The work is a contemporary transposition of the story of landlord Liu Wencai. During the revolutionary era, Liu Wencai was a victim of political muckraking and depicted as a brutal exploiter of the peasants. Liu's historic appearance as a despotic oppressor was the origin for the monumental and sculptural masterpiece called Rent Collection Yard (1965) also known as Rent Collection Courtyard. Permanently exhibited in the rent collection courtyard of landlord Liu Wencai's orchard (in Dayi County, Sichuan Province), this group of sculptures portrays the class struggle between the indigent farmers and the ruling landlords prior to the Chinese Communist party's coming to power. Commissioned by the provincial government of Sichuan Province and realized by a team of local folk artisans and Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, professors and students, Rent Collection Yard consists of 114 clay figures crafted in a stylistic combination of folk realism and Western academicism. In his version 'Rent' - Rent Collection Yard Li Zhanyang transposes the format of the original sculptures in order to apply a realistic approach with elements derived from his own art education that is emphasizing in particular the revision of Baroque art that refers to the iconographic languages of humanism. In an interview the artist states: "I am entirely dedicated to portray life for stressing an individual spirit on the most rudimentary levels of society."1

To Li Zhanyang the lasting value of an artwork does not exclusively rely on its technique, content, or the chosen media, but on contemporizing its message and innovating the technique, as well. Li's understanding of "rent"-in a more formal and conceptual way-refers to "nalaizhuyi" (meaning tentatively "grabism" that is grabbing what is useful) as a creative process of assimilation and not merely a superficial form of cultural appropriation.2 For this reason, when artist Cai Guoqiang in 1999 had the original Rent Collection Courtyard remolded at the 48th Venice Biennale as a conceptual performance, he transposed it into a contemporary art context, as well. Though, it is important to understand at this point that for Li Zhanyang, logic and singular theories are no longer suitable for the discourses of contemporary art as his conceptualization of both the original version from 1965 and that of Cai Guoqiang is about a continuing process and the significance of this artwork that will not terminate with the passing of time.3

Consequently, in Dying a Martyr, Li Zhanyang shows Cai Guoqiang in an eye-catching scene together with Samuel Keller, the former Director of Basel's art fair Art Basel. The two protagonists are carrying a deceased Jesus Christ-a mighty visual reference to the internationally acclaimed Swiss curator Harald Szeemann (1933-2005) who was the curator of the Venice Biennale 1999. As a parallel figure to the terrible landlord Liu Wencai, in Foot Washing Li Zhanyang has chosen the internationally renowned artist and architect Ai Weiwei. He is shown in an armchair-chubby, cheerful, and cozily slumped-having a foot massage while doted on by his wife, curators, collectors, and his gallerist and assistants. In Li Zhanyang's eyes, it could well be that the initial struggles of Chinese contemporary art are definitely over since it has now become accepted by the international art scene.

 

Text: Nataline Colonnello

 

 

 

 

The Tongue is My Yardstick

 

 

'The tongue is my yardstick' - to quote Not Vital. Once again he has transformed a sense organ - all but unmediated - into a sculpture. In 1994 there were ears: countless black bronzes stuck into a thick, upright plaster shape, entitled Sausage and Ears. This was followed by Antlers + Eyes: white plaster antlers with plentiful dark eyes, like leaves on a tree, gazing down from the wall. And then there was the teaching that Vital took on in December 1988 in Cairo - when his Egyptian students asked what sculpture was, he referred them to their own noses. This led to the making of  171 Egyptian Noses in 1990, consisting of a tower of organs cast from individual human faces.

Take almost anything by Not Vital, and you will find human organs and their sensual function. Sensuality means sensitivity, sensitivity means pain. Vital's sculptural method involves making casts of the organs and impaling them. Now, after more than twenty years preparing the ground, the 'tongue' has emerged as the outstanding motif, a monument in its own right - upright and chased in stainless steel.

At first, in his early gallery shows in New York, there were plaster or bronze animal cadavers, fixed to a wheel like a trophy on some sort of mountain path. Even the Pole Animal on a tree trunk (1982) was upright and 330 cm in height, like an orientation point in the Swiss Alps, where you have to be prepared for snow drifts and avalanches in winter. Similarly impaled on rods are the Sei Sorelle, six sisters, embodiments not only of the principle of totems and taboos, but also of Picasso's famous maxim, 'I do not seek, I find!' Vital finds sensuality, but not only for himself - it is for us, too. His tower-like sculpture Gramophone is a homage to our sense of hearing. His immensely elegant sequence of marble hearing aids, His Master's Voice (1992), was dedicated to the deaf Ludwig van Beethoven.

However, with this new Tongue for Beijing, the time of the trophies, shocks and memento mori seems somewhat to have passed. Vital's sights are no longer set on papillae, the little nodules that alert our brains. This Tongue of Vital's - not only a taste organ, for it also touches and sucks and registers the temperature of foods, before passing them on to the digestive system, now (more than ever before) - stands before us in even greater sublime splendour. Gleaming, it points to yet another function - human speech. And in the People's Republic of China, it may well also relate to the fact that medical students, training to become tongue diagnosticians, are said to have to scrutinise between fifteen and twenty thousand tongues during their training.

The story of Tongue began in 1985 when Vital bought a calf's tongue in a butcher's shop in Lucca. He then took it to Pietrasanta, made a plaster mould and had it cast in bronze. The ensuing, first bronze Tongue was thirty-nine centimetres tall and perhaps Vital's most impossible work of art. We need only recall reports of the horror that met Auguste Rodin's Age of Bronze  -  a cast made, after much consideration, directly from the fine figure of the soldier Auguste Neyt with elegiacally raised arms, only to be initially rejected by the jury of the 1878 Salon in Paris. Because it was a cast! The extent of the jury's mistake is clear when one views their decision in light of Rodin's search for physical immediacy, for direct feeling, and his battle against historical traditions, in particular the canonisation of the art of Classical Antiquity. It fell to Rodin to pave the way for the twentieth century, a century that was to know direct pain.

The good citizens and art connoisseurs of Switzerland have been able to see Not Vital's work, including his Tongues, for some time now. I have heard some of their comments: 'I don't know whether it's good or bad.' And they were not especially amused by Vital's  hypertrophied Testicles of Michelangelo's David (now measuring 138 x 120 x 97 cm) hanging on the wall in Kunsthalle Basel. So can a Tongue be a work of art?

'If I say so', might be Vital's answer, but he held his tongue. He enlarged his 1985 Tongue, and ten years later - by now 200 cm in height - it was shown on a sculptor's stool in the Sperone Westwater Gallery. On that occasion in New York, you could have walked into a virtual huntsman's room and responded to the sight of body parts of dead animals with a grim, grinning dance. But what Americans would feel like dancing at the sight of animal entrails? 1996 saw the making of Vital's Tongue in Carrara marble; this version is now in Kunsthalle Bielefeld. At the time, Germany had its own Rodin moment with the sculptor Not Vital. 'Of all the pieces you've bought, I have my doubts about this one,' was the reaction of one of my most valued colleagues.

Admittedly, as yet there are no comparisons to be made with Vital's work, no style and no library - as in the imagination of Jorge Luis Borges - where you could read clever things on the subject of tongues and, very important in art history, find a foothold. Although in 1951 Albert Einstein did allow himself to be photographed with his tongue out because the paparazzi were getting on his nerves. He took the newspaper picture (having cut out his companions) and sent it to his friends as a portrait of himself. And in 1973, the artist Peter Weibel - to name a contemporary of Not Vital - had his tongue cemented into position for an hour as part of the Action Raum der Sprache.

But while the tongue is still as much of a sculptural taboo as ever, Vital simply takes this as his cue to enlarge the work. In 1995, he installed a bronze Tongue, 360 cm in height, outside his parents' home in the Engadine. Once again he held his peace, and just showed the work with a smile. Now at 768 cm, the work has been chased in stainless steel for Beijing. It rises up like a monument to the twenty-first century. 'The tongue is my yardstick,' says the artist, perhaps suggesting to us - as the beholders of this work of art - that if sculpture today wants to break its own boundaries, it can celebrate an organ that uniquely links our cognitive capacities, our sensuality, our sex drive and our consumption of food and drink. What else is there? We are connected - by our tongues - with all other human beings and with all mammals. Archaic is the new modern. And, wherever possible, Not Vital adds pleasure to pain.

 

Text: Thomas Kellein

Translated from German by Fiona Elliott