Michael Eddy on
BIG BLACKBOARD: BEIJING
an exhibition at CU Space, Beijing, Aug 7, 2010 – Sep 10, 2010
A large but essentially simple construction divides the CU Space gallery diagonally in half—a huge blackboard, obviously. Big Blackboard: Beijing. Written in chalk across its didactic surface are a few hundred names of Beijing places and people, and some fairly straightforward connections are indicated by lines, boxes and relative positions. The English block-letter handwriting that conveys about half of this is consistent and of a single hand, and we understand from this first round of marks who is being addressed and who is doing the addressing—this is the language of the foreigner, Karl-Heinz Klopf—but we can't for the moment say whether this is intentional targeting or just working within his limits, a distinction that sets demands of the foreigner artist, which we will come back to. The names and their significance are personal, we can assume, meaning different things to different people and signaling a number of inclusions and exclusions visible according to the experiences of the individual viewers. Though it is possible to imagine what happened at "King's Dental, Towercrest Plaza" and the names of shopping malls evoke a fairly generic profile, some of us may wonder about "Fragrant Hill Hotel" that sprouts like a thought-bubble from the name "Li Xiaodong." But if this was simply an act of nomination and self-portraiture, then the qualities of chalk and blackboard other than the expository gesture would be irrelevant and maybe even an obstacle, in that content has the potential to be further annotated, rearranged, or erased. Not only by the original author but by those undaunted by the prospect of modifying the appearance of an artwork, which, given the context of the eager and willing Chinese art-district public—not to mention the readily available chalk—we can presume is an intended outcome. So rather immediately others' contributions are perceived: translations into Chinese, spelling corrections, cartoons, a local's recommendation, contact details. We can imagine the schematic crispness of the slate's original state soiled some weeks later, and if this was a piece that was about participation per se we would be able to judge the earnestness of the work in its degrees of wet-rag censorship and its quantity of dirty words. But despite the desire we might project on the Big Blackboard to embody some new "democracy wall" of free expression, it's still Big and unscalable with many hard-to-reach terms, and still directly supervised (perhaps front and behind would have to be reversed if the board were really to operate like the partition of a bathroom stall). So the Big Blackboard imposes its function of naming while inviting a partial reordering. And yet I haven't mentioned what's on the other side of the wall, the behind-the-wall, which can be accessed through a gap between the Big Blackboard and the gallery wall at the far end of the space, whose light (being the only part of the gallery lit) creeps over the edges of the blackboard as if to indicate the glowing moment of the board's arrival. But there is not much to see except the struts and raw boards making up the construction. On the gallery wall are tacked five digital prints (Arrangement, 2010) of hands working over an office table to manipulate various chunks of metal and stone in a variety of ways. It's mentioned that these are the hands of architects testing material samples, which reveals something about the processes that Klopf is ultimately engaging.
For artists, architects represent a curious cousin with onerous responsibilities but incomparable powers, and embody alternative creation processes and sets of values from the artists' own self-understanding.(1) The believed autonomy of artists should be immediately pointed out as problematic, however, and the elaboration of why (which includes the spread of instrumentalization both on the "private" and on the "public" levels) should be saved for another time.(2) But these differing vocational identities are only one level of the reasons why artists and architects become attracted to each other; curiosity in practices and how these practices engage with the world are another level. For instance, one could look at some of Klopf's work from the past decade and trace an ongoing exploration of contemporary urban reality, from Tokyo to Istanbul to Taipei, in projects that have had him reside in cities for prolonged periods. Last year Klopf spent six months in Liverpool, UK, getting to know an area of the post-industrial city that for years has been hanging in suspension between degradation and gentrification. Watching the video They that he shot during this time (not on view in Big Blackboard: Beijing), one gets a strong sense of the balance Klopf tried to maintain between an aesthetic interest in the space—the perforated steel panels enclosing the condemned houses that formed whole uninhabited, mute settlements—and the place—the contextual narrative filled in by the ex-residents, community groups, politicians, developers, and landscapists. Through his videos and other works the actually existing social sphere emerges on complementary footing with the formal and technical (ie. the architectural, in conventional terms) aspects of cities. Klopf connects to a tradition of urbanist explorer who identifies architecture in the relations that residents or users have with spaces, be they handmade, makeshift solutions, unstable and hybrid rituals or awkward fits and no-man's-lands; complex dream/nightmare situations that have proliferated greatly in the last few decades of globalization and neo-liberalization. Those same years simultaneously yielded the conditions that nurtured itinerant contemporary artists, an irony not lost on the ones like Klopf. Their experiences of foreign cities have often taken the form of observing material systems of places, at times with the eyes of documentarists or ethnographers, or with the tendency toward site-specificity. With such attention on discovering places and how people live, one of the most puzzling challenges can be locating oneself.
The thematic of urbanism and architecture and cities can get heavy for artists who seem to find themselves in contradictory roles on the local level (for instance, Klopf's Liverpool project was partially supported by the development association at odds with the residents he was interviewing). As for Beijing, if you live here you are forgiven for asking what the connection is between site-specific approaches and architecture, as it seems there is almost no relation between buildings and local contexts in most new developments in the city. Chalk is a fairly light material after all, but one that can serve to chart out a position, and a re-position, endlessly. So on the face of the Big Blackboard, I see an opportunity for a challenge to architects, however subtle and cursory it may be. A diagram of relations isn't so much a prescription for a new building process, but an attitude toward site and locality that some might claim, just out of convenience, is one of those "impossibilities" for architects (and one of the privileges we could identify with the "autonomy" claimed for artists). This is not to say that all that gets built warrants the designation of "architecture," and there isn't much evidence that Klopf is insinuating the architects are complicit in the all-pervasive and seemingly arbitrary obsession on development and the forces that it demands, but someone's hands are making the models that in turn make the arduous journey from the virtual to the concrete.
So what of those hands, those inquisitive and spontaneous arrangements in the pictures behind the Big Blackboard? Well, this is also architecture, in those moments that are kind of hard to explain to clients. The play involved in imagining what something will look like scaled up a thousandfold, in the testing of materials or in the brainstorming in groups, incorporates some elements of the folksy, bodily means that can be found on the streets. These working methods, as much as the artistic fascination with the "right-side-up"-ness of architects, create a certain awareness of the potential for play to make up everyday reality, offering a critical reflection in turn of many artistic strategies that rely on their own protected status. Contrary to many artists' underscoring of self-compromise when making a point about the market for instance, these methods are not done with cynicism; artists who get involved with architects can get a vivid feeling and sense of the passage from playing to becoming instrumentalized, cheerily. If the problems of architects and artists with regard to locality are not identical, Klopf signals the mutual dilemma of seeing the site as a clean sheet of paper on which the magnificent word (or building) must appear and of the conventional approaches to finalizing that appearance, which preclude endless play and network-building as bona fide forms of art or architecture. In the case of Big Blackboard: Beijing, the words we see are pretty banal—but not written in stone.
1) "This architecture circulates in a right-side up world of economic profitability; interest is openly avowed, and while there is an exceptional dependency on clients with regard to opportunities to create, there is also a privileged proximity to the field of power. As sociologists frequently note, the result is that the autonomy of the writer, the painter or the poet, is an "impossibility" for architects." Hélène Lipstadt 'Exoticising the Domestic': on New Collaborative Paradigms and Advanced Design Practices in Architecture and Authorship, eds. Tim Anstey, Katja Grilner, Rolf Hughes (Black Dog Publishing, London) 2007.
2) For an informative discussion—funded by the Frieze Art Fair—on the future of public funding and cultural policy in the European context, refer to "European Cultural Policies 2015": www.eipcp.net/policies/2015. The relevance of this matter for the Chinese context is debatable, as there is no discussion around public funding, and because of the popularity of factory-style production processes in which, at least in Beijing, we are given the ostensible impression that artists don't try to hide their instrumentalized status and there is no shock about culture's marriage to money. I would bet, however, that even in China it wouldn't take much to re-situate, under the worldly operations, the aura of autonomy the whole enterprise is based on, but that, as I said, is for another time.