Keywords: Fiction; Reiteration; Action
Actors in the factory:
In his video installation Disguise[i] (Yang，2015), Chinese artist Yang Zhenzhong scans the faces of 50 workers with 3D technology and asks the workers to wear masks while working. In the video, each worker still has his/her own face, but their expressions freeze as they are working on the assembly line as usual. Facial expression is the main method for human beings to disclose their feelings and desire, either on stage or in daily life. As the faces are hidden behind the masks, the working bodies of those workers are signified.
The artist also uses a high-speed camera to enhance the theatrical sense of this video by presenting these workers’ daily life in slow motion. This technique adds a dignified and solemn attitude to the labors as if they were actors with Noh masks. Furthermore, the live sound has also been distorted into the effect of echo in the nightmare because of the speed change. The solid perception of the labor scene, combined with these simple artistic treatments, presents a limited absurdity and strangeness, therefore an uncanny sensation. This also constitutes the tone of many of Yang’s works: both witty and humorous which shows a streetwise of contemporary art.
I find this work interesting because it is ambiguous in the ways how it can be interpreted: On the one hand, the application of masks has made the workers more thinglike, as Merleau-Ponty calls “objet historique”,[ii](Pietz, 14)On the other hand, the mask they have is individualized, because each of them has a mask with his/her own characteristics, and they act in passive yet active ways like they do in real life.
The paradox lies behind these two interpretations are obvious: The labors in the production mode are oblivious and are considered to be subversive bodies, they are silent and have been hidden behind certain masks like in this video. In meanwhile, as China steps into late capitalism, the mobilization of labor -like other advanced capitalist countries-has made the labor process more performative.[iii](Mouffe,86) Contemporary production has made productive labor in its totality similar to performing artists like is shown in the video.
It is hard to tell if the masks of these workers are a satire on the alienation of laborers by capitalist machines, or a reminder of workers as performers.
Who is watching?
It is worth mentioning that Yang’s sponsor is an art fund of an international enterprise, which produces kitchen utensils, and Yang’s project is completed under the support of this Italian company, furthermore, the video is taped in the Chinese factory of this company. The exhibition of Yang’s Disguise is divided into three parts: the 3D mask exhibition; a 30-minute video; and a photo exhibition about the production process of the video, which all belong to this art fund, and stored in three different galleries in Shanghai and Italy. After the 30-minute video is completed, the artwork was sent to the company’s exhibition hall in Italy and was to be exhibited with the products produced by these workers to advertise for the company. As it was strongly opposed by the artist, the art fund agreed to package the product with plastic wraps, “camouflage “it into a static sculpture to match the exhibition of the video.
What happened in this exhibition venue can be viewed as the reiteration of “Disguise”: The products are concealed in a deliberately wrapped way to highlight the scene of the workers working on line, which is a dramatic perversion of daily life. In advanced capitalism, the products are everywhere, while the workers who made them are oblivious. Arendt makes distinctions between work, labor, and action, and believes that homo faber is the only kind of laborer who can take action and get power through laboring because they communicate with each other through their labor,[iv](Arendt, 208) in other circumstances, the labors in the society are merely making a living because they are far away from what they are fabricating. In the exhibition process of Disguise, the artist makes this absurdity more obvious by juxtaposing the products and the workers in the same space.
The actions of the workers, even though represented through the media, have also occupied this joint venue through this exhibition, therefore, make their appearance in the social space, which has been neglecting them purposefully. And this kind of appearance has not been less powerful because of the mediation. Judith Butler believes that when the body enters a certain place, even if there is no violent resistance, the appearance itself is an action.[v](Butler,74-75) From this point of view, whether the viewer is a retailer preparing to buy Italian kitchen utensils or an audience who is ready to enjoy the high art, Yang has helped the workers to take action and complete a certain degree of presence. Nevertheless, like many of Yang’s works, a relaxed subversion and a tease of the public seem to strengthen the performance of these producers and in turn their resistance.
Labors in performance
When putting the artwork into the context of his career, we will find that Yang’s works have similar deep thoughts about people or laborers in plural forms. The Story of Spring[vi] is an early work of Yang’s made in 2003. He divides Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour speech[vii] into countless pieces, and asks each of the people who worked in Shenzhen Siemens AG at that time to speak out one word, and in turn, reconstitutes the speech through the editing. The reinterpretation of the speech is also a reinterpretation of political performance. Unlike the empty propaganda of the politician, the laborers change the political gene of speech in the form of individuals; by reiterating the performer from singular to plural, they make a solid action, without being silenced. When putting these two art pieces together, the development of China’s economy in the past two decades is clear: labor-intensive production mode remains the same but as the capitalist form continues to develop, the totality of workers has changed dramatically.
From the semi-underground state to the display of works in dozens of countries, Yang has been using labor to make his art for decades. A Chinese critic Lu Mingjun calls Yang’s works ” illusions of revolution”[viii] because Yang seems to avoid weighty expressions by being playful. To some extent, Yang’s artworks are political and revolutionary because politics and performance are connected after all. By forming “fictions”, politics and performance produce symbols to rearrange what is seen and said, between what is done and what can be done.[ix](Rancière,35-36) Performance and politics are both iteration and repetition of certain modes[x](Schechner,33) and performance can also be a kind of preparation for politics[xi].( Taylor, 3) (Boal, 20)
Although being witty and sometimes cynical, Yang’s works should be considered as political spectacle for sure.
Political spectacle recommendation：Exam and other video installations which appear at Yang’s personal exhibition called Still life and Scenery provoked Hutong Rectification in Beijing, which makes another perfect example of Yang’s artworks as political spectacles.[xii]
[i] Yang zhenzhong.com. Disguise. last modified in May 2015
[ii] Pietz, William. 1985. The Problem of the Fetish, I. Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (2): 5–17.
[iii] Chantal Mouffe. 2013. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. London: Verso.
[iv] Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. Edited by Margaret Canovan. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
[v] Butler, Judith. 2018. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly.Santiago: Pléyade.
[vi] Yang zhenzhong.com. The story of spring. last modified in March 2008http://www.yangzhenzhong.com/?p=250&lang=zh-cn
[vii] Dengxiaoping’s speech in his southern tour is a milestone for China’s economic reform and opening, Shenzhen is the harbor of economic reform.
[viii]artron.net. Panorama: Vision – the politics of theater and surveillance
last modified on September 2018 https://news.artron.net/20180904/n1021426.html
[ix] Rancière, Jacque. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics. Gariel Roc. New York.
[x] Schechner, Richard. 1985. Between theatre and anthropology. University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia.
[xi] Taylor, Diana. 2003. The archive and the repertoire: Performing cultural memory in the Americas. Duke University Press Durham, NC.
On another level, performance also constitutes the methodological lens that enables scholars to analyze events as performance. Civic obedience, resistance, citizenship, gender, ethnicity, and sexual identity, for example, are rehearsed and performed daily in the public sphere. (p. 3)
Boal, Augusto. 1998. Legislative theatre. A. Jackson, Trans. London: Routledge .
Our mandate’s project is to bring into the centre of political action—the centre of decisions—by making theatre as politics rather than merely making political theatre. In the latter case, the theatre makes comments on politics; in the former, the theatre is, in itself, one of the ways in which political activity can be conducted. (p. 20)
[xii] Panorama: Vision – the politics of theater and surveillance
Yang zhenzhong.com. Exam. last modified in August 2012 http://www.yangzhenzhong.com/?p=2237&lang=zh-cn