The Limits of Time ?

The phantom of the 1997 digital clocks in Beijing and Shenzhen serve as a time bomb to remind Hong Kong people the deadline of our final count-down at zero hour on July 1st, 1997. If one perceives the shimmering red digits as a metaphor of the eyes of a angry demon, the clock will be the invisible window of surveillance in which we could not evade or even notice the existence of such horrific gaze. The allegorically position of the clock rested between the concrete arms of the arch under the supreme Communist emblem and waving flags further symbolises the party*s victorious gesture of regaining their legitimate reign over this colonial island.

These underpinning connotations of the digital count-down clock, together with the show force of the 1997 garrison - the People*s Liberation Army based in the Southern borders since the end of January in 1996 might have filled up the silence of Deng*s billboard painted in Guangdong where slogans are absent and the message of the propaganda is still mysterious (the painting depicts Deng*s half lifting right hand during a deliver of speech with Guangdong*s panoramic landscape at behind). We are told by the tabloids the digital clock is misleading in exact time calculation, but who have time to bother the minute glitches of technology and the encrypted meanings behind Deng*s baton signs?

Under the spell of money culture and the urgencyof this transition period, everyone has their own invisible clock tickling towards it*s private degree zeros; thus pushed forward the hyper-accelerated pace of life in our social fabrics and there is no stopping sign of this hazardous life before the coming of the Reds. What is at stake to most Hong Kong citizens are their incapability to change or participate democratically in the up-coming objective political realities which will then lead to an inescapable dooms day. In light of our own psychological frustrations, we began to recognise the internalisation of this invisible political, economic and even cultural pressures. This deep seated uncertainty is objectified and expressed directly or indirectly as mournful outcries in our visual culture. As a timid participant, the most deteriorating dilemma to my worry will be a up-coming society with a loss of speech freedom, the superimposition of cultural censorship and a degrading level of human rights, not to mention the blind faith in consumer culture (as well as cultural consumerism) which is experiencing in parallel.

My interest lies on deriving a safe and interesting practice of subversive visual language with a critical stance which is congruent with the everyday code of visual production and at the same time, will not risk us in jail or torture after the Communist siege. To be more positive, we should not considered this transitional period as a devastating rupture between two heterogeneous historical segments or a final battle between the Good and the Evil1, therefore, my proposal should not be treated seriously as the only feasible way or a fatal strategy in dealing with the clouded visions ahead. Before picturing a possible strategic tactics for future survival, we should probe into the origins and ultimate problem of cultural crisis, which is the disastrous result of cultural consumerism happened in both Western and Eastern metropolitan cities.

Requiem for the Capitalistic Art Worlds

With the downfall of the Avant Garde between the two world wars, the visual arts have shifted to service the state governments as a means of propaganda. The death of Avant Garde is announced when there is a shift of meaning of creative activity from value of finished product to the realm of consumerism or Kleenex culture of the pecuniary market after the 50*s. In John Berger*s view, *Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, where it exploits, to define their own interests as narrow as possible (within the confined realm of commercialisation)... which is a false standard.*

The steady displacement of radical consciousness by the forces of professionalism, bureaucracy, and commercialism has caused Avant Garde art to lose it*s power of rebellion and has crippled it*s impact. Art no longer presents a significant alternative to the bourgeois values. The young, restless and radical artists now reflect a culture of consumerism rather than to challenge it. Limits of art have reached and over turning conventions become routine after 1945. Modernist art which rejects past models and standards has no fixed goals and ideal; the Modernist artists stand alone and invent it*s own destiny without any reference to the actual world. The original meaning of Avant Garde, which is aesthetic innovation and social revolt, have left out the social framework in the late Modernism of 60*s and 70*s. The real problem of modernity is the loss of belief in any system of values beyond the self. And the real crisis of Modernism is the absence of a system of beliefs that justifies allegiance to any entity beyond the self.

The 80*s and 90*s can be said to be the heyday of cultural consumerism. The French sociologist, Jean Baudriallard have contested since 1968 that consumption has become the chief basis of the social order and advertising (especially TV commercials) codes products through differentiated symbols (image) and the object has it*s magical effect when it is consumed by transferring the intangible, value-added meanings to the individual; to him, these commercials with infinite play of self-referential signs re-orders the society and provide the individual with an illusory sense of freedom. The consumption world constructs out of models or simulacra which have no referent or ground in any reality except their own; subject, truth, meaning, nature, society, power and reality according to Baudrillard have all been abolished in the transformation of industrial-commodity society into a post-industrial mediascape.

The capitalist west gives rise of a new psychological type of artist: the bureaucratic personality who lives in a condition of submission to a cultural and economic system because of the rewards of money and prestige. In the era of Postmodernism, heroism high art as competed by popular culture is out; with playful and self-referential visual signs, the artist merely transformed the Avant Garde from an ethical into aesthetic movement. The abandonment of common ideology in favour of a pluralist situation actually lowers the degree of innovation. Postmodernist art scene reminds us that ours is now a culture without a focus or centre, it satisfies our aesthetic expression while requiring nothing from us in the way of social commitment or belief because we no longer rely on tradition or cultural habits to give us substantiated values. A market oriented atmosphere of cultural scene (in which selling is more important than creating) with it*s constant demands for something new to consume, is highly unfavourable to the creation of authentic and permanent values.

John Berger have used the domestification of wild animals in our city zoo as a metaphor to show how modern man tame Nature and their cultural heritage (article, Why Look at Animals in About Looking, Pantheon Books, 1980); by putting and observing animals in a city zoo or animal museum, the mediate between man and Nature is broken. This kind of marginalising of animal is put into an extreme of distorting the original into commercial usages (e.g. animal toys, caricature, films etc.). Zoos cannot but disappointed, no where can a stranger encounter the real look of animals in a zoo. Zoo visitors belong to a species which has at last been isolated; according to Berger, the historic loss to which zoos are a monument is now irredeemable for the culture of Late Capitalism. The present crisis of modernism and postmodernism art culture drives us to search for a better direction to proceed; this leads me to the self-relfective visionary of the Classical artist, Hans Holbein.

Anamorphosis as a Strategic Tactics for Survival The skill of painting the illusion of real in western civilisation did contribute the work of art in earlier tradition to celebrate the wealth and coercive power of a fixed social or divine order2. The masterpiece of the German artist Hans Holbein (1497/8-1543), The Ambassadors (1533) can illustrate how the precise depiction of light and textures of the globe, telescope, furs, mandolin and middle east carpets could tell us visually and literally the possessions of the French ambassadors whom was probably the commissioner of Holbein*s painting. The elements in the painting allow us to decode the situation of that period of history: the beginning of colonisation, slave trade and the import of exotic goods.

Unlike other traditional hired oil painters, Hans Holbein added a sense of personal moral judgment within all these realistic representation. Besides a carefully painted statue of Jesus crucified on the cross at the upper left hand corner of the painting (which is out of sight in the attached diagram), the wrapped paper in the foreground was instead a distorted skull painted in an optical technique named anamorphosis (one could recognise the skull from looking one tip of the painting to the other in a slanted angle). An anamorphosis (a Greek work meaning *transform*) is a deliberately distorted image which is almost unrecognisable in the preliminary sight, it is only when the image is viewed from a certain angle that it turns to a normal appearance3.

In view of Alison Cole, *...this bizarre use of perspective was first described in the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, although the term was not coined until the 17th century... at first, it was probably used as a witty exercise... but soon, painters such as Hans Holbein used anamorphosis in a more intellectual fashion, to conceal spiritual or political meanings in their works* (ibid. p.32-3). The distorted skull lies along the mosaic floor of the drawing is like a secret code embedded with cryptic message. To Berger, the representation method of this metaphysical symbolism - momento mori, which is a medieval sign of death is a transcendence of Holbein*s predecessors (ibid. p.91). In fact, according to the artist, if he had it painted in the form of the old masters original concept of death would be similar with the hypocritical approach of the church*s idea of death. The distorted skull instead is a challenge to the old dogmatic and sermonize divine as well as stating his social comment to his present degraded ruling class. We are told that the The Ambassadors secrecy was not opened and recognised as an anamorphosis until 1873, which is three hundred years after the picture was painted.

The importance of this particular masterwork of Hans Holbein as a form of commissioned art embedded with a transformed moral judgement can be served as a guideline for the endangered artist to survive in Hong Kong after 1997. Similar with the ambiguity of Holbein*s masterpiece, the meaning of the original visual art work might shift under specific circumstances of re-readings. The social grammar of hegemony is never static, but subject to its own dialectical constructions. Alongside the specific, literal challenges to authority represented by images of coercive authority, there is also another, more subtle challenge posed by the introduction of new forms of visual language which may be described as the introduction of polysemy into the authoritarian usage of single, unified meanings or icons.

The word polysemy is similar with the idea of multi-accentuality which sought to show how the meaning of signs and symbols is not fixed by the abstract system of language, but by the dialogistic interaction of social relations within which the potential for meaning is fixed. Multi-accentuality/ polysemy requires :

1. Attention to the concrete or empirical conditions in which meanings are produced out of the resources of signification in social use (e.g. common practices of commercial and propaganda visual languages).

2. Recognition that signs themselves are not exempt from social divisions and struggles - there is a struggle for meaning every bit as important as other types of social conflict in maintaining or changing the structure and direction of a community.

Like Holbein*s strategic visual tatics, there is a quest for the moralistic artists a bastardisation of normality of the dominant authorities in a clever manner, which is dressing up ourselves as normal conformists to the reigning consumer and fascist rule. Our distorted sign itself may, in times of social upheaval, become fluid with respect to its meaning, and emerge with a completely different evaluative accent. A new code of visual language disguised anamorphically embedded with a reservoir of multi-accentualitic / polysemic signs therefore have its subtle undoing of the highly codified meanings favoured by authoritarian and dogmatic regimes whether they are post-colonial Hong Kong or Communist China.

Footnotes

1 This optimistic thought owes much to Foucault's grand vision towards history: "One of the most harmful habits in contemporary thoughts is the analysis of the present as being precisely, in history, a present of rupture, or of high point, or of completion or a returning dawn. The solemnity with which everyone engaged in philosophical discourse reflects on his own time strikes me as a flaw. I think we should have the modesty to say to ourselves that, on the one hand, the time we live in is not the unique or fundamental or irruptive point in history where everything is completed and begun again. We must also have the modesty to say, on the other hand that even without this solemnity - the time we live in is very interesting!" in Colin Gordon (ed.) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 by Michel Foucault, Pantheon Books, 1980.

2 The English art critic John Berger have supported this argument by quoting Claude Levi-Strauss, "...It is this avid and ambitious desire to take possession of the object for the benefit of the owner or even of the spectator which seems to me to constitute one of the outstandingly orignal features of the art of Western civilisation... for Renaissance artists, painting was perhaps an instrument of knowledge, but it was also an instrument of possession, and we must not forget, when we are dealing with Renaissance painting, that it was only possible because of the immense fortunes which were being amassed in Florence... and that rich Italian merchants looked upon painters as agents, who allowed thim to confirm thier possession of all that was beautiful and desirable in the world..."(p. 84-87 in John Berger, Ways of Seeing, British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972).

3 For a detailed description of the history of anamorphosis, please refer to Alison Cole, Eyewitness Art: Perspective- A Visual Guide to the Theory and Techniques from the Renaissance to Pop Art, National Gallery Publications, London, 1992 and Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Wesatern Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat, Yale University Press, 1990.