Two for Tea: The Pasts and Futures of China and Russia

Oslo: Just around the corner from the Norwegian Architecture Museum, on Bankplatz, is the sexiest Jugendstil building I have yet encountered. It is called, since 1990, the Samtidkonst Museum, which works out to “Same Time” Art Museum, meaning Contemporary. But it used to be the Central Bank of Norway, until all those North Sea oil transactions made it too small for its purpose of monitoring the currency of Norway. What a gorgeous building, so gorgeous it is often hard to concentrate of the art contained therein. With a knockout restaurant, high quality, low price. I had Peking Duck soup in honor of half of the exhibitions, and if they had sold vodka, I would have honored the Russian side of this remarkable two part global encounter.

Let me begin with the Chinese. The basic figure is The Long March, that heroic achievement that Mao Tse Tung directed, when it became clear they couldn’t whip the Kuomingtang in the cities with the resources they then had. It was heroic and mythic, these peasants and their urban if not too urbane leaders taking them into the hills, the better to fight for their freedom down the road. There is a leitmotif of prison, emblemized by striped kimonos hanging seiatim for several hundred feet. The exhibition has the extraordinary title of “Light as Fuck: Shanghai Assemblage”.

It is actually a collocation of movies, some about the gigantic building boom in Pudong across the river from Old Shanghai. Some of these focus on the hysterically rapid pace of the New China. Others are antithetically calm to the point of stasis about the difficulty of having human loves in this hopped up environment. The love scenes are touchingly pure, in gross contrast to the four letter word title. Long March, indeed, if ever with a satisfying conclusion.

It happens that the first thing I did after retiring early at age 55 was to go to Shanghai to study Mandarin for six weeks, the intellectual equivalent of learning chess in such a short time frame. Actually I had moved from Philadelphia where I had been a professor of American Literature for twenty-five years to Camp Meeker, a hippie output outside of Santa Rosa, CA, where I had been a visiting Andreini Fellow 1975-76, to avoid Independence Day Bicentennial Burnout in Philly.

I aspired to forge my first scoop as a free lance journalist by writing about the first visit of the Shanghai Museum outside China—at the Asian Museum of Fine Art in Golden Gate Park. I got my cover story on “San Francisco FOCUS” (May 1976), but for your years I pondered what I had learned about the newest China. The director of the small group tour (its terribly difficult task of becoming literature in Chinese was softened by some high toned tourism to Hangzou, Suzhou, and Beijing, especially Beijing. I was then also a correspondent for “Connoisseur” magazine, which got me a night in the newly opened I.M.Pei designed Pleasant Hills hotel outside Beijing.

The Asian American architect had just finished his luminous Louvre entrance, and was full of praise for the indispensability of the French craftsmen who made that addition to the Louvre such a visual sensation. Conversely, the Chinese “craftsmen” were so incompetent that Pei, his wife, and their daughter ended up on their knees making last minute repairs before the hotel’s “soft” opening. What a difference indigenous craft traditions (or lack of them) can make towards the construction of first rate architecture.

The six weeks were full of serendipities: Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, the first allowed in decades. Deng Zhou Ping was just loosening up the tight ass Commie establishment .Ann, my companion during the trips, and I met a young Chinese English teacher at their Hyde Park, who invited us to meet his fiancee. They were about to defect secretly to Hong Kong or L.A. (their parents were deployed in both places) and eagerly listened to Californian Ann’s summary of LA’s virtues and vices for immigrant.

His father had been in a labor camp for the decades after the Cultural Revolution for the unpatriotic job of being an English teacher! Course work aside (and it was a ball breaker, studying Chinese), such serendipities leavened the flat bread of daily existence there. “Light as Fuck” is a silent homage to the America they perceive as the avatar of Freedom. As if Howard Stern was their Thomas Jefferson! The gentleness and pathos of their love movies will soon disabuse them of such callow fallacies.

Meanwhile, across the august corridors of the former Central Bank, the Russians were coming, figuratively. Their exhibition, a joint but diverse avant garde show from St. Petersburg and Moscow, suggested a split personality. It was called SE OPP! (“Watch Out”! in Russian). The St. Petersburg contingent centered on the New Academicism, which amounted to heavy-handed satire of Western Ikons.

For example, one especially funky canvas was a masculinization of the Matisse “Dancers” at my home town Barnes Foundation. The dancing ladies had become very very virile men with their Thangs whanging about in all too festive glory! Simultaneously, in another chamber, Moscovites were cutting loose with paintings such as the poster like call to harms of Ira Waldron’s “Hard Porn” (2002), headlined FUCKISTAN which displayed a bearded lady (a la 1900 Circus) who brags “I Have a Bomb in my Pussy”! It’s a flakey takeoff on the Terror crisis, an Islamically turbanned man mugging a poor old Westerner. And elsewhere there’s Elvis dressed up in medieval armor. Heavy handed Putinesque humor.

Heh, it’s their country, right? They’ll soon get over their America-derived fondness for foul language. What the fuck. They have been screwier episodes in Western art history. Take Dadaism, for example. You take it, you reply, bored silly by the boringly and long gone revolutionary excesses of EuroArt in the past century.I say the more merde, the merrier.

Get the crap out of their systems and hope to God their unsurveiled atomic bombs don’t go off accidentally while they grow up, after several centuries of totally tight totalitarianism. Meanwhile, bless those Oslo curators with the curiosity to show us what’s going on in the greatest threat to humanity in the last century followed by the greatest challenge of our own. Those cool Norwegians know how to keep a steady head. (Isn’t that why God made Scandinavia so cold—to keep them awake, thinking for all of hotheads down South?)