tiananmen and the power of narrative — Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern at the MoMA retrospective, discursion
Jeez, where to even start?
On June 4 in 1989 the Chinese People’s Liberation Army massacred a host of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square, and has spent the next thirty years alternately denying it, defending their actions and generally obfuscating the truth.
On May 4, 1907, Lincoln Kirstein was born. He was a rich Jewish boy who went to Harvard, co-founded an influential art magazine, founded New York’s esteemed New York City Ballet company for good measure, acted as a serious tastemaker and collector for the MoMA, and was generally a Renaissance man in the field of contemporary art. He eventually died in 1996, so it seems he was around to hear about the massacre at Tiananmen, though I couldn’t say what he thought of it.
I was born on October 5, 1994, so I was not around to hear about Tiananmen when it happened, though I’ve learned much about it after the fact. In good time I grew up to love art, and today, June 3, 2019, I went to the MoMA’s retrospective/honorary of Lincoln Kirstein, one day before the 30th anniversary of the end of the protests, and it made me think about a lot of things.
All of those could be the beginning, depending on how you define it.
Anyone who loves art has to understand the power of stories and narratives, and the power art lends to the exploration of stories and narratives. Art has an unparalleled ability to open new views and new ways of seeing views. Through a story, or a picture, or a painting, we see the world that we’re living in transform and, more importantly, we transform our own experiences in turn. Here is the photographer Walker Evans, from the Kirtstein exhibition. His photos aren’t of anything special, no more than anything is inherently special — roadside gas signs, buildings at oblique angles, families in summer — but through the way they resonate with my own experiences, they are transformed from pictures to expressions of deeper things. When I see Walker Evans’ photography I am doing more than just looking at a picture. By interacting with them I am re-experiencing the ennui and disorientation that boils up from life in a city like New York, as well as the intense, effervescent individuality of the people who live there and make it worth it. These photos resonate with my own experiences of wandering lonely in multi-million people cities, as well as calling to mind the chance encounters that change my life; in seeing the photos and in reliving my own experiences and thoughts through them, I get to reexamine myself and my world with a more nuanced layer of context.
In this sense I think most art is subversive, because most art is trying to get you to think critically, to take a deep look at your own experiences and assumptions, to brush off the dust of your internal life and really dig down into what your life is about and what you value.
This power isn’t always welcome. Xi Jinping, who in 2014 gave a speech on the purpose of art in China, I am sure understands it well. His speech itself is dosed with a hefty chunk of patriotism, which isn’t unusual for any head of state, but at its core there’s an entreaty for art to “serve the people”, which is an assertion I’m wary about. In this case I’m led to believe that it means art should uphold harmony, stability, and other espoused values rather than causing any problems — art is not for the person like me, but rather the people, which is probably just the nation-state, whoever they are. In his words:
“To focus on the people is to make meeting the people’s spiritual and cultural needs the starting and ending point of art and culture and the work in art and culture, to make the people the subject in artistic representations, to turn the people into the critics and judges of artistic aesthetics, and to make serving the people the bounded duty of artists.”
To be clear, lots of art is misguided, and some of it might even be actively deleterious. I find Francis Bacon’s ideas on the necessity of violence and art to be unappetizing at best and vile at worst, and I’m sure a good case could be made for excluding him from the annals of art theory or art history.
But the point here isn’t whether any one artist or any one person makes a good or bad work of art. All bad things ricochet off all good things and form the world that we live in, just as nitrogen and oxygen mix to form the air we breathe. Nothing is in an event itself so much as in the response to that event, which is both more nuanced and more influential in the long term. Though atom bombs were only used twice in the history of warfare, the legacy of those events led to the development of abstract expressionism in America as well as a spirited debate on what was and wasn’t acceptable in warfare.
At play in China is not only the desire to control the Tiananmen square narrative, nor a desire to control all narratives, but rather a desire to reconstrue how narratives are constructed, recognized and used. To the ruling party, what is important is not that the story they extol — where protesters were counter-revolutionaries seeking to upend social order — is gospel, but rather that it is unimportant to consider alternatives. Louisa Lim talks about this in an opinion piece for the NYT (as well as in her full-length book, I imagine), but it’s a point of view that resonates with and distresses me, a lot. The goal of Xi’s government, in the end, is not to render censorship so complete as to void any reference to Tiananmen, but rather to render the populace so completely apathetic to the ideals and the plight of the Tiananmen protesters that censorship becomes unnecessary.
Perhaps in the end I shouldn’t say anything myself (not being Chinese and not having to live under a regime of censorship), but I’ve seen the documentaries and the footage of what happened in the square over those most violent days, and the thought of a world where people would willingly forget what happened then shakes me to the core. It isn’t a refutation of a particular scene or group of people, nor even of a particular ideology, but rather a complete decimation of a way of remembering. The ability to look back at myself and my history in a nuanced way (particularly the way I do so through art) is essential to how I’ve grown and continue to grow, and though I don’t know what the anniversary of Tiananmen will look like like 10, 20, or 30 years from now I hope it’s a full one, with everything that implies.
