February 5, 1989. Beijing. The National Art Gallery opens China/Avant-Garde, the summing-up, the big one, a decade of work by artists who spent that decade being told there was no decade. Somebody hangs a no-U-turn sign on the banner outside. At about 11:10 in the morning a woman walks up to her own installation and puts two bullets through the mirror. Police clear the building. Most important exhibition in modern Chinese art, open two hours. She turns herself in after four. Four days inside a cell.
Great story. Everybody’s got it. It’s in the surveys, it’s in the audio guides, it’s the slide that wakes the room up in week nine of the lecture course. It’s Chris Burdenesque without the blood.
Everything you can recite about this piece comes from things written afterwards by people who were tidying up. The declaration. The catalogue copy. The wall label. The framing that arrived in June. The two seconds where a woman pulled a trigger twice, [BANG… BANG] are the least documented part of the most documented gesture in Chinese contemporary art.
So here’s where this is going. I don’t thik the gun is the interesting part of this story.
The interesting part for me is the paperwork.
An act that size has to be about the state. That’s the reflex, and it’s a reasonable one. Live rounds, national museum, Beijing, 1989. Do the arithmetic before you’ve finished reading the sentence.
It was about a guy.
A guy and a phone call and something that had gone bad between two people. The two figures in the booths are a young man and a young woman on the phone to each other, and when Xiao Lu finally talked about the piece properly she tied it to exactly that, the completely ordinary catastrophe of not being able to make yourself understood by somebody you’re fucking. And further back, to abuse she went through as a child.
That’s the whole motive.
Now. The easy move here is to say isn’t that moving, the personal is political, and go and have your buckwheat blueberry scone. I did think that for a while, in fairness.
But in truth it’s the other way round, and this is the part I think that actually matters.
The smallness is why it got taken. A public act with a public motive is self-filing. You agree or you don’t, students write your six hundred words, class dismissed. An act that big with a reason that small won’t file. It sits in the middle of the room like a dog nobody will claim.
And a thing that won’t file… The institution doesn’t hide it. The institution just can’t hold it, too many people know, so it swaps the motive for one it can carry, and the swap looks like interpretation. Ah, here we go, the swap looks like scholarship. The swap looks, from the outside, like somebody being generous about your work.
Seven days after the shooting a declaration about the act is submitted to the curator, Gao Minglu. It explains that this had been an artistic endeavor aimed at deepening our understanding of art and its social value. You know the sentence. It exists to make a gunshot eligible for a catalogue.
Two signatures. Hers, and Tang Song’s, her lover (the guy on the other end of the phone), who had not fired the gun. And on the strength of that second signature, on a document written a week after the fact, that schmuck is credited as the second author of Dialogue.
Fifteen years that holds. Catalogues, surveys, wall labels, the lot.
So there’s your villain, and you can feel how good it would feel to write that paragraph. Man takes woman’s work. File it under the usual, share it, move on.
Except I don’t think anybody stole anything.
Picture the week instead. A woman in a prison cell. An exhibition shut down, police asking questions, every career in the building suddenly made of glass. Somebody sits down and writes the document that makes the whole thing survivable, and survivable requires a we. Cowardice usually requires a we. But I’d put money on every person involved going to bed that night believing they had helped her. Also it’s the arrogance of administrators.
Which is worse. Not rhetorically worse. Actually worse, structurally…
Theft you can litigate. Theft has a date and a perpetrator and an aggrieved party, and art history is pretty good at theft, it loves a restitution narrative. But nobody has ever built a procedure for recovering work from people who were being kind. There’s no claim to file. There’s no one to accuse. The authorship just quietly becomes joint, in a sentence somebody wrote to keep you out of prison, and 15 years later that sentence is the fact and your version is the revisionism.
David Borgonjon put the knife in better than I can: the collective declaration of the death of the author here looks an awful lot like an excuse for appropriation.
The author wasn’t dead. The author was in a cell while her name got renegotiated by committee, on her behalf, with the best will in the world.
Four months later the army came into Tiananmen Square, and the shots got renamed. The first gunshots of Tiananmen. The overture. The warning. You’ve heard it, it’s in the audio guides, it’s how the piece gets taught.
And that reading is what keeps the work alive. Let’s be honest about that. Without June, Dialogue is a footnote in a closed exhibition. The prophecy framing is the reason anybody outside Beijing has ever heard of it. It bought the piece forty years of attention.
It also did exactly what the declaration did.
Same machine. A private act is too small to be worth what it cost, so it gets upgraded, and every upgrade makes the work more important and the author less present. Quarrel becomes collaboration becomes prophecy. At the end of that chain you have a slab of art history in which the only person who definitely, physically, provably was there, the one whose finger was on the trigger, is the least cited name in the paragraph.
And I want to be careful, because there’s a cheap way to say this. I’m not telling you the piece was apolitical. Fire live ammunition in a state museum in Beijing in 1989 and you’ve made a political act whether you meant one or not, and four days in a cell is not a metaphor. The objection is narrower. The reading arrived from outside, 4 months late, and took the same thing the paperwork took.
Here’s the bit I keep coming back to.
History was the second co-author, and history didn’t have to sign anything. Tang Song at least had to put a pen to a page. June just helped itself, and we all nodded, and the nodding is what made it stick. Which means the mechanism isn’t a bad man or a bad state. The mechanism is us, being appreciative, in print.
From 2004 she starts saying it out loud. Interviews, curators, anywhere there’s a microphone. Dialogue is mine. Tang Song came in afterwards, around the arrest. Some people back her, Gao Minglu and Xu Hong among them. Li Xianting holds the line that it was genuinely collaborative. The argument has never fully closed.
And that’s the version you’d put in the documentary… and this would make an awesome documentary, go ahead and steal that idea. But she found her voice, she told the truth, the record was corrected.
Telling the truth did nothing for fifteen years.
She wasn’t quiet before 2004 so much as unheard, and even after 2004 the saying is not what moved anything, because 15 years is more than long enough for a credit to turn into a fact. While testimony is the thing institutions are built to absorb.
What worked was an object.
In 2006 she took an archival photograph of her own shooting, somebody else’s capture, one of those images in every survey of the period, printed it in an edition of ten, and signed and dated each one herself.
That’s the move. Not the gun. Not the witnesses standing right there in the room. The photographic print. The thing with a margin wide enough to hold a name.
And think about what that concedes, because she clearly understood it better than anyone writing about her. Seventeen years on, the way to recover an act you committed with your own hands in a national museum in front of a crowd was to take possession of a picture of you doing that act.
So the art world does not run on what happened. It runs on title and signature. It is a registry, and it always was, and everything we say about truth and testimony and the integrity of the record is what the registry sounds like when it’s talking about itself.
I have used a lot of big words on this blog telling you the photograph of a performance lies. That the shutter takes a 1/120th of a second out of an hour and hands it back to you as the entire hour. Klein never lept, Shunk and Kender pulled the tarp out of the frame. Man Ray was doing arithmetic, not reportage. The thing you’re looking at in the Cartier-Bresson is a composition that happens to contain an event.
I’d write every one of those again… I think.
It’s also a consoling little position that I hide in.
Because “the photo lies” leaves the performance sitting there behind the lie. Wronged, misrepresented, why not, but intact. Still itself. Still available in principle to anyone honest enough to go and dig. It makes the photograph a shitty witness to a real thing, and a shitty witness implies a real thing, and the real thing is where I get to keep my faith.
Xiao Lu takes that away.
In her case the photograph isn’t a witness at all. It’s the deed, the body. The only part of that act with a surface you can put a name on, the only part that can be owned, assigned, co-assigned, reassigned, editioned, signed in the corner. The performance is gone. The record is now the estate.
So the question was never is it accurate. Fuck that, there’s no money in that. It’s whose name is on it, who put it there, and who was behind bars when that got decided.
And once you have asked it in those words you can’t stop, which is the bit I write in the margins. Every performance you’ve loved is inside this problem right now, tonight. The video’s in somebody’s archive. The photographs got taken by a person who is credited, or isn’t. The program names a director and says nothing about the room. And somewhere there’s a document, written after the fact, by people who meant well… and in 40 years that document is the truth, because it will be the only thing left standing that holds a signature.
The beautiful lie that’s more true than any truth. I still believe it. But the lie has an owner, and the owner is hardly ever the one who bled for it. Chris Burden probably be a counter argument here.
She fired twice. BANG… BANG. Two seconds. Then she spent seventeen years doing the actual work, and the actual work was fucking paperwork.
Go find out who signed the picture of the last thing that wrecked you.