Tag Archives: Robert Adanto

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art documentaries : Chimeras in the mix

Another year another China art documentary, focusing on questions of identity, or, as Wang Guangyi asks in Finnish film director  Mika Mattila’s Chimera: “what are our roots?”

The question itself continues to inspire new documentary work, but not, perhaps, much discussion or even interest (at least not for me). I remain intrigued, however, by filmmakers who are able to take this topic as the subject of their art, in other words, film artists who make art the fodder for their art. The arrangement is curious in that so much of what is compelling about such work is derived, if not flat out stolen, from someone else’s creative work. Where would, in other words, Mattila really be without Wang Guangyi and Liu Gang, who in most media reports (LA Times, for instance) are the headliners anyway, with the ‘real’ artist–the filmmaker–relegated to round about paragraph three. Journalists can see proportionality in this case of creative production, anyway.

The question is somewhat personal, I suppose, as I’ve endeavored off and on to tackle Zhong Biao in documentary format. Whether or not the project ever comes to fruition, I am certain that the better part of what emerges as watchable (耐看) will stem from his painting, or other products from his fundamentally creative hand. The structure, rhetoric, even cinematographic dimensions of my work would all rightly be upstaged by the artist or artists in question.

Robert Adanto’s work, discussed elsewhere on this blog, is also a case in point, but in watching that work we are forced to admit a certain spectrum of truth to the proposition that the documentarian of art is a thief of sorts, particularly when compared with Alison Klayman’s work on Ai Weiwei, a more modest, and therefore artistically thin operation. Yet in either case there is something there, in the art of the art, something beyond mere convenience (documentarian travels to locales we cannot in order to bring back the goods of what’s good), something expressive and individual, self-deprecating by design, but occasionally aesthetically there in the mind’s eye of the viewer.

And so it will be with Chimeras, I expect. I’m looking forward to seeing it when it comes to town.

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The Rising Tide–not quite a review

I first mentioned Robert Adanto’s film Rising Tide (2008) in this blog early this year. I’ve not finally got my hands on it.  The film was produced in 2008, and features Chinese art and artists from Beijing, Shanghai, Los Angeles and New York. Following is a a rough form of my comments presented at the Rocky Mountain in Modern Language Association meeting early last month:

Rising Tide is a bold work, but not because it allows the filmmaker his own voice, subject to speculation, revision, polyphony in Chu Yingchi’s terms (on Chinese Documentary. Adanto does not appear in his film. He begins (via Gordon Chang, lawyer and author of the 2001 “coming collapse of China,” a not particularly prophetic work) that China is too vast to generalize about, and then aims to generalize. He does so, though, using contemporary art, most particularly contemporary video art, that of Cao Fei, Zhang O as well as photography of Yang Yong and others. In other words, the point of view of the work, bifurcated in Chang’s “China is coming to an end” and Victoria Lu’s (Creative Director, Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai) more measured and certainly optimistic view, is prismatic. Authority is asserted and then dissolves, repeatedly, although a pervasive sense of menace (for Chang, the Chinese Communist Party) remains, increasingly unnamed, often associated with money, but ever ambivalent. The menace, if anything, is history itself, the violence of China’s recent past, a pressure seemingly connected with the current state of development, a new menace, sheer rapidity of change.

What comes out intact and clear from the otherwise mutually canceling perspectives of Adanto’s authorities is this element of change and its relationship to art. More specifically, and again beginning with Gordon Chang, but also including (predictably) such China arts-world figures as Colin Chinnery (then of Ullens) and Meg Maggio, former director of the Courtyard gallery in Caochangdi and others, is that artists are the best spokespeople for the changes taking place in China, the real documentarians, so to speak. Chen Qiulin, arguably the best example of this, and the most powerful to my mind in the film, frequently refers to herself as just such a documentarian. Adanto is not so much out of the way of this process, as the way itself for their somewhat uncanny integration. For in addition to the artists testimony, or even intimate shots of their working environments and people featured in, for instance, Alison Klayman’s recent work on Ai Weiwei, Adanto has used the artists own art, photography, and video in particular, to advance his edification project. The social point of view of the text, its authority, is thus delicately mashed-up with some highly potent in its own right aesthetic objects, objects which are seduced into the framework of “the document,” a setting at once befitting but also powerfully misplaced. Where Bill Nichols fourth-order voice, that of the filmmaker revealing him or herself in the network of perspectives s/he purports to document, Rising Tide , with a simple “courtesy of” (given gallery) shell games the voices to the point that the overlap fully drowns out the single authority. What emerges is a rich act of theft, a chaos that seems so clearly in tune with its subject that one senses significant, if perhaps ethically dubious, accomplishment.