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Given China’s influence in the global economy, where is the Chinese Psy?

In October 2012, U.K. producer Terror Danjah, the so-called Godfather of Grime, made his first tour of China. Grime emerged as an East London phenomenon at the turn of the millennium, heavily propagated by a pirate-radio underground that was broadcasting increasingly aggressive strains of bass music. At first glance, Terror Danjah’s arrival in China seemed to confirm the global arrival of Beijing’s rapidly expanding (albeit predominantly expatriate) dance-music scene, which has been incorporating ever more adventurous streams of electronic music.

But Terror’s visit had strange roots. In 2003, grime had spawned a subgenre, Sinogrime, as London producers set their sonic sights east. By appropriating everything from martial-arts-movie soundtracks to cheap video-game muzak, grime’s East London soundworlds were briefly submerged in East Asian glitz. For a genre obsessed with futuristic aesthetics, this shift meant much more than a momentary orientalist indulgence. Music journalist Dan Hancox saw Sinogrime as part of a sociopolitical vision, reflecting the “current, gradual shift in superpowers from west to east, incorporating China, and rejecting America: in terms of the U.S., it’s notable that grime has always been nothip-hop.”

Sinogrime pointed to the reversal of a long one-sided and humiliating musical exchange between the West and China. A 2011 performance by the New-York based Chinese pianist Lang Lang at a White House state dinner in honour of China’s President, Hu Jintao, also reflects this. Lang Lang performed the Korean War anthem “My Motherland”, whose original lyrics boast “we deal with wolves with guns” — an explicit reference to the U.S. As Lang Lang wrote in a blog post the following night, “I was telling them about a powerful China and a unified Chinese people.”

Beyond delighting the Chinese delegates present, it is remarkable just how Lang Lang’s performance managed to channel the political intent of Beijing. This is a pianist who is celebrated in endorsement contracts that stretch from Adidas to Montblanc. Why does the music of the People’s Republic continue to exert such a nationalist project in the reform period? Unveiling the entwined relationship between market and state is crucial to understanding the drivers behind Chinese pop culture. The state still engages in the direct fostering of Sinopop. But parallel to overt policy, the state also deploys its silent control through the market itself.

Pop sounds from the People’s Republic of China walk a fine line between dabbling in adventurous experimentalism, selling out to the lure of big business, and negotiating political pressures. When I visited the capital last year, the finishing touches were being put to Beijing’s Dada club, which had already started hyping appearances from a whole host of dubstep pioneers including Pinch and Kode9. Meanwhile the vast National Centre for the Performing Arts, nicknamed ‘the Egg’ for its organic, titanium architecture, was featuring an evening of patriotic opera. One night in Beijing offers a kaleidoscope of incongruities, from manic pop-stardom to triumphalist hipsterdom.

But while the cacophony on the surface might suggest that China’s market reforms have eroded the Party’s capacity for cultural control, the reality is far more sober. The seeming diversity of Chinese pop only masks how institutionalized it is. While Chinese pop stars like Cui Jian, the grandfather of subversive Chinese rock, and the gender-transgressive Li Yuchun, who found fame in 2005 on Super Girl, an Idol-like contest that attracted hundreds of millions of viewers in an unprecedented “democratic moment” for the Chinese pop-music industry, seem to suggest diversity, their talent was nurtured by the music-conservatory system. Beijing’s cultural academies are inextricably bound up in the state’s system of rewarding those who play the game with prizes and prestigious tenure. 
Musicians like Li Yuchun form a singularly useful component in the state’s cultural project, stifling truly dissident art in a haze of superficial unorthodoxy. And in 2012, Beijing officials announced a £1.4 billion “China Music Valley” project, encompassing studios, music schools and five-star hotels, fully displaying the state’s persistent investments in soft power.

Observers have long been optimistic about the submission of Chinese pop culture to the full gold-rush fever of the market. In The Party and the Arty, Sinologist Richard Kraus observed that “by 1992 the Party had given up trying to purge all dissident voices and opted instead for the strategy of urging all arts organizations to strive to earn more money, an approach that ultimately feeds professional autonomy.” But market reforms and globalization have done little to introduce freer political expression or ease the Chinese Communist Party’s influence. It turns out that a superficially diverse, profit-driven, market-oriented culture industry is perfectly consistent with state censorship and the Party’s nationalistic aims. Although the influence of Party orthodoxy is less crudely visible, it still exercises ubiquitous control via private business and the media.

The rise of the market for cultural goods in China has had many disturbing repercussions. In her survey of 21st century mainland Chinese fiction, historian Julia Lovell examined how literary commercialization, sharply accelerated by the emergence of the internet, has led to a blurring of professional standards: “As market hype threatens to drown out reasoned literary judgment, nationally renowned professors of Chinese for a fee have taken to puffing works of uncertain literary value in reviews.” The same infection can be found in the PRC’s musical culture, where the boundaries between music criticism and press releases are frequently indistinct.

Even more problematic is the CCP’s particular system of oppression and reward. With more private investment in the cultural sector, Party censorship has begun to give way to self-censorship, as culture-industry firms must embed themselves more deeply within the party-state system to maximize their market leverage. Website operators are held responsible for all the content that appears on their sites. Instead of being incompatible with market models, self-suppression becomes a necessity in order to maintain market access and profit. Far from guaranteeing human freedom, the free market is perfectly at ease with censorship.

Arguably, Chinese pop has become less diverse in recent years, not more. Hong Kong Cantonese pop, first smuggled into China via pirated cassette tapes, rose to prominence in the late 1970s. But from 1997, this balladic “cantopop” music began to decline severely in market share, as Cantonese artists increasingly chose to perform in Mandarin. Taiwanese pop’s chances of success on the mainland similarly revolves around prospective performers’ self-censorship. Taiwanese musician 
Jay Chou, arguably one of the biggest Mandarin pop artists of the last decade, has carefully cultivated an apolitical act, avoiding all references to issues of Taiwanese independence and even promoting traditional Chinese cultural elements in his music. In short, the rise of the mainland has seen a fall in transnational cultural pluralism.

It’s not just commercial pop music that has been ensnared in this state-cultivated exclusivity. More than anything else, the sanitization of Chinese rock illuminates how the Party has seized firmer cultural control. During the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations, Chinese protest rock’s subversive qualities converged. Cui Jian pioneered Chinese-rock protest songs, drawing on satire and 1940s revolutionary music. In 1987, his version of the Chinese communist song “Nanniwan” got him banned from public performance for two years. But by 1989, his music was being taken up as an anthemic declaration of heady times.

By 1993, however, Chinese rock had lost its bite as politically safe music was marketed more intensely on the mainland and the state imposed ever more stringent restrictions on performance, including a ban on televised rock music. China scholar James Millward, a research student in Beijing in the aftermath of the Tiananmen demonstrations,
 recalled singing Cui Jian songs at the Peking University ‘Beida’ Guitar Club in 1990. But he observed later that “the image of these students at Beida” — roughly, China’s Harvard — “reviving a banned Tiananmen anthem in a candle-lit classroom seems like a final frisson of student political engagement that has given way to today’s frenzied consumerism.” The utopian promises of market diversity offer nothing but wishful thinking. Consumerism has been an essential factor in the CCP’s implementation of social control. While the scene has seen numerous revivals since then, from an extraordinary explosion in metal bands to festivals of Chinese rock, its subversive element had been effectively curtailed by the mid-1990s.

But even in 1993, Cui Jian was claiming that Beijing-based rock pointed to a socially progressive future, a musical vision very different to the decadence of Western rock. While such rock musicians are viewed with suspicion by the state, the cultural critic Geremie Barmé argues that ‘in the larger realm of China they are actually patriots.’ Despite sitting far outside state sanctity, Chinese rock’s ‘super-patriots’ have long demonstrated an extreme predilection for nationalist exclusivity.

Nationalism has been an essential force in Chinese consumerism. The hegemony of the mainland market ties soft power and pop culture to the Party’s nationalist agenda. But in many ways the state’s huge investments in building Sinocentric Asia’s cultural attractiveness is a project doomed to fail. Soft power is not something you can just buy.

The state’s persistent hand in Chinese pop culture reflects the Party’s profound anxiety over pop, especially compared with the vibrant musical cultures of its Asian neighbors. China may loom over its neighbors in financial and political capital, but the narrow potential of its cultural capital has become glaringly apparent in the face of the Hallyu wave — the Asian term for the 21st century dominance of Korean popular culture. China has its own ambitions for a soft-power offensive through homegrown culture, but the inadequacy of its initiatives was plainly illustrated by the massive international success of Korean star Psy’s “Gangnam Style.”

K-pop, which is rooted in Korea’s relaxation of state censorship in the 1990s, has been rapidly developing a pioneering musical hybridity and consumer vision. Its preoccupations with the virtual world, and the marketable and disposable nature of its music, uphold uniquely futuristic ideals. But beyond enthusing over the pillowy soundscapes and monolithic production values, from the architectural possibilities offered by “Gee” by Girls Generation 
to the kaleidoscopic synths of Hyuna’s “Bubble Pop,” it is the way that K-pop merges art and commerce that fully makes it at one with the accelerated digital age. In 2009 boy band Big Bang released their single “Lollipop” as part of LG’s promotion of its new cellphone, also called Lollipop. Refusing to draw hard lines between composition and business, K-pop reaches for unabashed global pop domination.

The Hallyu wave has long been a source of contention for the CCP and has provoked a series of Chinese attempts to counter its effects. In the past, China has used its protective regulatory e­­­nvironment to deny Korean firms direct access to Chinese markets, pushing them into relying on Chinese partners. Now the state maintains its strong regulatory position but combines this with a private-sector presence. This subtler offensive looks to effectively blacken the Hallyu wave as a Korean ”invasion,” while cloaking the state’s nation-building agenda in the domain of cultural industries.

But the real loss lies at home. The mainland circulation of pirated tapes of Hong Kong and Taiwanese pop during the 1980s was a formative experience for China’s burgeoning pop culture. Yet gradually, the linguistic and market hegemony of the mainland has enforced self-censorship and consumer uniformity within the PRC soundscape. Earlier this year, construction workers from Wuhan protested their unpaid wages by dancing “Gangnam Style” outside the nightclub they had built. But where was China’s Psy? The sounds of the People’s Republic have drifted a long way from 1989, when Cui Jian’s song “Opportunists” roared across Tiananmen: “Oh, we have an opportunity, let’s show our desires, Oh, we have an opportunity, let’s show our power.”

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/powerpop/

Dame Jane Goodall’s use of Wikipedia is part of a more decisive shift in authorial culture.

In the 21st century, a writer facing allegations of copying is in for a distressing time. The veteran naturalist Dame Jane Goodall certainly discovered this for herself several weeks ago, when she admitted that her forthcoming book Seeds of Hope lifts passages verbatim, without proper attribution, from several internet sources including Wikipedia. Goodall, known for her pioneering primatology work in the 1960s, has seen the publication date of her 25th book put back as well as finding herself the subject of intense media scrutiny.

[The following is an op-ed and, as such, does not necessarily represent the opinions of the editors.]

Last year Thaddeus Ma Daqin declared his resignation from the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Assocation (CCPA). Ma’s announcement was honoured with applause in Shanghai’s cathedral of St. Ignatius. But the decision taken by the Vatican-ordained bishop, a blow to the credibility of state control, was taken as a calculated violation by the powers that be in Beijing. Ma soon found himself under house arrest.

The election earlier this year of the former Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Bergoglio, as the first non-European Pope in close to 1,300 years, was a move full of resonance. Standing at the head of a global flock of 1.2 billion, Pope Francis needs to reach out to the estimated 12 million Roman Catholics that reside in China. For decades, China’s Catholics have been split between underground “house church” membership, loyal to Rome and defiant of the government, and the state-founded CCPA.

As a Jesuit, Francis is surely aware of the extraordinary influences his 16th and 17th century predecessors left on the Chinese literati and imperial court. For the sake of his church, Francis must now rebuild the Vatican’s ties to China in the 21st century.

Many overlook the unique foreign policy potential that the Catholic Church wields.Writing in the Guardian, Nick Spencer dismissed the new Pope: “Francis has no more than words and example to work with.” But the decisions taken by Conclave should not be underestimated. They have surprised us in the past. Absolutely nobody expected the appointment of a Polish Pope in 1978. Pope John Paul II went on to play a critical role in the downfall of Communism in Eastern Europe.

As the Vatican comes under ever increasing global scrutiny, Pope Francis needs to show that the Holy See remains a force to be reckoned with. But China remains elusive for the Vatican.

The problems stretch back over half a century. China severed its diplomatic ties to the Vatican in 1951, after the atheist Communist Party came to power and expelled papal representatives to China. As the CCPA was born, so were the secret “house churches” which sheltered Catholics across China, still loyal to Rome and under threat of state persecution.

In the past decade, the most significant form of tension between Vatican legitimacy and Beijing’s insistent control has been over the appointment of bishops. With the Vatican frequently threatening excommunications and Beijing in turn accusing the Holy See of violating religious freedom, there is little sign of relief.

The Chinese reaction has been shortsighted at best, warning the Vatican to cease its relations with Taiwan, which China claims as its territory, striking out at Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou’s presence at Francis’ inauguration, and calling on the Pope to “stop interfering in China’s internal affairs, including in the name of religion.”

Such hawkish posturing within the Party continues to assert power in narrow terms, but the moral capital of the Party is in short supply in the People’s Republic, especially for those left behind by their country’s economic zeal. The Catholic Church, meanwhile, is particularly sensitive to the discontents of economic modernization. China’s extraordinary religious revivalism has poured into the vacuum left by the ruptures of Communist ideology, and in the last decade has increasingly infused the educated and wealthy. As CCPA bureaucracy and the underground church pull spiritual allegiances further apart, the mainland has created a singularly unhealthy atmosphere for Catholics — forced to operate in the shadows or under the control of an atheist bureaucracy.

The Holy See needs a diplomatic breakthrough to make its moral authority and international influence worthy of the new age. Writing in the Huffington Post, David Gosset has proposed possible diplomatic smoke signals — the canonization of the 16th century Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci, so emblematic of the Jesuit China Mission, for instance — that could pave the way to China’s opening up to the Vatican.

For their part, Beijing’s leaders need to awaken to the unstoppable religious dynamics that are shaping Chinese society, and look for an alleviation of the internal tensions that are pushing Chinese Christianity into an increasingly fraught arena.

http://www.tealeafnation.com/2013/04/opinion-for-both-pope-and-politburos-sake-beijing-must-open-up-to-vatican/

The Chinese artist’s visual-linguistic imagination unfolds in this exhibition of his landscapes

In 1999, trekking in the Himalayas, the Chinese artist Xu Bing explained a particular sense of resonance: “Sitting on top of a mountain, facing another mountain, I sketched a mountain. In China, painting and writing a mountain is the same thing.”

Xu filled his Himalayan journals with landscapes composed of Chinese characters, exploiting the pictographic origins of the script and returning it to its organic setting. Born in 1955, as a child Xu had performed daily calligraphic exercises under the instruction of his father, a historian at Beijing University, mastering both brush and language, and becoming rooted in this traditional Chinese symbiosis of painting, calligraphy and poetry

The Ashmolean Museum’s Landscape/Landscript exhibition traces Xu’s visual-linguistic imagination, as it flowed from the pages of his Himalayan sketchbooks into his series of Landscripts, vast natural worlds populated with Chinese characters. Composed on Nepalese paper, Xu’s vistas form mountains built by the Chinese character for “stone”, expanses of “grass” characters and rivers of semantic meaning, created in the tactile contours and monochrome wash of traditional Chinese landscape painting.

The violent, traumatic extremes that language reached during the Cultural Revolution, so utterly divorced from all meaning, form a thread that runs through Xu Bing’s artistic life. As a teenager Xu learnt of the arrest of his father from one of the handwritten character posters denouncing reactionary intellectuals. While his father was paraded through the streets in disgrace, Xu found a kind of solace in print catalogues, woodcutting tools and French printing ink. In 1974 Xu was sent to the remote farming commune of Huapen, labouring in the fields as part of the Cultural Revolution’s educated youth policy. Landscape/Landscript collects the immersive pieces he made there, documenting this formative time spent in the mountainous northwest where, each evening after work, Xu would take wrapping paper from the production brigade’s store and draw the landscape and life around his village.

Even with the end of the Cultural Revolution, rural imagery followed Xu in his emergent work during the late 1970s while at the Central Academy of Fine Arts’ printmaking department. The Ashmolean pulls together his Shattered Jade woodcuts, quietly conversant with socialist realism, folk traditions and memories of Huapen. But Xu was on the verge of making his break with orthodoxy and reaching for contemporaneity. At a time of intellectual ferment, Xu found himself exhausted by the feverish heights reached by the reform period’s cultural consumption. In his McKenzie lecture in Oxford earlier this year, Xu described his disorientation: “My generation has a strange relationship with books. We became very thirsty when the Cultural Revolution ended. I was able to read all sorts of books, but then I felt lost after taking in so many things.” In the summer of 1986, Xu removed himself to the northwest of China. “Mountain Rhythm” is the product of his etchings made at the Longyang Gorge in Qinghai Province. Xu engraved the landscape en plein air on copper plates which had been waxed in Beijing. Using a portable printmaking set, Xu scratched through the wax with a needle, adding acid later in the evening.

Landscape/Landscript follows Xu’s concentrated contemplations on the printmaking process. The Repetition Series of 1987 narrates the textural life of a printing block, carved and printed in 11 sequential stages to reveal its untouched, black space in the first print, an emergent patchwork landscape by the middle print and then gradually cut away to a final, almost blank reduction. Spread across a gallery wall, the “Ziliudi Scroll” from Xu’s Repetition Series details plots of land, with their crop patterns arranged in evocation of printed text.

Xu’s new meditative approach culminated in his maximalist 1988 project, Tianshu, in which he invented and handcarved 4,000 meaningless Chinese characters, displaying them as draped scrolls hanging in the air, wall panels and books spread across the floor. His expressive qualities increasingly found common ground with China’s new wave artists, part of the wider mid-1980s political movement that reached its tragic conclusion in the Tiananmen demonstrations. Caught up in the ensuing critical backlash against the avant-garde, in 1990 Xu left for the US, where western life pushed his work into further realms.

Standing at the heart of Landscape/Landscript, the Suzhou Landscripts lithographs, nearly a decade in the making, draw on a lifelong obsession with nature and language, as well as personal encounters with Chinese and western traditions. Taking 17th-century idyllic ink paintings of the Ming and Qing dynasties from the Suzhou Museum’s collection of hanging scrolls, Xu renders them in radiant fashion, layered in red characters that act as reminders of the ancient pictorial forms that appear on oracle bones. But the Suzhou Landscripts are also adorned with Xu’s square word calligraphy, a system of “masked words” he designed back in 1994 which places Roman script within the idioms of Chinese calligraphy. Challenging the assumptions of linguistic signification, the Suzhou Landscripts straddle the boundaries of different language systems. “My characters are like a computer virus, ruining our brain mechanisms,” Xu playfully observed in his Oxford lecture.

The closing act of Xu’s Ashmolean collection, the “Mustard Seed Garden Scroll”, picks away at the illusory effects of the artistic landscape tradition. Xu takes as his cue China’s venerable tradition of copying as pedagogy, as exemplified in the 17th-century Mustard Seed Garden Manual, an anthology codifying brushwork conventions. Such prescriptions for creating the motifs of landscape within the Chinese tradition have an almost linguistic structural quality. Xu rearranges images from the Manual, carving them into pearwood blocks and reinstating them in print as a new composition.

Landscape/Landscript is a cerebral submersion in nature, as well as a vivid set of reflections on the power and treachery of words. Xu’s Landscripts teach us another way of seeing the world, where language flows over the landscape, becoming a feature of the natural world itself.

Until May 19, www.ashmolean.org

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/86f48960-9ac1-11e2-97ad-00144feabdc0.html

‘Taking Mstislav Rostropovich’s interpretation as a guideline is a big mistake’: I interviewed cellist Alban Gerhardt about his new recording of Britten’s Cello Symphony for Gramophone magazine’s February issue http://www.gramophone.co.uk/latest-issue/february-2013

Last year the controversial Chinese novelist Mo Yan, in a Stockholm press conference before receiving the Nobel prize for literature, compared censorship to airport security checks. I argued at the time that the Nobel laureate’s stance on the necessity of censorship was unforgivable. Last week Mo consented to his first interview with foreign press since receiving the Nobel. Speaking to Der Spiegel, Mo broke silence to provide a vigorous defence: “I have emphasized repeatedly that I am writing on behalf of the people, not the party.”

As his first novel to arrive in English translation since the Nobel debacle, doesPow! shed any light on Mo Yan’s political mystique? Does its defiant use of hallucinatory affect absolve it of a lack of political consciousness, or is it quietly doing its bit to uphold the Party’s erasure of China’s traumatic history? The disturbing confessional of Luo Xiaotong, who narrates his life to a monk in a crumbling temple, weaves together themes of corrupt local officialdom, China’s deep rural poverty and a village’s transformation into a gargantuan meat processing plant. In his afterword, Mo cites his debt to Günter Grass’ novel The Tin Drum. Grass’ Oskar, a boy whose mental age progresses but body doesn’t, is reversed by Mo’s Luo who keeps his child’s mind in a grown body.

Mo describes Pow! as autobiographical. The setting itself mirrors Mo’s rural Shandong upbringing. In his Nobel acceptance speech, Mo thanked “the fertile soil that gave birth to me and nurtured me. It is often said that a person is shaped by the place where he grows up. I am a storyteller, who has found nourishment in your humid soil.” But the novelist also warns that his protagonist is singularly unreliable. Luo is a “powboy” – particularly prone to lie and boast. The kaleidoscopic narrative itself draws on a fantastical vein of ghosts and fox fairies, via which Mo’s characters are frequently reduced to their violent, animal appetites.

With the departure of her husband, Luo’s mother attempts to save money to build her own house and in doing so, subjects her son to a tortuous deprivation of meat. Luo’s consequent perpetual lust for meat is elevated to a central vehicle for ironic observation and sexual craving: “I knew the meat preferred the feel of my skin. When I gently picked up the first piece, it gave out a joyful moan and trembled in my hand.” But this story is in turn repeatedly crashed by a series of manic appearances, from the “Carnivore Festival’s Meat Appreciation Parade” through to the staging of an opera “From Meat Boy to Meat God”. Illusory visitations surrounding Luo’s surrealistic narrative propel the novel towards a literally explosive finale in which Luo fires off 41 old Japanese Army mortar shells.

Does this visceral orgy of butchery point to disturbing trends within the whole spectrum of modern Chinese literary culture? With its heavy dose of hallucinatory realism, critics have argued that Mo’s literary landscaping escapes the very real problems of contemporary China and that his crude strokes can even be seen as a symptom of an increasingly marketised writing culture. It is hard to square this with Pow!’s dark, satirical take on the violent, materialist and morally corrupt undercurrents of society. The village’s meat factory spends a vast proportion of the novel coming up with new ways to disguise its produce, from injecting water to increase its weight to applying formaldehyde to keep it fresh. Luo’s ingenious contribution to this is to suggest filling the animals with water while still alive. As he proudly proclaims: “the move from post-slaughter to pre-slaughter injection was nothing less than revolutionary, a turning point in animal slaughter history.”

The ways in which Mo’s writing manages to fully align itself with official censorship rules has troubled many critics, fuelled largely by that very Western predilection for the “banned in China” label. But there are surely more nuanced ways of talking about Mo than stridently taking his apparent political cronyism to task or accusing his Western critics of cultural imperialism. From its reflections on capitalism’s moral vacuum to its invocation of China’s history of famine, Pow!’s taste for the grotesque offers a bitter vision of contemporary China as a whole.

Those in search of a West-centric conception of Mo have often called him China’s Faulkner, but perhaps this is the root of the problem. At its best, Mo’s brand of highly ambiguous satire mocks all concerned. Wang Shuo, the best-selling sensationalist author of tough Beijing working-class narratives, once crudely remarked to the New Yorker: “Now Liu Xiaobo (the dissident Chinese writer) is in a labour camp and I am here (in a Beijing disco). I was proved right. A writer is a writer. He should stay away from politics.” Certainly there are many Chinese writers contentedly sitting in a gilded cage. It would be a mistake to definitively say this of Mo Yan’s slippery writing.

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2013/03/writing-people

The Nobel Literature prize laureate’s comments on literary censorship were unforgivable.   

“Why is modern China lacking in great writers?”, asked the Chinese author Murong Xuecun last year, in a speech itself banned in China. “Because great writers are castrated while still in the nursery”. Such lamentation gained a particular bitterness last week when the 2012 Nobel prize in literature winner, Mo Yan, provided a defence of censorship during a press conference in Stockholm before receiving his award. Mo compared the necessity of censorship to airport security checks, warning of the dangers of defamation and rumour. The critics were quick to line up. “Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian aparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime”, concluded Salman Rushdie. But should we have been so surprised? In an interview for Granta earlier this year, Mo spoke of how “censorship is great for literature creation”.

China’s long frustrated pursuit of a Nobel laureate comfortable with the political establishment – a “Nobel Complex” embedded in the national psyche, was finally sated in Mo’s win this year. It was a controversial decision for the Nobel committee, given the author’s longstanding Party credentials, including a position as vice-chairman of the state-sponsored China Writers’ Association. Mo’s problematic history was swiftly seized upon by his detractors, from his public rejection of exiled writers such as the 2000 Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian to his part in the state project of hand-copying Mao’s 1942 Talks at Yan’an, a text celebrating art as a state tool.

The dissident artist Ai Weiwei called the award an “insult to humanity and to literature” while for the 2009 laureate Herta Müller, it was “a slap in the face for all those working for democracy and human rights”. Yet in the wake of his Nobel success, Mo managed to put much potential international concern to rest by expressing the hope that the 2010 Peace prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, imprisoned for incitement to subvert state power, “can achieve his freedom as soon as possible” – a statement of well-crafted intent aimed at quelling Mo’s critics. But the tensions have been brought into the open once more following Mo’s behaviour in Stockholm.

Can Mo’s literary voice tell us something of why the writer might choose to make such comments on censorship? It is a voice that embodies above all the complexity of an artist symbiotically linked to an authoritarian system, despite his frequent claims of the separation of literary and political spheres. Mo was a child of the post-Mao literary thaw – a generation laden with symbolic capital, healing literary rupture by embracing traditional and avant-garde aesthetics. The shattering of sexual taboo in his novel Red Sorghum was typical of this 1980s “Enlightenment” and Mo’s “hallucinatory realism”. But while Mo would frequently cast his attention on a troubled land, these were often criticisms of local social exploitation and bureaucracy. His voice is firmly aligned to a state strategy of apportioning blame away from the political centre.

The sinologist Julia Lovell has noticed that “hysterical realism”, the term applied to Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace and others by the literary critic James Wood to describe their chaotic language and its consequent denial of meaning, could be readily applied to Mo Yan. Instead of meaningfully engaging with moments of deep national trauma, whether the Great Leap Famine or the Cultural Revolution, Mo seeks refuge in a manic, ironic voice, that dances around open dissent in a Kafkaesque nightmare.

“I think Kafka could not have written anything more absurd and unbelievable than this”, Liu Xia, the wife of Liu Xiaobo, told the Associated Press last week in her first interview in 26 months. The AP journalists managed to visit Liu, confined to house arrest, while her guards had left for lunch. China’s literary freedom has significantly expanded, with the state’s focus shifting to the suppression of mass media. But the Party’s ability to adapt to changing cultural norms should not be underestimated. “We have not only lost the right to criticise, but the courage to do so”, Murong warned.

Mo’s comments were, in truth, unforgivable. But behind his stance on censorship lies a commitment to collective cultural amnesia. Beyond the perpetual balancing act of state collaboration that China’s artists play, Mo represents a suffocating sickness deep-rooted in China’s literary scene – a problematic relationship with history. 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/9743516/Nobel-winner-Mo-Yan-and-Chinas-cultural-amnesia.html

An obsession with the human voice was a central project in the music of British composer Jonathan Harvey, who sadly passed away this week. It was a preoccupation present right from his first explorations of acoustic and electronic borders at the Paris music research institute IRCAM – the brainchild of Pierre Boulez. Harvey’s 1980 tape piece Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco (I lament the dead, I call the living) delved into the particular sonorities of Winchester Cathedral’s Great Bell and his chorister son’s voice – a soundworld where spiritual boundaries met submerged acoustics via groundbreaking digital synthesis. Nearly two decades later, emerging from a period of intense research at Stanford University’s Centre for Composition Research into Music and Acoustics, Harvey’s ecstatic approach to aural shape-shifting elevated the voice to orchestral grandeur.

The voluminous power of sound crosses from instrumental expression towards the voice at its most primal in Harvey’s pulsating 1998 essay, Tranquil Abiding, written for chamber orchestra and extended percussion. Organic symbolism is given physical life as a backdrop of oscillating chordal movement – inhalation and exhalation blown up to universal proportions – while timbral life flickers across the surface. Fractured melody is streaked through this perpetual breath, before drifting into cathartic resonance. The title, described by Harvey as ‘a state of single-pointed concentration’, is typical of how eastern philosophy infuses his music.

The seminal influences of Stockhausen’s musical mysticism and the electronic soundscapes that Harvey encountered while at Princeton during the 1970s, combined with a personal and intensified spiritual shift to the East, pushed his music out of the confines of the British canon towards a state of ‘Gregorian Paradise’ – a strange meeting of plainchant and Tibetan ritual. Within Harvey’s interest in rendering emotional issues strange by digital technology was a great paradox. Here the electronic world had become a way of discarding the obsession with suffering inherent to 19^th century music, reaching for a pure land beyond.

And yet despite its evocation of transcendent realms, the articulation of chant and intense radiance, Harvey’s music has always been a far cry from New Age escapism or the minimalist oases of Arvo Pärt’s ‘new simplicity’. Writing tonal music ‘fills me with dread’, the composer once said. Tranquil Abiding’s elongation of soundscapes and unravelling of facades inhabits a complex environment. Buddhist conceptions make a perfect fit for Harvey’s spectralism, where sound is exposed in all its minutiae: ‘the materiality of the sound itself…the ‘suchness’ – to use a Buddhist term – the ‘thing in itself’: the grain, the richness, the quality of sound’.

http://articulatesilences.wordpress.com/2012/12/06/tranquil-abiding-jonathan-harvey/

Alison Klayman’s documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry is a quiet take on the dissident artist and ultimately asks more questions than it answers

“There are no outdoor sports as graceful as throwing stones at a dictatorship”. Ever the satirist, the conceptual artist Ai Weiwei continues to fascinate western audiences, not least in the recent reception of Alison Klayman’s documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry. As Ai’s activities as both artful agitator and social critic make the move from the editorial page to the cinema screen, it is time to ask how he has so captured our public imagination.

Never Sorry is a perceptive treatment of the Chinese provocateur, in its unparalleled access to a critical juncture in his career. Writing in the Guardian last month, Ai described the 2008 Beijing Olympics as “a fake smile, an elaborate costume party with the sole intention of glorifying the country”, and its opening ceremony as nothing more than “the fantasy of a totalitarian society”. Klayman charts Ai’s denunciation of the Beijing Games, for which he co-designed the “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium. Profoundly disenchanted by the enforced relocation of Beijing inhabitants as a result of the Games, and indeed the propagandist nature of the event, Ai completed his journey from radical but successful artist to infamous activist – a move compounded by the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Ai’s investigation into shoddily built schools, “tofu construction”, resulted in the creation of a monumental list of the dead – a striking moment of art as journalism and a stinging critique of local corruption. Investigative art feeds Ai’s work, leading directly to an exhibition in Munich in which he created a mural of 9,000 children’s rucksacks to spell out a mother’s memory of her daughter lost in the disaster; “she lived happily for 7 years”.

While Klayman provides a useful survey of Ai’s formative years, Never Sorry offers most in its focus on moments that have resonated strongly in the West, from Ai’s 2010 Tate Modern project in which he flooded the Turbine Hall with 100 million hand-painted ceramic sunflower seeds, to his detention the following year. Binding Ai’s recent activity is his embrace of social media, especially Twitter, both as a media-savvy tool against the State’s eye, and as well as a transcultural gesture.

With the state’s continued erosion of Ai’s adopted role as comic dissident, Never Sorry adopts a dramatic narrative, moving from Ai’s brutal beating in Chengdu to prevent him from testifying for the earthquake activist Tan Zuoren to the destruction of his Shanghai studio and climaxes in his 2011 imprisonment. But as an explanation of the power of conceptual art, and the artist’s remit in a totalitarian situation, Klayman’s documentary serves only to further Ai’s elusive character, asking more questions than it answers. Perhaps this is partly the result of a first-time director, and a narrative that has to straddle a political and cultural scene that is confusing at best. And for all its faults, it still stands as a moving portrait of an artist rejecting the safety of success, in return for a lifetime of homeland struggle (and indeed now trapped in China by a state claiming tax evasion charges). Amidst all the dehumanizing rhetoric that seems to have latched onto Chinese athletes this summer, Never Sorry is certainly refreshing. And the numerous moments when China’s food culture elides with acts of protest provide some of the most heartening parts of the documentary, from Chengdu police failing to stop Ai holding an impromptu roadside feast with his fans to a river crab banquet to protest the razing of his Shanghai studio.

But Klayman gets side-tracked by Ai’s family affairs, especially his son outside marriage, and curiously chooses not to push this aspect while also failing to ask the more pressing questions. Klayman shies away from fully delving into the artist’s complex relationship with his Western audience. She does document Ai’s repeated interaction with the idea of China, from painting the Coca-Cola logo on ancient pots in the 90s, through to his large-scale critical pieces. Furthermore Klayman details Ai’s formative experiences growing up as the son of the modernist poet Ai Qing, who along with other 50s intellectuals was labelled a public enemy. Similarly Ai’s time spent in New York in the 80s – an often neglected yet vital moment in his life (perhaps because no real market existed for his work back then) – receives due attention. Because he never shared in the Central Academy mentality, “Ai is not the kind of person we are familiar with in China”, a fellow artist observes at one point. But Ai’s return to China saw him spearhead radical movements as well as keeping an eye out for Chinese art’s burgeoning western audience. It is this relationship between Ai’s critical ideology and Western adulation that has received little focus.

The problem is encapsulated perfectly by one installation in particular. Ai’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads piece, installed at Manhattan’s Pulitzer Fountain, featured bronze zodiac animal heads based on sculptures from the 18^th century imperial Summer Palace, looted by the French and the British in 1860. In a provocative move, Ai radically recontextualised the sculptures in the land of China’s sworn enemy. The ruined image of the Summer Palace has achieved iconic status in Chinese culture, from cover art to T-shirts. “Ruin culture”, as described by the scholar William Callahan, is a perpetual testament to foreign invasion and forms a significant part of the discourse of national humiliation that is streaked through Chinese historiography. The Summer Palace lies at the very heart of this humiliation narrative. Klayman’s documentary, like many other explorations of Ai before, misses out on painting a more nuanced picture of dissent and art. Ai, as a provocateur par excellence in a repressed political situation, has long held a complex relationship with the West, and the troubled history of his country.

The Party’s nationalism is such that it has coined the definition “one hundred years of humiliation” for the period from the Opium Wars to Liberation. But this year has also seen cracks appear. Bo Xilai once enthused over Cultural Revolution songs, but his fall from grace has dominated the news agenda. It is Ai’s role within Chinese history that remains the most crucial aspect of his character. He openly breaks the Party’s exceptionalist national story. It is striking that last year, the centenary of the end of the imperial system (and indeed the democratic ideology of 1911), coincided with Ai’s arrest. Klayman sees Ai’s work as unambiguous, but it would not be cynical to say that Ai has always presented the perfect figure for Western editorial pages to further chastise China’s systemic problems. Never Sorry shows us something of this exceptionally courageous artist, but perhaps not enough of the complicated relationship that we have built with him.

The Hayward’s “Art of Change: New Directions from China” captures a pivotal moment in the country’s art scene.

A woman freezes mid-fall; the sound of feeding silkworms filters through; a column of human fat towers overhead.  The Hayward’s decision to present a collection of Chinese installation art in its latest exhibition, “Art of Change: New Directions from China”, seems right on trend. But for an audience at best only familiar with the polar opposites of Chinese art, either the polemic of Ai Weiwei or Mao pop art, this kaleidoscopic glimpse is disorienting. Are these displaced stories a snapshot of modern China? A common Chinese term for performance art is “xingwei yishu”, literally “behavioural art”. But attempting to find a social situation for the works on display, within what little we know of China’s strands of tradition and modernity, makes for a discomforting experience. This lack of traceability is not helped by the country’s overnight transformation, or its problematic relationship with its own history. The new millennium saw a sea change in our appreciation of Chinese art. But this art has been wrought with tension, with its reliance on external commercial appreciation. “Art of Change” looks to embody something of China’s rapid change. This is a change felt within the ephemeral nature of performance itself, but also within a scene that has global implications.

The Chinese avant-garde is, of course, well versed in Western themes. Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, two graduates of Beijing’s Central Academy who have worked together since 2000, respond to commercialism via the brutality of the everyday. The four-metre tall Civilization Pillar, encasing a steel column in human fat collected from beauty clinics, delights in notoriety. But political provocation is a different matter. MadeIn Company’s Revolution Castings, casts of rocks thrown in protest (with the casting process itself forming part of performance), should fit the part. Yet it feels strangely lacking in dissent – a silent forest of steles that says more about the art market than politics. The exhibition features an archive detailing how Chinese artists looked to the western avant-garde and rediscovered traditional culture in a gesture of self-liberalisation, from the early steps of the Beijing Spring during the 1970s through to the 1985 New Wave. This Chinese avant-garde all too often coincided with democratic movements. But the artists here are all heirs to Tiananmen’s legacy. Critique actively avoids the political, instead looking to social conditions.

The Shanghainese Xu Zhen, born in 1977, is the youngest practitioner here. In The Starving of Sudan, Xu deals with agency and authenticity in a video recreation of Kevin Carter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a vulture watching a starving Sudanese girl. The onus is now shifted to the audience in this unambiguous critique of China’s African interests. While Xu made his name with a piece in which he swung a dead cat around a room for 45 minutes, he is equally capable of providing a softer answer to the violent escalation of 1990s Chinese performance art. With In just the Blink of an Eye, an individual is frozen mid-fall, held by hidden braces. But above all, China’s installation art has been conditioned by the post-Cultural Revolution’s first-generation émigrés. These included Chen Zhen, who studied in Paris in 1986, crafting a spiritual and social critique out of his interest in everyday traditional culture. On display here are his pieces of furniture converted into drums, as well as the deceptively static Purification Room, a room covered in mud, slowly drying throughout the exhibition’s duration. Meanwhile Liang Shaoji’s Listening to the Silkworm, where the sounds of worms feeding and spinning trickle through headphones, provides a moment of minimalist retreat. But most enthralling is Gu Dexin, a lifelong Beijinger without formal training, who worked in a plastics factory and used similar methods to create large-scale, melted sculptures. Gu rejects discussion, marking his work by date alone. His images of raw flesh, sometimes encased in glass, are typical of China’s 1990s sensibilities.

If there is any danger of over-glitz, this is more than balanced out by Yingmei Duan’s dreamy, hazy performance in Happy Yingmei, with the artist herself drifting through a miniature forest before engaging in unnerving encounters with strangers. Here the medium is at its best, offering something both cathartic and mysterious. Yingmei moved from Beijing’s legendary East Village (where artists lived alongside migrant workers) to Germany in the 1990s. Her work clearly cites external influences, whether it is an interest in Egon Schiele from time spent in Vienna or her studies with the doyenne of performance art, Marina Abramović. Happy Yingmei perpetuates a dreaming state – that liminal zone between the physical and the psychological. But this is also a place where nostalgia and globalisation meet, where the competing processes of emulation and absorption of Western forms join traces of longstanding traditions – old religion and folk tales. As I leave, Yingmei hands me a note: “maybe this will be the only time we meet in our lives”.

The dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, writing in the Guardian, sharply argued, “I don’t think it’s worth discussing new directions in the context of Chinese art”. Ai’s complaint is that “Art of Change” is guilty of simplification and fails to address the vital issues at hand, akin to “a restaurant in Chinatown”. Ai is right to call out the state’s use of the avant-garde for what it is – a form of soft power. The health of China’s booming art scene has always been a tender subject. In an excellent piece for the New Yorker, the critic Alex Ross examined how China’s creative climate, even within the minimal domain of classical music, “with its systems of punishments and rewards, still resembles that of the late-period Soviet Union”. The problems are all too visible on the ground. In 2007 the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art opened in Beijing’s 798 art district, with early exhibitions including a survey of the ’85 New Wave movement. When I visited last month, the Center was holding an exhibition of luxury Swiss watches.

The truth is that Chinese art faces a pivotal moment. The once meagre prospects of the avant-garde have escalated into the full speculative fever of a gold rush. The art may look familiar, but it operates under different rules. Many of the artists in “Art of Change” artists, growing up between the end of the Cultural Revolution and China’s new advent, have always seen art’s ulterior motives, from propaganda through to advertising. The Chinese attitude proposes a new model, rejecting western niceties and opening itself up to the cultural-financial realities. In an interview earlier this year) , the Hayward’s curator Stephanie Rosenthal observed: “in the east the copy is something that can often be more valuable than the original”. Post-Tiananmen artists such as Chen Zhen have created a legacy whereby artists manage their own affairs, bypassing the art dealer. This is a world in which dealer-artist exclusivity and copyright are no longer givens. But China’s path is itself uncertain. Today the 798 art district prospers and artists are content to be used in a game of soft power. The question becomes: what will happen tomorrow?

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/art-and-design/2012/09/eastern-promise

(Tri-Angle) UK release date: 15 October 2012 

Bristol-based Vessel (real name Seb Gainsborough) plays a dual role as chameleon-like electronic artist and sound architect on his debut full-length record. His diverse musical language, already partly evident on last year’s EP Nylon Sunset – a psychotic blend of immersive expression and schizophrenic frustration – has journeyed towards a crafted perfection on Order Of Noise. Vessel’s frozen sounds indulge rhythmic obsession and nocturnal timbres in equal measure to build a nuanced electronic music that at times recalls the textural magic of Actress.

Amidst a bewildering array of stylistic influences, arguably the label itself becomes a valid aspect for critique. There is of course no escape from the nature of Order Of Noise’s production – rather predictably via Tri-Angle Records. Vessel’s half-lit ambience makes a perfect fit for Tri-Angle’s shadowy artists, exploring ambiguous terrain between dubstep and “witch-house”, and follows last month’s subterranean release – the excellent Held from Holy Other. The logical corollary of a label right on trend is the depressing generation of a large amount of cynical hype. Tri-Angle’s releases often come veiled by all the hallmarks of the internet – its detached geography and hazy ideology – and this combined with an enigmatic sensibility has only encouraged the constant pigeonholing of its artists and the apparently sophisticated, cultish identity that Tri-Angle has crafted for itself.

But now the vision has been considerably widened. While Order Of Noise shares interesting territory with Holy Other’s Held, in its minimal sonic palette and a rejection of a dancefloor aesthetic, it nevertheless displays all the power of a true original. In an interview earlier this year, Gainsborough observed: “I think that the common thread connecting the artists on Tri-Angle’s roster is probably more of an attitude towards electronic composition, than it is the sonic traits of the music”.

Burning a path through degraded techno and underground house, Order Of Noise manages to reconcile swirling, tortured textures in a startlingly organic arrangement. Vizar opens with ambiguous vocals, hanging in the air, before its music starts to breathe, gathering together in riverine force. A wary bass leads in the propulsive Images Of Bodies, before disintegrating into jewelled synths. Elsewhere Vessel flits between sensuality and frenzy, from the slippery textures lying beneath Scarletta’s sonic conflict, through to the night bus heart of Stillborn Dub and the edged panic of Court Of Lions.

Binding the constant drift between percussive language and bloodier depths is a fine sense of architecture, a web of breathing noise and reverberatio, that pushes opposing experimentation towards a cohesive whole. Order Of Noise dances that fine line between the club and something dreamier. And as such, it arrives with sharp impact, melding abstraction and direct sound to impressive effect.

http://www.musicomh.com/albums/vessel_0912.htm

Latest post for Articulate Silences - a blog on 20th century music http://articulatesilences.wordpress.com/

“I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played.” The musical world of the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt has long existed in a curious state of tension, balancing the hermit-like aura of the composer himself, and the outstanding commercial success his music has achieved since the 1980s.

In Tallinn during the 50s, Pärt’s subversive serialist experiments attracted the critical eye of the regime. Exhausted by state censorship, Pärt drifted towards writing for Soviet films, but at the same time his personal musical language was undergoing a profound transformation; his music absorbed lessons learned from his study of Franco-Flemish choral music, Gregorian chant and ultimately the sound of the Orthodox Church. Where once his serialism was denounced as decadent, now his new religiosity was in flagrant defiance of state atheism. His music existed in a state of “time and timelessness”, bathed in the sound of fading bells.

Pärt eventually fled the country and settled in Berlin in 1981. But exile was to prove lucrative. The German music label ECM, set up by Manfred Eicher, had for some time focused on championing an austere minimalist aesthetic and its interest in the “New Simplicity” – the term for the 80s wave of spiritual minimalist music emerging from the former Soviet bloc – was inevitable. In 1984 Eicher founded ECM New Series for new composers, with Pärt’s 1977 composition Tabula Rasa as its first imprint.

Why does Pärt’s music continually evoke descriptions soaked in hyperbole? Much of his musical language relies on the simplest of means – silence, the tolling of bells: “The three notes of a triad are like bells. And that is why I call it tintinnabulation [from the Latin for bells]”. 1977’s Tabula Rasa is a blossoming of his new-found style, where kaleidoscopic simplicity and bells are utilised in heightened emotion, both reminiscent of something archaic and yet never victim to Romantic escapism. Whereas early attempts at tonality, such as 1966’s Pro et Contra, were often presented in ironic juxtaposition with atonality, Tabula Rasa represents a fully fledged style. The piece’s orchestration is reminiscent of the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke – 2 violins, prepared piano and strings – and was dedicated to the Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer. The intensity of woven melodic voices and the stylistic absorption of the late medieval and Russian Orthodoxy produces a cathartic, “cleansing” experience.

But Tabula Rasa’s appeal also relied on something more prosaic. The sparse scalic and triadic figuration treads a fine line between modernist critique and banality. Its retrogressive aspects are buried under its “timeless” religiosity. This brand of spiritual music provided a minimalist oasis for the technological over-load of the 80s economic boom, as well as a triumphalist “healing” for the violence of 20th century music’s history of conflict. And yet we should not forget that the same musical language had its roots back in Estonia as a defiant gesture. Tabula Rasa exists in two states – its stylistic birth under the Soviet regime, and its aesthetic appeal under the West’s late capitalist culture.

For full text and listening notes go to…

http://articulatesilences.wordpress.com/2012/09/20/tabula-rasa-arvo-part/

En Liang Khong thinks Central London’s public art scene needs to face up to the increasing gap between artistic integrity and corporate aspiration.

I’m standing on a leafy street in Hackney, looking up at a row of shattered windows. Local artist Alex Chinneck has timed his latest project, Telling the Truth Through False Teeth, a piece of carefully controlled vandalism – to meet the bombast of the Cultural Olympiad. 312 identically broken panes of glass have replaced the windows of a derelict factory, sitting on the corner of Mare Street and Tudor Road. For those inquisitive enough to look up, the effect is kaleidoscopic, as the sunlight catches on the glass. Isolated from the large-scale art pieces that fill central London, which are currently drawing in crowds of tourists, Chinneck’s installation is a picture of quiet protest. It got me thinking about the price we are paying for public art.

What price art?

In many ways the public art projects scattered across this city exist as failed utopias. Several tube stops later, I walk into the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Since 2000 the hall has housed a series of blockbuster art pieces. This afternoon Tino Sehgal’s These Associations is being rehearsed in the cavernous expanse. Performers form a circle in the darkened hall, murmuring and half singing. They break into clusters, coiling across the space. It does seem removed from the weight of previous, rather precarious Turbine Hall spectacles. Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei previously flooded the hall with 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds, but the dust kicked up when visitors waded through was soon deemed a safety hazard. By the end, Sunflower Seeds was stripped of its central experience — – only to be viewed from behind security ropes. In any case Sehgal’s “constructed situation” has now gathered near universal adoration since its opening. But Claire Bishop’s excellent piece in the Guardian is less sure. For Bishop, participatory art has lost its once radical voice against the absurdities of the art market, and under neoliberalism it serves a double agenda: offering a popular art of and for the people, while at the same time, reminding us that today we all experience a constant pressure to perform and, moreover, this is one in which we have no choice but to participate.

Sehgal’s work may want to break out of the ritual of the gallery and the primacy of the frame, but it is still intimately tied to the market, albeit via Sehgal’s own oral contract. It is still a luxury – something to be sponsored.

The Turbine Hall series is sponsored by global corporation Unilever. Unilever’s Group Chief Executive, Patrick Cescau, once described the series as providing an artistic “exploration that resonates within Unilever”, a comment that perfectly encapsulates how the Turbine Hall project has long veiled the gap between artistic and corporate aspiration. But Adrian Searle’s review of Tino Sehgal finds the gap unproblematic: “These Associations is a great antidote to the ever more spectacular, large commissions the Unilever Project has produced”, he enthuses, “It is also a rejoinder to all the brouhaha and corporate fascism and jingoism of the Olympics.”

I wander through to the Tate’s new space devoted to live art, The Tanks, “ a subterranean setting adapted from cylinders fuelling the former power station. One tank houses Lis Rhodes’ Light Music, a pair of projectors casting crosshatched monochrome patterns across the smoke-filled room alongside a throbbing soundtrack. In fact Lis Rhodes is just one among a whole bunch of radical artists showcased by The Tanks, and yet it is interesting how the Tate always manages to neuter this political edge. No reference is made to the museum’s problematic relationship with sponsorship.

Does it matter where the money for public art comes from?

The director of the Tate, Sir Nicholas Serota, whose enterprise has perhaps been the largest part of the museum’s success, has commented in the past: “There’s no money that is completely pure.” Journalists have risen to defend the Tate’s associations even further. Jonathan Jones has devoted several pieces to that end: if museums “can get BP to hand over its filthy lucre for the cause of art”, he argues, “well, it is going to good use”.

But of course corporations are perfectly aware of what they are buying into, and it is naive to believe that we are the ones in control of this exchange. They are buying a licence, and the frightening thing is that it is happening here and not in some distant oil field. The prestigious cultural centres that line the Southbank are squarely in the hands of BP and Shell. The question must become instead: is this a price worth paying?

The key thing is that the Tate Modern has been a marketing success, transforming a former power station into one of the UK’s leading tourist melting pots. At the Tanks launch, Serota said of the Tate’s expansion: “It’s a very visible answer to the criticisms that have come from Government and others about non-dom taxpayers not making a contribution to the cultural life of the country”.

With international attention focused on London this summer, perhaps it’s worth thinking again about whether the capital’s arts scene really is in a healthy state. The Tate’s artistic domination this year has come with little critical comment, despite its visible expansion on the back of problematic sponsorship. We have paid a price.

En Liang Khong

En Liang Khong is an arts writer, cellist, and MPhil student at Oxford University. He has written for the New Statesman, the Telegraph, musicOMH, Cherwell and the Gramophone. Follow him on Twitter.

http://thethingis.co.uk/2012/09/10/public-art-the-price-of-sponsorship/

(Tri-Angle) UK release date: 27 August 2012 

The voices seep through the subterranean ambience, gradually revealing a riverine power gathering force in the half-light. But the resolution never comes, and all that is left is frozen night music. Layered samples swirl and gape across a weary bass. Listless vocal lines hang in the air, waiting to be pulled away. Holy Other’s debut album Held is a curious straddling of sacral lament and erotic ballad, and its perpetual delight in painting varying musical shades of black is merely a continuation of the tone set by the Manchester producer’s EP With U from last year. Despite being far more cohesive and richer, Held still shares significantly similar timbral ground with its predecessor – the same droning pedal points, shattered vocals and percussive expanse. Holy Other’s expressive textures can seem relentless at times. But Held’s mesmeric quality relies on this use of cavernous oppression.

 Held is released via Tri Angle (also home to Balam Acab and oOoOO) – a label seemingly right on trend this year. As such the album faces a fight to rise above cynical hype and prove that it has all the power of a true original. Tri Angle’s artists have been variously described as a movement exploring the intersections of dubstep and the shadow of “witch house”. Burial’s muted textures and ambiguous vocals are repeatedly cited as a reference point. You might suspect that these interpretations owe more to the pseudo-scientific aspirations of music journalists from the “sunken cathedrals” school of writing, ever eager to present the nearest snaking bassline as the sure signifier of a new genre. And while Holy Other shares Burial’s hallmarks of bedroom anonymity and the disconnect of the internet, this is not music particularly concerned with the recording of the urban landscape. Held seems far more interested in constructing fragility, romanticism and sensuality.

 Vocal motifs are woven through the record, bathed in stuttered rhythms, to create waves and waves of sound that border on liturgy. The immediate effect is one of intense pleading. A clouded backdrop opens (W)here, dashed through with yearning voices and soaked percussion. Minimalist textures and liquid vocals well up on Tense Past as the album gathers pace. From then on, the music expands into a sequence of variations, from the darkened synth colours that form the bed of Love Some1 through to the blocks of dying breath on Nothing Here that bring the album to a close. But the most remarkable moment comes during the title track, as the mantra-like vocals shift from indecipherable incantation towards a defined yearning: “hold me”, all dressed up in a steaming wall of sound.

 “I like things slow rather than I like things dark”, Holy Other observed in a Dummy interview last year. While the ways in which Holy Other manipulates texture to filter his sound through the blackest of screens are an important part of his musical appeal, it is the slowing down of the music to a porous crawl that forms the most significant aspect of his success. Strictly speaking, Holy Other’s palette is relatively small. So what does this slowness – this rejection of the dance floor and opening up of facades – do to us? The music works in much the same way as the drugged up, occult culture of the 1990s screw movement – slowing down music as both a minimalist and transformative act. Voices become androgynous, the bass tires, and the impact is both ambiguous and highly sexualised. Screw’s shrouded sounds continue today, particularly in the diseased anthems and iconography of Salem. Similarly, from his performances in pitch darkness with his face veiled, through to the crumpled cover art of With U and Held, Holy Other reinforces an erotic, nocturnal imagery.

 A couple of years back the track “U Smile 800% Slower” – an elongation of Justin Bieber’s song into a soaring half hour soundscape, went viral. It was the perfect encapsulation of how slowness can unravel the façade of pop culture, revealing something mysterious, dark and unexplored. Held’s seductive immersion points do not require the listener to work hard at all but instead merely follow the gradual expansion of a minimal textural palette into extreme drama and suffocating sonority. The resulting wash of sound makes for an escapist experience par excellence.

http://www.musicomh.com/albums/holy-other_0812.htm

The pick of the new fiction you should be reading this season.

Umbrella by Will Self
Bloomsbury, 16 August
Umbrella, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, spans the 20th century and explores the nightmarish qualities of its technological revolutions. The psychiatrist Zack Busner encounters Audrey Dearth, who has been confined to a mental asylum after falling victim to the encephalitis lethargica epidemic at the end of the First World War.

Philida by André Brink
Harvill Secker, 2 August
Also longlisted is Philida by the South African novelist André Brink. A historical novel set in 1832 in the Cape, it delves into the relationship between the slave Philida and her white master’s son, François, who has reneged on his promise to free her.

NW by Zadie Smith
Hamish Hamilton, 6 September
Zadie Smith returns to north-west London, her birthplace and the inspiration for White Teeth. In her first novel in seven years, Smith focuses on the lives of four former friends from the Caldwell housing estate, exploring adulthood, class and the contemporary urban landscape.

The Casual Vacancy by J K Rowling
Little, Brown, 27 September
The ceaseless march of the J K Rowling brand continues with her first novel for adults, a blackly comic work that is no doubt destined for bestselling status. Set in the idyllic English town of Pagford, The Casual Vacancy looks beyond the facade to find its inhabitants caught in perpetual conflict.

Risk by C K Stead
MacLehose Press, 27 September
In C K Stead’s latest novel, the New Zealander Sam Nola arrives in London in 2003, with the case for intervention in Iraq swiftly gathering momentum on both sides of the Atlantic.

Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt
And Other Stories, 1 October
Helen DeWitt follows her debut novel, The Last Samurai, with a sharp, satirical take on contemporary office life and the masculinity of corporate culture.

May We Be Forgiven by A M Homes
Granta, 11 October
A M Homes casts an eye on domestic life in the 21st century, piercing the troubled heart of contemporary America.

Silent House by Orhan Pamuk
Faber & Faber, 4 October
The second novel from the Turkish novelist and Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk. In Cennethisar, a former fishing village, Fatma awaits the visit of her grandchildren – a visit that will draw the family into the troubled politics of Turkey’s struggle for modernity.

The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín
Viking, 25 October
Colm Tóibín writes of a Mary still caught in grief years after her son’s crucifixion, in this reimagining of the religious icon’s story. Alone in Ephesus, Mary rejects the idea that her son was the Son of God and has little interest in the authors of the Gospels who regularly visit her.

Havisham by Ronald Frame
Faber & Faber, 1 November
The Scottish novelist Ronald Frame’s tribute to Dickens’s creation is a prequel to Great Expectations. Born into new money, Catherine Havisham is sent to live with the Chadwycks. She discovers sophistication in the elegant pursuits of the rich – but finds herself increasingly vulnerable.

http://www.newstatesman.com/2012/08/autumn-fiction-highlights