philip tinari

I met two old friends and new colleagues for dinner last night in a little place off of Huaihai Lu, the sort of place that they only have in Shanghai, with a deco stained-glass door and superfluous wooden moldings, stuff that’s plausibly old and thus able to obscure the fact that it’s probably new. Dainty menu, but not the sort that holds itself in much regard. This was not, mind you, one of those simulacral French places, though Shanghai does the francolacrum almost as well as McNally-era New York. (I went to one of those for breakfast this morning, a self-proclaimed “maison de qualité”; Handel Lee was at the next table, little French kids were running around unharnessed, and the only outlet was on the ceiling, the better not to disturb the affected buffed wood paneling.)

But back to our little dinner of dry-fried pomfret and tomato soup. They were closing a supplement, so we didn’t sit down until twenty past ten, just as the usual Friday-night crowd began to settle their tabs. We were into duck pancakes when a loud group of five or six middle-aged Chinese intellectuals stumbled through the spring-hinged door and sat itself at the next table. My phone was trying to access a Halloween picture of my improvised Karl Lagerfeld next to a stunning network news reporter in a chador. My editor friends were waiting politely as the little download wheel spun. We moved to Riesling. Their German architectural photographer buddy was on her way over, with the new husband, an industrial-shipping broker. They arrived and the conversation moved to shipbuilding overcapacity, piracy and its effect on fee schedules, a lark to restage their wedding in the German Pavilion come May, and one friend who’s trying to make an art career from the fashion world.

And then, out of nowhere, the six intellectuals start talking about art. They’re drunk and rowdy and impassioned, and I don’t think they’d ordered anything. There’s a woman, and she’s insisting on her creative prerogative in the abstract. There’s a man, telling her she’s too Westernized. They’re batting ideas around, toggling between Shanghainese and Mandarin. Someone throws out the name Zhou Tiehai, calls him a fraud. The woman with the artistic aspirations, thinking we don’t understand or just not caring if we do, starts with the old rhetorical device of ask-the-people-at-the-next-table, who though we are two Chinese faces and a Western one, are enough to represent for her some sort of taste hierarchy that will confirm to the man that she is not exactly like us. The substance of the argument is of course not important here, but the modality, the timbre, the way they sit on some chairs and use others to rest elbows, the way their bodies consume the limited space of a narrow joint on a narrow street with strangers in proximity who can be invoked but never addressed.

And that’s when it occurred to me: Yang Fudong not as fantasia but as mimesis.

So the non-controversy of the CCTV-as-genitalia Chinese web meme seems to have died down, as these things generally do after three days. Still I feel there are some interesting things to point out about the whole non-incident. First and foremost, the time lag is just utterly remarkable. The basic mimetic contention at the heart of the the conversation takes me right back to the summer of 2004, when the design had just come out, and pointing out this uncanny resemblance was a Freudian party trick unleashed at every Beijingers-for-John-Kerry benefit or Fahrenheit 911 screening or endless Prosecco night at Aperitivo in Sanlitun. The stakes seemed higher then, when the utopic Beijing of 2008 was still beyond imagining, and the entire city seemed to have temporarily become a chessboard for a match between the Swiss and the Dutch.

This doesn’t change the fact that the damning pictures which supposedly prove that Koolhaas had unspeakable things on his mind when designing the party spaceship were taken completely out of context. The basis for Xiao Mo’s argument seems to be a 2004 post on Art218–coincidentally an old-school pre-ba-ba art-world BBS named after the address of the China Academy of Art (218 Nanshan Lu in Hangzhou)–in which an array of possible “covers” was posted as if they were in fact the front pages of specific magazines. That post featured individual jpegs of each possible cover, when the two-page spread which actually ran in the book looked like this:

In which you see that none of these covers actually ever existed in the sense of running on the front of an issue of a magazine. They were sketches, like any produced in Rotterdam. (And apparently, as OMA has now stated, rejected sketches.) But more interesting still is this rendering, which accompanied a China Daily front-page story on Saturday. Credited simply as “file photo,” it presents a vision of CCTV that only CCTV itself could love.

The grid looks about right, but seems to be articulated as a network of extruding cornices, rather than inset gaps between panes of the curtain wall, a fairly massive distinction both aesthetically and conceptually. It’s CCTV as the Eiffel Tower, which is what everyone says it is/wants it to be anyway. I can’t say for sure, but this image occurs nowhere in, say, the 2005 a+u special issue on the project, nor in Content, nor in any other OMA-published source I have at hand. If I had to surmise, I would say that CCTV produced the image as part of its own press kit on the new headquarters project some five years ago. This raises questions like, Why do you run a rendering when the building actually exists in built form? And what’s up with the skies of puffily clouded blue? Gu Dexin actually had some very good things to say about those, albeit in the context of a scathing critique of authoritarianism at Galleria Continua earlier this summer. Drive by Zhongnanhai and look at the construction barrier that runs along the south side of Chang’an, and you’ll see what he meant.

The next entertaining thing is that the article this photo accompanies quotes none other than the fatman, tagged here as “leading architectural designer and curator who has a copy of Content on his bookshelf.” The last part of the sentence I know is not true, but it explains why he called me frantically at lunchtime on Friday asking if I was in Beijing and if I had a copy of Content on my bookshelf. He couldn’t resist taking a little jab, calling the controversy “a ridiculous joke, created by people who do not understand architecture and a section of the media that has not bothered to find out the truth.” The last part of that sentence is pure earthquake-investigation rhetoric, here channeled to sillier purposes. But the huge question this raises is if, as he claimed last week in seminar, the only words that turn up no results in a firewalled search are “freedom,” “democracy,” “Ai Weiwei,” and “f**k,” then why the f**k is Ai Weiwei quoted essentially speaking for freedom and democracy on the front page of the China Daily? (In the only slightly amusing category is that the byline, Liu Wei, admittedly a very common name, seems here to mark a reporter as cheeky as his two artist namesakes.) The full article, just for fun:

Apparently the China Daily hearts the fatman, which is what Mathieu Borysevicz told me w/r/t the Sichuan madness, that they had run a quote in which he criticized the local police. What kind of media blacklist is it that sees his existence completely deleted from the Chinese web, yet quoted, just below the fold, in the national English-language daily? This goes in the same “mysteries of one-party rule” category as, Why can’t China put together a decent pavilion for the Venice Biennale? Also, did anyone ever realize that the guy who edited Content, Brendan McGetrick, lives in Beijing? Liu Wei, you’ve got a lot to learn.

Finally, on the topic of dirty thoughts and the CCTV, I leave you with one tiny iPhone photo snapped last April on the great cantilever during a guided tour from Captain Kool himself. I won’t translate it, because my mom reads this now, but suffice it to say this is worker graffiti is nastier and more graphic than anything that theoretically sophisticated junior architects could dream up.

Wang Xingwei, Untitled (Hostess and Luggage), 2001. Oil on canvas, 200 x 200 cm.

After a week of slow connections in Shanghai, I finally saw the first of the new season last night, 5 1/2 days late if you include the time difference. Though I haven’t read the chatter, it all seemed a bit clichéd–the boiling milk that segues to maternal flashback, the British boy secretary with an accent the girl secretaries love, the fire bell that reveals Sal’s darkest secret, and of course Don Draper with a flight attendant. Even astutely researching who flew 707s from LGA to BWI (if those are even historically accurate airport codes) in 1963 can’t do away with the basic triteness of the stewardess fantasy motif.

In Matthew Weiner’s defense, it transcends. Wong Kar-wai famously adapted it for ’90s Hong Kong. The day after the episode aired, I stumbled across the following, on the morning hop from PEK to SHA. (In a Shanghai Airlines 757–perhaps the very last of the 1050 that Boeing built between 1982 and 2005). It’s an article from The Beijing News about a national flight attendant search that sounds more meat market than Super Girl. Much has been made of the way in which Mad Men evokes the anxieties of a world on the brink of cataclysmic change that resonates with the American mindset in 2009. China, I guess, does cataclysmic change without the anxiety, at least when it comes to flight attendants. Just ask Mr. Liu, quoted in the story below.

584 GIRLS JUMP THE FIRST HURDLE; ENTER PROFESSIONAL EVALUATION

Yesterday the “2009 China Southern Stewardess Competition” concluded its Passenger Committee Evaluation phase for the Beijing selection area, as 584 girls were chosen from 6000 registrants, moving on to the expert evaluation phase.

Those With “O-Shaped Legs” or who “Can’t Laugh” Cannot Become Stewardesses

Sources say that the application process comprises the six phases of Gaze Evaluation, Written Test, Trials, Callbacks, Selection-Area-Specific Television Exposure, and Final Competition. Yesterday, at the site of the competition, all registrants were divided into groups of ten, then called one-by-one to the stage to introduce themselves. Next, according to the requests of the committee members, they were asked to turn around, put their feet together, then walk a loop across the stage and return to where they had begun.

Do not think these are such simple motions; indeed they encompass every sort of serious requirement used to select stewardesses. Passenger selection committee member Mr. Liu noted that competitors are asked to turn around so that the committee can see whether they have obvious O-Shaped or X-Shaped legs; putting their feet together allows for evaluation of whether their legs are symmetrical; and asking them to walk across stage is mainly to see whether their bearing is sufficiently elegant and magnanimous. Aside from this, judges also give marks on the important criteria of whether the competitor has a naturally radiant smile and a full set of glowing white teeth.

Mr Liu said, laughing, “I initially thought choosing stewardesses would be an enjoyable, relaxed affair. Who knew I would have to worry about the high standards of China Southern? It seems that being a judge is also a form of manual labor!”

Their Height Not Reaching 1.63 Meters, Nearly Half of Competitors Eliminated

As of 7:30 p.m. on Sunday, the China Southern Stewardess Competition official website had announced that 584 competitors from the Beijing Selection Region had passed the Passenger Committee Evaluation.

China Southern added that many contestants did not measure 1.63 meters, and that nearly half of all contestants were eliminated on this account. “If they are enrolled students, they must ensure that they will finish their studies before Sept. 1, 2010; those who do not meet this requirement will also be eliminated,” a China Southern spokesperson said.

The fatman came to our seminar. Since the two things he professes to hate the most (besides the thing he hates the most) are Shanghai and the academy, I didn’t think he’d make it, and that was even before what happened last week in Chengdu. I didn’t believe he’d come until I got the call to come to his suite late one night, where he sat in his bathrobe on a couch next to an old writer-friend, the poolside Mao incarnate. The next morning after a state-owned-hotel breakfast of gruel, broccoli, and a soy-sauce friend egg, he sat before the assembled audience of academics in a pink t-shirt, his blue linen worker pantlegs tucked into his socks. “Designing China could mean anything,” he opened. “Like Fucking China.”

Shanghai is a city of servants, began the diatribe, who traded the foreign occupiers for the fiction of the people’s democracy. From there he moved through the litany of cases that to him mark the increasing inhumanity of an irredeemably flawed system. The sterilized cop-killer executed. The earnest lawyer detained. The earthquake investigator on treason trial. No slides of dropping vases, dipping vases, grinding vases into powder. No gray brick buildings, no riffs on Ming chairs or Qing temples. No ceramic flower panels. No hundred-hour-long videos.

Someone asked: “Whither Chimerica?” He replied that the die were cast the day Pat Nixon got taken to see the pandas in the Beijing Zoo while the two boys struck a “deal among mobsters.” Two illicit lovers, unable to hop out of bed and into the shower. NBC was the only news outlet not to interview him last August, although they sent an invitation for him to come into the studio to demonstrate calligraphy. “Don’t think Western valuations of human life are absolute,” he chided, “particularly across cultures,” one eye to Abu Ghraib.

Someone asked: “Can’t we separate China as nation-state and China as civilization?” He replied that you can’t tell by looking at a girl whether she’s deep-down good; you can only say her skirt fits well or her shade of lipstick flatters.

Someone, a misguided old Shanghainese friend from the New York days, asked: “How do you keep up the opposition even as you design buildings for the government?” That he had so little idea about how things get built–that the fatman was on retainer to the Swiss boys, who were in turn at the hire of the state–is interesting, even if the answer, the old line about how the government would never pick him in a million years, was not.

Someone asked: “What can we do here as foreigners?” all stuck on the problems of presence as complicity to the bigbad state. “Foreigners in China are only ever here out of interest,” using in Chinese the two words that mark the two main valences of “interest,” “So you’re best off walking around, finding a nice restaurant, taking some pictures, and going home to tell your friends what a great time you had.”

After the talk, that’s just what he did. While the scholars kept behind closed doors–the Californians wondering if he was all for show, the Shanghainese taking offense on behalf of their city and country–the fatman was out taking pictures for his copkiller documentary, chauffered by an abstractionist-cum-art deco dealer in a five-series and a Patek Phillipe.

I met them for lunch in a little Huaiyang place around the corner from Xintiandi. We had a good, tight room on the second floor, just four of us. The walls were hung with line drawings of bygone local scenes–a barber drying a head with a coal-heated blower, picky ladies inspecting meat. Having eaten his lunchtime pills, he carefully filled the tiny Ziploc into which someone had sorted them with spoon after spoon of tea. He sealed the bag and set it at the center of the table, which at this point only held a few cold appetizers. He let three seconds go by, just long enough for the three of us to start wondering exactly what the teabag was doing on the table. And then suddenly, a fist fell from above, bursting the bag and soaking the abstractionist in tea. “You sure move quick!” came the gleeful punchline, as the abstractionist produced a napkin and began to wipe down his face. “Funny, no?” he asked. “I learned that one from Uli Sigg.”

Yang Fudong, The First Intellectual, 2000.

I spent last week in Shanghai for the first half of a theory workshop convened by a humanities center from the University of California system. The theme is “Designing China,” and the speakers are a lot of the people whose names circulate enough that I feel like I have longstanding intellectual relationships with them even though we’ve never really talked, or in some cases even met–Yung Ho Chang, Hung Huang, Liu Suola, Leo Ou-fan Lee. For those of us who exist in intellectual professions outside the academy proper, it’s a strange but joyous thing to be thrust back into the seminar room. You quickly catch up on the new words that weren’t yet in vogue while you were an undergrad: “haptic,” “conviviality,” “elsewheres.” You remember that every point made, every question raised (every speech-act, I should say), is to be called an “intervention,” a word that to me at least skews a bit fierce for what are ultimately civil interchanges among mutually respectful colleagues. (Then again, I used to find it annoying that people in the art world called every room a “space,” and I got used to that.) Ultimately you have to cherish the quaintness of a professional community whose comfort and status derives so transparently from its function of preparing the ninety-nine percent of undergraduates who don’t go on to further disciplinary study for “regular” careers staking so much self-worth on the possibility of envisioning itself as deeply critical.

That said, their conversations are to mass opinion as the haute couture shows are to Zara, and I know which I like better. People trade in smart, generally extemporaneous coinages that, while not suited for mass consumption, seem to explain everything for a second or two: “recombinant urbanism,” “every city needs its big idea,” “not deconstruction, reconstruction.” You sit there and listen to folks, your age or a bit older or younger, who have spent the last few years “avoiding the pitfalls of both localism and exceptionalism,” wondering “how to take the surface seriously as an analytical space.” As in any field, the best maxims are those that seem completely trite to the speaker but completely novel to the listener, as in, “Every anthropologist who’s sat in on or led brainstorming sessions knows that they’re closely related to ritual and magic.” I also still relish good post-structuralist wordplay, and am glad to note that the belabored multi-parenthetical zingers of the fin-de-siècle (”medi(t)ation,” “dissemi-nation,” “(gyn)ecology”) seem to have given way to a more brazen form of punning–searching for the “Dasein of design” and locating “the ‘decade’ in ‘decadence.’” Sometimes, people say things that are downright insightful, like Benjamin Lee’s extended analysis yesterday of the reflexivity of financial instruments like derivatives as rehashing the ethnographic conundrum of how to account for the observer’s always-already disturbing presence. (He somehow got from there to Frank Knight’s 1921 distinction between uncertainty and risk, and from there to Knight as Weber’s first translator, and from there to the Protestant Ethic as a response to the fundamental salvation uncertainty of Calvinism. Wow. PDF here.)

For all that smartness, though, people still make the same sorts of pedestrian observations (lane-house-next-to-the-Starbucks stuff) and traffic in the same vulgar pomo/poco contentions you get at most art world panels. The big question–Whither, China?–is still the big question. “Context” as concept looms large, but people don’t find the specific dynamics of how this or that text gets made very interesting, and they still fail to pick up the earnest treatises on Harmony placed at the seminar room entrance by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences hosts. If the art world is, as Jonathan Napack once said, a parody of the real world, then the humanities are a really long conversation about it. Investments differ and affects fluctuate, but at the end of the day, the two are cousins, and we’re all clear on the fact that both beat actually having to “intervene” in anything so specific as, say, an assembly line, a construction site, or even a state-secrets trial in Chengdu.