Katie Hill
Manchester, September 2004. The audience wait in the dark gallery for something we know will be shocking, bizarre, a spectacle. The tipsy atmosphere adds to the buzz and excitement of the performance to come. Cai and Xi spring into view clothed only in giant Union Jack worn as capes reminiscent of boxers’ regalia. They move to the corner where a severed picture of the young Queen Elizabeth II crowned and enthroned is projected on the wall. Facing her, they start jumping up and down rhythmically, speaking breathlessly, their voices slightly out of synch to add to the sense of disjuncture: ‘I, Cai Yuan do solemnly declare, that I … will be loyal to her majesty…’ After the fragmented, breathy oaths uttered in Chinese accents, they sit down, take the flags off their backs and tie them around their ankles. It takes three assistants to lift the heavy body of each man up, hoisting them on ropes so they can be suspended upside down from gallows. They swing precariously round and back, heads filling with blood. The National Anthem suddenly sounds out and the artists join in, uncomfortably swinging, their voices separate from the grandiose sound filling the gallery space: ‘God save our Gracious Queen, long live our Noble Queen…’
Happy and Glorious, the performance and exhibition, addresses the bizarre ritual of citizenship and its inability to instill loyalty and attachment in the nation’s others. The work has a lasting relevance, that moves beyond the usual focus on identity and the colonial subject. It enacts the distorted relationship of cultural and political coupling which causes a sense of alienation in its very quest for national belonging.
In the light of the London terrorist attacks of 2005, issues of identity and ‘being British’ are hotly debated in the press: how could these young men, living for years on British soil, feel so disenfranchised? Although the discourse focuses on Islam and jihad, many others have a deep understanding of the diffi culty of ‘fitting in’. In this work and in all the previous Mad for Real performances, it is the revelation of the madness of reality, though, that is fundamental to the work’s raison d’etre.
In a neat manipulation of artistic power, the letter sent by the Tate’s lawyers banning the artists from all Tate premises, is framed and exhibited in a giant coffin (the Death of Art). The Tate’s failure to cope with the threat of art’s power from within, (ie art in the making, what art is really about) is shown to be deeply ironic, almost tragically out of touch with ‘reality’. In booting out two artists who are beyond the pale, the institution is revealed to be merely an art bully.
Performances by Cai and Xi use the body as an agent between historical, geographical and institutional frameworks. The unspoken barriers of cultural protocol, class, taste and national loyalty are all dissolved in their work but the appeal of much of their 1999–2005 projects still lies, ironically, in its Britishness. It is the specific cultural references, the focus on larger symbolic aspects of British culture and their absurdity, which makes it accessable to a broader public – a public which is not ensconced in the narrow elitism of the art world.
The My Bed intervention, which launched them into the public eye six years ago, was a classic moment of British popular culture, which has become insinuated into institutions of British life such as University Challenge and Have I Got News for You. The bed incident is regurgitated by the press when the Turner Prize comes round year after year. Ironically, this work is democratic. By being critical, it opens a conversation with both the establishment itself and with ‘foreigners’, young people and those outside of the mainstream.
Here the idea of the ‘foreign body’ literally comes into play. The artists’ bodies are partly used as ideological instruments, with inscriptions of political ideologies hand-written on their torsos, symbolically denoting the histories into which we are inadvertently thrown. As foreigners, they challenge the presumption of who is expected to appear where and why. The body is used to disrupt expectations and behave rudely within certain cultural and political settings that require sets of rules and codes of behaviour in order to uphold them. When these rules or æsthetics are disrupted, the established order is upset. In this way, the body is primarily a tool of subversion and an agent between three spheres of life: a public divided by their loyalty to or boredom with ‘the system’, the media, and the art world. The use of the body in their work as objective material nevertheless belies an undeniable humanity in the work. In the interventional works that take place in public, there is an assertion of and insistence on the notion of a real possibility of freedom that is witnessed in the act of performing, even if this possibility remains essentially within the artwork itself. True freedom, perhaps they are saying, is only possible in art.
In Soya Sauce and Ketchup Fight the artists, wearing white t-shirts bearing the words ‘Mad for Real’, squirt each other with soya sauce and ketchup, splashing the walls of the gallery space as they do so and gradually become drenched with the liquids. The action, accompanied by loud shouting, is offset by shrill pop versions of Mao songs, with the audience watching from the street through the gallery’s glass windows. The artists use strong physical and vocal gestures which evoke Tai Chi and Qigong to throw calligraphic splurges of colour in a gradual process of immersion in a fusion of liquids, red, yellow and brown. The result is an intervention between the audience and the artists, with the audience literally blocked out by the splattered walls and window. This could be interpreted as a play on issues of globalisation and marginalisation. Although the everyday products of global consumerism are instantly recognisable, once the products are squirted out, they become alien substances out of context. What is left is a slimey, dark, stinking mess which reeks of the aftermath of violence. The amusement and entertainment of the spectacle of the fight, afterwards changes to bewilderment and disgust at the sight of repulsive gunge covering the ground.
Cai and Xi use the city of London as an exhibition space fusing their actions onto the British national landscape as symbolised by new buildings such as Tate Modern and the Millennium Bridge, and established icons such as St Paul’s Cathedral.They engage with artistic, political and social activism, making comments on present conditions of globalisation, consumerism and the relationship between East and West.
What is interesting about the Chinese side of the work is not only the oblique use of Chinese history in references to Maoism but also the simplicity of using their ethnicity as naked costume. Merely to look Chinese and to be Chinese makes the performances work. This idea is taken further in the Monkey King work when make-up is used to push Chinese symbolism further.
When the artists jumped onto the infamous confessional work by Tracey Emin, My Bed, the intervention became known instantly through its extensive media coverage. Interest in Emin’s work had grown due to Cai Yuan and JJ Xi, Two Artists Jump on Tracey’s Bed, Tate Gallery, London, Turner Prize Exhibition, November 1999. Tracey Emin, My Bed, Turner Prize Exhibition, November 1999 Cai Yuan and JJ Xi, Soya Sauce and Ketchup fight, Fordham Gallery, London, 1999. At the Liverpool Biennial it was performed in a glass case outside the Bluecoat Gallery on 21 September 2002 3 Cai Yuan and JJ Xi, Two Artists Swim across the Thames, May 2000 debates in the media about whether it could possibly constitute ‘art’. The artists were arrested, the exhibition temporarily closed while Emin was called in to pass judgement on the event and ‘remake’ the bed. The artists were released without charge. In the resulting news coverage Cai and Xi were described as ‘Japanese tourists’, or ‘Chinese art students’. Many members of the public liked what they saw as the debunking of the self-seriousness of young British art. Matthew Collings, an afficionado of the ironic aspects of the contemporary art world and presenter of the televised ceremony of the Turner Prize, wrote dismissively about it, seeming to be out of his depth as the artists were not established yba’s (young British artists), but somewhat strangely from mainland China. In an article he wrote for Modern Painters, he referred to Cai and Xi as ‘Chinese art students’. ‘I happened to meet one of these students [Xi] in a bar the other night’. He studied at Goldsmiths and is now ‘studying to be a situationist’. Collings’ patronising remarks as one of the insiders of the British art world, have racist and elitist connotations which continue the notion of ‘backwardness’ of non-Western artists vis-à-vis the ‘real thing’ (in this case yba). In fact Xi was part of the earliest movements of performance art in China in the late 1980s, well before Emin ‘made her bed’. Also, Cai’s art education in Britain has paralleled Emin’s to a remarkable degree; he spent time at Maidstone School of Art before entering the Royal College. Both Cai and Xi were by no means new to art, each having their own history in China before coming to Britain.
In Two Artists Swim across the River Thames (pp.84–89), Cai and Xi use an oblique reference to Mao Zedong’s famous swim of the Yangste River, a symbolic act at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution to ‘struggle with great waves and wind’ as a preparation for political and class struggle. In the performance the artists stripped down to their underpants with ‘isms’ written on their torsos, then stepped into the river at the site of the newly built Millennium Bridge, which crosses the river at Tate Modern to St Paul’s Cathedral. They swam across as crowds of people watched from the side and from the newly built bridge. The river police then appeared and intervened, forcing them to give up the swim. It is well-known that the River Thames is a dangerous river to swim in because of its strong currents, and the police pick out dozens of bodies a year, which illustrates the degree of physical and explicitly masculine bravado involved in the work. In the water, the ideologies inscribed on their bodies were washed away symbolically. Shortly after the performance, the Millennium Bridge was closed as a result of faulty engineering which became another story in the press, the scandal of a new piece of architecture which failed to fulfi ll its promise. In the photograph crowds of people are standing on the bridge.
The London series of performances use the city as a kind of stage or ‘real’ canvas, bringing an element of Chinese history briefly into the realm of contemporary London and its own cultural and historical institutions. The act of performance in their work is a display of freedom and an articulation of marginality, marking the marginal by literally ‘placing it on the map’. The ‘real’ in the work is not only in the use of London as a physical and æsthetic space, it is also the constant interplay between the work and the media’s own commentary in small pieces of news appearing with headlines such as: ‘Nude streak puts London on the map’. The artists’ use of London is touristic in the choice of its location. Their use of the press is a shrewd way of revealing and perpetuating the voyeuristic view of contemporary art by the general public, always thirsty to follow a bizarre snippet in the press about the latest antic. The ambivalence of the work as art also highlights the rigid structures within which the vast majority of works of art are embedded and forced to be given credibility. The photographs that this work produces show images of the artists appearing as small fi gures making a blip on the cityscape – standing by the riverside, Chinese and English scribbles on their backs, two heads bobbing in the Thames, with clear markers of the location through the presence of the bridge. These seem like acts of futility – expressions of individual human fi gures attempting to make their mark. In this way they both act, physically, by the use of the body, but also in doing so, describe the act, through the concept of the artwork.
Running Naked across Westminster Bridge with Tony Bear only caused a mild stir in the media. Whilst by no means shocking, it involved the naked body and an overt reference to the prime minister and a streak across a landmark of the British establishment. A bizarre fusion of cross-cultural misunderstandings was enacted on a famous London landmark, a fl eeting streak in the heart of tourism and the symbol of the British political system: the Houses of Parliament. Here China’s reduced view of Britain is blended with Britain’s reduced view of China, in a parody of partial understandings and positioning. The institutions of Westminster and the prime minister are left absurdly trivialised, as Tony Blair is transformed into a panda bear and the unlikely vision of two naked Chinese bodies disrupt the usual tourist view of a London icon: the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben. In all of the London performances, the body is performing some sort of action: jumping, running, swimming, crawling, shooting – emphasising the power of the body as an active physical force, in a suggestion of activism with political connotations of the difference individual action can make. There is a strong evocation of strategic warfare, or an imaginary view of it through the lens of the media. The work draws on the radical political tactics of the Cultural Revolution in the slogans: ‘Down with…’ (as in the cries of ‘Down with Saatchi’ at the Tate or the ‘arrest’ of the curator Hou Hanru), which recall the persecution of individuals who were deemed to come from the ‘wrong’ class background.
Several of these works have a specific cultural or political referent against which the work is played out. Emin’s Bed is the first – now an icon of British contemporary art – which as Deborah Cherry says, ‘became an over-night sensation, as a rhetoric of shock, sensation and controversy swirled around the artist and her work’. In the urinal piece Duchamp’s Fountain is one of the most famous iconic works of twentieth century art; Tate Modern could be seen as one of the new architectural symbols of London; in Open Fire in the Royal Academy, the artists use Jeff Koons, a contemporary artist whose representations of consumerism and sex, in kitsch figures of La Cicciolina and Michael Jackson and Bubbles, are legendary. The Royal Academy also has exemplary status as the establishment. Its own engagement with contemporary art has been highly controversial with the staging of exhibitions such as Sensation and Apocalypse, which caused some academicians to resign. Other new and old icons are simply the symbols of British public life such as Westminster, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, St Paul’s and the Millennium Bridge. In the Paradox series the nude bodies of the artists are shown absurdly positioned in London. The magnification and manipulation moves beyond the action work, so that the body is shown publicly posturing in impossible ways. This extends the idea of the foreign body as agent still further, so that what is seen is unbelievable to the point of absurdity.
Ultimately this work raises questions about agency and the relationships between art, public life, the media and the art world. It does not seek to answer them, but is made to show them up. (The Sun’s headline ‘Fan hits sheet’, was one of the typically comic elements in the media’s own sideshow which has accompanied their work and cannot be separated from it. Another aside is the policeman’s remark: ‘We usually get a different kind if artist in here’, when the two of them were brought in for questioning after Jump.) Since this first intervention, the work has gained an apocryphal alternative discourse through anecdotes revolving around what happened when, which is important as part of the concept of the work. In this work the body is an interventionary agent, which works subversively to highlight the structures of these frameworks and the position of the artwork and the artist within these structures. Working from the outside of these structures emphasizes the absurdity and ambivalence of systems of culture and system of belief, challenging these systems which are normally taken as given or fixed. This work cannot easily be categorised as it stands at the edges of art history and art institutions, perhaps serving to critique both of these as mainstream, Western structures of power. In the performances the body is literally inscribed with ideologies, both communist and capitalist, serving to highlight how it is impossible to live outside ideological structures and inherited histories.
Mad for Real’s work appears to be about being at odds with the environment and yet curiously, also seems to be asserting a new form of belonging artistically and perhaps culturally as well. In it, the foundational structures of Western thinking are challenged. Crucially the performances take place in real time and space. The live, physical action of performances become frozen as visual images. Like all artwork, the ‘real’ becomes unattainable in retrospect as history takes over the moment after it is made. The testimony of these pages is that art gives form to life. The visual simplicity of the photographs is enriched by the work’s contexts, its layers of language, æsthetics and form. Appreciation of work by Cai and Xi is not in its accommodation or commodifi cation, it is in the understanding and embracing of it as art which continues to pursue its own æsthetic.