The author is grateful to Tiziana Andina as well as to Robert Bernasconi and Gary Shapiro, and, for discussions of Wang Guangyi and Warhol, conversations with the late Tracy Strong. For helpful recommendations, I thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments.
- 1 Warhol’s relation to capital and commercial interests have long been an issue for critics. Thus Jam (...)
1Sometimes described as the “Chinese Warhol” (Wang 2013b), Wang Guangyi, to borrow a musical metaphor, ‘covers’ Andy Warhol, Just so, Warhol, trained as a commercial illustrator, appropriated posters and prints already ‘ready-made,’ industrially reproduced as advertisement/consumer goods displays,1 ‘covers’ including Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans, Brillo Box sculptures, and Coca Cola motifs (Figs. 1a; 1b), including the trademarked font.
2Wang Guangyi classically employs his own grid form (see below, Fig. 10) taken from Albrecht Dürer but ‘otherwise’ varied quite “because in Chinese culture there is the jiugongge box to make things bigger or smaller” (Cohen 2012). Here there is a relation to fonts, thus Andrew Cohen explains the “nine-square grid, commonly used as a guide to proportions when learning calligraphy” (ibid).
- 2 See here Strong’s explanation that “political power is to be understood on the model of God’s creat (...)
3In addition to cultural critique, Wang Guangyi’s art may be interpreted as featuring a certain ‘political theology’ following Tracy Strong on Carl Schmitt2 read via Jean Baudrillard’s (and Theodor Adorno’s and Günther Anders’s) emphasis on consumerism and capitalism, signified via Warhol’s Coca Cola™ (Fig. 1a and Fig. 1b) (see Andina 2019; cf. Dillenberger 1998).
Fig. 1a
Andy Warhol, original pencil, Coca Cola 3, 1962
Fig. 1b
Coca Cola 3
4Wang Guangyi’s covers of Andy Warhol’s covers (or copies) of capitalist icons is politicised. Rather than the three-dimensional morphology of the Coke bottle, as Warhol repeats the iconic form in various iterations (Fig. 1b), including sketches of the cardboard carrying case (Fig. 1a), Wang Guangyi adopts the Coca Cola font (Fig. 2), along with political/religious elements, complete with red star and red book, elements of socialist iconography (Zhuan 2014).
Fig. 2
Wang Guangyi, Great Criticism, 1994; 2002.
5Thus critico-mimetically, Wang Guangyi ‘covers’ Warhol’s images, including Warhol’s 1972 portrait of Mao (Fig. 3), duplicating Mao in colour variations expanding Warhol’s 1964 Shot Marilyns (see Fig. 6).
Fig. 3
Andy Warhol, Mao Series (1972)
- 3 See, at the acme of postmodern art theory, Krauss 1986; Jackson 2022; Gerez/Mallet 2016; Heinich, 1 (...)
6The term ‘cover’ here applied to art is a musical industry convention, including a claim to distinctive originality as opposed to a deceptive fake or ‘copy’.3 Traditionally, a ‘cover’ refers to the imprint of a recording of a record (originally vinyl) of another recording of a song another artist has either written or already covered (Babich 2018). In the case of Warhol’s album covers, the graphic ‘cover’ is literal: the detachable banana peel, covering a flesh-coloured banana of Warhol’s 1967 Velvet Underground and Nico adding yet another element to the notion of a cover (see Figs. 4a and 4b).
Fig. 4a
Andy Warhol, Album Cover: The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967)
Fig. 4b
Andy Warhol Album Cover: John Lennon, Menlove Ave (1986)
7At stake is copyright: the right to profit from the particular recording, including radio use and other ‘uses’ (Babich 2018). Complex legal arrangements allow corporate interests to profit, also allowing various artists to be paid on these terms (see for references to contemporary art, Babich 2019).
8Hillel Schwartz analyses The Culture of the Copy as doublings, emphasizing the ‘original’ and the proliferation of ‘copies’ (Schwartz 2014). In Nietzsche’s provocation, whether a painting, a literary text, or even a person, most people “prefer the copy to the original” (Nietzsche 1878: 239).
Fig. 5a
Andy Warhol, Shot Marilyns, 1964
Fig. 5b
Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962
9After Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych in 1962 (Fig. 5b), and his Shot Marilyns in 1964 (Fig, 5a), the cadence of death continues with Warhol’s 1975 Skulls series (see below Fig. 6), a kitsch focus on thanatology (see for a curatorial discussion, Fairbrother 1989).
Fig. 6
Andy Warhol, Skulls. Installation, 1976, Dia, New York
10A decade later, themes of morbidity and mortality continue – this is echoed in Wang Guangyi’s work – with Warhol’s preoccupation with celebrity death, as in his 1985 Ads portfolio, Rebel Without a Cause. James Dean, Figs. 7a (and a lithograph cover, 7b).
Fig. 7a
Andy Warhol, Rebel Without a Cause. James Dean 355. Ads portfolio, 1985
Fig. 7b
Lithograph Print
11Dean’s doomed persona illuminates the working violence of mimetic desire, identity/identification, celebrating both youth and early death and thereby what Lacan called the Real: impossibility in a fated Heideggerian sense. The impossibility of possible desire, the shadow in Warhol’s Rebel Without a Cause haunts the figure of Dean, preserved, thanks to movie posters, advertising, and Warhol’s own thanatophiliac identification with Dean. The metonymic gesture (Fig. 8), so Jean Baudrillard argues, both dissolves and commodifies the artist as icon, freeing us “from aesthetics and from art…” (Baudrillard 2005: 44).
Fig. 8
Andy Warhol in front of The Last Supper (Yellow) (1986) at the opening of Andy Warhol – Il Cenacolo at Palazzo delle Stelline, Milan, January 22, 1987. Photo by Mondadori Portfolio/Archivio Giorgio Lotti via Getty Images.
12Gary Shapiro reads Foucault on Warhol highlighting the insights of pop as the “magma of stupidity” (Shapiro 2003: 361), focusing, via Nietzsche’s reflections on himself and his views on women as he writes in Beyond Good and Evil, on “stupidity”. For Foucault, this is a matter of “life, women, death!” as Shapiro reminds, it is
the life of commodities that is at stake and the fetishized images of sexual desire (as in the Marilyns) that are offered to us, along with the death that haunts the automobile crashes and the electric chairs (ibidem).
13Shapiro reads Foucault on Warhol’s “greatness” to balance his reading of Danto on Warhol.
14And as Tiziana Andina summarizes Warhol’s “profound novelty” for Danto, this
consisted of understanding how reality could be transfigured (and how it could transfigure) being left the way it was, in such a way that Superman, Coca-Cola bottles or Marilyn Monroe could perfectly express our world and our desires (Andina 2011: 118).
15If images of sexual desire for Warhol correspond less to Marilyn Monroe than James Dean, Wang Guangyi’s neonized style echoes Warhol’s neon-style James Dean (Fig. 7b), adding dimensional depth, here to recall Ernst Gombrich’s analysis of Apelles’ line.
16Tobin Siebers tells us that Warhol’s “works allude to the open wounds in American society created by political assassinations or the suicides of celebrities”, (Siebers 2003: 20) echoing Baudrillard’s attention to Warhol’s “reliance on mechanical reproduction”, as this “emerges simultaneously with Warhol’s preoccupation with the deaths of both the famous and unknown” (ibidem).
17The key is the ritual Siebers discerns in Warhol’s compulsion/sanctification:
The victims and wounded bodies portrayed in his art do not die or suffer alone. They have caught the attention of a collectivity, through great cost to themselves, and are famous for its sake. They are sacrifices killed on the altar of America (ibidem: 23).
- 4 Allison, although a philosophical antipode when it came to reading Nietzsche, claimed Danto’s corro (...)
18Highlighting the fascination Warhol held for academics, Arthur Danto, an analytic philosopher, was, like Warhol, himself an artist in the 1950s, claiming a voice as art critic for the Nation and as Columbia professor (prestige is key to academe). As his Long Island summer neighbour, the Stony Brook philosopher, David Allison (1944-2016) argued, Danto would make Warhol Warhol.4
- 5 Menand 2010, and see, also with reference to Gombrich, about whom more below, Carrier 1996.
19Warhol was encumbered by philosophy.5 For Baudrillard,
Warhol went the farthest in abolishing the subject of art, of the artist, by withdrawing from the creative act. Behind this mechanical snobbery, there is in fact an escalation in the power of the object, the sign, the image, the simulacrum and value of which the best example today is the art market itself. This goes well beyond the alienation of price as a real measure of things: we are experiencing a fetishism of value that explodes the very notion of a market and, at the same time, abolishes the artwork as work of art (Baudrillard 2005: 44).
20The paradox of the artist’s success or popularity is confirmed by an explosion of market value, a matter of capital speculation also a feature of Wang Guangyi’s work. The philosopher does not live on the terms of the art world, thus his reflections on the simulacra are philosophically construed and just this is challenging for critics and artists. For Baudrillard, art itself has changed: “Art now is only an idea prostituted in production”. Given the connivance of art with itself, “nothing differentiates” art
from technical, advertising media and digital operations. There is no more transcendence, no more divergence, nothing from another scene, it is a reflective game with the contemporary world as it happens. This is why contemporary art is null and void: it and the world form a zero sum equation (ibidem: 89).
21Thus, for Baudrillard,
When Andy Warhol advocated the radical imperative to become an absolute “machine”, even more mechanical than the machine, because he sought the automatic, machine like reproduction of objects that were already mechanical, already manufactured (be it a can of soup or a star’s face), he was following the same line of absolute commodity as Baudelaire (ibidem: 102).
22If “the problem of the existence or non-existence of God was settled by simulation” (ibidem: 119), that is, as no longer a question to be raised, religion is key to Baudrillard’s reading of Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych (Fig. 5a), including a double play on consumption and excess.
23The perfectly preserved (dead) James Dean, frozen in Keatsian perfection – forever wilt thou love, where the conjunction makes the difference of irony, and she be fair. Worse in the case of Marilyn Monroe, misogyny turns in death to Baudrillard’s simulacrum: the iconicity and the abyss, the absence of the divine.
- 6 At issue is a system of credits and still more crucially, of licensing fees. When political propaga (...)
24Like Warhol, Wang Guangyi incorporates brand names – he has a fair range of these, fairly cliché – coveted by consumerism, thus his critical eye concerns Western capitalism as absorbed by and reflected in Chinese consumerism.6 And just this inspires – and provokes – critical assessments of his work (see Tang 2016).
25Mixing, as gallery informational materials inform us concerning Wang Guangyi, agitprop with kitsch, post poster art, patently post pop, the ‘contemporary’ determines whether an artist remains on the cutting edge (or not). If the contemporary art is a moving target, like the moving sidewalks featured at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair, it is also the negative image of Benjamin’s angel of history: blown into the future by the wreckage and waste of the past, ancient references, forgotten images, the Girardian Satan of literary gnosticism – ‘falling like lightning’ – and the allure of the newest, latest name, compare Ai Weiwei and hearken back to Wang Guangyi’s 2001, Great Criticism: Andy Warhol (Fig. 9).
Fig 9
Wang Guangyi, Great Criticism: Andy Warhol (2001)
- 7 Wang 2013b. Still a 2012 Beijing retrospective of Wang Guangyi’s work was titled: Thing-in-itself: (...)
26Warhol, for Wang Guangyi, “makes the ordinary even more ordinary – he lives in the light of day” (Wang 2013b). At stake is the artist’s challenge, exposed in the spot light, to interviewers, to museum openings, gallery events: how can one deal with questioners who come to ask questions that would baffle even a Socrates at the beginning of philosophy in the West, challenging Kant, the reading of whose books often left him “perplexed”,7 so Wang Guangyi tells us?
27Here, with the ordinary and with death, we discern Michel de Certeau’s reflection on the everyday (see de Certeau 1980). Echoing Baudrillard’s reflections, de Certeau ‘covers’ Heidegger, on our non-relation, the self’s non-relation to others as to itself in its flight, its obscenity, its denial:
Its message is seen in the faces that are slowly decaying, but they have only lies with which to say what they presage (be quiet, you stories of getting old told by my eyes, my wrinkles, and so many forms of dullness), and we are careful not to let them speak (don’t tell us, faces, what we don’t want to know) (de Certeau 1980: 194).
28De Certeau outlines Heideggerian flight in the face of death as the ‘impossible” – a Lacanian turn, a writing, signifying, characterizing our lives. This flight is the everyday as it withdraws from notice, from presence, being there.
- 8 Danto 2014 and Danto 1997. Cf., as Danto titles his own book forty years later in response to Dicki (...)
29On the level of art and practical, tactical know-how, this is the art of finding beauty in the ‘ready-made’ styles of found art, designated via the name of the artist in the fashion of analytic philosophy of art – these names the philosopher is willing to cite in addition to asking what is art? when is art? In reply to their own, they are not citing other, questions: art is what we – the ‘we’ here being the artists, failed as Danto was, or else the museum curators, or else what ‘we’ experts, the ‘philosophical aestheticians,’ collectors – say it is.8
30Death ‘always comes,’ as Tracy Strong liked to say until he proved it on 11 May 2022, ‘from outside the frame.’ The ‘released’ art of Verfallenheit – allowing what is to be as it is, wabi-sabi, fallen as it also continues to fall (See Babich 2017), sees that fall, frames what is apart, inviting that outside to be part of the frame. To frame death is part of flight in the face of death (for discussion, see Babich 2023).
Fig. 10
Wang Guangyi, Mao Zedong: AO (triptych), 1988
31Jan Jagodzinski identifies the disjunction that is “Guangyi Wang’s critical commentary on communist capitalism (or is it capitalist communism)” (Jagodzinski 2010: 46). A clear cover of the portrait of Mao hanging in Tiananmen Square, Gate of Heavenly Peace, Beijing, China, Wang Guangyi compares his own Mao Zedong AO to its mass-made origins (Fig. 10).
32Qua ‘cover’ of Warhol, Mao Zedong AO (again, Fig. 10), the first work in Wang Guangyi’s newer Mao series departs from a store-bought, “embroidered portrait”,
as Wang says, “Posters are paper, and fragile. Embroidery is on cloth, a textile. It’ll survive long term”. Wang likens this prefabricated portrait of Mao to Marcel Duchamp’s infamous use of a readymade urinal; and in a gesture similar to the dada artist inking a mustache and “L.H.O.O.Q.” on a postcard of the Mona Lisa, Wang applied his hallmark grid and the letters “AO” in black paint onto what was, after all, just another image of Mao (Cohen 2021).
33In his discussion of Danto and Foucault on Warhol, Shapiro recalls the history of aesthetic mimesis as Foucault highlights
not a picture of Liz, Elvis, or Marilyn, but at the matrix, grid, or series in which these are repeated – if not to infinity, at least with the suggestion that the repetition could go on indefinitely (Shapiro 2003: 357).
34By way of “repetition”, Shapiro argues, “Warhol effects an emptying out of meaning, what the Greeks call kenosis, that overcomes the old inertiae of equivalences” (ibidem: 357-358).
- 9 According to Duchamp himself, in a letter to Suzanne Duchamp (11 April 1917): “One of my female fri (...)
35Duchamp’s Fountain as objet d’art has been revealed as a non-work taken by Duchamp (Fig. 11) from a less known, meaning less-named, routinely forgotten, woman artist who died in penury. The work, by definition ‘found’ (a found foundry work) and hence already ‘ready made’ was not ‘not-made’ ‘by’ Duchamp, i.e., hence not a non-work by Duchamp but a non-work originally ‘not-made’ by Baronness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.9
Fig. 11
Photograph: Arthur Stieglitz (1864-1946), Fountain by R. Mutt. The Blind Man (No. 2), May 1917. 291 Gallery. ‘Fountain’ attributed to Marcel Duchamp (Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven).
36At the same time, Duchamp’s/von Freytag-Loringhoven’s Fountain (Hustvedt 2019) was featured as Stieglitz’s photograph in the 1917 journal, The Blind Man, with the legend: The exhibit refused by the Independents, facing an article entitled ‘Buddha of the Bathroom’ (Norton 1917: 5) (note the Fountain’s interior shadow highlight, set wrong-side up, ‘useless’ as Danto complains). Wang Guangyi’s New Religion – Prophecy (2010) (Fig. 12) thus ‘quotes’ Duchamp’s/von Freytag-Loringhoven’s/Stieglitz’s photograph (Fig. 11). Via Wang Guangyi’s grid, and its calligraphic guidance, a more complicated repetition turns into a theological aesthetic.
Fig. 12
Wang Guganyi, New Religion – Prophecy (2010)
37Wang Guangyi’s New Religion – Prophecy (Fig. 12) is no ‘useless’ plumbing feature, which would have lent some comfort to Danto. Where Freytag-Loringhoven’s ‘fountain’ (Fig. 11) signed by a pseudonym, has overtones in German (‘R. Mutt,’ in German, Armut, poverty), Wang Guangyi’s Prophecy is a print overwritten with a ‘religious’ Greek font: (Matthew 10:36: “‘A man’s enemies will be the members of his household’”) (reference is drawn here from Zhuan 2014).
38This theological aesthetics asserts not beauty but inscription and prophecy. Thus, Hans Urs von Balthasar’s reflections on the proof of deity given by beauty as such – though this remains challenging as Aidan Nichols’ complicated study can show (Nichols 2006) – is displaced via Warhol’s commercial definition: The most beautiful thing in Tokyo is McDonald’s. The most beautiful thing in Stockholm is McDonald’s. The most beautiful thing in Florence is McDonald’s. American consciousness continues to attest to the relevance of Warhol’s vision.
39The ancient Apelles is famed as the greatest painter of antiquity but no works survive. Ernst Gombrich explains Apelles’ ‘greatness’ as the ancients saw it (how does he know this?) as corresponding to “something like the perfection of rendering lustre, the power of suggesting a gleam that brings the shape forward” (ibidem: 15). To illustrate, Gombrich recalls Pliny’s account of the oblique (they never meet in person) contest between the two painters, Protogenes and Apelles: each artist in turn drawing ‘barely visible lines’ [lineas visum effugientes], in which Apelles emerges victorious, recognized by his opponent. Apelles invents the highlight, mastering “the elusive effects of lustre, glitter, and gleam” (ibidem: 16) thus: “He painted what cannot be painted: thunder, flashes and lightning” (Pliny, cited in Gombrich 1976, 17).
Fig. 13a
Rembrandt, The Artist in His Studio, c. 1628, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Fig. 13b
Reconstruction of the Line of Apelles. Detail from Marian Wenzel, in Gombrich, Plate 111, p. 19 (Gombrich 1976: 19).
40We need the technical, descriptive detail as we read Pliny’s accounts of patina and overlay telling us that Apelles gave his paintings a dark colour to highlight his colours, “such that by reflecting it enhanced the brilliance of the colour white” (Gombrich 1976: 15). Gombrich who also writes on ancient shadows (Gombrich 1994), as the ancients played with the unseen, offers a theoretical reconstruction and commissions a reverse painterly ekphrasis from a painter, Marian Wenzel (Fig 13b), but Gombrich, keen on matters of technique, is interested in the technical literality of that play: starting with a blank surface, Apelles draws a single line (see for a general overview, Land 2020: 11-13).
41In other agonistically fabulous antique contexts, we read of painting a white cloth that ‘seems’ to cover a painting, thus tricking the viewer into a attempting to raise the overlying cover to see what lies beneath. The technique is painterly: the striking white line of the closest vertical edge of the painting turned away from the viewer in Rembrandt’s oblique self-portrait (Fig 13a) illustrates the ‘rule of Philoponus,’ as Gombrich cites it from Johannes Grammaticus commentary to Aristotle’s Meteorologica (Fig 13b) (Gombrich 1976: 5). The phrase Nulla dies sine linea [no day without a line], Pliny attributes to Apelles refers to daily painting, including the space for future modification or correction: to-be-finished.
42Wang Guangyi includes a direct reference to Duchamp as concept artist and to this extent, it makes no difference whether Duchamp himself did not make or Freytag-Loringhoven did not make what neither one of them made. For Wang Guangyi,
The entire value of any work of art is only ever conceptual. After Duchamp, the existence of any art, its value, is entirely conceptual. Duchamp brought a new concept to modern art (Wang 2013a).
- 10 Nor is this irrelevant: the “original” Stieglitz photograph itself was, so Danto and others have ar (...)
43At issue is representation, mimetic copies. Thus with respect to Freytag-Loringhoven’s ‘original’ fountain, qua appropriated by the usually attributed Duchamp, authorized objects exist, thus physical exemplars of “Duchamp’s Fountain”, display copies, are ‘covers’: three-dimensional realizations of the original two-dimensional Stieglitz photograph.10
Fig. 14
Wang Guangyi, New Religion – Pieta (2011)
44In the case of New Religion – Pieta, 2011 (Fig. 14), among the works included in a 2014 solo show entitled: “Negatives of Idols”, we have the dark image, linear, ‘neonized’ outline of Mantegna’s foreshortened, delicately somber, 15th Century, The Lamentation of Christ and Three Mourners (Fig. 15) (Wang 2014).
45As in the case of Warhol’s ‘cover’ of Leonardo, Wang Guangyi’s cover of Mantegna brings us to see, once again, or for the first time – this too is the line effect of Apelles – Mantegna’s work. Emblematic of negative theology, “the death that cannot be said”, as de Certeau reminds us, “can be written and find a language” (de Certeau 1980: 195).
Fig. 15
Andrea Mantegna, Lamento sul Cristo morto. 1470. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. Public Domain
46Signified along with the dead body in Mantegna’s 1470 painting (Fig. 15), are the three mourners to the upper left. Crowded on the edge and barely seen (there is nothing on the other side of the bed) are women and obscured presence is their role. At the bottom of the painting, the feet are key as is the foreshortened perspective: this Christ has been crucified, has died, and having been prepared for burial, is to be entombed. The time between the death of Christ and the resurrection of the body essential to the doctrine of incarnation, is a time of harrowing occlusion. Mantegna’s theology is negative, illustrating the absence of deity.
47The foreshortened reclining figure, as Wang Guangyi’s work includes entombed figures in the case of it, Mao, in his The Death of the Mentor (Fig. 18), and seemingly, more a matter of printerly composition than morphology, Grünewald, but not less the complicated colours that were the colours of Italian renaissance art as the color iterations of Warhols’ The Last Supper (Fig. 8 above) served to show, are the ‘negative’ idols of religion (Fig. 19). A certain nostalgia echoes through irony and the power of these idols.
Fig. 16
Wang Guangyi, The Death of the Mentor, oil on canvas, 400 x 600 cm, 2011
48The pastiche fragment of Mantegna featured in the 2023 exhibit, Obscured Existence in the Palazzo Pitti (Fig. 17 uses Wang Guangyi’s new ‘ancient,’ ritual techniques. repeating part of his earlier print, including the same outline of Mantegna [Fig. 15]).
Fig. 17
Wang Guangyi, Obscured Existence, 2022
- 11 See Riegl’s discussion of color and sculptural relief in his drafts for his 2004.
- 12 Gombrich 1976: 14. Gombrich commissioned Marion Wenzel’s paintings to illustrate his argument. See (...)
49Here, Fig. 17 above, especially, if subtle, the color of the feet (corpse-yellow, -green) illuminates some of Gombrich’s arguments concerning the role of color (drawing on Riegl’s systematic, Hegelian reflections)11 and line, and so confident was Gombrich of his theoretical ekphrasis that he commissioned several paintings (e.g., Fig 13b) to illustrate “the rule of Philoponos and the gleaming ridge”.12
- 13 That is: “the commentary to Aristotle’s Meteorologica by Philoponos (Johannes Grammaticus) of the f (...)
50Gombrich cites the ‘rule of Philoponus’ from the 17th century Junius, writing on the painting of the ancients, originally ‘culled’ from the 5th century Johannes Grammaticus:13
If you put white and black upon the same surface and then look at it from a distance, the white will always seem much nearer and the black further off. Hence when painters want something to look hollow, such as a well, a cistern, a ditch or a cave, they color it black or brown. But when they want something to look prominent, such as the breasts of a girl, an outstretched hand, or the legs of a horse, they lay black on the adjoining areas in order that these will seem to recede and the parts between them will seem to come forward (Gombrich 1976: 5).
51Recalling the studies concerning “advancing and receding colours in the nineteenth century”, Gombrich aids the reader, conceding a certain disciplinary ressentiment, to argue that empirical evidence would vary (science does not provide final answers as matters of perception are culturologically, ethnographically, complicated, such that the evidence of art requires hermeneutics and phenomenology in Patrick Aidan Heelan’s study of space-perception, explaining Cezanne and van Gogh via Merleau-Ponty on perception and depth) (Heelan 1983).
Fig. 18
Wang Guangyi, New Religion – The Last Supper (2012)
52Gombrich’s discussion of line and contrast highlights the luminosity of Wang Guangyi’s Last Supper in his New Religion series (Fig. 18).
Fig. 19
Wang Guangyi, The last Supper (New Religion) (2011). Olio su tela / Oil on canvas, 400 x 1600 cm. Photograph: Renato Corpaci (Corpaci 2019)
53As in the case of Warhol, what may be difficult to catch, above we noted the comparative contrast with the artist in the juxtaposition of artist and or in the work (Fig. 8 above), is the issue of scale. Wang Guangyi’s “New Religion – The Last Supper”, an oil on canvas, is a daunting 400 x 1600 cm (Figs. 18, 19).
- 14 Here one may see the square postcard sized version of André Malraux’s Museum Without Walls, taking (...)
54There are various examples of scale as in Van Gogh’s theologically enigmatic Crows in a Wheatfield which can seem to have characteristics of a larger painting, the same holds in the other direction for sculptural works, such as Michelangelo’s David, larger in life than depicted in isolation in an art book. This is the point Malraux already highlights14 and matters are no better with Google, despite the seeming availability of digital images that are in fact more liable to loss, quite as if they had never been, than print media ever was.
55Here the literary limits of the medium that is the text defies the appreciation, aesthesis, sense of the work. One has to be in the presence of the work and both Warhol’s reproductions and Wang Guangyi’s echoes of Leonardo, scale-wise, require a sense of space: the call to supper, the last supper, graces a refectory, a wall in a dining hall.
56If Danto argues that museums today take the place of religion in popular culture, Wang Guangyi uses religious images for iconic force. This is the detritus of history and Nietzsche argues that we can barely imagine the ceremonies we will need to invent. Retelling ourselves, rebranding the artist, one can say, as some argue, that Wang Guangyi is not an artist of the political per se (pop), but attuned to religion, theological aesthetics. Here we return to Baudrillard, with the same ‘lines’ of shadow and depth Gombrich emphasizes: the velvet Jesus is, aesthetically speaking, the kitsch of Las Vegas Elvis.
Fig 20
2,200-year-old Terracotta Soldiers. Qin Terracotta Warriors and Horses Museum. Photo: China Life, 2005
57As counter, one can think of the buried armies of soldiers, some 8,000 strong Terracotta warriors (Fig. 20), as ritual mimetic abundance. In other contexts, I have argued for reasons for the original abundance of life-size ancient Greek bronzes (see Fig. 21 for a reconstruction of a reconstruction of such) as in antiquity, with thousands, up to 70,000 in Athens alone (Babich 2007).
58I argue that these bronzes are technical accoutrements more than objects of art, serving not for contemplation, not as ‘art,’ but ready to hand, to be recast as armour and as weapons in times of war (Babich 2021). In antiquity, soldiers, warriors, would have been every man, every citizen, just given the life-and-death stakes of war. In the case of Socrates it was not that he went to battle, that every citizen would do: what was distinctive was that his friends lent him a hoplite’s armour which saved his life. Part of the shock doctrine of Plato’s Republic was not only the claim for the lesser equality of women such that they too would fight, being the same, if smaller and weaker, than men but also the assertion that there be a warrior class/caste from which, thus tyranny, sovereign rulers would be drawn. Plato’s Republic proposed to transform the standing citizen army into soldiers trained for battle, only lacking any access to private property, to possessions and in consequence immune to corruption (Babich 2007: 3; see for discussion and further references, Schriefl 2018).
Fig. 21
Polykelitos, Doryphoros, 339 BCE. 220 cm. Modern bronze reconstruction by Georg Roemer of the supposed original. Destroyed in Munich, 1944. Reproduced after Babich, 2007
59Workers are transmogrified in Wang Guangyi’s prints: the long march was a march not of warriors, terra cotta or otherwise, but all walks of life. That long march – and it can happen in the West that we forget this after 1945 – also succeeded. Thus to the sadistic, fascist question, ‘where is your god now?’ – we have Google, part of the Great Criticism Series in 2007 (Fig 22a) which has today become a cover for silencing and censorship, and Lenin and, seemingly, Nietzsche (Fig. 22b), as, unlike Warhol, Wang Guangyi reads philosophy (see the contributions to Andina and Onnis 2019).
Fig. 22a
Wang Guangyi, Google |No|, Great Criticism, 2007.
Fig. 22b
Art Now.
Fig. 22c
Art co.
60If ‘Google’ (22a) adorns a reference to the people as signifier, ‘Art Now’ (22b) features Lenin and a glowering Nietzsche, negated in each case as political signifier. Signifiers are simulacra, in the case of medicine, the art, “favored terrains of simulation”, all to be tracked “back to religion and the simulacrum of divinity” (Baudrillard 1983: 1-13, 23-49).
61The twin of God, Mao is the art icon par excellence in an age of non-religion (Fig. 22c), official reclamation of the death of God, a death which, just as Nietzsche first speaks of the death of the Buddha – nota bene, and his shadow shown in a cave – in The Gay Science (§105), would have numerous names, numerous claims. But in the trenchancy he calls “monotonotheism,’ reflecting on the decay of the ability to ‘fashion’ deities, Nietzsche observed in The Antichrist: “Two thousand years, almost, and not a single new god [und nicht ein einziger neuer Gott]” (Nietzsche 1980: 6, 185).
62I began by citing Tracy Burr Strong (1943-2022) on Carl Schmitt’s political theology. Strong’s great aunt, Anna Louise Strong (1885-1970), (Fig. 23), a long-time friend of Mao, was also significant for her Letter from China, instrumental, as Strong recollects in a review of Henry Kissinger’s On China (Strong 2011), in the US political understanding of China. For more than two decades – the current author was married to Tracy – I lived with a framed, poster-size woodcut of Anna Louise Strong and Mao, with red armband and a red book. Here in the spirit of ‘original’ copies, Fig. 23 reproduces a black and white photograph from an autobiography of Anna Louise Strong: Right in Her Soul (Strong/Keyssar 1983: 241). These are politico-religious icons.
Fig 23
Print reproduction of a woodcut of Anna Louise Strong (1885-1970), wearing a Red Guard armband, receiving Quotations for Chairman Mao Tse-Tung from the Chairman, 1966. Original color print woodcut, belonging to Tracy B. Strong
63Both the activist, Roman Catholic priest, Ivan Illich (1926-2002) and Wang Guangyi argue against an all-too Western imperialism, invoking a critical political theology to do so. Recall Strong’s three elements involved in Schmitt’s understanding of “the secularization of theological concepts in the realm of sovereignty” (Strong 2005: xxvii). Firstly involving an understanding of power as well as a contrasting faith, “made from that which is not something and thus not subject to laid down laws” (Strong 2005: xxvi) and binding legislation across differences, key for the sovereign, in this case Mao, decisive for folk consciousness [Volksbewusstsein] (ibidem: xxix).
64As Alasdair MacIntyre reminds us, to Hobbes must be added Luther and Machiavelli, as he argues, thence to capitalist intervention or speculation (or colonialism/imperialism with a good conscience), prepared so MacIntyre argues, with the more than iron doubling of a Calvin:
although Calvin’s theocracy makes clergy sovereign over princes, it sanctions the autonomy of secular activity at every level where morals and religious practice do not directly conflict with such activity. Provided that sex is restrained within the bounds of marriage and that churchgoing is enforced on Sundays, political and economic activity can proceed effectively unchecked by any sanctions whatsoever. Only the most obviously outrageous are ever condemned and the history of Calvinism is the history of the progressive realization of the autonomy of the economic (MacIntyre 1966: 124).
65More coarsely, Jacob Taubes explains a not-unrelated point – Taubes, as I knew him, lacked a censor – characteristic for his 1948 Occidental Eschatology:
In Catholicism, man’s deeds are for the glorification of the redeeming God as a response to the word of redemption. The Protestant man refrains from performing any act for the glory of God because he can no longer assume that earth and heaven are one in the Ptolemaic sense; he entrusts redemption to pure grace. … The Catholic earns the fruits of grace ex opera operato; the Protestant because he is standing on the Copernican earth with no prospect of heaven to which he can devote his actions, allows grace to be given him freely, as pure grace (Taubes 2009: 125).
66Underlining the economic, Taubes cites Marx on economics as requiring hermeneutics, qua foundation of nature, that is history as a “science”. For Taubes, reading Karl Löwith who read Heidegger along with Weber:
The self-alienation of man now appears not as a logical but as an economic process. Marx diagnoses money as the source of self-alienation. Money is the real spirit of all things. “Money lowers all the gods of mankind and transforms them into a commodity. Money is the universal, self-constituting value of all things. Therefore it has robbed the whole world, both the human world and nature of its own peculiar value. Money is the essence of man’s work and existence, alienated from man, and this alien essence dominates him and he worships it”. Right from his first analysis of self-alienation Marx takes aim at the bourgeois, Christian world. Money in bourgeois society is the embodiment of value, which conflates and exchanges [verwechselt und vertauscht] all things. Thus money is “the overall conflation and exchange of all natural and human qualities” (ibidem: 180-181).
- 15 There is a complex array of literature with different concerns, and for a useful overview, see van (...)
67Above I cited Gombrich on Apelles, arguing that Wang Guangyi’s outlines neonize the ‘rule of Philoponus’ in his 1991 International Politics (Fig. 24). For Gombrich, who follows Riegl on ancient style, colour adds depth. Above I quoted Gombrich’s argument (no extant works confirm or contest it) for Apelles as the greatest of painters on the basis of a single line, part of a contest with Protogenes who drew another line in response, to which Apelles added a colour highlight.15
Fig 24
Wang Guangyi. International Politics – Necessary Negotiation, 1991. Oil on canvas, 120 x 150 cm, © 2013 Wang Guangyi
68More dangerous than Schmitt’s political theology for most theorists of the political, in Illich’s political theology, the proselytizing presumptions of American consumerism undercut missionary advantage, a point Illich makes in his 1968 lecture, “To Hell With Good Intentions”, addressed to student missionaries in Cuernevaca:
Next to money and guns, the third largest North American export is the U.S. idealist, who turns up in every theatre of the world: the teacher, the volunteer, the missionary, the community organizer, the economic developer, and the vacationing do-gooder. Ideally, these people define their role as service. Actually, they frequently wind up alleviating the carnage done by money and weapons, or seducing the “underdeveloped” to the benefits of the world of affluence and achievement. Perhaps this is the moment to instead bring home to the people of the U.S. the knowledge that the way of life they have chosen simply is not alive enough to be shared (Illich 1968).
69So too in 2011 New Religion – The Solicitude (Fig. 25), not only in black but color, as Gombrich likewise contends, highlights the imperialism of Western religion, including a crowded disposition of religious figures, itself a longstanding stylistic claim as Riegl argues.
Fig. 25
Wang Guangyi, New Religion – The Solicitude/Care, 2011
- 16 In a recent interview for exhibition at the Palazzo Pitti, the works on display: “employ the ancien (...)
70The motif (and staging) is varied as self-portrait, in Wang Guangyi’s 2014 self-portrait (Fig. 26a and 26b), using complex ritual techniques, Daily Life No. 4.16
71We cannot have history without perspective, as Nietzsche reminded us. To this extent, we need Riegl’s ‘aerial perspective,’ spatial volumes, as hermeneutic historiography for the sake of reading the art of Roman antiquity.
72Wang Guangyi’s technique of ‘neonized’ outlines, as characterized above with reference to Gombrich on Apelles, draws on an ancient Chinese painting technique, Wu Lou Hen, as in the case of New Religion (Figs. 18-19) to ‘cover’ classical works with lines drawn through, as his self-portraits show, ‘obscuring’ the painter, echoing the disposition of the moment of transubstantiation, Obscured Existence (Fig. 26b), a perspective on perspectives.
Fig 26a
Wang Guangyi, Daily Life No. 4.
Fig. 26b
Obscured Existence: Wang Guangyi at Palazzo Pitti in Florence.