How art helped spread Maoism around the world: Left wing extremism
An
excerpt from Art, Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution,
edited by Jacopo Galimberti, Noemi de Haro García and Victoria H. F.
Scott, explores the contradictions inherent in the global spread of
China’s 20th century political doctrine
“Contradiction
is present in the process of development of all things; it permeates
the process of development of each thing from beginning to end.”
Mao Zedong, ‘On Contradiction’, 1937
Art
and images were and continue to be central channels for the
transnational circulation and reception of Maoism. Though it is rarely
acknowledged as such, the so-called Great Chinese Proletarian Cultural
Revolution (1966-76) was one the most extraordinary political upheavals
of the 20th century. And similarly, no other post-war statesman has
elicited more conflicted emotions than Mao.
Indeed, despite being responsible, by some controversial accounts, for tens of millions of deaths, the man
is still widely revered both inside and outside China, and in the 21st
century, the contested legacy of this powerful figure has only expanded.
![A 1967 poster features an illustration of Mao Zedong above the phrase “Raise High the Great Red Flag of Mao Zedong Thought to Carry Out to the End the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”. Photo: Getty Images](https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2020/02/27/d26bf514-549f-11ea-8948-c9a8d8f9b667_972x_121252.jpg)
A
1967 poster features an illustration of Mao Zedong above the phrase
“Raise High the Great Red Flag of Mao Zedong Thought to Carry Out to the
End the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”. Photo: Getty Images
Marking the 50-year anniversary of the
,
in both China and other countries, academic research produced
pioneering studies of the Red Guards, the Shanghai People’s Commune, the
“little red book” and seminal theoretical disputes (opposing, for
instance, Mao to Deng Xiaoping). Some aspects of Maoism are being
reassessed, partly because they speak to the present moment, such as
Maoism’s critique of colonialism and racism.
If
the 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of anti-colonial struggles, and “an
awakening sense of global possibility, of a different future”, this
should also be ascribed to Maoism. Thus it comes as no surprise that
Fredric Jameson viewed Maoism, rightly or wrongly, as “the richest of
all the great new ideologies of the 1960s”, when the idea of “Maoist
China” became a productive epistemological device to reimagine the
world, to reinterpret its hierarchies and to act to change them.
Maoism
preceded the Cultural Revolution, and can be traced to the founding of
the People’s Republic of China in 1949, or even earlier. It was,
however, only with the Sino-Soviet split and China’s experiments with
nuclear weapons that it gained real momentum. Mao’s sustained criticism
of the peaceful coexistence between the two superpowers, as well as his
advocacy of armed struggles in the Third World, broke what many regarded
as the theoretical and geopolitical impasse of Marxism.
Art
and images were paramount in the dissemination and reception of
Maoism’s revolutionary ambitions. Not only could they travel fast to
distant places, but some visual conceits could also be easily adapted to
specific contexts.
In
recent years there has been a scholarly reappraisal of the art produced
in China between 1966 and 1976. No longer stigmatised, this type of
visual propaganda has been widely examined, helping to shed new light on
the semantics, aesthetics and memories associated with Maoist plays,
posters, photographs, paintings and artefacts of all sorts.
The
dynamics created by travelling objects (model works, “little red
books”, posters, badges, pamphlets, journals, etc), people
(intellectuals, party cadres, diplomats, activists, etc) and ideas
associated with Maoism had an enormous impact. However, any effort to
delineate the “standard Maoist position” on the arts is probably doomed
to failure because of the long history, complex networks and diverse
practices into which Maoism has crystallised. By the same token,
searching for the putative “essence” of a Maoist aesthetic in Mao’s
founding texts leads to an impasse.
The lecturer on modern Chinese history and literature
has observed that the Cultural Revolution did not attract significant
interest among students in the United States until 1968, when it began
to resonate strongly with their own anti-establishment sentiment. She
concludes that this identification is “far more informative about the
preoccupations of these distant observers of Chinese politics than about
Chinese politics itself”.
![Students at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing create political artworks. Photo: Getty Images](https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2020/02/27/0b41302a-54a0-11ea-8948-c9a8d8f9b667_972x_121252.jpg)
Students at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing create political artworks. Photo: Getty Images
In
his study of the anti-authoritarian Left in West Germany, the historian
Timothy Scott Brown echoes Lovell’s remarks. He maintains that the
reception of images associated with Maoism “served as a bridge between
the global and the local”, and was driven “less by the meaning imputed
to images or cultural products at their point of origin, than at the
point of their reception”.
Yet
scholarly literature has had little to say regarding the role played by
art in global Maoism. The wealth of studies and exhibitions about the
art of the Cultural Revolution has not been accompanied by comparable
analyses of European, African, Asian and American artists who were
heavily influenced and inspired by the events in China.
Nor
has the recent interest in exploring the worldwide influence of Chinese
communism in the 1960s and 1970s been met by a commitment to analysing
the visual components of its reception. The omission is surprising, as
for several years this global phenomenon shaped the work and thought of
major artists as diverse as John Cage and Jörg Immendorff, to name just
two.
For
more than a decade, global Maoism permeated art production in a variety
of ways that continue to be neglected by standard art-historical
accounts of the post-war period. Caught between a cult of personality
and libertarian impulses, thousands of artists, architects, designers
and film directors appropriated or emulated the political ideals of the
Cultural Revolution, translating them into a wide variety of visual
propositions.
![A Soviet communist poster. Photo: Getty Images](https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2020/02/27/3b97364a-549e-11ea-8948-c9a8d8f9b667_972x_121252.jpg)
A Soviet communist poster. Photo: Getty Images
From
the Californian campuses to the Peruvian campesinos, many attempted to
integrate Mao’s principles and the Cultural Revolution’s material
culture, iconography and slogans into their production and model of
authorship, although in different, and at times highly incompatible,
ways.
It
is unlikely that the lack of scholarship on this topic is accidental.
The widespread apprehension concerning the attribution of historical
significance and intellectual sophistication to the Maoist phase of
several American and European artists is directly related to the
political implications of espousing Mao Zedong Thought in the West. On
the one hand, the predominant narratives of art history are still
embedded in the Cold War dualistic conceptual frameworks, setting
capitalism against communism.
Modern
art and modernism were long ago constructed as the counterpoint to the
propaganda of so-called totalitarian art, which brought durable
discredit upon the latter. On the other hand, the current presence of
Maoist guerillas makes the topic politically sensitive in several
countries, pushing scholars to see Maoist artistic production as
secondary over issues of state security. Moreover, claiming the
political primacy of the Chinese Cultural Revolution challenges the
Eurocentrism of both the Left and the Right, which still, occasionally,
thinks in terms of “oriental despotism”.
A
further reason accounts for the scholarly reluctance to explore Maoist
artists. The Red Guards’ “cultural” revolution represented a shocking
rejoinder to the Western definition of “culture” as it had emerged since
the Enlightenment. Denouncing ancestral traditions and wisdom not as a
shared heritage that had to be preserved, but rather as an obstacle to
the exigencies of communism, in the West the Red Guards were decried as
vandals, destroying culture rather than renewing it.
![A poster created by communist trade unions celebrates May Day in Kolkata, India, on May 1, 2006. Photo: AFP](https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2020/02/27/a9ad89ae-549e-11ea-8948-c9a8d8f9b667_972x_121252.jpg)
A poster created by communist trade unions celebrates May Day in Kolkata, India, on May 1, 2006. Photo: AFP
Maoism in India
is still very much alive, and in several areas Maoist guerilla fighters
continue to combat the Indian state. Sanjukta Sunderason’s chapter
“Framing margins: Mao and visuality in 20th century India” maps the
traces of Mao and Maoism in India’s long 20th century.
Drawing
from the visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff ’s notion of
visuality, Sunderason explores three key moments of Indian Maoism in
relation to art: the iconography of resistance developed by the
Communist Party of India in the 1940s, the Naxalites’ “statue-smashing”
in Calcutta in the early 1970s and the afterlives of Maoism in Indian
art from the mid-1970s to the present.
The
early 1970s were a key period for Maoism in the US as well. Colette
Gaiter’s chapter, “The Black Panther newspaper and revolutionary
aesthetics”, looks at the work of the American artist Emory Douglas, the
Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, which at the time was
subscribing to a political tendency known as “intercommunalism”.
More
expansive than other strands of leftist thought, intercommunalism
sought to unite countries of the world in resistance to global
capitalism and imperialism. A wave of “Black Maoism” swept through black
liberation movements at this time and came to visual life in Douglas’
work on The Black Panther newspaper.
![An image in The Black Panther newspaper. Photo: Getty Images](https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2020/02/27/ac2feb04-549e-11ea-8948-c9a8d8f9b667_972x_121252.jpg)
An image in The Black Panther newspaper. Photo: Getty Images
The
analysis then moves to the years of the Cultural Revolution, and to the
two industrialised countries that were the first to see the emergence
of a large Maoist movement: West Germany and France. Lauren Graber and
Daniel Spaulding’s joint contribution, “The Red Flag: the art and
politics of West German Maoism”, maps artistic Maoism in West Germany
from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, tying it to both the student
movement and the extra-parliamentary opposition. Looking at a broad
sample of artists, the authors demonstrate how the image of Mao and the
politics for which it stood became contested terrain where the complex
dialectic of Pop and revolution was played out in perhaps its most
spectacular form.
France
is the European country where Maoism has had, perhaps, the most lasting
and pervasive impact on society, with intellectuals – the most
prominent being the philosopher Alain Badiou – continuing to eulogise
Mao and the Cultural Revolution. This is especially significant because
of the role many French intellectuals from this period had in the
formulation and dissemination of postmodernism.
Like
their northern neighbours, southern European artists also appropriated
the Cultural Revolution’s political ideals and forms of authorship. “La
Familia Lavapiés” as a collective, collaborated but also argued with
political leaders, mass organisations, political parties (especially the
Communist Party), workers, students, neighbours and, of course, other
artists.
Sympathetic to acracia
(the suppression of any kind of authority, of domination, of power, of
coercion) and Trotskyism, the members of La Familia Lavapiés saw art and
Maoism as tools with which they unsuccessfully tried to challenge and
transform the cultural and political milieu in which they carried out
their activities.
![Mao’s “little red book”. Photo: Getty Images](https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2020/02/27/64360020-54a0-11ea-8948-c9a8d8f9b667_972x_121252.jpg)
Mao’s “little red book”. Photo: Getty Images
In
several countries Maoism was so strongly refracted through the prism of
the local specificities that it occasionally became a pretext and even
a joke. Could one at once be a Maoist and poke fun at Mao’s cult? By
1976, some Italian militants were advocating a new form of Maoism that
conflated pop culture, autonomist Marxism, Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix
Guattari’s philosophy and, last but not least, avant-garde art. They
defined this trend as “Mao-Dadaism”.
In
“Another red in the Portuguese diaspora: Lourdes Castro and Manuel
Zimbro’s Un autre livre rouge”, Ana Bigotte Vieira and André Silveira
examine Un autre livre rouge,
an artists’ book made by the Portuguese artists Lourdes Castro and
Manuel Zimbro while they were living in Paris. The two-volume work
alluded to Mao’s “little red book” and was entirely devoted to the
contradictory meanings and psychological associations that red
conveyed.
The
work was crafted mostly between 1973 and 1975 at a time of radical
political change in Portugal. The Carnation Revolution and the PREC
(Período Revolucionário Em Curso, Ongoing Revolutionary Period) informed
Un autre livre rouge, which was, however, both less and more than a political book.
The
significance of Maoism for global independence movements around the
world is an important subject that merits further attention,
particularly for countries in Africa, for example. In “Avenida Mao Tse
Tung (or how artists navigated the Mozambican Revolution)”, Polly Savage
examines Maoism in Mozambique. Drawing on interviews and archival
records, the study focuses on the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique
(or FRELIMO).
![A Peruvian Communist Party poster. Photo: Getty Images](https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2020/02/27/9d2fa112-549e-11ea-8948-c9a8d8f9b667_972x_121252.jpg)
A Peruvian Communist Party poster. Photo: Getty Images
Between
1970 and 1977 FRELIMO negotiated an artistic and cultural agenda
combining, not without difficulties, leftist internationalism and local
traditions. The analysis of works produced by the graphic designer
“Mphumo” João Craveirinha Jnr offers insightful perspectives on how
these tensions materialised in images. In the case of the artist Juan
Carlos Castagnino, often considered to be the official painter of the
Argentinian Communist Party, his relationship with China informed both
his politics and his practice.
Peru
was on the verge of becoming a Maoist state in 1990, set against the
background of the civil war between the Communist Party of Peru (PCP),
also known as Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), and the Peruvian state, a
conflict that began in 1980 and lasted well into the 1990s.
Austrian art historian Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art,
published in 1950, is the world’s bestselling book in the field of art
history. In 1953, at the height of McCarthyism, Gombrich wrote a
scathing review of Arnold Hauser’s book The Social History of Art.
Criticising Hauser’s methodology, Gombrich argued that contradiction
was an ontological trap that led to theoretical paralysis. But the
notion of contradiction is an insightful one for describing and
understanding the impact of Maoism on the visual arts.
Instead
of eschewing the paradoxes that animate art history, one must expose
them and reveal cultural contradictions for what they have always been:
a powerful source of political, social and aesthetic transformation,
for better or for worse.
Excerpt from Art, Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Edited by Jacopo Galimberti, Noemi de Haro García and Victoria H. F. Scott. Published by Manchester University Press
Source: https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3052605/how-art-spread-maoism-around-world-china-all-way
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