Metonymic residues of Tibetan identity represented in Zhang Huan s Buddhist Hand

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1 Vielhaber 1 Greg Vielhaber Lisa Claypool and Dana Katz ART 301 April 21, 2008 Metonymic residues of Tibetan identity represented in Zhang Huan s Buddhist Hand Zhang Huan s art typically focuses on one of two themes (which under certain modes of analysis can be seen as parallels or even the same theme); the sacred and the abject. Examples of each are plentiful; parts of Buddhist bodies represented in sculpture and (debatably) masochistic performance art, respectively. Sacred and abject aside, all of his art is plagued by a kind of urban decay. That is to say, his art pieces are selfconsciously representations under the burden of Chinese urbanization. This process of urbanization is a distinctly recent event; China s economic boom in the last decade or so has caused massive migration and immigration towards major cities, in turn producing massive slums with little to no conveniences that the richer more capitalist driven urbanites experience. That is to say, those on the periphery of major Chinese urban spaces are silenced politically and economically, and living in rather destitute conditions. This condition of urbanization is reminiscent of Baudrillard s notions of ecstatic communication, a world in which subjects are disenfranchised from their reality and under which the world of advertisement and globalization intrudes into subject interiority, absorbing cultural symbols while forcefully erasing their symbolic value. Zhang Huan s performances typically focus on the body and discourses of the body under urbanization, whereas his paintings and sculptures tend to focus on the effects of culture or specifically Chinese (actually Tibetan) Buddhist heritage under the new milieu of urbanization. To reiterate, Zhang Huan s art focuses on how new societal production effaces the very subject it attempts to create; in the instance of abjection, the body is efface or removed; in

2 Vielhaber 2 the instance of the sacred, cultural inherited symbols such as the body of the Buddha are fractured or reduced to residues. Specifically, Zhang Huan s sculpture Buddha Hand demonstrates this principle of subject disenfranchisement: the sculpture is itself an amalgam of residues, a relic, a vestige of the whole of the Buddha body metonymically associated with the hand but wholly absent; Buddha Hand is a representation of symbolic value obliterated under discourses of ecstatic communication. explained: First, Baudrillard s theory of ecstatic communication must be more fully We are no longer a part of the drama of alienation; we live in the ecstasy of communication. And this ecstasy is obscene. The obscene is what does away with every mirror, every look, every image. The obscene puts an end to every representation. But it is not only the sexual that becomes obscene in its pornography: today there is a whole pornography of information and communication, that is to say, of circuits and networks, a pornography of all functions and objects in their readability, their fluidity, their availability, their regulation, in their forced signification, in their performativity, in their branching, in their polyvalence, in their free expression (Baurdriallard 231). Ecstatic communication is a distinctly urban phenomenon in that ecstatic communication is a tool for institutions to organize and make legible massive amounts of otherwise undistinguishable bodies (undistinguishable to the institution). In what could be referred to as a nostalgia for the way things were (the good old days, though Baudrillard has no illusions of a utopian past), Baudrillard explains how the subject is disentangled or disenfranchised from its past, its symbolic and cultural value. In previous forms of ideology, the subject is implicated in a kind of fantasy which labeled the world in terms of objecthood and otherness; however nowadays, because of the massive presence of information gathering techniques even this fantasy has been eliminated. Everything has been categorized; that is to say the subject believes that everything has been named or labeled, that everything is able to be named or labeled at all, and that these labels,

3 Vielhaber 3 metonymic reductions, residues, advertisements are obscene (pornographic) through their obsessive attention to banalities which in turn become forced significations. In a sense, non-meanings or symbolically absent value within a given context becomes forced into a strained legibility that is itself a simulation. Under the presence of massive cultural symbols that point everywhere (the Buddha, the McDonalds arches), that are now overendowed with a kind of pornographic focus to value, these symbols have becomes totally absent of any value at all; they have in effect, lost their cohesion in the tide of ecstatic communication. Communication is ecstatic because at every point of communication, there is an overabundance of information that insists on being deciphered, that the space of necessitated deciphering is itself already a forced projection. It could be said that urbanites project ecstatic communication from their satellite locations onto their countryfolk counterparts, symbolically reducing them to mere mechanized producers of sustenance. Buddha Hand is in the shape of the hand holding the lotus flower typically represented in images containing Buddhist iconography. It is a disembodied hand, hung upside down. It appears leathery from a distance, partially rotted. The hand looks like it has been intentionally smashed in specific locations, as if the Buddha s hand had been smashed with a hammer repeatedly. There is no lotus for the fingers to grasp. Across the surface of the sculpture there are general shapes of color, which at first glance appear undecipherable. However, upon closer a closer examination, the nature of these color shapes becomes clear: they are images of Buddhist iconography, Buddhist narrative, reduced to mere shapes, (barely) maintaining only their familiarity as a Buddhist scene. The narrative the surface attempts to represent has been effaced, reduced. The only

4 Vielhaber 4 clearly decipherable symbol is the Tibetan Medicine Wheel, one of the most familiar and widely known Buddhist icons. It is no coincidence that the medicine wheel looks as if it has been carved into or inscribed upon the hand as a kind of branding. To be blunt, Buddha Hand is a representation of the amalgamation of Buddhist pastiche. It is a representation of making the sacred into the abject, from the symbolically valuable to the obscene. Recalling the iconoclasm of the Cultural Revolution, when many traditional art objects where destroyed as if they were humans being tortured, Buddha Hand seems to be a vestige of a culture that consumes its past. What was once sacred, what was once an image of divinity, now only points to its past self; Buddha Hand is merely recognizably Buddhist; the Tibetan Medicine Wheel, the hand that should be clenching the lotus flower, vaguely familiar shapes recalling Buddhist narratives, these are the banalities of spirituality, of the sacred. Under the era of ecstatic communication only banalities are visible; only banalities reveal information. The information presented in Buddha Hand is obscene because it speaks nothing of Buddhism, nothing of symbolic value, nothing of narrative nor discourse, but mere metaphysical and physical location, that the hand is clearly of a Tibetan Buddhist who has been theoretically beaten and has had a medicine wheel carved into. And furthermore, that the recognizable symbols look as if they have been forcibly placed, inscribed, tortured upon the hand is no accident; the kind of banalities to be found reveal more about the inscriber than the inscribed because they are projections of Buddhist pastiche of the inscriber, of what Buddhism is commonly reduced too, both physically and metaphysically. Therefore, what constitutes Tibetan Buddhism in the discourses of Chinese identity is not a self conception, that is to say an identity composed by and

5 Vielhaber 5 through its participants, but merely a forced blanket term (one thinks of Althusser s apparatuses) that congeals nothing, that simply points to and labels, inscribes bodies as from such and such a place believing in such and such a religion. Furthermore, this inscribing allows bodies to be controlled and manipulated (tortured) because of their easily accessible obscene legibility: Buddha Hand demonstrates the sacred reconstituted as abject, or a kind of non-value, through the process of reduction to massive (in that they are pop culture, pastiche) but absent cultural symbols that have been reduced from their former value and massively repeated and instantiated as the truth of or the essence of Tibetan Buddhism.

6 Vielhaber 6 Works Cited Baudrillard, Jean. The Ecstasy of Communication. Ed. Joanne Morra, Marquard Smith. Visual Culture; Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies. Routledge; New York, Zhang Huan Buddha Hand 2006, Copper 264 x 177 x 55 inches(670 x 450 x 140 cm)

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