Rockbund Art Museum 上海外滩美术馆

Around the turn of the millennium, a major debate erupted in contemporary Chinese art, one which would lead a long-lasting influence on the understanding of performance and the body. The debate arose out of several works and exhibitions that involved the human body and animals (dead or alive) as the material and theme. These works and exhibitions originally aimed to attack, from a radical standpoint, a conceptualism becoming more methodological by the day and a fast-standardizing exhibition format. Works dealing with the human body and with animals rapidly became the focus of attention, with reports and discussions about similar works and exhibitions spreading right across the country. And thus an experimental creativity directed at the extreme margins was very quickly rendered as a “pissing contest” to see who could pander most to the crowds. In the end, this caused all performance- and body-based experimental art to be viewed as preposterous cheap thrills in the public eye.

Recent year, with the popularity of live broadcast applications, there are numerous videos uploaded by people from underclass on the internet, which often involved a variety of discomforting bodily performances, including all kinds of self-abuse, violence, eating various (weird) objects, forced tattooing, and excessive bodybuilding. Some critics and researchers consider the body is the only productive resource of the proletariat, the only means to shake off poverty that they themselves manage; it is their way to distinguish themselves from the upper classes, or in other words, to define themselves through differences in class identity. This is the case for performers on live broadcast apps as much as it is for artists. The commentators from different fields have raised such a tragic, cruel horizon of class illustrates the degree to which such views have become influential in contemporary culture. I t so happens that we can use this to guide they way, to search out what the values most urgently needed in today’s art are: whether artists can provide us with a different outlook, to let us glimpse both the actual, inescapable conditions of class, and at the same time, to create the possibility of a worldview and positive significance that classism cannot determine.

千禧年前后发生的一场重大争议，对中国当代艺术对行为和身体的理解造成了深远的影响。这场争议起源于一些以人体和动物（活或者死的）为材料和主题的作品和展览，这些作品和展览本来目的，是以激进的姿态冲击日渐方法论化的观念主义和标准化的展览格式。相类似的作品和展览的报导和讨论漫延全国，于是，本来有针对性地走向极端的实验创作，很快被解读成一场哗众取宠的尺度竞赛，都被社会舆论看成荒唐奇闻。

近年来，随着直播软件的热烧，在网络平台上出现大量由社会底层演绎的视频，包括各种自虐、暴力、吃异物、强迫性的纹身及健身等等令人不安的表演。网路评论与文化研究者将“身体”视为是无产者的唯一生产资源，是经营自己以摆脱贫穷的唯一媒介，是他们用以区别于上层阶级、亦即通过阶级身份差异去定义自我的方法，对于直播软件上的表演者是这样，对于以行为作为创作媒介的艺术家亦如是。而这种悲观的、残酷的阶级主义视野，说明了这种视野在当下文化中正愈见显要，而我们恰恰可以以此为指引，去寻找何为在今天的艺术中最为急迫需要的价值：艺术家是否能给我们提供一些不同的视野，让我们看到既不逃避阶级状况的真实处境、同时又能创造阶级主义所不能定义的积极意义和世界观之可能性。