They turned the cemetery into a hospital then the hospital into a grain warehouse and then into an art museum.
Australian Galleries, 28 Derby St. Collingwood, May 30 – June 17
A narcissist requires a world available to interpretation, nothing is defined or acted upon by the past or the people from it. Descartes talked about empting every belief out of your head like empting a barrel of apples and then carefully examining every belief and only returning those beliefs to the barrel that pass your particular standards or in the Cultural Revolution’s case those apples that are “useful “.During the Cultural Revolution everything was in constant revolution, not just people, ideas and objects but places as well. Cemetery land was better used for hospitals, for living people not the imaginary figures of a pre -Cultural Revolution failed Chinese history. Hospitals would soon need to be repurposed as the superior Maoist medicine – lead by the Mao Zedong Thought Medical Team of the People’s Liberation Army units 1 – 3016 – could cure all the diseases and disabilities that sort to undermine the party. The constant changing of things and renaming of things, and people, meant that most types of mental illness was categorised as “schizophrenia” by the Party’s medical records and this meant that mental illness was a scientific (solvable) problem rather than an ideological (insolvable) one.As the People’s Cultural Revolution progressed it was anticipated that all government buildings would only be needed for storing the copious amounts of excess grain and for celebrating the great achievements of the Cultural Revolution. Artworks that were damaged under one idea during the Cultural Revolution then stuck back together again because of another idea later in the Cultural Revolution – would be displayed in the one-time cemeteries, one-time hospitals, one-time grain warehouses now art museums. The sticky tape and glue holding the exhibits together made the artworks more beautiful because they showed the signs that they had been “examined” or “struggled “by Mao Zedong Thought and then had been able to reassemble themselves into a better form. In some museums, the mice and moths that had contributed to the transforming of the artworks were celebrated as the artists. In the art museum pictured there still remains some evidence of the old hospital. Physically disabled people were celebrated as party war heroes (losing their limbs in farming accidents using defective equipment “donated” by Russia). The mentally ill had a special place as representing the ability to constantly change (a special place jammed in the toilet block).Behind the art museum many veterans of the red guards have been sent to the countryside to be re-educated by the farmers, they are digging holes and then refilling them. Whenever you refill a hole there is always extra dirt left over. These piles of extra dirt were a tribute to both Descartes and Mao because they showed that whenever you change something for no other reason than to change it there is always something great – a record of you-left behind. During the cultural Revolution Chinese landscapes were littered with little mounds of extra dirt.
cameronkhayes 