Tag Archive | Cultural revolution
June 7, 2023  

 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.

add field deatail

May 18, 2023  

“The Great Leader Declared War on the Four Pets” 

Australian Galleries, Melbourne, May 30 – June 17. Opening Tuesday May 30th 6-8pm

The “Four Pests” campaign was introduced in 1958 as a hygiene campaign aimed to eradicate the pests responsible for the transmission of pestilence and disease: the mosquitos responsible for malaria, the rodents that spread the plague, the pervasive airborne flies and the sparrows -specifically the Eurasian tree sparrow – which ate grain seed and fruit.

With no sparrows to eat them, locust populations ballooned, swarming the country and compounding the ecological problems already caused by the The Great Leap Forward, including widespread deforestation and misuse of poisons and pesticides. Ecological imbalance is credited with exacerbating the The Great Chinese Famine. The Chinese government eventually resorted to importing 250,000 sparrows from the Soviet Union to replenish their population.

The Cultural Revolution had rejected the five values of Confucianism – kindness, righteousness, propriety, wisdom and faith and replaced them with lists of things or reasons to; hate, suspect, fight and report. The “Nine Black Categories” were landlords, rich farmers, anti-revolutionaries, bad influences, right-wingers, traitors, spies, capitalist roaders and (ninth) intellectuals. In November 1951, Mao formally launched the Three Antis Campaign (san fan). Its purpose was to eradicate three specific ‘evils’: corruption, waste and bureaucracy

A second campaign, the Five Antis (or wu fan), was launched in early 1952, almost concurrently with san fan. The five ‘evils’ nominated by Mao were bribery, tax evasion, theft of state property, cheating on government contracts and stealing economic information.

All of these party enemies and behaviours were to be surveilled, policed and fought by all citizens during the Cultural Revolution. Of course, the easiest way not to fall into one of the categories was to accuse and hate as many of these party enemies as you find, imagine or lie about. The process of avoiding being accused started with writing accusations about people in your town, that you barely knew, on big poster paper and pasting it on public buildings. With the support of other like-minded people, you then organise a struggle session where you could be seen accusing your target person of the impossibility of not avoiding one category of the impossible to remember-never ending list – of anti-party behaviours. Mao had learnt from the Catholic Church that you must keep creating sins to keep ahead of your power to forgive them.

The war on the four pets: budgerigars, cats, dogs and rabbits was a logical reaction to a political program that had exhausted the conflict weary population to the point that they could only experience the world as being on one side or the other of a political and social see-saw. Having fought with and against friends and enemies again and again, declaring war on domestic animals was a state sanctioned (no apology needed) form of forgiving each other.