London Calling
One of Ai WeiWei’s “F*ck Off” series of photographs
Here I sit on an aeroplane en route to Beijing and Shanghai – yet all the while I hear “London Calling”. Hardly surprising: my mission in China will be to find artwork for a London art exhibition that will mark the 30th anniversary of The Clash’s seminal album of the same name.
Those of us of a certain age will remember with an anarchic smile The Clash’s apocalyptic, politically charged title tune, featuring the band’s famous combination of reggae bass-lines, punk electric guitar and vocals – the lyrics reflecting the desperation of the band’s situation in 1979. And whilst punk was highly controversial in mainstream society back then, the platinum-selling album received unanimously positive reviews and in 2003 ranked at number eight on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
Great art, like great music, can impact upon individuals and society in a number of ways. First and foremost, of course, it must touch our hearts. But often art also has an important place in provoking dialogue, causing controversy, shifting attitudes: witness the dramatic effect of exhibiting the thought-provoking sculpture “Physical Attachment 4” at my own gallery recently. Art can really make us think.
Nonetheless, curating the Chinese contribution to the “London Calling” exhibition (which is to feature punk-inspired artwork from around the world, produced in the style of an album cover), will be something of a challenge. First there is the daunting predicament of trying to follow in the footsteps of the original album’s own award-winning cover, an homage to Elvis Presley that was designed by Urmston’s very own Ray Lowry. It will also be a bit tricky because the music scene in China is somewhat disconnected from the visual arts.
Furthermore, some of my curator associates in China have asserted that punk is not a good fit with Chinese culture. However, I think they might be forgetting the photographs of Ai Weiwei (the revered godfather of Chinese contemporary art) and Zhu Yu, amongst others, shown at a notorious art exhibition which ran alongside the Third Shanghai Biennale in 2000. The exhibition’s title reportedly transliterates from the Mandarin as “Uncooperative Approach”, but a blunter English language sentiment was soon adopted. Ai, the son of two poets who were exiled and made to clean toilets during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, is one of the Chinese Government’s most prominent internal critics. He encapsulated the exhibition’s artistic-curatorial attitude with a set of photos in which he gives the finger in turn to the White House, the Forbidden City and the viewer, and another in which he releases an ancient Han Dynasty Chinese vase that smashes to at his feet. The exhibition was shut down by the Shanghai police before its closing date: I think we can safely say it was provocative!
