Song Dong

November 2009 Reviews

Target Practice

The Audio Show

Dorothy Iannone

Anton Vidokle

Rirkrit Tiravanija

Walid Raad

Richard Long

Song Dong Simon Starling The Art of Eating Claire Sherman in New York Simon Starling A Consuming Performance Getting to the Heart of God's Bottom Introducing the 2009 Turner Prize Shortlist

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In the early 1960s, as China struggled to recover from the failed communist policies and natural disasters of the Three Bitter Years (1959-61), the government supplied each urban family with 12 feet, 8 inches of fabric, for clothing, plus half a bar of soap and a roll of toilet paper, per year. In these spartan conditions, the dictum wu jin qi yong — "Waste Not" — was less a proud manifesto than a law of survival. It’s also the title of a sprawling installation, on view at MoMA through September 7, in which the Chinese Conceptual artist Song Dong has laid out for inspection all the objects his mother kept after coming of age during a time when nothing that might someday prove useful was thrown away — ever.

Song, whose mother lived to see the project exhibited elsewhere, has always tried to give his work a distinctly Chinese identity, as well as an intimate, familial one. His performance Touching My Father (1997), in which video footage of the artist’s moving hand was projected onto his father’s face, is a case in point. In Waste Not, Song spread his mother’s broken furniture, mismatched flatware, old shoes, abandoned toys, empty toothpaste tubes — anything that ever entered the house, really — throughout MoMA's vast atrium.

The installation stands on firmer ground than most object art, which relies on some pretext imposed by the artist. Simon Starling’s transformation of the wood from a demolished shed into a boat, which he sailed down the Rhine, and then back into a shed comes to mind: The entire project was merely a sly suggestion that, through this applied narrative, the house crossed the threshold between object and art object. Waste Not, although also an attempt to make ordinary things into artworks, is the true story of a family told through its belongings and a tangible reminder of the living conditions wrought by communism gone awry. At previous showings in China and Germany, where rationing and frugality — and the hard times that made them necessary — have more immediate resonance, audiences have reportedly wept before this mass of stuff.

Still, Waste Not presents its own problems, not the least of which is that the role of the artist in it has been diminished to that of curator of the household items. Leaving aside the memories that they carry for Song, nothing has been created here, only shipped and organized for the viewing public. The art historian Wu Hung seems to agree in his catalogue essay, remarking that the installation "does not transform the material world into a different representational medium but only transports the past into the here and now."

Wu does see artistic impact in what amounts to a large gallery’s worth of junk, stating that it "astonishes viewers with an unforeseen combination of grand monumentality and unadorned ordinariness." But judging from my own experience at this exhibition, most viewers who connect with it will do so through their personal knowledge of deprivation, not through the minor attraction of everyday abundance. Although some may have found it moving as a historical reminder, this limited spectacle is the latest exhibition to raise questions concerning MoMA's ability to make decisive curatorial statements about new art.

"Song Dong" originally appeared in the November 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' November 2009 Table of Contents.