内容提要
序
错位的接触
皮力
中央美术学院人文学院教师
应该说在当下的文化语境中，马堡中的作品一直没有得到应有的关注和重视。在过去二十年里，国际政治、冷战与共产主义一直是他关注的主题。虽然，在90年代中，政治波普和玩世现实主义也是围绕着政治形象展开自己的语言系统的，但是和马堡中的作品相比，它们毕竟只是在形象和符号层面的语言滑动。马堡中的作品往往以历史照片为原型，在场景上和环境的真实的还原。他作品中不断出现的典故和暗示，对于当时流行的符号化处理，无疑“不够直白”或者过于艰涩和复杂。再往后，当年轻的观念艺术家开始通过观念和媒体的拓展来反思政治波普和玩世现实的时候，马堡中的写实性的绘画语言相比那些活跃的媒体试验似乎又有些传统和不合适宜。2000年以后，在观念艺术的带动下，很多艺术家开始通过随意截取文化符号或者置换绘画中的原创性和手工性。在这种观念性的绘画潮流中，马堡中的绘画似乎又有些沉重。
历史的选择往往就是这样，既有生逢其时和生不逢时的命运问题，往往在一个时间内掩盖我们的价值判断。但是经历了一定的时间后，历史似乎又总会宿命地重新进行价值系统的调整。一直以历史和国际政治为主题的马堡中，其作品探讨的往往是历史的选择与个人的命运，或者历史选择对个人命运的影响、压制和忽视。但是从艺术史上来说，他的艺术似乎也无法逃避他所关注的这些问题。也许是基于同样的理由，我们完全有理由在今天重新梳理和认识马堡中的绘画。
马堡中因为意外而被迫中止的学院教育所赋予他的是典型的现实主义创作方法论。在这种方法论的影响下，典型人物和典型瞬间，在构建绘画场面时往往时决定性的作用。也正是因此，马堡中的作品在当下流行的绘画潮流中才显得如此的“怀旧”。但是和被共产主义意识形态改造过现实主义相比，马堡中的写实是带有表现主义色彩的写实，他不已美化历史为目的，而是将目光聚集在宏大历史场面背后的细节，试图在宏大历史场面背后祛除时间性对于历史和命运的遮蔽。
从90年代开始，国际政治特别是冷战与后冷战的历史是马堡中作品中相对稳定的主题。在这些作品中，著名的历史事件、或者冷战冲突中的道具武器，往往和现实的生活场面结合在一起。 和当时流行的政治波普不同，马堡中在画面总所结合的不是符号与形象，而是具体的场景。这种场景的结合马堡中的作品开始具有一种魔幻现实主题的氛围。黑暗的风味，激烈的武力冲突、貌似外交的政治交易暗示着强烈的不安定感。 这种不安定感其实是90年代中国社会政治氛围的真实写照。今天回过头看，无论是就绘画的丰富性而言，还是对于现实的穿透能力，其意义都大于当时流行的政治波普和玩世现实主义，但是同样，正是因为其对当时政治与社会现实的深刻也造成了画面的阴暗和艰涩，而这显然和当时猎奇、大众化的西方眼光大相径庭。
也许是受到时代风格的挤压，马堡中随后创作出了“AK47”系列。作为冷战的象征，前苏联时期的AK47步枪冷战体系中的共产主义。艺术家将冷冰冰的武器，与炽热的人体结合在一起试图以性的隐喻来探讨政治暴力与个体的关系。但是正是在这些以人物代替场景的画面中，马堡中发展出了一种局部刻画的描绘方法。早期风格中对于舰船枪炮的刚硬刻画被应用到对于人物形体结构的刻画上，边缘线变得刚硬而直接。人与物之间的语言界限于是被模糊。这种刚硬而琐碎的描述继而成为了艺术家一直延续下来的风格。或许这种语言的转换使得艺术家能以更加个性化的语言切入到对于场景、人物和事件的具体分析中。1997年，因为历史的机缘，马堡中完成了一件几乎无法公开展览的作品。在这件以中英签署香港回归外交协议为主题的作品中，艺术家几乎机械的使用了一张标准的新闻照片，然后以超体量的方式将所有的这些人物和场景放大出来。整个画面延续了他刚硬的局部绘画风格，在这种风格的营造下，真实客观的场景被放大和变形，被历史场面所掩盖的人物的悲剧性命运开始呈现出来。写实然而机械化的人物造型暗示了政治事件的无情和历史的残酷。
经历了90年代末期的转折后，为了获取绘画对现实切入的直接性，艺术家放弃了现实生活的场景，而是直接聚焦于政治场景。艺术家试图通过个性的语言塑造来重新阐释历史。从某种程度上说，他试图回归历史画这样一个已经被淡出当代艺术领域的题材。与传统的历史画不同，马堡中的这些作品不再是记录和纪念，而是分析与改写。在这个名为“接触”的展览中，一方面艺术家截取了那些被媒体渲染的不同意识形态的政治人物接触，彼此走向对方的瞬间。在这些画面中，场景似乎已经不再重要，人物成为画面中绝对主角。由于场景的消失，政治事件成为了戏剧表演，每个人物都被被目光的焦点放大。伴随着艺术家刻画，整齐划一的政治表情被转换成戏剧性的姿态。这些，无疑也暗示着艺术家对于新的全球政治的判断。另一方面，艺术家截取了那些中国现代历史上重要的历史图片，同样，艺术家通过分割画面，将场景变得支离破碎，从而再浓重的背景中突现出孤零零的人物。在这些画面中，突现的同样也是政治舞台上，不同身份人物的角色扮演。当我们熟知了这些照片的典故后，历史也就成了戏剧，在美好的事物被毁灭的同时，荒诞与模糊成为了历史舞台上恒久的氛围。
经过十几年的探索，马堡中并没有流于艺术的时尚，而是在符号不断更新的潮流之外，保持着自己的方向，即通过对于历史事件的个性化呈现，获得对于历史与政治本质的独立分析和判断。从这个意义上说，他试图对于历史与政治做出终极判断的不合时宜的努力，恰恰证明了他在当下潮流中的特殊性。而我们坚信，经历了这个浮躁的时代后，他的特殊性也终将显示出恒久的文化意义。而这也是他所关注的主题：如何用个性的方式祛除历史与政治对于个性的遮蔽。
The dislocated contact
By Pi Li
Teacher of Humanities College of Central Academy of Fine Arts
In the context of China’s contemporary cultural discourse, Ma Baozhong’s works have never received the due attention and recognition that they deserve. Over the past two decades, Ma Baozhong has largely confined himself to subjects like international politics, Cold War, and evolution of communism. The Political Pop Art and cynical realism, both of which have derived their artistic vocabulary from political imagery throughout the 1990s, seem to be mere semantic maneuverings on the level of images and symbols when compared with Ma Baozhong’s
works, which, based on historical photographs, set out to seek a genuine representation both in terms of milieu and physical environment. Because of the constant presence of allusions and implications in his works, his treatment of the then prevailing symbols has been blamed for “lack of straightforwardness” or recondite, unnecessary ambiguity. Later on, when those young conceptual artists began a critical examination of Political Pop Art and cynical realism by adopting experimental ideas and new media, Ma Baozhong again seemed out of fashion for his artistic vocabulary, which has been essentially realistic. Since 2000, the rise of conceptualism in art has inspired such practices as the arbitrary uses of cultural symbols and the displacing of originality and manuality in the act of painting. As such giddy levity of conceptualism were fast gaining ground, the gravity of Ma Baozhong’s paintings was forced to take the inevitable back seat.
Whether an artistic style is to stand the test of time, which sometimes depends on its agreement with the taste and quirk of its time, seems to be a forever open question that often clouds our judgment for quite a period of time. However, at the end of that period, it is doomed that a re-adjustment will come about in our value system. Ma Baozhong, a devout enthusiast of recent history and international politics, has endeavored to contemplate on the canvas the interplay between inevitable historical choice and individual destiny, or in other words, the impact, repression, and slight that history has exercised on the fate of individual beings. From the viewpoint of art history, it appears his works are closely bound with such questions, which concern him deeply. It is for the same reasons that we’re now obliged to conduct an overall examination of Ma Baozhong’s paintings.
His education at the fine arts academy, though cut short by unexpected incidents, has given Ma Baozhong an artistic methodology typical of realism, which dictates the decisive importance of major figures and typical moments in constructing the scene on canvas. That explains the quality in his paintings, which many term as “nostalgia” today. However, in contrast to the brand of realism reformed by communist ideology, Ma’s realism is distinguished by a strain of expressionism; instead of prettification of history, he has put the focus on certain particular details in the grand, sweeping scenes taken from history in an effort to stripping off the camouflage with which contemporary relevance cloaks history as well as human destiny.
Since 1990s contemporary international politics, especially the recent history of the Cold War and post-Cold War world order, has been a consistent theme in Ma Baozhong’s
works, which often transplant elements such as major historical events or weaponry used in Cold War-related conflicts into contemporary everyday life. Unlike the Political Pop Art, which was at the height of its popularity back then, Ma Baozhong preferred actual scenes over symbols and images in his compositions, which instilled into his works a kind of magic realism. Those dark tinctures, violent armed conflicts, and political dealings disguised as diplomatic affairs all help inspire an irrepressible sense of insecurity, which was a most realistic depiction of China’s social and political environment in the1990s. From today’s perspective, such works were of much greater significance than the then popular Political Pop Art and cynical realism both in terms of pictorial richness and relevance to contemporary reality. Paradoxically, it was precisely this relevance, which entails the darkish tone and compositional unpleasantness, that had banished those works from public attention that was then obsessed with an overly curious, populist viewpoint of the West.
Perhaps feeling the squeeze of such a Zeitgeist, Ma Baozhong set out to produce his AK-47 Series. The image of the cold, inhuman assault rifle from the Soviet Russia period, once a symbol of the Cold War, was fixed onto Ma Baozhong’s canvas, in an attempt to explore the interaction between political violence and individuality through the metaphor of sexuality. And through these compositions in which human figures replace the actual scenes, Ma Baozhong has developed the pictorial depiction method that focuses on localized treatment. Commonly observed in his early works, the technique used for painting warships and weaponry gives a look of hardness and directness when applied in outlining human figures, blurring the semantic boundary between inanimate objects and humanity. Such a steel-like yet particularized technique of depiction gradually became a consistent feature of the artist’s style. It is highly likely that this shift in artistic vocabulary has strengthened the artist’s individuality in his analysis and examination of the scenes, characters, and occurrences in his paintings. In 1997, Ma Baozhong completed a painting that is doomed to be avoided by almost all public exhibition venues in a sequence of happenings that can only be explained as a historical incident. In the work depicting the signing of the diplomatic agreement between China and Britain on Hong Kong’s return, the artist virtually based his composition on a standard news photo, the characters and overall scene of which was blown up in an exaggerated manner. Following his signature style of localized treatment, the actual, objective scene was enlarged and distorted, as the tragic destiny of its characters emerged from the historical context. Beneath such a realistic yet mechanically inflexible figuration the audience can perceive the inhumanity of politics and the ruthlessness of history.
Since the turning point in the late 1990s, Ma Baozhong embarked on a journey to seek a direct relevance between the act of painting and human reality, which turned out to shift his subject from contemporary daily life to the political scene. Through his deeply individualized vocabulary, he tried to interpret history in a fresh light. To a certain extent, he was returning to historical painting, a genre that had long faded away from contemporary art world. Unlike traditional historical painting, Ma Baozhong’s works go far beyond the confines of chronicling and commemoration and enter the realm of analysis and interpretation. In the exhibition titled “Contacts”, the works exclusively focus on the moments when political figures of different ideologies come into physical contact with one another. In these works, the scene seems no longer relevant as people come to dominate the canvas. The disappearance of the scene transforms political events into a piece of drama, and each and every of its characters is exaggerated in the eyes of spectators. The artist’s touch turned those eerily uniform political expressions into high dramatic gestures, suggesting a judgment of the new global political order given by the painter himself. On the other hand, Ma Baozhong took some of the most significant images from China’s recent history, which were cut into pieces and creatively rearranged to highlight the characters that were caught in the midst of their solitary background. In all these paintings, the focus is on the role-playing of people with different identities on the political stage. Once we’re acquainted with the allusions in such images, history presents itself as a piece of drama; as the beautiful things are ruined one by one, absurdity and ambiguity comes to rule supreme on the stage of history.
In his nearly two decades of artistic exploration, Ma Baozhong has never succumbed to the fleeting fashion of the time. Steering clear of the ever-changing symbols of contemporary art, he has steadfastly adhered to his conviction that the individualized presentation of historical events is key to any independent analysis and judgment of the essence of history and politics. In this sense, it is his untimely endeavors of seeking the ultimate judgment for history and politics that has set him part in the contemporary art world of China. We believe that as this superfluous era comes to an end Ma Baozhong’s distinctiveness is bound to display its cultural significance. And that happens to be the subject that concerns him most, that is, how to remove the cloak that history and politics put on individuality by means of individuality itself.
（文章来源：《接触-马堡中新作展》）
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