MCLC: Self-Styling diss review

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Self-Styling diss review
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Source: Dissertation Reviews (5/20/14):
http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/9105

The Making of the Chinese Creative Class
A review of Self-Styling: Practicing Creativity and Remaking Aesthetics in
Post-Socialist China
by Lily Chumley

Self-Styling: Practicing Creativity and Remaking Aesthetics in
Post-Socialist China is a fascinating study of ideologies and practices of
creativity in China in the market reform era. According to the author,
Lily Chumley, who is currently teaching at the Department of Media,
Culture and Communication at New York University, self-styling refers to
“the complex semiotic work of cultivating and narrating an aesthetic style
and expressing an ‘individual’ self” (p. 5), a central aspect of creative
practices. At its core, the dissertation explores what it means to
cultivate creativity and creative subjectivities in a politically
illiberal society, and it does a laudable job parsing out the tensions and
contradictions experienced by young artists while trying to “find
themselves.” Specifically, the author makes the following interlaced
arguments: (1) Visual culture industries and its workers, including
artists and designers, have played a central role in remaking political
and commodity aesthetics, a role that certainly does not exclude the
Chinese state as a key player in the growth and expansion of art education
and creative industries. (2) Post-socialist visual culture is
characterized by the coexistence of “the aesthetic novelties of reform and
the aesthetic legacies of socialism” (p. 16). Specifically, for example,
socialist realism has survived the market reform and has continued to
exercise influence—in a highly specific form (images of pensive faces and
weary bodies of the working-class) and through a perhaps unexpected venue
(private test prep classes)—on post-socialist visual culture across
multiple genres, including official art, academic art, and the
avant-garde. (3) Creative practices in post-socialist China are shaped by
nostalgia for an idealized past and anxiety about the commodification and
perceived disintegration of Chinese society. (4) Young artists learn to
perform creativity by “mastering genres of speech and narrative” (p. 179),
developing personal styles “through the discursive marking of aesthetic
and stylistic differences,” and socializing to “distinct aesthetic
communities” (p. 177). (5) The political implications of self-styling
remain ambiguous insofar as the “self” remains a neoliberal self whose
interest does not go beyond pursuing freedom in the private sphere.

Taken together, these arguments make a compelling critique of creativity,
debunk the myth of creative subjects as being born of the market force to
become democratizing agents, as some Western observers would believe, and
embed the emergence of forms of creativity in historical circumstances
shaped by dominant institutions—the state, school, family, and the market.

The dissertation is composed of five substantive chapters in addition to
an introduction and a conclusion. In Chapter 1, in addition to explaining
and contextualizing the key terms of “self-styling,” “practicing
creativity,” and “remaking aesthetics,” the author provides a useful
justification for the focus of her research project on art schools. She
reasons that “art school is the one place in which all members of all the
visual-culture industries cross paths, an institutional nexus for a highly
diverse array of fields and communities… Art schools therefore constitute
a world of intersecting communities of practice and aesthetics far beyond
the narrow professional fields of the ‘fine arts.’ Second, insofar as
‘creativity’ and ‘self-styling’ are the central topics of this
dissertation, art schools provide the ideal place for examining how these
productive capacities and subjectivities are cultivated (peiyang) in
society.” Thus her field sites include private test prep schools,
art-school entrance-test grounds, art supply stores, art bookstores, and
art institutes. Other major sites of research include works of
contemporary art and films, art exhibits, galleries, museum, studios, and
cafés.

Documenting a series of art exhibits commemorating the thirtieth
anniversary of reform (from 1978 to 2008), Chapter 2 looks at how the
nation’s recent history is remembered and narrated in three independent
art exhibitions. Notably, all the art exhibitions are “interdiscursive”
with the official narrative, often employing the same imageries, tropes,
and timelines of reform. At the same time, they are also differently
inflected by personal stories and perspectives. Most, if not all, of the
artworks in the exhibits draw upon nostalgic sentiments about the past as
well as critical/cynical views on hyper-consumerism in contemporary
Chinese society. Chumley makes an insightful argument about the “aura of
the undesigned,” stating that “these artists employed a kind of
archaeology of reform to create a postsocialist pastoral, memorializing
and romanticizing a lost world of workers and peasants. By moving
‘unstylized’ objects into this highly stylized exhibition space—a sleek
gallery with white walls, exposed pipes and buffed concrete floors—these
artists seek to recapture a kind of authenticity belonging to things that
are not designed: things whose aesthetic qualities are not reflections of
their performances as commodities in markets” (p. 58). There are also
artworks framed by a narrative of self-expression and self-realization.
But whether celebratory, nostalgic, or moralistic, these art exhibitions
are ideologically complicit in the sense that they “naturalize capitalism”
(p. 73) by being silent about the central role of the state in China’s
post-socialist transition, a role that comes to the surface in a
historical account of the institutional reform of the Central Academy of
Fine Arts (CAFA).

Chapter 3 explores the conundrum of the proliferation of Soviet-style
socialist realist drawings (remade as art test realism or ATR) in the
midst of the art test fever, and the rapid expansion of private test-prep
industries in the 2000s. Chumley points out that the art test fever is by
no means an indication that more young Chinese aspire to become artists;
rather, it is more due to the parents’ calculation that taking the art
test will provide their children with the best chance of going to college,
especially if the children are not doing well academically. As art tests
become increasingly standardized with the growing number of test takers,
preparing for the test comes down to mastering three skills derived from
Soviet-style socialist realism: “delicately shaded bust-length portraits
of work-weary faces, called sumiao; vividly colored impressionist
still-lifes focused on a chunky materiality, called secai; and rough,
choppy, outlined sketches of people sitting, squatting and standing,
called suxie” (p. 129). These are exactly the manual skills that students
are taught to master in private test prep schools (huaban). Interestingly,
because these skills are taught out of context, the history and politics
of socialist realism are completely erased. As Chumley writes, “as the
discourses surrounding drawing training … focused on drawing as a form of
manual-technical training … oriented exclusively toward the entrance
examination, the political and historical meanings of the realist genres
being re-produced were ‘erased’” (p. 84). Hence socialist realism is
reproduced without design by the private test prep industry.

In Chapter 4, Chumley argues that the art test fever played a key role in
remaking the visual culture in contemporary China by “generating first a
set of increasingly specific image-genres (the most prominent being a kind
of highly detailed pencil portrait of an expressionless, weary face)… and
second, a more subtle aesthetic, which I argue percolates beyond the rigid
genres of the art test into contemporary Chinese visual culture, including
avant-garde art and film” (p. 128). She traces the striking similarity in
the portrayal of the migrant worker between ATR and the dominant realisms
in visual culture, i.e. avant-garde realism, official realism, and
academic realism. She explores the proliferation of images of the
expressionless, resigned, weary faces of the migrant workers and argues
that regardless of the genres to which they belong, these images all index
a “vision” of “sympathetic objectification” (p. 133) through which the
“envisioner” recognizes the working class’ contribution to the
accumulation of societal wealth while at the same time turning laborers
into “fundamentally passive” (p. 172) objects for contemplation. Thus, the
seemingly meaningless ATR becomes fully meaningful when examined in
juxtaposition with these images contextualized within the official,
academic, and avant-garde genres. Worthy of further exploration in this
extremely fascinating inquiry are: (1) the larger discourse of the
marginalized groups (ruoshi qunti) that has proliferated in all kinds of
Chinese media; (2) the centrality of the marginalized groups as Other in
the formation of the identity of the Chinese middle-class; (3) images of
the working-class that run counter to the ATR imagery (consider The Piano
in a Factory, or gang de qin, directed by Zhang Meng).

Chapter 5 provides a deeply engaging ethnographic account of how CAFA
students are taught to perform creativity in discussion-based,
critique-style “creativity classes.” In these first-year classes, students
are told to explore their selves in bodies and memories and to embed the
“self” in aesthetic forms—forms that they also learn to use to locate
themselves in relation to larger aesthetic communities, “groups of artists
and designers differentiated by styles (high modern, neo-classical,
traditional, anti-mainstream etc) and modes of aesthetic
self-presentation” (p. 180). Chumley contends that finding one’s self in
the context of creativity classes is politically innocuous, as the self is
fashioned as fundamentally depoliticized and content with realizing
his/her freedom in the world of consumption. Chumley gives a telling
example of a student incorporating the image of the Statue of Liberty in
her artwork. For the student, the image had nothing to do with a desire
for political freedom or with its appropriation in the 1989 Student
Movement; rather it meant “free, and a goddess” (p. 208). This chapter
sheds important light on how creativity is actually taught, learned, and
practiced in institutional settings like CAFA.

Chapter 6 further elaborates on the idea that “personal style is itself
cultivated through the discursive projection of aesthetic community” (p.
237), and goes on to describe how one continues to find and articulate
one’s self in diverse and overlapping practice and aesthetic communities
after leaving school. This section focuses on events and interactions in a
number of locations, ranging from art market and galleries to studios and
cafes, where artists and designers develop and sharpen their sense of
identity and identification with larger communities that may be physical
and based on face-to-face interaction, or imagined via commodities or
media in long-distance circulation.

To the extent that the dissertation focuses on the formation of “creative
subjects” through practices that initiate young art students into the
burgeoning cultural industries as “self-styling” visual culture workers,
this research is also about the making of China’s “creative class.” This
very timely study fills a gap in the anthropology of Chinese capitalism by
focusing on production rather than consumption, and a gap in Chinese media
studies by asking and answering a crucial question: How is creative labor
produced and reproduced for the burgeoning creative industries of China?

Ruoyun Bai
Department of Art, Culture and Media
University of Toronto
rbai at utsc.utoronto.ca
Dissertation Information
University of Chicago. 2011. 304 pp. Primary Advisor: Judith Farquhar.