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Tools |
The floor is crowded with naked hammers and sickles. There is no human being, only the handles of those tools hint at their owners' absence. The stony silence brings forth ¡®the night into plain day' (la nuit en plein jour) (E. Levinas). However, it is a kind of thundering silence. The endless emptiness spreads an unconquerable fear and trembling. Absence is present. The lava of Existence surges up as the breath becomes shortened. Anonyms, who suddenly stand up, pick up their formerly-used tools soaked with their own smell and flee to the wild fields, like apparitions. They return to their own fields, their rustic faces under the broiling heat, their misty eyes facing the iron gray land. They shed sweat like rain. The position realized by Mao Tongqiang is comparable to the grand consecration of mountains, rivers or deities. With the artist's uncommon driving force, he accomplishes a call for another Existence, which places the anonymous voiceless people under light, drawn out of the darkness where they once had been confined. Those people are then invited to the stage, breaking away from barbaric anonymity and telling stories of their individual experiences. The audience, another mass of anonyms, will probably be enlightened by understanding why ¡®the force of common people could become immeasurable', because they seek liberation from the predestination of their anonymous existence. Perhaps, it is a conscious display. When people give up fighting, they just put down their weapons. What they reject is war and the taking of lives. Hatred among people is questioned and the imagined ¡®enemy' is deconstructed. French sculptor Arman once piled up bullets and named his artwork ¡®Christmas Spirit' (Esprit de No?l). Through his position, Mao Tongqiang has revealed the metamorphosis of a symbol of an age: hammers and sickles which were once viewed as ¡®sacred' like the ¡®torch' become a sign of ¡®the retrogressive force', rather than ¡®the progressive'. They have been steeped in time, mud and sweat. They have been damaged by overuse. They have been blunted, broken and made obsolete. They have even been discarded by their owners. The scene depicted by the artist is a modern tragedy as well, which hasn't been recognized by the ¡®developing countries'. The mad developmentalists scornfully discard industrial civilization and also the manual labor, isolating the authenticity beyond the virtual Information Age and smothering real human potential in the natural environment. Perhaps, it might be sedimentation and fermentation of the consciousness of this tragedy that forces artists or anthropologists to be on the run collecting these ¡®useless' tools from life. It is hoped that through doing so, a memory of history can be retained. Like the terra-cotta warriors and horses, the numerous anonymous abstainers, embodied by hammers and sickles will hibernate for thousands of years. However, philosophers tell us that when escape is hopeless and when they have been condemned to be in some half-live and half-dead situation, people will simply begin to sleep deeply. With fatigue they give up the life struggle, but retain at least a tiny plot of land as a place to exist. The tools of Mao Tongqiang gloomily crowd the space. But they form a canyon for echoes, refracting infinite emptiness and sending calls to those people who have laid down their hammers and sickles and roam further and further from their homeland. But there is no response. There are only boundless diffusing echoes, looking for a direction, a reason for being or their own names? The memorial ceremony is certainly collective while the awakening of the consciousness occurs in each one's mind.
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