Ambiguity and Olympics: Review of "Terra Cotta Warriors: Guardians of China's First Emperor"

            Now in its final week, and well over a month after the 2008 Beijing Olympics you would think that the enthusiasm for all things Chinese would have died down. Yet the American audience is insatiable. A testament to this can be found in the continued popularity of the “Terra Cotta Warriors: Guardians of China’s First Emperor” at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana.

From May 18^th until October 16^th, a selection of 14 of an estimated 7,000 plus life-sized statues that constitute the fantastic funerary army will be exhibited alongside numerous pieces of affiliated armor, weaponry, jewelry and other ritual objects. Unearthed quite accidentally by farmers near the tomb of the First Emperor Qin Shi Huang, a man credited with having unified the disparate municipalities of China under one regime, these pieces had lain undisturbed for over 2,000 years.

Each one of the warriors is remarked to have had individual features unique to them as if carved from the faces of the warriors they represented. And yet this alone cannot help compensate for a noticeable but profound sense of disappointment upon seeing the sparse offerings that make up the core of this exhibition. What is inherent to the mysticism and grandeur of the “Terra Cotta Warriors” and therefore their large appeal is admittedly their unprecedented numbers as much as their unique individual attributes.

Not surprisingly Bowers never fails to remind us of the unparallel nature of its discovery nor that this exhibition will mark the largest of its kind to ever have appeared in the United States. To be fair though, the Museum fought long and hard to make it happen. Plagued with reversals and doubts, the Chinese end of the negociations had to be reassured again and again, not only to loan the items out but also to allow Bowers to be the first to exhibit them. In past showings it seems only a handful of the warriors were ever allowed to leave China at a time.

Tellingly, a major factor behind the museums tenacity in their fight to realize the exhibition despite the relatively few amount of warriors was the assurance of success in the ongoing build up and climax of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Already a hot topic of conversation, China’s hosting of the games seemingly tripled its “brand-value” over a relatively short period of time. In this sense, Bowers had wisely hedged their bets on a popular piece of “cultural commodity”.

            Clearly then, the record breaking number of people that have and continue to attend the exhibition are swept up in something more than just an immense archaeological discovery. The carnivalesque atmosphere of the outrageous lines and “Terra Cotta” performers that can be seen giving out high-fives to a confused and bewilderingly opinionated crowd seems at least to me, something strange and out of place for a museum. 

            Everyone apparently has something to say about human rights or the origins of paper and gunpowder while waiting for, our touring the show. But I would go further than attributing this phenomenon exclusively to a ubiquitous Olympic excitement. It appears rather to be a reflection and propagation of a carefully constructed media event that has been ongoing for some time now: the drawn out debut of a new rival on the world stage.

            From a series of soft toned black and white photographs of meditative, smiling “Warriors” that greet the audience upon arrival, to the barely audible generic Chinese harp that pointlessly wafts through the air, the exhibition at times appears to paint a peaceable serenity onto an otherwise suggestive Chinese “war machine”.

            Yet in equal measure, it contains a curious amount of underlying threat in the milieu of bureaucratic Tai Chi. One such example is found underneath a giant info blurb entitled “Unification” which seeks to explain the nature of the First Emperor’s reign:

“His regime was characterized as a rule by law: laws were issued from the center to control populace not as a guarantee of individual rights as it would be under a rule of law.”

It is as if to clarify that the Qin Dynasty was not a democracy, as if the audience was unaware that ancient empires were anything but despotic. And if the suggestive nature of this wasn’t clear enough, immediately adjacent is an image of a few “Warriors” spearing a villager without any real context.

            The popularity and frenzy then of the “Terra Cotta Warriors” is part and parcel of something bigger. It in effect encapsulates the American audiences’ response to a China as an object of disturbing ambivalence. The confused and contradictory signals that place the “Warriors” and as a result, China, in a firm context as oppressive and threatening while simultaneously highlighting a defanged, prosaic orientalism accentuated by the spectacle of the Olympics is directly reflective of this.

            Other than participating in some sense of China “as event”, the value in seeing the “Terra Cotta Warriors: Guardians of China’s First Emperor” rests squarely in the ability to give life to this palpable anxiety and confusion indicative of China’s emerging place in the American cultural consciousness. 

“Terra Cotta Warriors: Guardians of China’s First Emperor” 

May 18th until October 16th 

Bowers Museum Exhibit Website: 

http://www.bowers.org/exhibits/TerraCotta_Warriors/index.jsp

In Focus: The Landscape

In Songs of the Sky, No. 2, one of twenty-seven prints featured in the Getty’s eclectic exhibition of landscape photography, Alfred Stieglitz tilts his camera upwards and photographs a silhouetted sky. It’s a small black and white print (not even 4 by 6 inches), but as powerful a depiction of natural beauty as any image in the exhibition. By including Stieglitz’s print, the exhibition blurs the distinction between landscape and cloudscape, broadening the scope of the former to include the latter. With this gesture, the curator acknowledges that any form of nature—including the celestial heavens—can conceivably create a “landscape” photograph.

Unlike the two neighboring photography exhibitions—Bernd and Hilla Becher’s “Basic Forms” and August Sander’s “People of the Twentieth Century”—“In Focus” occupies just one small room in the Getty’s photography wing. The landscape photographs, displayed in more or less chronological order, are situated close enough to each other to easily facilitate artistic comparisons, “to make the progression of aesthetic and technical developments apparent,” as the curator says. Presenting the prints chronologically also enables one to see how, in spite of having uniquely photographic techniques such as deep/shallow focus and negative splicing at their disposal, early landscape photographers still tended to mimic landscape painters—sometimes even painting or drawing over their negatives. In contrast, Stieglitz’s 1923 cloudscape abruptly signals the arrival of a new breed of photographer, the photographer as an artist in his own right.

Like Stieglitz, Edward Weston—another modernist photographer who embodies this new breed—also tests the limits of landscape photography with his print of a sand dune in the California desert. While Stieglitz’s image focuses exclusively on the sky, Weston’s limits itself to the curves and ripples of the desert sand. The photograph eschews traditional landscape composition to emphasize the inherent grace in detail; the coastal horizon is barely visible beyond the sharp-focus, high-contrast desert.

Deserts—in various renditions—are a recurring theme in the exhibition. From an 1867 sepia photograph of the Nevada desert to a 1995 color print of the Owens Valley in California, several artists document the desolate landscape of the American West. What unites the prints is not just the common setting, but the presence of humans, either literally or symbolically. In every desert image besides Weston’s (which, by virtue of its modernist style, betrays a human touch), the photographers depict human migration or its consequences. And while the early photographs tend to romanticize the West, the later prints—including Robert Adams’s—emphasize a more skeptical view of westward expansion. One notable exception, of course, is astronaut James Irwin’s 1971 lunar landscape, a photograph that glorifies exploration as enthusiastically as the desert landscape images of the 19th century.

On the surface, Robert Adams’s photograph of a quarried Colorado mesa may not seem quite as riveting as some of his other landscapes (especially the photographs in his 2006 Getty exhibition, Landscapes of Harmony and Dissonance). In actuality, the print still demonstrates Adams’s deep environmental concern, but with greater subtlety than usual. From an aerial position of virtual omniscience, Adams captures a desert landscape marred by an endless series of tire tracks; the humans are absent, but they’ve clearly left their mark. Viewing Highway 54 from a more human perspective forty years earlier, Dorothea Lange’s print, The Road West, depicts a similar transformation with less censure, emphasizing the social over the environmental.

The final image in the exhibition, a color print by Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee, succeeds in reconciling the social and environmental concerns of Lange and Adams into a single landscape photograph. The print’s composition—blue sky, snowy mountains, and desert shrubs—would form a very conventional landscape photograph if not for the intrusion of rusted, man-made furnishings in the foreground. Before westward expansion, this patch of land in the Owens Valley was home to a Native American tribe. As Americans moved west, however, the tribe lost its land to an apple orchard, which eventually lost its water to Los Angeles. Decades later, during World War II, the land became the site of an internment camp for Japanese-Americans, the remnants of which are visible in the image. By evoking the plights of these diverse groups, the photograph records the disfiguring of a pristine environment and bears witness to a history of social injustice.

In Focus: The Landscape
August 26, 2008-January 11, 2009 at the Getty Center, curated by Brett Abbott
www.getty.edu

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