Paper Monument

Xu Tan
Keywords School – Venice
“Making Worlds”
Venice Biennale
June 7 – November 22, 2009

You have to apply to Xu Tan’s Keywords School – Venice, according to press materials for Daniel Birnbaum’s exhibition, “Making Worlds,” at the Venice Biennale. It seems that applying is the same thing as signing up. An ungoogleable person named Michael emails you back with a date – in my case June 6th. The school itself is to be found, or missed, at the center of the Giardini, an elaborately provisional structure made chiefly of two-by-fours and air.

Enter this specimen of participatory artwork’s vernacular architecture, and you encounter a table, nine chairs plus one for you, and a great quantity of audio and visual recording equipment. There will be people seated in the other chairs, but since there are no introductions, you won’t immediately know if the artist is present. Instead, an uncharismatic Canadian youngster recently graduated from the Staedelschule (Michael) will begin to explain to you the Keywords project. It began in China as a series of interviews that the artist conducted with various public figures. Their transcripts were analyzed for “keywords” – defined by frequency, social sensitivity, and a number of other criteria. You can see the results on the panels incorporated into the Schoolhouse structure – Michael gestures. Ah yes, there they are, printed on the ceiling. Some of the Chinese characters have English translations, others do not.

Xu Tan, who turns out to be seated at the table, will finish off the explanation – which by now has gone on for some time. He will look to be in his mid forties (he was born in Wuhan, China in 1957) and will be giving off an air of serious relaxation. In fact he will probably be the most relaxed-seeming person you see in all of Venice. Xu Tan is interested in understanding, very precisely, the differences in the meanings that people ascribe to words. For example, during an iteration of the project in Sweden, people reacted in surprising ways to the words “Western” and “Center” (the first they identified with America, the second, they feared, was shifting eastward). On the basis of their reactions, Xu Tan has generated a new set of lists, with which you will momentarily be confronted. Your responses will eventually be analyzed in the same way. Then, Xu Tan hopes, you will help by supplying some of your own “key” words.

You may at this point be getting a little bit restless. All the more so when you note that according to the green notebook in front of you, the school is to run from 3 until 5:30 – a point most certainly not advertised in the press materials. You may be wondering, as a matter of fact, in what sense this is even “school” – given that for the next few hours, apparently, you will not be learning, or showing off how clever you are, but rather supplying material for a line of artistic research which, frankly, you’ve only just heard of. “It’s not really a school.” Xu Tan will say with a smile when you ask him this. “It’s kind of like a workshop, but we have more of a direction. It’s more like a school for me.”

You will start to discuss the keywords, one by one: Center, Survival, America, Contact. People you don’t know will be reacting to these words, volunteering information you don’t care about. Xu Tan and team appear to care deeply – adjusting recording equipment and so on—and this, you’ll be noting, is only prolonging the process. One young man will be telling the group that he feels that communication, like a lot of other things, has become really specialized and rarified. This seems to make him sad. It doesn’t do much to check the flow of his reactions.

After half an hour or so of this, you may be thinking about whether you could just leave – why, for that matter, you can’t just leave. You could at this point be in Elmgreen and Dragset’s mock apartment in the Nordic Pavilion getting a tour by a real estate agent, or advancing in the all-day queue for a ticket to the Steve McQueen screening – which would, come to think of it, actually be less tiresome than what you are enduring now. This is as bad as a college seminar, you may be thinking, or worse because you have no grounds on which to tell people to shut up – since the point, and seemingly the only point, is for people to talk.

Thomas Hirschhorn can bore you with 24 hours of Foucault-related incoherence; Rirkrit Tiravanija may impress on you a free meal you could’ve done without; Liam Gillick can assault you with a lecture whose opacity was modeled on uranium – but they still deliver. They deliver something for you to decode, or at least to pass judgment on – evidence for you to marshal when you go home and moan to your partner about the state of the field.

Xu Tan, on the other hand, is not delivering anything. He asks you questions. When you respond, he says Thank You. It seems like he means it. Sometimes he looks blank, then he asks you something else, like: What is the difference between the city in which you live now, and the one where you grew up? Occasionally the questions will surprise you. But they’re never meant to surprise you. The conversation depends on you – it’s just not, irritatingly, about you.

When you ask Xu Tan a question, however, he’s forthcoming. (After all, he is in school.) He is happy to tell you, if you ask, that he began his career in the early 90s, interested in Western Conceptualism – Joseph Beuys, Joseph Kosuth, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke. But then he encountered a problem at the level of the concept itself – concepts, he realized, are just words that represent mental processes. But I don’t think this is a perfect description, Xu Tan will tell you.

In Western language, words are assumed to correspond to nonsubjective meanings, but this is a biased view. You can understand the bias by reading ancient Chinese – largely indecipherable to those brought up in the country after the Cultural Revolution’s language reforms – which has almost no concepts, yet also supports complex logical constructions, philosophy. Xu Tan will continue to be supremely relaxed, but at this point he will be looking at you sort of intensely. You will be trying to understand what this could conceivably mean. Xu Tan may tell you, if you continue to engage him, that by his lights art is also about modeling human awareness; that what good artists do is to create structures less partial than languages; that each artist – or writer – articulates the relationship between the conceptual and the sensorial in a distinctive manner. It’s to that end that Xu Tan’s own practice – the circle seems to be closing – involves a global plumbing of language.

And this is what makes Venice so exciting for Xu Tan: It is the first so wide international stage! (This will be the first time that Xu Tan needs to use an exclamation point.)

You might be interested to know what concrete plans Xu Tan has for the information he will have collected after the Venice Keywords School closes. He does not. Xu Tan’s practice is more like a river – continuous and fluid, without determined endpoints.

After you’ve been on board for a few hours, it is very gratifying when the Keyword School seems to be working for Xu Tan. “This is a good discussion. We go deep.” You may be pleased.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s contribution to this year’s Venice Biennale – to which she has been invited five times – is a video documentary about her past contributions. Watching a sullen Gonzalez-Foerster explain previous cycles of inspiration, realization, and reception, and the emotional ups and downs associated with each, viewers can’t help but feel acutely conscious, and maybe a little guilty, about the inexhaustible generosity we implicitly demand from artists. And yet the ostentatious weariness in Gonzalez-Foerster’s response seems a little self-indulgent, especially when compared to Xu Tan’s engagement with the Biennale.

Keywords School is no gesture of refusal; it is not ungenerous. It simply does not operate in the same economy as other works of art. (Comparing art to scientific research, Xu Tan says he is a pure scientist. Applied scientists, and artists who produce artifacts for cultural consumption also do invaluable, socially necessary work. But this is not what Xu Tan does – his process is of limited public interest, and it doesn’t necessarily have outputs.) To put it another way, Keywords School reverses the exchange between artist and viewer – it demands authentic generosity from the latter. Not a representation thereof – it doesn’t ask you to hang a wish on a tree, or for some other visible gesture of selflessness – it’s two and a half hours of your time. At the Venice Biennale. You won’t get it back. We all talk a good game against spectacle, and we’ve each sworn our commitment to routing the influence of consumerism from the province of serious art. But try attending the Keywords School. Whether it’s worth it is yet to be proven – and the fact that you can’t know is precisely what permits your generosity.