"Nonsense
A. n.
I. Senses relating to absence of rationality or meaning
i. a. That which is not sense; absurd or meaningless words or ideas
b. Foolish or extravagant conduct; silliness, misbehavior. Chiefly in negative contexts, as to stand (also take) no nonsense, there is no nonsense about (a person), etc.
c. Used as an exclamation to express disbelief or surprise at a statement
—- The Oxford English Dictionary[1]
November 24, 1986 — Around a circle surrounded by cryptic protestations “Without assassination of art, there can be no peace!”; “Art is like opium!”; and “Dadaism is Dead!”; the Xiamen Dadaists concluded their retrospective exhibition by burning nearly sixty artworks, mostly oil paintings in the public square of the Xiamen Palace Museum.[i] For Huang Yongping, the destruction of his body of work prior to 1986 was a liberating act, one that clarified his desire to break with the past. In his essay “Xiamen Dada-Postmodern?” written shortly after the exhibition, Huang declared that the public burning was to provoke further participation in the “chaos of the national avant-garde.”[2] He targeted not the political system, but rather the discourse of “mainstream avant-garde artistic trends of the time.”[3]
An act such as Huang Yongping’s burning of his works is labelled as “performance art,” yet the content is more complex. Huang declared that he has rebelled against the mainstream; in this aspect, he was not unique because many contemporaries of his time often also made works of art that are considered radical or anti-institution. As Lu Peng comments, “not all the participants subscribed to the spirit of Dada,[4]” but the way in which works were created and intentionally destroyed certainly did have Dadaist overtones. However, Lu Peng notes that Huang’s strategy was “methodical”; Huang aims to trigger many different ideas, provoke our personal connections to history, present, and future. Though inspired by the spirit of anti-materiality of the Western Dadaists, Huang noted in an essay that the term was simply a placeholder for much more complex thoughts and processes of thinking: “…the exhibition was named after Dada with the purpose of using the term Dada at will, without caring whether it fit in with the context or not…”[5]
Interpreting Huang Yongping is an intellectual challenge because his work is guided by many thoughts that are frequently contradictory. His work is closely connected to personal experience, such as responding to a book or an event in the news. To interpret Huang Yongping requires a certain degree the author’s lived experience, which is lacking in this paper. To create a coherent narrative, it is necessary to select certain pieces to not become lost; yet, one must in the words of John Dewey not “lose sight of the forest for the trees.” Specifically, I do not touch on his works of a religious and cultural nature. Instead, I have focused on works that provoke tension in academia and the world stage. He provokes critique of the writing of history as remembered and reported regardless of the veracity of the events. For Huang Yongping, history is about perception that incites argument and exchange. As Huang wrote in his personal notes in 1984 after reading a text by Wittgenstein, he felt a “need to reexamine instinct and unconsciousness.”[6] What Huang proposes is beyond an argument over revisions of history; Huang invites the viewer to think about a hidden authority during recording of every event. This line of thinking has become even more conscious in his recent work, which resonates with patterns of history and anticipates the future. Dadaism for Huang Yongping is not nonsense, but to make sense of the history of civilization."
The point to posting this is to show a link, if there is indeed one, to Levi Bruhl’s take on primitive expression, where all action may define other familial actions, and I would hazard to link that with logical positivism of the modern era.
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