Absurdity, Allegory and China

An old joke: first day in prison a young inmate sits silently in the cafeteria spooning his gruel. The rule for all meals is a firm ‘no talking.’ As everyone quietly slops it in a guy jumps up and yells, “Fifty-six!” and quickly retakes his seat. Everyone breaks into hysterical laughter (gruel spraying through the imprisoned air), except for the new guy who has no idea what’s so funny. A few minutes later another guys hops up, screams, “Twenty-four!” and drops like a stone back into his seat. Again everyone roars hilariously, and more misty gruel. The new guy’s now very lost. Back in his cell he asks his much older cellmate, “What’s the deal with the numbers?” and his cellie tells him that the ‘no talking’ rule has forced them into memorizing jokes, assigning each one a number. Someone stands, screams out a number and everyone knows which joke it is. Simple. The next meal the new guy decides that the way to curry group favor (as well as, possibly, saving his seat) is to hop up and “tell a joke.” So up he jumps and shouts out, “Seventy-one!” then quickly falls back into his seat. There is nothing but a deathly, deadly silence, not the least little titter, as everyone blankly stares at the rookie. Back in his cell the new guy, anxious and confused, asks his cellmate, “What’s the deal? Those other two guys yelled out numbers and everyone laughed. Why didn’t they laugh when I did?” The older man turns to the newbie, puts his hand on his shoulder and says, “Son, some people can tell a joke and some people can’t.”

Implied in the can/can’t tell axiom is that other, equally yin-yangish truth, that some people can get jokes and some people can’t. There is nothing quite so disarming as telling a good joke well only to have it DOA as the punch line sails hopelessly into oblivion over the receiver’s head (imagine Sarah Palin thumbing through The New Yorker). If you have to explain a joke it morphs from good humor into bad pain. Understanding Do you think I really wanted a 12-inch pianist is critical affirmation (and confirmation) that the last few minutes of your life – of telling this particular joke! – has been time well spent (and mensurable). But when all you get back after delivering the dagger is that doe-eyed “Ahh… yeah, and then what?” look, it’s as if you have fallen into a gray hole of ungetting, where time is looped, twisted and choked, where the heavens cave in as gravity fails, and for a brief flash you’re sure you’ve caught a glimpse of sickle-shouldered Death, only to be thrown back out on the other side (which is really the side you started from) as plumb and level come out of juddery warp and slowly steady back into focus. You’ve survived, but not by much. Jokes, after all, are serious business.

If you are not familiar with the recent/retro hoopla over the CCTV project as a giant pornographic display foisted upon unsuspecting leaders who, in the race to go Western, allowed themselves to be used in ultra-whorish fashion, have a look here at retired architecture professor Xiao Mo’s short essay entitled The Structural Similarity of the CCTV Headquarters and Hindquarters, and here at Rem Koolhaas’ artful dodge and a link to Xiao Mo’s clarification (Ch.) who “regrets the offhand manner in which he introduced the idea into his discussion of the CCTV building.” The blocked but irrepressible Danwei has been keeping up with all the bilingual salacious details.

The CCTV project as a giant symbol of “genital worship” has raised enough stink for an official response: the China Daily has waded and weighed in here, bringing Ai Weiwei into the mix on the “You don’t get it” side of the aisle, which is where officials want people to be. (In the culture of unforgiving and unforgotten reciprocities, the government now owes Ai Weiwei one. So, how many Sichuan students lost their lives in the May 12, 2008 earthquake when poorly built schools collapsed in unfathomable numbers?)

The Global Times cast their net a little wider and dragged a handful of professors into the fray, one from as far away as France, a ploy they wouldn’t have tried sixteen months ago when all things Gallic were sharp objects of “hurt feelings.”

G. Pascal, a professor at University Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle, said, “Architecture is culture, we’d better talk about it with humor.”

As I’ve mentioned a time or two in here, the CCTV project is a joke. But it is much more sophisticated than the crude version that Misters Xiao and He imagine it to be.  Their vision of the joke is an adolescent pull-my-finger gag, an unimaginative and predictable stunt of xenophobia.

In what can only be interpreted as neo-RedGuardism (or Conservative Confucianism a la Ming), Professor Xiao, a retired architecture professor from Tsinghua (pinyin: Qinghua) University has a solution. Or rather he agrees with the solution put forth by He Qing, “an art critic and a professor at Zhejiang University College of Art,” who Xiao aligns himself with.

Mr. He Qing proposed that the main building and the annex should both be blown up because they are a great shame for the Chinese people and cannot be allowed to exist. I basically agree, for I cannot think of any reason not to blow them up. Seize the initiative, is the age-old lesson! May that explosion shake awake those lost Chinese architects and those elite who even now are beating the drum for Chinese culture to fall in line with the west.

Sink the fleets! We’re staying home! Learn from Uncle Lei Feng!

If it wasn’t already pretty clear that CCTV torched their own building, Xiao and He would, no doubt, be in custody for tax fraud, revealing state secrets, internet addiction or some combination of the three.

This building has been controversial from the beginning and that it would remain so – especially after the dramatic burning of what Xiao refers to as the male member of the genitalia exposition – is not really news. But it really is good fun, full of half-wit bit players seeing all sorts of pornographic images in the clouds. But again the scab has been picked, setting it all to oozing once again. In what can only be seen as another lousy joke, the GFW (Great Firewall of China) has weighed in to.

And in a twist anyone could have predicted, the search phrase “Koolhaas CCTV” is now a sensitive term: Baidu returns no results, claiming violation of national laws and regulations.

The battle for this message, the struggle for the meaning of this metaphor will be one that promises to not go away, unless, of course it eventually falls over and everyone finally sees it as the head of a very large weapon.

August 21, 2009, 5:35 AM, fm beneath the Guanghua Lu flyover (click for larger photo)

For a few more photos of the CCTV project go here.