Absurdity, Allegory and China

I am not a man of or for the seasonal expression of Resolve. Far too many official and potentially damaging implications are tied – as in a noose – to the concept of swearing something, either off or on, under the arbitrary guise of a date change. If January 1st, then why not March 29^th or August 15^th, both of which seem as inherently and imperfectly good or bad as any New Year’s Day.

If you make a resolution (or for the truly insane, more than one), odds are you will break it. So what’s the point in sowing the seeds of your own disaster? The Greeks gave us tragedy to warn us away from stumbling into self-generated catastrophe, and for better or worse, I paid attention. Imperfectly learning that lesson has not stopped me from pitching headlong into calamity, but I’ve come to understand that if I am going to wander into a minefield, it’s just as well that I was not the one who laid the mines: besides the obvious damage, I’d have to live with the knowledge that no one else planted the seed of my own destruction. There have always been enough agents of derailment afoot in the world to knock the best (or least) of us off the track, and, since making resolutions falls under the same general heading as suicide, I try my damndest to give it a pass. But things don’t always work out according to the Plan.

That said as preface to a resolution, I will now spill my latest obsession: I cannot comfortably look away from the massive hulk of the CCTV Headquarters Building rising in flagrante in the center of Beijing. Blue sky, Moon-rising night, deeply thickest Fog, I cannot NOT look at this thing. Last week as I was traveling west-to-east along Jianguomen, approaching the noodly confusion of the interchange, I told myself, “I’m not going to look north. I am not!” even as I turned to gawk. I’ve got it bad, as, I must believe, everyone in Beijing, for one reason or another, has it bad. It is the singularly most controversial building I have ever had the opportunity to see rise up before my eyes. And as it rises so do a flood of images, some of which are actually anchored in experience.

Before moving to China I heated our rural Virginia home with wood and had a variety of tools to assist with the duties of making trees into stove-sized fuel. Of all the tools I owned, the Monster Maul is one that, short of hydraulics, put all the other wood splitters to shame. The wide orange wedge set on an unbreakable metal handle, was wrapped in an all-weather hardy black foam. Total weight: 23 pounds (10+ kilos). It was a lift-and-drop medieval-looking weapon that split nearly anything. Rounds of the nastiest hardwood would pop apart from fear before the Monster even made contact. In its design Beauty had been forsaken for Utility, and the force that drove the form was a mix of Heft, Taper and Gravity which ultimately leads to Heat. If you had the strength to repetitiously lift it, the result was a ready pile of fuel.

To be in Beijing right now is to be under the insensible shadow of an unimaginable building wave, punctuated by a visual siege of disparate and competing architecture. The assault leader, located in the emergent Central Business District, is the CCTV (China Central Television) Headquarters Building, the state-funded State’s center of mass propaganda and highly-controlled entertainment. This loopy building commands not only the skyline, but also viewers’ imaginations, though not, I think, as artistic inspiration as much as by the question, “Does anybody really get it?” It seems more of a straining cross-cultural joke as told from a culture that is, as yet, undefined. It has become a symbol out ahead of a cause, though, through sheer bully and shove, the structure has become an integral player in the creation of the cause.

Before a few years ago there was no way to have generated the computer-modeled plans for a building such as this one. But Rem Koolhaas (what ‘more perfect’ name for an architect?) and Ole Scheeren, the former’s protégé, from Koolhaas’ Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) did it, in what the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has referred to as “one of the most visionary undertakings in the history of modern architecture” in their 2006 “OMA in Beijing: China Central Television Headquarters by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren” exhibition. And there it is, Art unfolding very visibly among us.

This project with recognized artistic tooth looks more like a wide-headed maul than a tooth. But, if, in fact, it’s Art as MoMA, by honoring it with an exhibition as it barely poked above the ground, claims, I guess we can see it as a tooth, a maul or clothed monkey heading east for that matter. When I think about it this way I get all-fuzzy for just a moment, almost relaxed, before that feeling passes as Confusion settles back in, and I return to understanding this structure more as a joke. A good joke, no doubt, and a well-engineered one, too, but it’s hard to figure out whose joke it is. Is it OMA’s on China, China’s on OMA, or China and OMA’s on the world? At any moment of any day I can choose any one of the above, as long I am comfortable with accepting that it is, in fact, a joke. And I seem to be coming around more to understanding it not as just another joke, but as the next Joke, the one that will never muddle and sputter into cliché, unless, of course, it falls down and takes out the flyover at Guanghua Lu, which could be phenomenally disastrous if it happened during any of the stuttered and extending rush hours.

But after the laughing stops, there is something that always lingers: an aftertaste of Agitation, both visual and conceptual. It’s like being attracted to an aging botox-ed Helen despite knowing her track record for sewing absolute Carnage. But here the Beauty is buried in the idea and the execution, rather than in its physical presence in the skyline, a presence more raw nerve than community consolation. To me it will always be a maul at its apex threatening to fall, a structural expression of a great lopsided tyranny. That Tyranny can tell a joke is, in itself, a joke, but if we enter into those halls we’ll find ourselves caught in the nasty and historic never-ending loop. No one wants to go there.

The essence of a joke is in the beauty of the telling, and someone has told a beauty here. But does anyone get it? The problem is it can’t be gotten until someone claims it as their joke, which will then, once and for all, set the true tone and punch of it, let us know who the butt really is. But determining ownership of the really big jokes, especially the ones that cost big money in countries that try their best to wish away hundreds of millions of their disenfranchised comrades, is tricky Business indeed.

With that said, I will now gingerly tiptoe out onto the plank and offer up a resolution, even though, as I’ve explained, I’m always loathe to do so. Resolve: I will do my best to not stop searching until I learn who made this one up. That I will give up before I get it is probably the inevitable outcome. Developing.