Description
In the lecture series "FH New Directions Lecture Series." Abstract: Mass art (qunzhong meishu) was a defining project of the Maoist fine arts program, an ambitious, expansive, and ultimately failed attempt to challenge the dominance of elite institutions over the arts of China through organized efforts at producing artists at the grassroots: to take untrained industrial factory workers, rural commune members, and low-ranking P.L.A. soldiers and make them artists (gongnongbing meishu). The art practice of worker-peasant-soldier amateurs was most legible when paired with the political and developmental programs of the state, such as the mural movement of the Great Leap Forward or the peasant art exhibitions of the Cultural Revolution. Yet I argue that the Maoist fine arts project was meant to produce more than propaganda and proletarian artists: mass art was conceived as an element of labor itself, with mass art activities organized as corollary to the labor drives and infrastructure projects of specific worker communities. In this presentation, I propose restoring the mass art movement to its labor context, examining the artwork produced by the P.R.C.’s earlier worker, peasant, and soldier communities in tandem with the construction and labor campaigns they were designed around. Through a close reading of paintings, cartoons (manhua), and serial comics (lianhuanhua) by amateur worker artists, I argue that the amateurism of mass artists challenged the commodification of the art object and of the professional artist through a decommodification of artistic labor that ran parallel to wider experiments to discard with wage labor through collectivization, such as the people’s commune. Mass art thus provides a rich opportunity to reread Maoist fine arts as a period project to capture aesthetics, as both a practice and a theory, for productive labor.| Period | 27 Feb 2025 |
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| Held at | Office of Faculty of Humanities |
| Degree of Recognition | Local |