North Island
Reading this book of Gaultier's, "In Search of Home," one is often amazed at how well written it is, with its aura soaring and colorful. Writing about his childhood in Chunxi Town, Gaochun County, a small town in the south of the Yangtze River, it is as vivid and bright as a traditional New Year's painting, as if one can touch it as soon as one reaches out. Mr. Gao, who comes from a painting background and is a self-made man in terms of aesthetics, has a special talent for storytelling with pictures, so those obscure experiences are turned into clear and picturesque scenes - some people talking, some losing their temper, and some grimacing, like watching an unedited film.
Why he is able to do this, perhaps, is helped by being abroad, where he has been living in the United States since the 1990s. In a non-native environment, language is not used for everyday communication, not as a medium for mundane tasks, and so it becomes possible to use it as material on which to make art. Including the reasons of nostalgia, it is possible to push the art of a certain language to an extreme. One is also reminded of Ernest Hemingway's writing while in Europe (The Sun Also Rises, Farewell to Arms, etc.), when he was not directly using English, he wrote the most beautiful English sentences. Mr. Gaultier writes contemporary "Dream of the Red Chamber" Chinese when he is not directly using Chinese.
In the midst of the full, rich sensibility, there are unexpected flashes of rational light that can send one, unguarded, into a daze of thought, like hitting the horizon. For example, writing about catching yellow sheep on a farm in 1968, an energetic animal that ran without a trace even after a leg was broken by a pinch cymbal. After starting to look and chase along the scattered bloodstains, it finally couldn't run anymore. "I sat down. Unexpectedly, this action scared it so much that it raised its head sharply and shook its body violently. I thought what a ferocious and horrible bloody monster I was in its mind! And indeed it was; I am so sorry." Man is a product of his environment, and it is evident how lacking in humanity the environment was at the time.
Particularly for a person like Gaultier, who was regarded as a child who grew up as a playful child, how difficult it was to fit him into the same pattern, to "format" him. When he was in junior high school, he repeated two consecutive grades, the first time because of naughty fights; the second time because in the dense woods built a bird's nest, hiding in it to read, of course, academic performance can not go up. When he was a little bit older when he wandered the Suzhou Garden, feel uncomfortable: "a hundred folds of the corridor of the nine curved bridges, walking on it even step can not step, not to mention that it does not lead to where, turn around and back to the original place." And those wigwams, leaky windows, moon gates, water and flower garden, "in which to turn around, they also seem to have a few false." Such a "muddy" people, in that a clear-cut era, its encounter is bound to be like what Wang Xiaobo said, "the Queen Mother poured the toilet - may be poured on the head of whom", that is, never know what will happen to something, that is, never know what will happen to something.
In a time when everything was clear-cut, what happened to them was like what Wang Xiaobo said, "The Queen Mother poured a toilet bowl - on whose head it might fall.
In the eyes of people of my generation, the discussion that was set off by Gaultier's 1957 essay "On Beauty" has a certain legendary quality. In that era of stifling aesthetics, there was actually such an "idealistic" piece that brought in the only remaining aesthetics scholars at the time, Zong Baihua, Hou Minze, and Hong Yiran, to write and discuss, and at this time, Gaultier was only 22 years old. But about this experience, the book has only a few words about it.
Hu Jihua
Time is always cold and merciless, sending the hurried passers-by on the stage of life into the remote backdrop of the depths of history.
When I talk to my students in the classroom about Gaultier and Li Zehou, about their times and what they thought and said, I am awkwardly confronted with either indifference or bewilderment -- these monikers are so distant and unfamiliar to them. An era has thus become a fading shadow in the confusion of a generation. Gaultier, Li Zehou initiated and represented the passionate as hot "aesthetic era" so become yesterday's spring tide, pale sunset?
After the nineties, the Chinese academic world seems to be extraordinarily harsh on the liquidation of the eighties, which is not only the so-called rigorous academic norms and mandatory academic establishment against the frivolous and arrogant style of learning, to the objective and empirical Qianjia "real science" crowded out, replace the romantic feelings and the ultimate concern. Moreover, the attention to passion and the value of the subject promised by history has been indefinitely postponed and even intentionally forgotten. The ill-fated deaths of several weak and thinly-veiled Chinese scholars of the twentieth century, such as Wang Guowei, Chen Yinke, Wu Mi, and Wang Xiaobo, have made the landscape of the Chinese cultural world more and more bleak, filled with the ominous scent of death and a strong atmosphere of mourning. We don't like such a dismal mood, and we don't want to face the dismal mood secretly. The twentieth century did not lack of sensational changes, but also swept through the iron bones of the figure. In the second half of the twentieth century, in China's thinking world hurriedly passed by a real power full, androgynous figure, as well as the figure of unity with the true feelings of the thick blood of the thought, adding a wisp of heroism to the history of the bright colors, but also the "man" obsessively written into the theme of history. This figure is Galt.
In the 1950s, Gaultier made his debut in the innocent and joyful youthful song of that generation. A debate on "what is beauty" unveiled the prelude to the spiritual performance of the elite, and knocked on the door to truth. In the asymmetric "dialog" situation where the dominant ideology dominates the power of discourse and has even become a cold ban, Gao gave a categorically negative answer to the question, "Is there any objectively existing beauty?" Gao answered "Is there any objective beauty?" with a categorical negative answer. Perhaps everything can be explained by youthful exuberance, "ignorance" and fearlessness, but his excessive sincerity and extraordinary intuition did expose the inner fragility of the seemingly grand and majestic ideology, and indeed demonstrated the inner perseverance of the individual spirit, and sounded a night alarm for the souls that were floating in the ocean of vulgarity and public will. He is excessively "ignorant"! Zhu Guangqian, He Lin, Wang Ziye, Huang Yumian and Qian Zhongshu, who were learned in both Chinese and Western cultures and had quick thinking, all of them were trembling, humble and pious, relying on ideology and relying on the discourse of power, stripping themselves naked and handing over their poor souls to be kneaded at will by the power. Although the time has changed, people will be "after all, is a scholar" this omnipotent excuse for them, but we have the right to doubt, stripped bare is not a more subtle disguise? But we have the right to wonder if stripping is a more subtle disguise, or if baring is a more strategic cover-up. Power and public will conspire to make the pressure is everywhere and pervasive. Coltrane was so "ignorant" that he only knew how to trust life, respect feelings, and recognize individual differences. He said that beauty is what you feel, and if you feel it, it exists, and if you don't feel it, it doesn't exist; that is to say, "the sense of beauty is absolute," and is not subordinate to norms, coercion, or social judgment. This voice was so easy to understand, but at that time it was so lonely, there was no ****ing and echoing, only verbal and written criticism. People have been linking Mr. Gao's viewpoint with Mr. Lu's statement in a wishful thinking, but can "beauty is a subjective confusion" and "beauty is a conception" really be equated? Mr. Lu says that "beauty is an idea", but what follows is the essence: "an idea is a reflection of existence". Such an ideological statement was regarded as a heresy and suffered the disaster of "academia", and even died tragically in the Qinghe Farm for no apparent reason. Gaultier's fate can be imagined. Even Mr. Zong Baihua, who has always been tolerant and gentle, and who has always been high and far-reaching, also chose the "Objectivist" lineup without thinking, and also made some comments on Galtrey's thinking and writing, but we cannot help but ask, "Did the old man not realize that Galtrey's thinking and writing were quite suitable for his "Walking Aesthetics"? "and his "Walking Aesthetics"? Once he appeared on the scene, Gaultier honestly chose tragedy. His aesthetics is, from the very beginning, a lonely sail of his destiny, swept to the wilderness by the storms of history, and he balances the asymmetrical "dialog" in the whole cultural context almost with a young heart and a lonely force. Of course, especially because he never bowed down or repented under the pressure of "authority" and "power", what awaited him were the Gobi Desert, the desert, the red sun, the labor reform, the banishment, his wife's departure, his son's and daughter's dispersal, his family's death, and the bad luck that pressed against him like a nightmare. But he has never been pessimistic, never give up on himself, "boundless travel desire to be lost", "wandering a thousand walls to the Danqing", he copied Dunhuang frescoes, study Buddhist classics, love in the extinction of culture and art, pouring the infinite passion for life and selfless love. In this most difficult time, Gaultier began to think about the theme of human blood, explored the vein of the occurrence and decline of Chinese art, and contemplated the subtle correlation between Chinese philosophy and Chinese art. Most of the chapters in the book "On Beauty" published in 1982 are the spiritual mellow brewed by him in the bitter years. Unfortunately, "heaven and earth do not share the philosophers' sorrows", from 1957 to 1980, the most luxurious and splendid years of his life were thrown away in the desert winds, forever cut off from the blue sky and sunshine.
As Mr. Xie Changyu, who wrote the preface for the book "On Beauty," said, the years of suffering did not leave a terrible black hole in Galt's mind. In the years after the vindication and correction of mistakes and the implementation of policies, his unprecedented outburst of passion brightened his sensual vitality and his spiritual creativity was at an all-time high. In the 1980s, Mr. Li Zehou's aesthetics dominated the world, and he confidently told people that subjective aesthetics "has disappeared". Is this really true? Gaultier never made a superficial argument, but just wrote one after another those very rich in personality, spirituality and poetry, telling people that the essence of beauty is also the essence of man, the essence of man is freedom, beauty is a symbol of freedom, art is the expressive form of human emotion. At one time, he quickly won the extra respect of the youth, not only because of his full of bitter water but not lose its magnificent image, dare to hate and love, a deep love of the sincere personality, but also because his aesthetics is the appeal for freedom, the persistent affirmation of the sensual power of life. In real life encountered misfortune and despondent young people naturally think of the great teacher of the vicissitudes of life, but also as his predecessors and friends and draw the power to strive for. Therefore, his aesthetics is respect, care and guidance for life, rather than axioms or dogmas written in textbooks. The so-called "beauty is subjective" developed in the 1980s into the symbolic realization of the subject's freedom: the so-called "beauty is absolute" developed in the 1980s into the continuous transcendence of "rational structure" by "sensual dynamics", and the quest for beauty is fundamentally in line with the emancipation of human beings. Everything that does not fit into the scale of freedom, everything that is not favorable to sensibility, life and individuality is, in his view, the antithesis of beauty. Because of the sincerity of his personality, because of the mundane conventions of a thousand-year cultural empire, and even more because of the power of his words, it was destined that the center of culture was not his home, and that he could not but be marginalized. He was almost exiled to the bank of the ancient Yellow River, from the Northwest plateau to the Sichuan basin, and finally chose the pleasant climate, the birds and flowers of Chengdu's eastern suburb of Lion Mountain to settle down, began to recruit postgraduate students, and also began his sweet third marriage. Perhaps, this initiative to choose the suffering of the big man after all is also a human being, is a human being also need a that even if it is a temporary calm harbor.
When we as students entered the door of Gaultier, the fierce waves rowing in the air, the waves cracked the shore of the "aesthetic fever" has ebbed, almost in the publication of the Yinghua fell, no longer brilliant in the ordinary years and the encounter with this great elder. We felt extraordinarily fortunate that he taught us at the same time as Professor Su Heng, a poet and literary theorist. Mr. Su had the grace of not competing with the rest of the world, but he was also full of spirituality and profoundly affectionate. We have long admired his name, but Gaultier never sat down to teach us a lesson in three years. We always walked beside him, talking and laughing, shouting as we walked (he had an ailment in his left ear), bitter but full of forceful words, "sense of sorrow", "sensual drive", "tragic struggle" "Alienation", "pseudo-semantic structure", and so on, were all spilled out in the sunset of Lion Mountain in Rongcheng. Whenever he is happy and forgetful, he waves his fist and high-fives. Our students and teachers were practicing Zong Baihua's "aesthetics of walking" on the campus of the Sichuan Normal University, and it became an interesting scenery on the campus. Sometimes he was silent for a long time, especially when he was painting on the table, and we could only stand behind him hour after hour, savoring the bitter "beauty" of silence. He was a man of great personality, but without prejudice. He seldom repeated the ideas he had already put into writing, but formed new ideas by arguing and competing with us. This is how the basic ideas in the article "Beauty and Pleasure" were formed, and even after it was published, we were still competing with him. In the 1980s, Sichuan Master was a piece of "forest enclave" far away from the cultural center, but in our opinion, it was an academic sanctuary far away from the impetuous hustle and bustle of the metropolis, where there were not only passionate intellectuals such as Gaultier who advocated freedom, but also intellectuals like Mr. Su Heng, who was as innocent, sincere, and tolerant as Mr. Su Heng, and in particular, there were also descendants of the Qianjia School, who were the most influential and influential school in China. In particular, there are the descendants of the Qianjia School - "Shuology" represented by Mr. Qu Shouyuan, Mr. Tang Bingzheng, Mr. Du Daosheng, etc. A large number of masters and elites of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who have learned from them, making the "simple" and "real" schools of thought and the "truthful" schools of thought. "They have their own academic norms and beliefs, and they have their own academic norms and beliefs, and they have their own academic norms and beliefs. They have their own academic norms and beliefs, but also outside the school of others and their views have the elegance of acceptance. Gaultier and Mr. Tang Bingzheng were close friends, and Gaultier repeatedly quoted Mr. Tang's views on Qu Yuan. Gao encouraged us to dialog and exchange ideas with these masters by letting us take their classes and listen to them preach and talk about literature. "The scenery is unique", and we truly have the spiritual space to transform the ancient and the modern, and to integrate the East and the West. Like Mr. Du Daosheng, over eighty years old and mentality as a child, in his mouth what Wyatt Hyde, Cahill, Levi-Strauss foreigners and other names also fly out from time to time. Lion Rock years, leaving us always not only learning, but leading the spirit of life, infected soul of the atmosphere. Gaultier a **** with more than a dozen graduate students, its thesis is no one to aesthetics as its pure theme, we are in the absence of any confinement of the state of mind, from Husserl to Derrida, from Zhuangzi to Wang Guowei, from the Chinese classical art to the folklore of the mysterious, ancient and modern Chinese and foreign, all dabbling in it, is it not still intriguing?
Galtaire's aesthetics is full of poetry and power, he is essentially an artist, but also considers himself a "warrior". His aesthetics at the same time gives the impression that theory is also green, and only alienated theory is gray. What he gives is first of all an uninhibited ease, in which there is a poetic soul leaping with endless charm. His words give a sense of force, revealing the tension between sensibility and rationality, the individual and the whole, life and form, power and obligation. He strongly disagreed with Li Zehou's "doctrine of historical accumulation", believing that this doctrine is based on static and points to the past, while "beauty exists dynamically as the driving force of future creation". Therefore, he proposed to abandon the accumulation, transcend the achievements, pursue differences, changes and diversities, put into the eternal time stream, and chase in the process and link, instead of paying too much attention to the faded legend and the myth of metamorphosis. His aesthetics is the aesthetics of change, "everything is a disappearing link", and aesthetics is the experience of process rather than result.
Gaultier is still moving, he is always actively forgetting, active erosion, and vowed not to follow the customary flow, not attached to the public will. When the "eighty-five new wave of art" put forward the Chinese classical art "the end of the road", and then invited from the conservative position of the attack, Gaultier cherish the young artists of the critical spirit of creativity, affirmation of the national art of the search for change, for Li Xiaoshan, for Shi Hu again and again defense. When many people in China are in love with the irrationalism that has pervaded the world of human spirit since the 19th century in the West, he sounded the alarm, called for the spirit of rationality, and advocated the use of natural science methodology in aesthetics. When the "methodology fever" came over the world and people almost became slaves of "method", he raised the banner of humanism and emphasized that scientific method should be commanded by humanism. When people closely follow the trend of modern western art and have nihilistic feelings towards national art, he argues for the spirit of Chinese art and its future prospects with his profound knowledge of Chinese culture and deep experience of life, and foretells the hope of national culture. When people were looking backward and almost fell into the predicament of cultural conservatism, he and Mr. Wang Yuanhua initiated the "New Enlightenment" at the turn of the eighties and nineties, advocating anti-alienation and eliminating the pseudo-value semantics of traditional culture, which was the enlightenment of the intellectual elites - the "Second Enlightenment". When the consequences of enlightenment unexpectedly raised the turbid current of "rejection of the sublime" and "desire for degradation", there appeared in the literary world the "helpers", "helpers", "helpers", "helpers", "helpers", "helpers" and "helpers". In the literary world, there is a morbid trend of "help", "help", "play", and so on, he argued again and again for the art of realism, emphasizing the critical spirit of art. He called for democracy and had the idea of freedom, but once the political fervor swept the square and almost became a farce, he was silent and stayed away from the events on the square, keeping a prudent distance from them, which reminds us of Derrida in the "May Storm" in the West in 1968, and which makes people puzzled about the mystery of the whole thing. In fact, the aesthetics of change, like the world-famous "deconstructionism", is an antidote to the inertia of thinking and the will of the public ****, which is characterized by a cool sobriety, not to be swept along by the trend and to lose oneself. Its essence is freedom, "the freedom of man to show his differences in choice is profoundly linked to his overall existence," says Berdyaev.
Galtung was free, so he was always so confident, and all his words and deeds were full of the sincerity of life and the redness of emotion, with the air of heroism. He loved to read "Li Sao" and loved the paintings of Shi Tao. Because from the sorrows and spiritual fission of Sanlu Dafu, he read the tragic conflict between heroism and slavery, and realized the powerful tension between Confucianism and Qu Sao's spirit, which gave "Li Sao" a soul-stirring artistic infectivity. He also realized that beauty is the glory of freedom from the "painting" of the Bitter Gourd Monk, and read the dialectics of life's distant travel and return. In a word, he proved the tragic struggle of sensual power against rational structure from Chinese poetry and paintings, which is the sign that his theory is different from the "accumulation theory". He had a deep experience of flesh-and-blood exchanges in Dunhuang Buddhist art, and he felt the spirit of sorrow and the consciousness of death in the artistic images of the cave murals, but he also found the power of optimism to dominate sorrow and life to conquer death, and even revealed the possibility of salvation for the world of suffering.
Galtaire's personality and words are the true embodiment of the "sensual dynamics" that he honors. The "sensual power" comes not only from his personal conquest of suffering, but also from the immortal life spirit of classical Chinese culture. The power of his personality and speech shook the pseudo-value system as a form of alienation and as a structure of rigid rationality, the dominant ideology in history, stripping off its grandiose exterior and revealing the deficit of its inner value. However, it is reasonable to think that after the real decline of the king's consciousness, the history of the king's way, and the classical authority, the "grass-roots spirit" rather than the "temple consciousness" of the classical Chinese culture will still be his blood element. His confrontation with Li Zehou is not a personal grudge (at least in the aspect of Gaultier), but an inescapable "predicament" of a specific era. Mr. Li Zehou over-values cultural and psychological structures, and is too obsessed with historical deposits, but in hindsight, this shows that tradition, as a stubborn and malleable rational structure, has far-reaching braking power, and always and pervasively sends a fatal challenge to the world of life, but in any case, the sensual power surpasses the rational structure as an irreversible movement. The profoundness of Galtaire is in recognizing the trend and direction of this movement. However, Mr. Lee was neither a fool nor a conservative. In his later years, did he not also struggle to break free from the cultural shadow of his own making, to affirm individuality, sensibility, and life, and to conceive of an "emotional ontology"? Because of the times and artificial constraints, this dialogue between Gao and Li, which was rich in the colors of the times, did not last at that time, much less achieve positive results. However, this too short-lived flash in the pan reminds us of the conceptualization of psychology and science, and especially reminds us of the "Franco-German controversy" in the West in the 1980s, the end-of-the-century controversy between Derrida and Lyotard on one side and Gadamer and Habermas on the other. The French thought that "heaven, earth, man and God" had been deconstructed, the grand narrative had fallen, modernity had come to an end, and man had died: the Germans thought that the world after deconstruction was not an ideal situation, and that the project of modernity initiated by the Enlightenment would always be unfinished business. In fact, the French-German dispute is a dispute between postmodernity and modernity. Postmodernity is an extreme form of aesthetic modernity, and it is only when Enlightenment and reason have metamorphosed and suspiciously shackled people that aesthetic modernity, in its extreme form of postmodernity, is continuing the unfinished business of modernity! If the German's exploration of public **** space, to interact with the **** the same body of the imagination of the human desire to return, then, the French declared war on the whole, to the differences of the publicity, precisely reflects the human impulse to travel, the desire for exile.
The long journey, the exile, is also the holy order that aesthetics has to receive. After the nineties, when Mr. Li Zehou was lonely and helpless, Mr. Gaultier left his homeland, leaving behind a worrying and saddening spiritual vacuum: the spirit of postmodern games was rampant in the academic world, and retrofuturism went to the blocking of creativity under the banner of Changming nationalism, both of which rejected the value of caring from the left and right wings, challenged the ultimate beliefs of human beings, and openly scorned the creativity of the spirit. In this ludicrous predicament, we cast an awe-inspiring glance at the back of this should not be so far away, but not mourning, will not be god!
Coltaire, a man who swore not to follow the vulgar stream. On the other side of the ocean, is he very relieved, very relaxed, very dashing and free?