When I enter the British Museum it is heaving. Heaving sleet outdoors and people indoors. I had forgotten how busy these kinds of places get; a born-and-bred Londoner, I pay little heed to the capital’s tourist destinations and rarely deign to pay them a visit. And now I remember why: the crowds. There is nothing glamorous about this crowd – it is damp, bolshy and overly assertive. An unsightly mob, it is unmistakably recognizable owing to the multitude of rustling carrier-bags it totes, each filled, I am sure, with homemade jam sandwiches. The throng tends either to be pushing pram or photographic apparatus and threatens, steely-eyed, to mow down any innocent browser who would drift aimlessly through the museum’s cavernous chambers.
Having engineered my way through this initial and sadly unrelenting obstacle, I find that this to be but an early indication of a saga whose journey which will see me through Ancient Egypt, where stony heads stare down at me, to Greece and Rome, all the way to Asia-Pacific and the Indian subcontinent. Tour groups composed of German (or are they French?) adolescents, each heavily kohl-ed and tightly jean-ed, must be dodged; digital Leicas, Canons and Panasonics surreptitiously abound, disregarded by the bored-looking, gum-chewing gallery attendants. Why, however, do I regale you with the woeful tale of my lengthy escapade? Because it all seems part of the pitiable aftertaste which was left lingering long after my visit to Icons of Revolution. Such a strong title, such a feeble resonance: it does not quite add up. Everything about it rings ‘not,’ to put it in Eliot’s terms, ‘with a bang but a whimper’. This is ‘the way the world ends’ – and this is the way Mao’s world ended. The fact that merely finding the display requires a feat of patience and persistence signals the sad demise of the grandiose edifice once occupied by the Communist Party in China. The girl at the ‘Information Desk’ had not even realised that this exhibition was on and I encountered not a single signpost upon my circuitous route. In the shop there was but a glaring hole where the purchasable paraphernalia usually associated with the pronounced ‘Icon’ should have been – only warrior after terracotta warrior. Not even a postcard was there to draw the pennies from my purse.
As I walked up the broad and imperial staircase to the upper galleries, the stately architecture gave way to an MDF landscape gaffa-taped with temporary linoleum flooring. Finally, having managed to draw an attendant away from his iPod for one irritating moment, a dark opening presented itself, closeted between several Grecian urns. An understated tunnel framed in black gave way to a tiny room clad in steel – and I was overcome with the sensation of entering some kind of nuclear bunker, such as that occupied by Hitler in the face of his crumbling Fatherland. Again this seems but a salutation to the ‘last days’-ness which underscores this exhibition: it advertises but the rather pathetic end to which the ‘splendour’ of the CPC was driven.
The Cultural Revolution in China took place in the years 1966-76, though the display features ephemera from as early as the 1900s. It charts the progress of the imagery from the stirringly emblematic and ideological to the sartorially dismissive and satirically lampooning attitude of the present-day. For though Mao’s image continues to play an important role in the Chinese landscape, today it is spectral and haunting in quality. His portrait still occupies pride of place in Tian’anmen Square, his face is still printed upon the red 100-yuan notes. However, in a cruelly ironic twist, it is more commonly to be encountered in 2008 appropriated by the various manifestations of pop culture, by advertising and marketing. When I myself was in China, souvenir shops were populated most densely by Mao-printed bags, t-shirts and red-star patches. Not a single backpacker was to be found without some revolutionary token pinned to his torso. These ‘icons’ have been wholly reclaimed by the energetically entrepreneurial spirit evident upon every street corner and as such, serve merely to hammer the final nails in the coffin of China’s communist past. One of the most subversive items on display is an enamel mug which reworks the slogan ‘Increase and vigilance, defend the homeland’ into ‘Increase and vigilance, defend the stock market’.
Such brave appropriation is the more genuinely revolutionary aspect of this exhibition. In truth, the display presents us with two revolutions: first, the accepted revolution of the CPC and second, that of the individual and of free speech. It is the latter which captures the authentic spirit of the term – it suggests the overthrow of top-heavy tyranny, of an impersonal social order in favour of the solitary speaking voice.
Despite this, I could not help but feel that a certain hollowness surrounded both enterprises. In Mao’s case, the question arises: ‘after the revolution, what next?’ A cause which derives its identity from the struggle to overthrow a dominant system cannot, by very definition, ever achieve its aim. The demand to ‘strive for victory’ and to ‘surmount every difficulty’ (1945) cannot ever be met. For once the posited frontier is broached we must immediately shy away; to unite the struggle with the aim would be to negate the struggle and would herald the cessation of the unity which holds ‘the People’ together. In order to maintain any notion of ‘the People’ and therein to be able to control and to master this mass (whose common goal reduces it to facelessness) the need for ‘revolution’ must be maintained as a maddeningly remote nose-bag. Consequently the answer to our question reveals only the illegitimacy of the act of asking – there is no such thing as an ‘after’ if we are to retain the identities which the revolution ascribes to us.
The impossibility of realisation seems to inform not only the theoretical emptiness of the entire endeavour, but even the aesthetic emptiness that I experience in the steely bunker. Cold, hard, unforgiving and unrelenting – the metal walls seem appropriate. Likewise the nature of the ‘icons’ which are worn simply as badges – they are declarations of loyalty whose words speak only sugar-shell gesticulation, only appearance. Revolution is fundamentally condemned to remain at Tian’anmen – at the ‘Gate of Heavenly Peace’. The threshold shall never be crossed; the marriage of the object aimed at and the activity of aiming never can be consummated. This is the impossible necessity of Mao’s paradoxically dictatorial order.
What, then, of our second enterprise – the rebirth of the ‘individual’ apparently demonstrated by the capitalist revolution of present-day China? Again the revolution is a void. The satire itself articulates the emptiness of the ruthless pursuit of capital. Neither system, it seems, emancipates the individual; in both cases, he/she is erased, overridden by the enterprise itself. The pinnacle cannot be conquered for the terms of success are ever redefined. We know it all too well in the West: quite simply, one can never be rich enough. The goal posts must constantly be shifted – and it is this constant movement which itself feeds the system, which maintains the social order which the ‘revolution’ purports to have overthrown.
I learned several interesting facts about Chinese traditional symbolism in the display; namely, that the pine signifies ‘long life’, the plum ‘survival in adversity’. Consequently we find such imagery abounds, as naturally do the red suns, red hearts, the hammers and sickles. The ‘ears of grain’ represent farmers and agriculture, the ‘cogwheel’ the workers and industry. Again the latter strikes me as ironic: for how could it have been thought that to function as ‘cogwheel’, as but a unit within some larger machine, could ever coincide with one’s liberation? That the CPC made it seem so is quite possibly the ultimate PR spin.
The revival of Mao iconography coincides with growing consumerism in China, which is the final point of the show. ‘Red tours,’ which ferry tourists around ‘revolutionary sacred sites,’ apparently abound in popularity. There is a certain nostalgia, it seems, for the collectivism of yore, for the notions of social sacrifice, of unity and of the ‘greater good’ which epitomised the core tenets of the ‘lost’ revolution. But this, as I say, is a revolution in itself – and offers a more genuine version of its demands.
I myself possess my own collection of Mao iconography. Or, more precisely, of Mao badges. They are stuffed into a brown envelope which is heavily worn, its seal folded and re-folded to such an extent that it feels to the touch no longer like paper but like brushed cotton. Collected from various antique and flea markets on several visits to China, they are made of plastic, embedded with dirt and garishly gold, red and even neon-pink in colour. They are like toys – nothing like the iron-cast badges shown at The British Museum. Reduced to the ridiculous, these ‘icons’ are now only the plaything of some Western girl, a girl whose intent at the time of collection was but to accessorize her being with some general emblems of ‘rebellion’. This is the ‘whimper’ of which I initially spoke, this is the sadness. Mao’s crumbling values have been transformed into their very opposite. Whilst not sanctioning old party regime, one cannot help but respond with…pity. Mao has…lost his face.
Icons of Revolution: Mao badges then and now | The British Museum, 10 April – 14 September 2008
Emilia's Mao badges. Photo: Emilia Fuller
