The Dancer at the Lightbulb Factory

Have you ever seen a lightbulb being made? It is a long, fast dance
of glittering, breakable parts: legs of glass and filament arms
shuttled around shakily, doll versions of Charlie Chaplin in the gears,
finally tested and transformed into dazzling, glowing, blinking
landscapes thrown back at their heavy-metal creators.

The ballet mecanique of the lightbulb can’t help but be nostalgic
for an American audience. Where have our factories gone? To China, of
course—where Cao Fei’s video Whose Utopia is set in a real
lightbulb factory. The first part of the 20-minute video portrays the
creation of a lightbulb from start to finish, and this abstract and
gorgeous scenario lasts until about halfway through, when hopelessly
soft human parts appear: slender female fingers pricked while sorting
through tiny heaps of sharp metal bits, shoulders slumped, eyesight
going. The bulb bodies take their toll on the flesh ones—an old
story—but that’s not the end of it. The flesh fights back.

Cao directed real workers to express themselves inside the factory:
a ballerina twirling slowly within a canyon of boxes stacked to the
factory ceiling, a man soft-shoeing under a sky of fluorescents, a
dancer wearing angel wings working alongside everyone else at the long
assembly bench. Each moment is a little protest by a still-hopeful
member of China’s rapidly developing economy in the Pearl River Delta
region, where Cao was commissioned by Siemens to create this video at
the Osram factory—a subsidiary of Siemens. Whose Utopia is
an unusually direct yet poetic study of the interlock of art and
economics in contemporary China, where Cao’s father is a sculptor for
the state and Cao’s awareness of her censors, both governmental and
corporate, is built into her process from the start.

My Future Is Not a Dream is the name of a rock band formed by a
handful of the young workers, individuals who have left their hometowns
and come to this industrial zone with big dreams. Their lyrics
accompany the final section of Whose Utopia, in which the
factory moves while individual workers stand still for portraits in
work clothes, as in August Sander’s early-20th-century photographs of
German workers. “Part of your life had waned and waned,” their song
goes in slightly broken English. “And to whom do you beautifully
belong?”

Cao enlisted the workers as coauthors instead of mere subjects to
empower them: “The conditions that these workers live under is
generally highly invisible to a broader public,” she told the
Vancouver, B.C.–based magazine Fillip. “What this project
does is release the workers from a standardized notion of productivity.
What we are doing is production, but a type of production that connects
back to the personal. I am like a social worker. They don’t regard me
as an artist. They think I’m an event organizer.”

Maybe so, but what makes the video so moving is its hopelessness to
those of us on the other end of rapid industrialization. This is not
going to work out, we think. And the art is, in some sense, playing
along by offering the carrot of a fleeting transcendence. Resistance is
futile—or fatal. This is the China in which so-called
“cutting-edge” contemporary artists (such as Cai Guo-Qiang of the
“exploding cars” at Seattle Art Museum) produce Olympics spectacles.
This is China, post–Tiananmen Square.

And without being too nationalistic, it is necessary to point out
that we helped to create it. In February 1989, just months before the
government executed a still-unknown number of student protesters at
Tiananmen Square, a large exhibition called China/Avant-Garde opened at the National Gallery in Beijing. Authorities shut it down
shortly after it opened (because of a performance including gunshots),
then allowed it to reopen and shut it down again, twice. It ran for
only two weeks, but it marked the culmination of a movement that had
been taking place throughout the 1980s in China, informed as much by
Mao’s Cultural Revolution as by Russian kitsch art and American Pop.
Early Pop was really invented by two fountainheads: Robert
Rauschenberg, whose ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange,
pronounced “Rocky” after his pet turtle) Project visited and influenced
Beijing in 1985, and Jasper Johns, whose 20 years of depicting the
lightbulb (1957–76) is the subject of a small exhibition on the
floor below Cao’s video at the Henry Art Gallery.

Jasper Johns: Light Bulb, organized by the Museum of
Contemporary Art San Diego, is a nerdacious little universe of
experimentation you could disappear into—but its coincidental
appearance here with Cao’s study of a lightbulb factory pulls it into a
broader context of economic and social history.

Cao, born in 1978, is a generation beyond what Art in America termed the “Children of Mao and Coca-Cola,” and maybe not even aware of
Johns’s lightbulb works, but the connections are natural. Both Cao and
Johns undercut the cliché that art is something that appears
magically, like a lightbulb above the head. Cao depicts light as
nothing more than a commercial product (and key to a surveillance
system); Johns’s lightbulbs are simply devoid of light. Made in bronze,
plaster, or lead, Johns’s lightbulbs are heavy, dark, and solid: the
anti-lightbulbs. In lithographs, they cast shadows rather than light.
They wear the stamps of their manufacturers rather than the artist’s
signature, in the classic Pop move of replacing the artist with the
machine. Just as light is the product of certain systems, so are
artistic ideas. The artist is a manufacturer, too; now: of what?

And Johns is also a case of the co-opted critique. The most laconic
of the Pop artists, his work is nevertheless today affordable only to
the extremely rich. His idea-objects have been elevated to the status
of the magical and the rare, an ultimate reversal of the multiple and
the banal nature of his subjects: lightbulbs, maps, flags, targets,
numbers. Every lightbulb has its price.