柯律格：是艺术家决定了艺术的走向，而非艺术史家
柯律格（牛津大学艺术史荣休教授）
在诸多场合、论坛上，问题和评论总会起始于：“我对中国艺术一无所知，但它打动我的是……”如果本书能消灭这些言论，哪怕只是让说出这些话语的人变得羞于启齿，那么我将相当满意。
上面这段话摘自刚刚出版的柯律格先生《谁在看中国画》一书中文译本（广西师范大学出版社，2020年4月）的引言。
从其上下文中可以感受到柯律格先生对中国艺术研究现状的“不满”。他也曾在另一本书（《明代的图像与视觉性》，北京大学出版社，2011年9月）中直抒胸臆地指出，自己著书立说，常常源于对另一位学者研究的不满。《谁在看中国画》贯穿全书的疑问就是，我们应该如何在“一无所知”与“无所不知”之间寻找自己的位置。
在接受《打边炉ARTDBL》独家专访时，柯律格先生一方面有直率和犀利的回应，另一方面则对某些话题显得非常小心和谨慎，用他的话说就是：“薄技在身，倒也安闲”。在谈及中国当代艺术时，他表达了对黄永砯这位贯穿这本书开头和结尾的艺术家的赞赏。他进一步指出，世界各地的艺术家擢发难数，他们以艺术为生，甚至过得非常优渥，但他们的作品都不会被写进教科书或走进课室，成为“艺术的故事”被传唱。
他补充强调，中国对这个问题的认识，比英国更警惕。
不满，是我写作的主要动机
ARTDBL：你曾在《明代的图像与视觉性》一书的前言《致中国读者》中说，自己著书立说常常源于对另外一位学者研究的不满。可以谈谈《谁在看中国画》这本书的写作开始之初，你的“不满”是什么？
柯律格：我说那句话本意并不是对某个特定的人提出批评或表示不满，而是说在这个领域我们可以做得更好，有时也可能是对我自己的作品不满意。在完成《藩屏：明代中国的皇家艺术与权力》（Screen of Kings: Royal Art and Power in Ming China）这本书之后，我就一直将《谁在看中国画》（Chinese Painting and Its Audiences）作为下一个研究项目。所以，当我（2012年）受邀在位于华盛顿的国家美术馆做梅隆美术讲座时，我便将“观看历史”作为一个重要课题。
我意识到，这个重要的讲座系列此前只有一次涉及过中国艺术，即1998年雷德侯（Lothar Ledderose）教授的讲座。随着进一步阅读和研究，后来我发现，贡布里希（Ernst Gombrich）1956年也受邀参与了梅隆讲座，讲座成果后来集结成他的著作《艺术与错觉》（Art and Illusion）。他在书中仅用一个简单的例子就囊括了整个“中国艺术”，仿佛它们全然无差别。我想，是这种对于中国艺术的多样性和复杂性缺乏认识的不满，促使我去思考我们要如何站在那个视角看待中国艺术，贡布里希又是如何做到的。这种不满是我写作的主要动机。
另一件我与之对话的作品是维克托·斯托伊奇塔（Victor Stoichita）的《自我意识的图像：早期现代的元绘画》（The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting），这是一部极富想象力和发人深省的关于欧洲艺术的作品，我非常佩服。但我在阅读中仍能感到作者对中国艺术中“元绘画”这一现象的忽略，因而某些陈述避繁就简，有待斟酌。
ARTDBL：除了由一个对手来展开你的研究和写作，你似乎对一些习以为常的“偏见”和无人问津的“边缘地带”感兴趣，并在书中指出：“边缘化的议题才是艺术史之建设和可持续发展的关键所在”，可以进一步谈谈你的研究如何找准选题，以及由此如何建立自己的研究原则和方法？
柯律格：我的写作是由多种因素促发的，没有一个选择议题的固定途径。有时可能是因为现有文献不太正确，或者忽略了某些有意思的方面。有时是觉得某些议题尚未被充分讨论过。平常阅读的文本或看到的图像都会激发进一步研究的冲动，甚至有可能因为一次偶然，比如在图书馆发现了非常有趣的东西，而你当时本想查阅的资料却完全与之无关，也可以是某个特殊的（视觉或文本的）历史证据与特定理论或方法论写作之间的相互作用，令人感觉“这两者配合得简直天衣无缝”。我的阅读一直都比较广泛，可以说有点缺乏系统，所以我有时选择的是一个主题，或者处理这个主题的方式，阅读中不期而遇的惊喜，启发了我去呈现它们。
阅读的内容不一定非要与中国艺术有关，也可以来自诸多其他的领域，比如我喜欢的历史、文学等等。尽可能地广泛阅读对于研究者来说至关重要，关注的话题也要尽量扩展，而不是仅仅局限于他们“认为”自己感兴趣的方面。
《谁在看中国画》书影
中国的地方差异是一个值得深挖的课题
ARTDBL：《谁在看中国画》指出观者／受众和艺术家在艺术史都扮演着核心角色，画家画什么和观众看到什么同等重要。那么在你看来，什么是影响观众的“看”的决定性因素？
柯律格：有很多因素，且有其历史成因，在不同时期、不同地方都不尽相同。我非常赞同“观看历史”这个提法（这不是我的原创），也尝试着就这一点对过去500年的中国试说一二。可以说，近30年（大约相当于我的职业生涯）艺术史上重要的变化之一，就是从单纯地观看艺术家创作了什么，大体转变为同时研究观众真正看到了什么，所以并不是只有我一个人在这样做。你可以说贡布里希是最早关注这个问题的，但他感兴趣的是观看的心理学，我更关心的是观看的政治学。
一旦开始将观看视作一个历史现象，我们就不得不思考权力，它关乎阶层、性别等诸多问题，因为这些因素会影响到是谁观看、看到什么，有时是以很直接的方式，有时则比较微妙。
ARTDBL：是什么机制决定了谁可以成为受众、谁能看见？是否存在一种干预“观看”行为的强权或暗流？
柯律格：同理，每个时期都不同，不同年代的社会权力来源也不同。很显然，有些时期朝廷占据权力的顶峰，例如18世纪。相反，在晚明时期，文士精英形成了更加广泛的社会力量。此外，我们还必须始终思考权力转移的方式，明代商贾的兴起就是一个例子。中国的地方差异是一个值得深挖的课题——中国地域广袤，我们不应把目光锁定在江南这种已经充分研究的区域，还要看到其他的地方。
ARTDBL：你将中国画的观众划分为“士绅、帝王、商贾、民族和人民”，前面三个类型的观众都能锁定到特定的人群，而“民族”和“人民”是比较抽象的概念，是否可以说“国家意志”在中国画的观众群体当中具有更强的影响力，自由且自主的观看是边缘的？
柯律格：这是一个非常有水平的问题。首先我得表明，在某种意义上，或者至少对我来说，“士绅”这个概念和“民族”一样抽象，尽管这两种类型都指向真实的人群。但作为一个艺术史家，我在展望和预判未来时，既不感到泰然，也没有自信。在我未尽的生涯中，我已经见证了诸多重大（且无法预料）的变化，试图揣测近期或远期内艺术观众将会受到的影响，似乎都是不明智的。观众总会有的，他们会与社会、政治、经济等各种力量互动。但是现在，我们正以六个月前谁也无法预见的方式生活，不断地被强制提醒着人类历史上的不可预见性。
ARTDBL：在分析吴作人的《齐白石画像》时，你提出这张画隐含了一种风格上的“内部东方主义”，当中国的国家意志和民族主义持续强化时，“内部东方主义”会不会得到更进一步的加强，它会将中国画和中国的艺术带向何处？
柯律格：这个问题再次引导我去思考一个我没有信心预测的未来。只能说，但愿人们因国家成就而产生自豪感的同时，能时刻意识到这些成就的多样性，也希望不断增强的民族认同感能与文化多样性的自信感共生。但这都只是愿望，并不是预期。事实有可能恰恰相反，因为历史的发展就是如此。
《谁在看中国画》封面局部
二元分割之外还存在其他历史选项
ARTDBL：在你的《谁在看中国画》一书中能读到很多对中国艺术史研究非常直率的批评，比如你在文中指出，“在过去的几个世纪里，无论是在中文、英文还是在其它语境中，大量中国画坛的原始文字资料却都没有被研究过。因此，可以说我们还没有学会走就开始跑。”我想问的是，为什么会出现这样的“无意去研究”的景象？
柯律格：语言障碍很显然是其中一个原因。即使是以汉语为母语的人，阅读中国古文也会感到相当困难，对一个成年后才开始学习汉语的外国人来说就更难了，几乎不可能。那句话我重点想指出的是，直到最近，学者在研究中国绘画史时都把注意力集中在少量关键的原始文字资料上，实际上这类历史资料卷帙浩繁，尤其在明清时期，而其中一部分从来没有被研究过。
我觉得并不是人们“无意去研究”，新一代学者已经在拓宽艺术史研究的史料视域，这一点在20世纪艺术史研究中最为明显。我希望并相信这会开始影响人们看待更久远历史的方式。
ARTDBL：在受众研究中，“媒体”是一个中间的物质，它影响，塑造和保存了观看的经验，你在书中也多次引用《纽约时报》的艺术报道。你如何看待媒体对观看的动员以及对观看意识的塑造的正反作用力？
柯律格：在19世纪末到现在（或最近）的大众媒体时代，我认为很难高估媒体在塑造观众认识、思考和谈论艺术方面起到的作用。遍及全球的观众在接触艺术之前首先看到的是复制品，而复制已经被理论化，且有过充分的讨论。那些无法复制的物品都消失了，或至少被推到了意识的边缘。
我们才刚刚开始认识到近几十年来数字平台和社交媒体对这种情况的改变——《谁在看中国画》这本书的时间范畴止于1970年代，原因之一是我觉得自己没有能力得心应手地驾驭这样一个庞大的议题。
ARTDBL：你多次指出，中国绘画和西方绘画的二分法是不明智的，毫无用处，但这样的二分法的制度依然影响着中国的美术学院的教学和研究，中国美术史和西方美术史都由不同的教师负责讲授，这个明确的知识壁垒影响着年轻人对艺术世界的构建，你认为这个当中存在哪些结构上的“顽疾”，时至今天还无法扭转？
柯律格：这么多人投入了大量精力去做的事，说它是“不明智”或“无用”的，会显得很冒昧。你也许会觉得，如果二分法“无用”，为什么过去那么多人都在使用，而且一直延续到现在？其实我想说的是，这种思维结构并非必然，并不是人们思考问题的唯一方式。
这个问题绝不仅仅在中国存在，我敢说在西方（更小的）中国艺术研究领域，这个问题要严重得多。在中国，这个问题已经存在了一个多世纪，无论个体怎么看待它，他们不会不知道这是个问题，也无法避免由此引起的争论。而在西方，很多人（我说的是普遍受过教育、对艺术感兴趣的人）甚至意识不到这个问题值得讨论，这对他们来说似乎理所当然。
我希望指出的是，这种未经审视的二元分割之外还存在其他历史选项。这将是我下一本书的主题，名为The Echo Chamber: Transnational Chinese Painting 1897-1935）（译者注：为避免有失风雅，书名暂不翻译。《谁在看中国画》也不是由原著书名直译而来。）。
《谁在看中国画》内页
黄永砯将永远在20世纪晚期以来的中国艺术史中占有一席之地
ARTDBL：在《谁在看中国画》中，时间线从明代一直梳理至毛泽东辞世，中国当代艺术家的创作也进入你的视野。中国画的价值被遮蔽，被无视，艺术史研究的欧美中心论有着主导性的影响，这样的问题也都出现在中国当代艺术领域，中国当代艺术还只是作为一种异国情调被谈论，被收藏。你认为这样一个症结，应该如何去消除和打破？
柯律格：这是我最难回答的一个问题，也是为什么这本书只写到1970年代，因为在那之后剧变频生。所以我未冒然涉足当代艺术领域，已经有很多优秀的学者在做这类研究，我仅有薄技在身，倒也安闲。
当代艺术实践这个领域已经超出了我作为一个艺术史家的能力范畴。不过我得说，我们所谓的“传统西方绘画”（尽管这些词并不常用）在今天仍有市场，例如重要人物的油画肖像，但艺术史界或著名机构对此鲜有关注。
在威尼斯双年展，就很少能看到油画肖像。只有很少一部分艺术创作可以被认定为“当代艺术”，在中国和其他国家都是如此。如今，世界各地的艺术家擢发难数，他们以艺术为生，甚至过得非常优渥，但他们的作品都不会被写进教科书或走进课室，成为“艺术的故事”被传唱。需得再次强调，中国对这个问题比英国更警惕。
ARTDBL：如果将《谁在看中国画》转换成《谁在看中国当代艺术》，你在这本书当中的论述的模型是否有可以继续生效的部分？那是什么？
柯律格：很多当代艺术作品本身就对其形式、对自身作为观看者或观众的一部分颇为关注，所以我相信，我书里讨论的诸多问题在某种程度上是相互关联的。但我也觉得必须点到为止，我无意宣称某种方法或模式可以放之四海而皆准。
ARTDBL：可以谈谈黄永砯吗？这本书的开头和结尾都谈到他的《〈中国绘画史〉和〈现代绘画简史〉在洗衣机里搅拌了两分钟》这件作品。他的离世让人惋惜。你作为一个观者和他的艺术受众，你如何“看”他一生的创作之如中国艺术史的意味？
柯律格：黄永砯的早逝确实是艺术界的一大损失，我和他只有过一面之缘。他是一位享誉全球的艺术家，这次我可以破例预见到，他的大体量作品中所蕴含的东西，将永远在20世纪晚期以来的中国艺术史中占有一席之地。
对我来说，他这件著名的“洗衣机”作品直接将艺术史作为材料，这个事实尤为重要；它提醒我们，是艺术家本身决定了艺术的走向，而非艺术史家。
*柯律格（Craig Clunas），1954年出生于英国苏格兰阿伯丁，2007—2018年任英国牛津大学艺术史系教授，现为该校荣休教授。曾任伦敦维多利亚与艾伯特博物馆（Victoria & Albert Museum）中国部资深研究员兼策展人，自1994年起先后执教于萨塞克斯大学艺术史系及伦敦大学亚非学院。柯律格是从物质文化角度研究中国文明史的重要学者，代表著作有《长物》《蕴秀之域》《中国艺术》《明代的图像与视觉性》《雅债》《大明》《藩屏》等。
Craig Clunas: The Really Difficult Choices about the Course of Art
ARTDBL：You stated in the preface (To the Readers in China) of your book Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China that your writing was often sparked by the ‘dissatisfaction of the study of another researcher’. So when you started to write Chinese Painting and Its Audiences, what was your major dissatisfaction?
Craig Clunas：When I say something like that, it isn’t meant to be a criticism of or a dissatisfaction with specific individual people, more a sense that as a field we all need to do better – it might also be about dissatisfaction with my own work. I had been pondering the topic of Chinese Painting and Its Audiences for a while as a possible next project (after the 2013 book Screen of Kings, published in Chinese in 2016 as 藩屏: 明代中国的皇家艺术与权力). So when I was invited to give the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC I knew this ‘history of looking’ was the topic I wanted to address. I was very conscious that this important lecture series had only once before dealt with the art of China (the lectures by Lothar Ledderose in 1998). But I also became aware as I did more reading and research that in 1956 Ernst Gombrich gave the Mellon Lectures which turned into his famous book Art and Illusion. Here he uses just one single example to totalize the whole of ‘Chinese art’, as if it were just one thing, and so I suppose my dissatisfaction with that sort of lack of awareness of the diversity and complexity of the art produced in China led me to want to investigate how we got to that position, how Gombrich could do that. That dissatisfaction was a major incentive to write what I did. Another piece of scholarship that I was sort of in dialogue with was Victor Stoichita’s The Self-Aware Image. This is a marvellously imaginative and thought-provoking work about European art, and I admire it a great deal, but I also felt when I read it that – by ignoring the phenomenon of the metapainting in Chinese art it was making some general statements which were in need of revision.
ARTDBL：In addition to exploring your research and writing based on an (visible or invisible) equal, you seem to be interested in some common ‘prejudices’ and ‘marginalized topics’ that people are not usually interested in. You have tried to suggest that ‘it is precisely the supposedly marginalized topics that are essential to art history’s construction and sustainability’. Choosing a topic to write about is probably the most crucial part of any research. Would you like to share with us your experience of topic choice and also the way of finding useful research methods?
Craig Clunas：I have come to the topics I have written about in a variety of ways, there is no single route to choosing a topic. Sometimes it could be the sense that the existing literature isn’t quite right, or has missed some aspect which seems interesting. Sometimes it’s the sense that a topic has just not been sufficiently addressed by anybody. It can be a text, or an image, reading something or seeing something which sets off the urge to investigate further. This can even be an accident, like finding something interesting in the library when you are actually looking for something completely different. It can also be the interaction between a particular piece of historical evidence (visual or textual) and a particular bit of theoretical or methodological writing, a sense that ‘this would work well together with that’. I have always been a wide and somewhat unsystematic reader, so sometimes it is a case of a subject, or a way of dealing with a subject, presenting itself, through coming across something unexpected in what I’m reading. This doesn’t have to be something specifically about Chinese art, it can be in any number of other fields that I like to read about, history or literature or whatever. I think it is absolutely crucial for the researcher to read as widely as possible, and about a range of topics, not just restrict themselves to the thing they think they are interested in.
ARTDBL：In the book Chinese Painting and Its Audiences you emphasized that both audiences and artists played a central role in art history. You suggested that what were actually painted by the artists were as important as what were perceived by the audiences. From your point of view, what are the determining factors that might affect the audiences’ ‘looking’?
Craig Clunas：There are a whole range of factors, and these have a history, it is not the same at all periods and in all places. I’m very taken with the idea (it’s not my original idea) that there is a ‘history of looking’, and I wanted to attempt to write part of that for the China of the last 500 years. You could say that one of the significant changes in art history over the last 30 years or so (roughly the course of my career) is a general shift from just looking at what artists do to also studying what audiences see, so this is not a particularly original move on my part. You could say that Ernst Gombrich was at the start of this, but he is interested in the psychology of looking, I am more interested in a politics of looking. Once we start to think about viewing as a historical phenomenon, we have to think about things like power, about class, about gender, since all of these factors influence who gets to look at what, sometimes in very obvious ways, but sometimes in more subtle ones too.
ARTDBL：What constitutes the mechanism that decides who could become the audience of certain works of art? In the history of Chinese paintings as you wrote, was there any ‘visible’ or covert source of power that intervened the process of ‘looking’?
Craig Clunas：Again, I do not think this is the same at all periods, there are different sources of social power at different times. Very obviously, there are periods – like the 18th century – when the imperial court is of great importance. But by contrast, in the late Ming period, social power is more broadly dispersed among a ‘literati’ elite. I think too we have to always think about the ways in which power is contested, as for example in the Ming with the rise of merchant elites. I think regional variation in China is a topic which could do with a lot more study – China is very large and we need to think not just about the well-studied areas like Jiangnan but about other places too.
ARTDBL：By examining paintings that depict people looking at paintings, you introduced readers to ideal types of viewers: the scholar, the gentleman, the merchant, the nation, and the people. While the first three categories can refer to specific groups of people, ‘the nation’ and ‘the people’ are more abstract concepts. Can we say that ‘national will’ is destined to have a stronger influence among the audiences of Chinese Painting and it therefore comes before any free and independent discourse that might otherwise guide the eye?
Craig Clunas：That is a very profound and very interesting question. First of all, I’d argue that in some ways, or at least for me, ‘scholar’ is every bit as much an abstract idea as ‘nation’, even if both categories equally involve the participation of actual real people. But as above all an art historian, I do not feel either comfortable or confident in attempting to look into the future and say what might or might not happen in the years to come. I have seen such massive (and unpredicted) changes even in my own lifetime that it seems unwise to me to try and guess what the influences on the audiences for art will be in either the very near or very distant future. There will be audiences, and they will interact with social, political and economic forces of various kinds, but especially right now, when we are all living in a way none of us could have foreseen six months ago, we are reminded forcibly of the role of the unexpected in human history.
ARTDBL：By analyzing Wu Zuoren’s painting ‘Portrait of the Painter Qi Baishi’, you discussed the idea of a kind of stylistic internal orientalism. In your view, might it be strengthened, as China grew more nationalistic? To where will it lead Chinese painting and perhaps Chinese art in general?
Craig Clunas：Again, this question invites me to look into a future that I do not feel confident to predict. I suppose that I would hope that pride in a nation’s achievements can go alongside an awareness of the diversity of those achievements, that a more confident sense of national identity can also be allied to a confident sense of cultural diversity. But that as I say is a hope, it isn’t a prediction. The unhappy opposite can equally be the case, as history shows us only too well.
ARTDBL：The book Chinese Painting and Its Audiences has in several places criticised the study of Chinese art history in general as a scholarly subject. For example, you pointed out that ‘most of the huge body of primary literature written in Chinese over the centuries about the “field of painting” remains unstudied, in Chinese as much as in English or other tongues, and we have therefore arguably run before we could walk’. My question is why this kind of literature remains unstudied and why people have ‘no intention’ to study it?
Craig Clunas：Very obviously, issues of linguistic difficulty have at least something to do with this. The pre-modern forms of written Chinese can be hard to read if you are a native speaker of the language, and extremely hard, nearing impossible, to read if as a foreigner you started learning the language as an adult. I suppose that what I meant to say was that there has been until recently a lot of concentration on a few key texts as primary sources for the history of painting, when in fact the written record from China’s long past – and particularly from the Ming and Qing periods - is huge, and parts of it are relatively little explored. I don’t think people have no intention of studying this, I think that a new generation of scholars is broadening out the base of what counts as evidence for art history – this is perhaps most obvious in the study of the art of the 20th century but I hope and believe it is also beginning to affect the way people look at the art of the more remote past as well.
ARTDBL：In the field of audience study, ‘media’ is an intermediate substance which affects, shapes and preserves the experience of viewing. You have also quoted some art reports from New York Times in your works. How do you view the media's role, from both the positive and the negative side, in mobilizing and affecting the audiences?
Craig Clunas：When it comes to the age of mass media, beginning from the late 19th century and extending to now (or to very recently), I think it is hard to overestimate the importance of media in configuring the way audiences come to know about, think about, talk about art. Audiences on a global scale came to art above all by seeing it reproduced, and this sort of thing has been much theorised and discussed. Things that did not get reproduced sort of vanished, or at least were pushed to the margins of awareness. I think we are only at the beginning of thinking about how digital platforms and social media have altered this picture in recent decades – one of the reasons I finished my book in the 1970s is my sense that I am not well-equipped to think about this huge topic in any interesting or original way.
ARTDBL：You have repeatedly suggested that the dichotomy of Chinese Painting and Western Painting was unwise and useless. However, such a dichotomy still affects the teaching and research patterns in art academies in China, where the courses of the Hisotry of Chinese/Western Art are taught by different teachers. It creates a knowledge barrier that hinders the construction of the art world by young people. Does this ‘systematic problem’ exist only in China? What is the root cause of this problem?
Craig Clunas：It would be very presumptuous of me to suggest that a distinction which so many people have invested so much in is either ‘unwise’ or ‘useless’. You might say, if it is ‘useless’ why did so many people use it, why do so many continue to use it now? I suppose what I wanted to suggest was that this structure of thought is not inevitable, is not the only way of thinking about things. It most certainly is not an issue which exists only in China, in fact I would say the issue is much worse in the (very much smaller) world of studying Chinese art in the West. In China, this has been an issue for over a century now, and regardless of the position each individual takes on it, they cannot be unaware of its existence as an issue, as a topic of debate. In the West, too many people (I suppose I’m talking now about the generality of educated people who take an interest in art) are not even aware there is an issue there to discuss, it just seems like something natural to them. What I am interested in doing is pointing out that historically alternatives to an unexamined dichotomy have existed – this will be the theme of my next book, which will be called The Echo Chamber: Transnational Chinese Painting 1897-1935.
ARTDBL：The time span of the book went from the Ming Dynasty all the way to the death of Mao Zedong and to the age of Contemporary Chinese Art (CCA). You have mentioned how the value of Chinese Painting had been ignored and how the influence of Western centralism dominated the study of the history of Chinese art. I believe the same problem can be argued in the field of CCA as well. Chinese contemporary artworks are still valued largely for their exotic qualities. In your opinion, what needs to be done to address this issue?
Craig Clunas：That’s a question to which I most certainly do not have an answer! Which is another reason the book concludes in the 1970s, too much changes after that point. And so I am leaving the field of contemporary art alone, there are so many clever people in the world who have thought about this a lot, I am comfortable with my limitations here!
The current field of art practice is sort of beyond my competence as a historian. But I will say this. What we could call ‘Traditional Western painting’ (although these words are not often used) still in fact flourishes as a practice (for example, the oil portrait of important people) but it gets very little attention from the world of academic art history, or the most prestigious institutions. You will rarely see a portrait painted in oils at the Venice Biennale. Only a very narrow part of the spectrum of actual artistic production gets labelled as ‘contemporary art’, and this is equally true of the situation outside China as well as within it. There are many many artists working today, in all parts of the world, who are making comfortable or even very good livings from their art, yet who will never find their work included in the ‘story of art’ as it appears in the textbook or the classroom. Again, I think this has been worried about as a problem in China much more than it has been in, for example, Britain.
ARTDBL：What if we change the topic from Chinese Painting and Its Audiences to Contemporary Chinese Art and Its Audiences? Are the theories in your book (a pattern or a mode) still valid? If so, which part?
Craig Clunas：A lot of contemporary art is of course itself very interested in the issue of what it means to look, to be a viewer or be part of an audience, so I think that the very broad issues in my book do relate in some ways. But I also think we have to let the past be the past, I am not particularly interested in claiming to have some method or pattern or mode which works for everything.
ARTDBL：Would you like to say something about Huang Yongping? You have turned your attention to his artwork of ‘“A History of a Chinese Painting” and “A Concise History of Modern Painting” After Two Minutes in the Washing Machine’ at both the beginning and the end of your book. His death is really regrettable. As a viewer, how do you ‘see’ the importance of his artworks to the history of Chinese art?
Craig Clunas：The early death of Huang Yongping – who I met only once - is clearly a great loss to the art world, he was a globally respected figure and it seems likely to me (here I am breaking my own rules about prediction) that there are things in his large body of work which will now always be part of the story, of the way in which the course of Chinese art from the late 20th century is narrated. For me that fact that one of his most famous works (the ‘Washing Machine’ piece) takes art history literally as its material is particularly significant; it reminds us that it is among artists themselves, and not among art historians, that the really difficult choices about the course of art are situated.
文章版权归深圳市打边炉文化发展有限公司所有，未经授权不得以任何形式转载及使用，违者必究。转载、合作及广告投放请联系我们：info@artdbl.com，微信：dabinlou2018，电话：0755-86549157。