Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

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brought into being a climate of extroversion and extraordinarily perceptive fluidity among the
youth of China.
The most serious error committed by Western observers has been that of assigning too
much importance to symbolic and ritual factors. In schools, factories and hospitals, work is
suspended for the choral recitation of Mao’s verses with complete disregard for the pressing
needs of the moment or for the demands imposed by technological rhythms; only if we succeed
in looking beyond the symbolic content of this action shall we get a clear idea of its function
as a “horizontal” emotive relationshipand as a psychic decontamination from structural and
technological work. In the technocratic or capitalist system, decontamination of this type enters
into the program in the guise of the entertainment industry with its release and escapist
fare. One of Mao’s sayings is: “Wouldst thou know the apple? Eat it”; the content of his verses
is cathartic in the sense that the simple, but nevertheless conscious gesture of eating the apple
brings the individual into touch with reality on the plane of time: the external stimulus and
the inner sensation are seen as the same, with no intrusion from the abstract relativism of the
mind. This attitude is as far from Zen as it is from Western empiricism, but stands close to the
perceptive dimension of the artistic and political avant-gardes that lie outside the system.
Many persons, “progressive” and at the same time ambiguous, spoke of the May barricades
in Paris as a great Happening; their interpretation of the facts sought, by way of a distorting
rationalization, to carry over to the language of the theater an event born of the creative
forces of life: life, indeed, was involved, political life in its most all-embracing and real form;
the element of creativity was to be found in the emotional relationshipuniting those who took
part and in the individual simultaneity of thought and action. During May, the Latin Quarter,
as well as other parts of Paris, was flooded with mural graffiti and manifestoes; the latter were
extremely terse and violent and extended the range of the face-to-face communication being
made during the action in the streets. They were generally published, at the rate of about 10
per night, by the Atelier Populaire des Beaux Arts.
European students have also developed political discussion in the market-place in another
fashion; in the squares of Paris, groups of 10–12 would trace a circle on the ground and
begin a discussion called “The truth game”: after an hour or so, they would move away leaving
the square full of people engaged in animated discussion; in Italy, students have chosen the big
stores as places in which to “interrogate” each other in public, or to act sketches dealing with
recent events, such as the procession of the previous day or their companions in prison.
In New York, some Greenwich Village groups have established communication in the
streets by means of “shock tactics.” At Central Station, a groupof marine commandos carried