The Return of the Real: The Pavilion of Realism
Raul Zamudio(New York )
The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal—Gustave Courbet
The Pavilion of Realism is a multimedia exhibition of artists who live and work in diverse cities including Amsterdam，Beijing, Berlin, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Hong Kong, London, New York, San Francisco, and Shanghai. Its title alludes to a similarly named exhibition mounted in Paris in 1855 by the Realist painter Gustave Courbet， and its curatorial narrative culls elements that are concomitantly historical and of the moment including the Universal Expo, its origins and relationship to Courbet’s pavilion, as well as the 2010 World Expo hosted in Shanghai.
Like the official French salons of the late 18th and 19th centuries where submitted works were rejected because they did not adhere to academic standards or censored because of their political content, the countries participating in the 2010 World Expo have their own criteria as to what should or should not be presented to the viewing public. To be sure, these countries will celebrate and promote themselves through cultural, scientific, and technological displays with attendant subtext of nationhood, and a few will even exhibit work commissioned by artists. In contrast to this official government mandate, The Pavilion of Realism will offer an oppositional project of challenging work that addresses social and political questions with a “realism” ostensibly absent from the foreign pavilions featured in the 2010 World Expo. The “realism” that the exhibition will address not only concerns politics, however, but the aesthetic as well; for the work displayed in Courbet’s pavilion was as much about artistic innovation as it was a political flashpoint regarding art’s function. Courbet’s Realism was avant-garde in that it critically engaged the social and political issues of his day, but it was also at the forefront of advanced artistic practice. More to the point, however, is that it proposed something altogether new: the possibility of exhibiting art outside the machinations of established institutional protocols. The ramifications of Courbet’s contested pavilion are still felt today in myriad ways including the concept of the alternative exhibition that operates outside the circuits of the market. Some of these include the Free Art Fair in London (2009) where art was given away at the end of the fair’s run， and Sal Randolph’s Free Manifesta that was part of Manifesta 4 (2002). Here, the artist bid on eBay for the right to exhibit in Manifesta 4。After submitting the winning bid，the artist offered anyone the opportunity to show at the prestigious exhibition for free.
The counter exhibition‘s inception, however, is historically associated with European modernism, but it has also manifested in other contexts。China, for example, has had its own Courbet-like phenomena as attested by Beijing’s East Village art scene of the early 1990s when performances and exhibitions were mounted for a single day because the work may have been perceived as subversive or formally challenging to accepted conventions。It is with this spirit rooted in the history of affirmative artistic and exhibition practices articulated via an unflinching avant-gardism that The Pavilion of Realism is in concert. But, of course, the history of the exhibition as counter discourse was spearheaded by Courbet’s oppositional response to the status quo and its proxies including the Academy, the Salon, and the Universal Expo.
After one of Courbet’s paintings was rejected from an official exhibition coinciding with the Paris Universal Exposition of 1855, which is what the World Expo of today is rooted in, he mounted his Pavilion of Realism outside of the exposition’s grounds. This was a watershed moment in critical artistic practice and art history as well; for before institutional critique and the Salon des Refusés, the first oppositional exhibition was launched vis-à-vis Courbet’ exhibition. The criticality of Courbet’s project was aesthetic as it was political. For not only was Realism a wholly new, radical artistic style, but Courbet was also inspired by the politics of his friend, socialist and writer Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. At the time of the Universal Exposition, Proudhon was known as the first to proclaim himself an anarchist， exemplified in his leftist writings including What is Property? (1840). Proudhon, who may have been France’s most well known political radical, had befriended Karl Marx when the political philosopher was exiled from London to Paris. In fact, Marx had read Proudhon well, since he wrote a rebuttal to Proudhon’s The Philosophy of Poverty which Marx published as The Poverty of Philosophy. It is within this social and politically tumultuous backdrop that Courbet’s Realism developed as an artistic practice that converged aesthetics and politics.
Although the art presented in Courbet’s pavilion was his magnum opus The Artist’s Studio: A Real Allegory of a Seven Year Phase in My Artistic and Moral Life (1855), it was his Realist works that earned both praise and scorn because of their political undertones and sympathies with the underclass. Realism sought to portray the socially marginalized with an air of dignity and empathy that had never been seen before. Along with Courbet’s Stonebreakers (1849) and works painted by other Realists including Honoré Daumier and Jean-François Millet, the new style portrayed society’s outcasts with a humanist pathos considered at the time to be avant-garde. But Courbet’s narratives and choice of subject matter was not only about creating something wholly distinct from the antecedent Romanticism and Neoclassicism。 Rather, his art was equally indebted to his politics as it was about formal innovation. In other words, Courbet’s Realism was inspired as much by the desire to create a new artistic lexicon as it was an iconography motivated by a critical ethos and political ideals. But the irony, of course, was that it was The Artist’s Studio that sparked rejection from the 1855 Universal Expo.
The Universal Expo was one of many signifiers of burgeoning Western modernity. By the time the first Universal Expo was launched in London in 1851, modernism was gestating in numerous cultural, technological, and intellectual registers. Although one cannot elide the rise of colonialism with the Industrial Revolution, the Universal Expo as a cultural practice signified a new internationalism, albeit that Europe was in the throes of what the literary critic and theorist Edward Said has called “orientalism.” To be sure, this bourgeois internationalism was exclusionary, yet the Universal Expo signaled a developing metropolitan consciousness via its international purview.
The World Expo and its precursor were, however, rooted in the French national exhibitions of commerce. The first national exhibition was held in 1844, but it was the Universal Expo in London in 1851 that inaugurated what today would be known as the World Expo. Launched by Prince Albert, the London Universal Expo was housed in Joseph Paxton’s mammoth Crystal Palace. Continuing the tradition of the expo as site for commerce, the Universal Expo became a kind of trade convention for European nations in the midst of the Industrial Revolution. This particular aspect would maintain itself until 1939, when there was a shift in the World Expo away from an emphasis on industry and more on culture as well as utopian view of technology fomented by modernism’s promise of social progress. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that a new factor entered into World Expo ideology beyond that of industry and culture, which has come to be known as “nation branding.” “Nation branding” is the use of the World Expo as platform to promote a country’s image abroad. This veneer, among other themes, has been the point of contention in the current exhibition. Commerce, science, history, culture, and politics oscillating between locality and globalization， is what the artists in The Pavilion of Realism investigate.
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