Inside out
Colin Chinnery
The opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games began at eight o’clock in the evening on the eighth day of the eighth month of the year 2008. The political party that tried for decades to stamp out superstition in China could not resist the allure of a lucky number, an invisible ally in which the whole country could believe.
and national prestige. The hosting country must take advantage of these opportunities, while the IOC must at least try to keep the Olympics a sporting event. The importance that countries place on hosting the Olympics demonstrates the potency of the Olympic brand. Thus, despite China’s extensive power, to work with the IOC was to play by their rules, even on Chinese soil. Very rarely will any powerful country allow that level of foreign jurisdiction in its own territory. The IOC effectively takes its own sovereignty everywhere it goes. Like a Russian doll, there was a structure within a structure: the IOC within China. China the host; IOC the boss.
The first half of 2008, however, started with a distinct lack of good luck. In January, inexplicable snowstorms hit subtropical Guangzhou, stranding hundreds of thousands of people trying to get home for Chinese New Year. Riots in Tibet then erupted in March, sparking a chain of events that eventually turned an Olympic torch relay into an international protest route against China, focusing the world’s media attention on everything China was trying to avoid, and turning an Olympic public relations dream into a nightmare. This was followed in May by the worst natural disaster in China for over thirty years, as a catastrophic earthquake killed close to 70,000 people in Sichuan province. The magnitude of human suffering resulted in an outpouring of international goodwill, and the Chinese government’s efficient reaction to the disaster contrasted strongly with the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina the year before. China’s image was saved, but at a strange and awful cost. The response to each event either directly or indirectly became part of the complex political matrix the Beijing Olympics was creating. It became a symbolic black hole from which nothing could escape association. For the first time, China was conducting a public relations campaign beyond its borders and beyond its control. By placing itself in the global media spotlight, the country was exposing itself to unprecedented scrutiny. Just as celebrities both crave and fear the media, China’s need for attention was a double-edged blade. For a government so accustomed to control, this exercise in celebrity was quickly turning into a lesson in humility. So it was with a great sense of relief that the torch eventually arrived in China, restoring a sense of control and harmony needed to properly prepare for the Olympics. The slogan “One World, One Dream,” which had lost its rhetorical edge during the torch relay, rediscovered some sense of decorum on billboards all over the country, and the world’s media went back into Olympic stand-by mode. While all this was going on, Sarah Morris was applying for behind-thescenes access to the Olympic Games to make her film Beijing, navigating a labyrinthine trans-continental bureaucracy that had become politically hyper-sensitive. At the heart of this labyrinth lay, in fact, two bureaucracies: the IOC (International Olympic Committee) and the Chinese government. This was the two headed beast protecting billions of dollars of investment, matters of authority and control, and the relationship between sport, business, power, and politics. With such high stakes, the relationship between the world’s most influential sporting brand and the world’s most populous nation was naturally fraught with tension. As the Olympic Games have become more popular over the past century, the believed transformative qualities for the city hosting them have reached almost religious proportions. The Olympic Games have come to represent a major opportunity for economic regeneration, infrastructural investment and environmental improvement, as well as a means of achieving international prominence
256
257
China’s bureaucracy is the oldest on earth. Its roots are buried deep in history, where everything is connected via systems that have continued unbroken to this day. For example, there is a direct connection between this age-old bureaucracy and the shape and structure of Beijing. The central point of Beijing city – the heart of the old Universe and seat of Imperial power – is the Forbidden City. Streets arranged in a grid aligned on cardinal points radiate away from the palace, where everything knows its place within a clear system. Here, architecture embodies the power structure of government, which in turn is based upon the family structure of Confucian ethical codes. However, this idealized structure has been disfigured over the past century by both revolution and modernism. Its clarity of form has been replaced by a confused tangle of competing and contradictory messages, like thousands of people thinking out loud. The Imperial center of Beijing has become empty of function, except of that of a potent symbol, and the search for China’s new identity can be read in Beijing’s architecture like an illustration. One sees the old city destroyed in parts, replaced by cheap and drab modern housing. Elsewhere, tall concrete buildings have Chinese ‘hats’ in response to strange and short-lived government regulations. Government planning got into bed with an aggressive real estate market to encourage home buying, retail facilities, and office construction, developing vast swathes of the city in a confusing variety of styles influenced by Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, and the United States. The Olympics formed the latest chapter in Beijing’s architectural odyssey by adding major statements from world famous architects. These grand gestures have become a defining feature of New China, of how a city relates to its people and to the world. Traditional clarity of form and thought has been replaced by a constant state of uncertainty, an uncertainty of direction. This lack of philosophical conviction has been replaced by a common sense of purpose. The way of achieving this purpose has been relegated by the importance of having purpose itself. The gestures of the Olympics and all its accompanying accessories mirrored, fed, and affirmed the empowering sense of purpose China has adopted in the past thirty years. The Olympics in Beijing was a historical moment. For Chinese citizens, it meant a coming of age, the arrival of recognition. Beijing was acknowledged as a member of an exclusive club of important cities around the world. Beijing citizens had a genuine glow of pride that they wanted to impart on visitors from abroad. For foreigners, the Beijing Olympics became the moment in the new land of opportunity, a place where anything is possible. To miss the moment would be to lose out to the moment, to lose a piece of history.
It was into this historical moment that Morris was determined to infiltrate. As an independent and unaffiliated person wanting access to the Olympic machine, Morris represented a threat to the order of things, a potential viral infection into the established system. Since art cannot be explained using the standard vocabulary familiar to a bureaucracy, her project represented something alien. To introduce something alien into a system is, by definition, a risk. And the idea of introducing any kind of risk into an event that defined China’s coming of age defied logic. Nevertheless, the slow and painful process of being digested by the Olympic bureaucratic system was an important part of the work’s creation, as it became fundamental in understanding the context within which the whole film was being produced. In fact, comprehending the shape and nature of the bureaucracy radically influenced the shape and nature of the film. Even the film’s soundtrack scored by Liam Gillick – with its fast, soft, and ever-present electronic rhythm, its background humming and clicking – evokes a constant presence, perhaps that of the bureaucracy Morris had to navigate to make the film possible. The relationships between structures and life are tangible throughout the film, from the duck farms outside of the city, to the Olympic Stadium’s VIP lounge. In the Beijing, such contrasts can exist only one edit away from each other, and although the duck farmer would not have access to the VIP lounge, his ducks might, albeit on a plate. For China, the history it was writing for itself was above reproach, beyond criticism, and not to be tampered with. Although unprecedented freedom was granted to international press for the duration of the Olympics, the government hoped this act of goodwill would be reciprocated by affirming China’s historical moment. The Beijing Olympics was China’s historical prerogative, and it is precisely this piece of history that Morris’s film presents us with: not the history recorded for posterity by the emperor’s scribes, but the different moments, big and small, that make any slice of time that we may call history. In this hyper-mediated place and time, Morris became another media, recording time like a cubist painter records space, whereby a complex reality is cut up into many perspectives and pasted back together again on one flat plane for new and different interpretations that deny the possibility of objectivity. The structure of the film, in approximating a rhythm of space, is reminiscent of the original architectural structure of Beijing, which was an attempt to form a kind of connected harmony. Traditional Beijing viewed from above was a harmonious sea of green trees and small grey structures. However, at ground level one discovers that the trees are hidden within the courtyards of those grey buildings, whose calm walls are punctuated by small doors – the portals to the Inside. Their architectural beauty is merely hinted at from the outside, and can only be
258
experienced from within. One needs to be invited inside to experience its language. The difference between inside and outside is intense in Chinese culture. To be inside is to be family. To be outside is to not exist. Traditional Beijing’s architectural structure was based on the hierarchies of government: relations radiated outwards in a series of concentric rings like those of an onion. In ancient Beijing, the emperor sat right in the center, and those closest to him in the imperial system were in the smallest rings. Likewise, the Chinese family structure places the father at the center, followed by immediate family, extended family, distant relatives, and then friends. To be outside the rings of the system is to not exist. What must be raised is the notion of Beijing as a decentralized city. Yes, it does have rings, but this does not mean that it has a functioning ‘center’, and Morris’s film underscores the de-centered character of the city.
The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games was the official articulation of that moment. Socialist collective performance hand-in-glove with Hollywood spectacle. Communism and Capitalism working in perfect harmony. The sense of historic gravity was emphasized in the performance again and again with milestones from Chinese history interlaced with visions of the future of humanity. In comparison, London’s eight minutes had all the vision of Pop Idol. It was clear that the Olympic Games meant different things to China and Britain. As Beijing articulates very clearly, there is little point in trying to understand what the ‘grand moment’ of the Beijing Olympics actually meant. Preceded by natural disaster and followed by financial calamity, its legacy is still unclear. What Morris’s film does is articulate the near-present, when meaning is elusive and not yet determined. It is not so much that no one knows what it means, but that no one can know what it means.
No matter how much Beijing has changed on the outside, the system of rings has been maintained and extended in a series of ring roads that encircle and connect the city. Beijing’s second ring road traces the route along which the city wall once stood. Mao Zedong destroyed the city wall as part of his revolution to destroy an outmoded mentality, but constructed a much larger psychological wall for China as a whole. The death of Mao allowed political change that led to economic development, and the third ring road was constructed as part of China’s post-Mao modernization, when Beijing could afford to grow for the first time. Beijing kept growing, faster and faster, and now there are six ring roads, the largest of which connects a series of satellite towns that surround the huge metropolis. As Morris was planning to film Beijing, she started an ambitious series of paintings. Her Origami and Rings series signify possible impending events and the multiple cities and years of their correspondence. The Rings paintings are titled by date of the various years of Olympic games and their corresponding cities from the past into the future. The ring or circle was an alien shape to Morris’s paintings until her experience of Beijing and of traveling on its concentric ring road system. The sense of moving in circles was also encountered during the frustrating experience of getting nowhere in the bureaucratic system. The perfect system of disorientation is to travel in a circle: to provide the experience of distance traveled, only to arrive back at the beginning. The best way that Morris found to reveal the construction of this ‘onion’ was to cut it open, to slice it in half. In her film, all the rings display themselves simultaneously, from the center all the way to the skin. This allows us to gaze into the various hierarchies simultaneous, but without any explanation. It also hints at a system of control and harmony, but without articulating it. The reality involved is so multi-layered as to defy direct analysis or even narrative. Indeed, the narratives are unfolding every second, in different directions, and at different levels. Yet somehow they are all connected. The film’s structure evokes this organic and frenzied structure of interconnectivity, which was inextricably lined – however loosely – with the historical moment of the Beijing Olympics.
259