The Spanish title of the show, ¿Revolución or Rizoma? calls to mind revolutions - both Cuba and China have had their share - as well as the concept of the rhizome as explored in the 1976 text, Rhizome, by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The concept of the rhizome - a concept this show draws on structurally - explores the understanding that existence is neither linear nor hierarchical. In his introductory notes for the show, Garaicoa also notes that recently his works have dealt with the idea of 'accumulation', immediately bringing to mind the 'accumulation' of capital, an ideal rather prevalent in Marxist theory.
The show, in spite of its complex foundation in economic and political theories, is not oversaturated with abstractions, but takes on a personal feel. To be sure, we sense that Garaicoa is using philosophy to deconstruct and better understand reality. He does this notably by using a few games, notably Chinese checkers and pool, then altering them slightly and placing them in a fresh context. The effect is that we've just overheard someone tell a good joke, only to realize afterwards, that there are several punch-lines, not just one, and we were willing participants all along.
Continua is divided into a large exhibition space and three smaller exhibition room. The three rooms, stacked on each other are contiguous and open to the larger space, so you get to explore the work from several site views. On the third floor, the political heart of the show is revealed when we see two Warhol-esque silkscreen portraits, enclosed within a grooved polyurethane case, of Castro and Mao. They are separated by a lush red carpet, embossed at the centre with the ultimate question of the show, 'Rhizome or Revolution'? The heart - and in a sense, since this is the final work we see - the climax of the exhibition is not an answer, but a question. Garaicoa is particularly interested in the identities that these leaders have projected of themselves but also, and more importantly, he asks how have the peoples in China and Cuba developed because of the decisions their leaders made, as well as the accidental fortunes and disasters that have affected their respective countries over the last half-century. At one time, Cuba and China seemed to be engaged in the same revolution, but the results have proven starkly different.
On the second floor, Garaicoa has provided a documentary video from his hometown of Havana. He wanders around Havana's Chinatown - purportedly the oldest in the Americas. He asks local Chinese their opinions of China's growth, its food and culture, and even its art. Of course, the overseas Chinese in Havana are as much Cuban as they are Chinese - their body language is a mixture of Latino and Asian. The answers vary from moving to naïve, and ultimately contributes to the multivalent approach, again non-linear and non-hierarchical, that Garaicoa is taking in order to understand China and to compare his China and native Cuba.
He takes an additional approach with a performance installation and video, also exhibited on the second floor. It's basically a one-table pool hall - with a few personal twists. Garaicoa played several matches of pool with a number of artists while he was here for the show. Along the wall, we see his victories and losses chalked up against his Chinese counterparts. A video of his games with the artists is projected down onto the velvet. Meanwhile, visitors are also welcome to play. The piece is a playful commentary on the nature of competition within the art world; and as an experience, it provided Garaicoa another avenue to interact with the Beijing art world (while having a good time in the process). Also, judging by his record, Mr Garaicoa seems to be a better artist than a pool player.
In the main space we see an installation that immediately brings to mind the ideas Garaicoa wants to explore in a nutshell: accumulation, the rhizome, and revolution. A group of hammers have been connected together, literally accumulating to form a mass of hammers in corner of the space. The hammers are identical - they suggest the capitalist boom and communist work ethic - and the multiplicity of influences and progressions when either two cultures collide, or one culture collides with the world.
Also in the main space we see evidence of his ongoing concern with the nature of the city. Bend City (Red) evokes a city, but it could be any city, a cookie-cutter city. The work also suggests what could be read as the hollowness of desire - that the moment we construct, or even desire to build, we are admitting a desire to destroy. This was and continues to be one of Garaicoa's most powerfully expressed themes, as he explores but theories of negation ('in my beginning is my end'), a perspective that echoes true as well in Buddhist philosophy.
The red cut-out structures of the model reveal the white hollows they leave behind. This is a refreshing, almost Zen-like approach, to the treatment of the subject we are used to seeing in Beijing: obvious images of rubbish and rubble are prevalent in this city, especially in recent photography. There's an inundation of images that capture traditional architecture torn down to make way for the ultra-new. Bend City works as a comment in Beijing, but more aptly, it's a concept on the very nature of building itself. To gain and to produce already implies loss. Desire suggests lack.
At the centre of the space, we view a number of musical instruments - taken from a local music school - and they are suspended inside a cube. The cube extends up to the ceiling, and it's as if, they are falling from the sky. They are silent in their fall, but we can actually listen in on the cube, to hear what the instruments might have sounded like, as stethoscopes have been attached to the cube. We listen on to blips of music from an orchestra - sometimes recognizing a riff from a classical composition, or the rasp of the first violin as it tunes up the rest of the symphony. Physically, the piece is surreal but it also remains clinical in that the way we hear the music highlights a real distance between the musician and the listener. What we ultimately experience here is a lesson in the way sound decays over time. Removed from their original context as members of a living orchestra, the music cannot communicate to us in the same way, now that it is suspended on the other side of a glass. Imprisoned, the music itself is lost, just as its message - whatever cultural symbolism it might have possessed - gets suspended and diminished. It's almost as if we are listening to these sounds for the first time, like anthropologists from the future, and most force ourselves to decode what they might have meant in their time.
How does one communicate in a new language environment? Again, the approach here is multivalent. Garacoia has set up a game of Chinese Checkers, but it's been enlarged and each piece encloses its own word: these 'word-pieces' are three languages, including Chinese, English and Spanish. Now, it's not just about getting all your pieces to the other side first, but about the combinations of words you have when you get them to the other side. Which word makes it to the top: death? love? If all 5 people play the game, there are 60 million combinations. As well as being a game - and like games, entertaining - Chinese Checkers also explores the near-infinite way in which communication, and the words we choose or happen to pick up (whether Spanish, Chinese or Romansch or Swahili) - how those accidents and decisions define the way we understand the world and our relationships to each other.
Stacey Duff
¿Revolución or Rizoma?, Carolos Garaicoa's Solo Exhibition, shows at Galleria Continua in Beijing until 19 June (6436 1005; www.galleriacontinua.com). Open 11am-6pm Tue-Sun.
Stacey Duff is Saatchi Online magazine's China correspondent and Time Out Beijing's art editor.
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