Polit-Sheer-Form @ Bizart: Form=Content=Form; Is progress antithetical to the post modern condition and can you pass me a banana please?

Polit-Sheer-Form’s exhibition opening at BizArt took many viewers by surprise when upon arrival instead of finding your typical reception they found a meeting in progress. Around a large white table spotted by plates of bananas and clouded by cigarette smoke the artist collective Polit-Sheer-Form debated and discussed with local artists and audience members the merits of, well, what exactly was going on. New Poly-Form is a creative collective comprised of the critic-turned-gallerist Leng Lin and the artists: Liu Jianhua, Hong Hao, Xiao Yu, and Song Dong. Each of these characters, successful in their own practices, had decided to make their friendship and debates a pronounced art movement in 2005. According to the exhibition literature the group eats, plays, gets massages, travels, and discusses important topics together. Being together and the social processes that occur is the crux of their practice. It is a stance, they claim, that resists the growing culture of individualism in Chinese society and instead harks back to a time not so long ago when individuals relinquished their egos for the good of the collective. Earlier this year an exhibition at Leng Lin’s Beijing Commune presented images based upon the group’s outings painted in a uniformly deadpan manner and inflected with a labeling system reminiscent of propaganda pictorials from that bygone era. However the art that Polit-Sheer-Form usually produces is not object orientated but instead conceptual gestures aimed at completing a system of self-referentiality in effort to, as Leng Lin professes, advance the notion of art. For this noble reason the group decided to take their esoteric art practice on a road tour to Shanghai. In Biz Art’s bare walled corridor a large framed photograph (presumably a composite portrait of the group’s members) hung to the left of the table, on the other side banners installed vertically on poles unveiled the group’s manifesto. “Within the context of… private desires allowed for by the market economy, the individual, without the literal and metaphorical support of the collective, is isolated within the course of development” At the beginning of this collective affair a computer rattled off recordings of questions that were to be topics for discussion. But the discussion quickly deteriorated into an attack on the group itself and it’s convoluted intentions. Leng Lin did a lot of the defending to basically what was an inquiry into the inherent structure of the group and event at hand. Besides the form of the group what is the content? Surely everyone engages in cavorting with friends, is packaging this as art interesting? Is form alone, especially an already tried and true form (the artist collective), enough to advance art? Whether or not Polit-Sheer-Form’s rebuttal helped to quell these issues they had already succeeded in their mission. For an art world increasingly unable to engage in critical issues this meeting broke down the relationship of producer and consumer and exposed a goldmine of issues that affect the very sustenance of art.