Allan Sekula / This Ain't China / Extended Through May 1st

Allan Sekula: This Ain't China

Extended through May 1, 2010

Curated by Monika Szewczyk

e-flux

41 Essex Street

New York City

T: 212 619 3356
http://www.e-flux.com

Allan Sekula's 1974 photo-text work, This Ain't China: A Photonovel, announces the artist's early attention to China as a foil for Western paradigms of production—cultural and economic. The work combines a (meta)narrative with staged photographs, shot in the spirit of Jean-Luc Godard (in a Maoist phase and channeling Bertolt Brecht). Sekula's plot concerns the employees of a greasy spoon restaurant in San Diego (artist included), all musing about working and living conditions, and plotting a strike—a microcosm implicated in a global imaginary, transformed by the presence of a different culture. This Ain't China was made at a time of great interest—especially amongst left-leaning Western artists and intellectuals—in the possibilities of Maoism. Yet the counter-example of China, and its negation, remain elusive. In the ambiguous way it is evoked, China could be both the country at the height of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and fine dinnerware (porcelain or "fine china").