Five Men and a Caravaggio is true to its title: a story of five men, each from different artistic professions, brought together by a Caravaggio. Chen Ming, a painter in China’s busy southern megacity of Shenzhen, paints a replica of Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness. It is then shipped to London for Swiss-Italian poet Vanni Bianconi, who has purchased it as a present to himself for his 40th birthday. The painting is unveiled at Bianconi’s party at a Hackney pub, where it is critiqued by Bianconi’s artist friends, among whom are French photographer Simon de Reyer, English philosopher Stephen Barker, and Eritrean writer Saleh Addonia. Five Men is novelist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo’s eighth feature film, after works such as She, A Chinese (2009) and How Is Your Fish Today (2006), and the documentary essay explores her recurrent concerns of rootlessness, alienation, boundaries and national borders with a cultural twist. Ideas of nationhood and belonging are mixed with off-kilter reflections on Caravaggio’s Saint John, as Chen Ming’s initial reproduction of the painting spawns reproductions-upon-reproductions by fellow artists in London. De Reyer tries to do a spin on the painting through his own medium, using a self-shoot camera while roaming around naked in the woods. Barker, finding Chen’s portrait of the young man too ‘Bieber-like’ (i.e., not adequately ‘rugged’), tries to finesse his own version. Addonia, the least visually inclined of the group, stays out of the debate altogether: instead he thinks about how he has too many books by Gilles Deleuze on his shelf.
A story that contrasts the lives of proletarian art workers in China with Hackney-based ‘creatives’ could easily result in a derisive portrait of Western hipsterdom, with its high-minded extractive lifestyles dependent on the bloodied souls (and labour) of those in the Global South. Chen Ming lives in Dafen, a suburb in southern China widely regarded as a global cultural hub where local artists reproduce paintings from the Western canon. Throughout Five Men, the village typifies the conflict between capital, globalisation and culture explored in the film: a shot in which a Chinese artist paints a portrait of a white couple – presumably customers – from a photo loaded up on his laptop embodies our anxieties around authenticity in the age of digital global commerce. But Guo is too curious about her subjects to make singularly didactic agitprop. Yes, Ming is one of the many Chinese artists who works in Dafen Village. Yes, Bianconi mail orders a Caravaggio from Ming’s workshop, armchair-Westerner style. Yes, his friends then pontificate on the painting from their nicely-decorated Hackney flats, peanut-gallery style. But this is not the story – their personal histories, anxieties, and dreams are. And they are somehow all centered around the historic 17th century painting that is Caravaggio’s Saint John, at a time when the world itself is rapidly changing.
In Five Men, Guo responds to theorist Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, a seminal discussion on art’s relationship to contemporary forms of industrial production. When Benjamin wrote The Work of Art, photography and film were rising as new artistic mediums that were changing the social experience of viewing art. While art appreciation was commonly seen as an isolated, intimate experience around a uniquely valuable object such as a single painting or sculpture, the rise of photography and film meant that the experience could be communal, public, and centered around objects capable of being reproduced. This shift, Benjamin warned, could lead to either collective liberation or a bloody descent into fascism. By approaching art as a material product embedded in commercial industry, with social and political implications, The Work of Art made a significant departure from the l’art pour l’art school of art criticism of the time, which preferred to see art as a transcendent and self-contained medium. Five Men picks up the debate 83 years later by looking at how art operates alongside the new and perhaps even more destabilising force of globalisation.
While Stephen the philosopher paints his version of Saint John in Hackney, his television plays news reels of Theresa May speaking unconvincingly about a reinvigorated Britain (was it ever great?). In Dafen Village, Chen the painter eats dinner with his family and tiny dog. He’s beginning to do more of his original paintings, he says with pride. In fact, the village is becoming less and less a home to mere duplicates – the artists there speak proudly of their turn away from reproducing Western work to become legitimate makers of art unto themselves. Brexit Britain and China on-the-rise meet in Guo’s film, as one of the major geographical junctures in which art is produced, commodified and traded in the world today. Capital passes easily between the hands of the five men, in exchanges that may make a critical audience snicker, particularly given that they are all pursuing careers that seemingly aspire to be above material conceits. But this is inevitable, particularly for those who live in London. When Vanni the poet unrolls his reproduction of Saint John in front of his friends in Hackney, they do not see the predicament of Ming and other artists in China’s Dafen Village, who struggle with the uncomfortable fact that the very work that earns them money – Western reproductions – requires making the sort of art they do not want to make. A particularly humorous – and telling – moment is when Saleh the writer discusses his new income from renting out his flat on Airbnb. The camera pans to his bookshelf, where he has a sizeable new collection of Gilles Deleuze books. He can afford these now because, he tells the camera with shy humour, he has Airbnb. It’s a portrait of the young man as an artist – and a politically confused reluctant capitalist.
The target of Guo’s critique is neither Saleh nor his money-making artist friends. Five Men does not so much chide individual people as it does the self-absorption of a world hooked on myths of the irreducibility of art as sanctified object. Despite its engagement with weighty 20th-century critical theory, the film also offers an unassuming story about five ordinary men in strange times, who harbour anxieties and aspirations as universally relatable as they are particularly felt. Vanni the poet wants to own a copy of Saint John because the painting reminds him of a vibrant youth now gone. He’s just turned forty, and has come out of his second divorce. Meanwhile, Chen the painter paints because he loves it and can’t imagine doing anything else. Just as the mechanised anonymity of the world’s industrial supply chain means that the lives of Vanni and Chen – though briefly brought together by a painting – remain neatly separate, there’s a final irony about the unknown identity of the young man who provided the likeness for Caravaggio’s Saint John. Vanni’s friends observe that he most likely was a working-class adolescent chosen by Caravaggio out of pure chance. That he is indirectly canonised, hundreds of years later, speaks to how artworks themselves contain hidden stories, lives and labour that are too often deemed insignificant.
“The best writing on photography has been by moralists” observed Susan Sontag “hooked on photographs but troubled by the way photography inexorably beautifies”.¹ The critical questions presented by Walter Benjamin, as didactic and heavy-handed as they may seem, address a truth beyond the general platitudes we assign to art: that pretty images are beautiful; images of human suffering are sensitive; that art itself is transcendent of our material world. Guo’s film takes Benjamin’s observes and operates on a similarly unapologetically desecrated terrain, challenging us to banish the notion of art from on high and to consider it as both a material commodity and as the facilitator of social relationships across borders. Some may take one particular scene in the film, where multiple reproductions of Saint John are placed against each other, as sacrilege against the singularity of authentic art. What if, Five Men pre-emptively asks, this was the real art?
1 Susan Sontag, On Photography, Penguin Modern Classics: London, 2008, p. 107.
Rebecca Liu is digital assistant at Prospect and one of Another Gaze‘s staff writers.
Next month Whitechapel Gallery hosts a month-long retrospective of film work by Guo. More details can be found here.
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