If You Go Carrying Pictures of Chairman Mao
Posted on January 26, 2020 Posted by John Scalzi 12 Comments
The Warhol portrait is in fact very impressive close up. But it was equally impressive how people seemed to unconsciously place themselves in a tableau around it.
I’m back from Chicago, where I hung about with many impressive people talking about many impressive things. This was good for my brain, but now I am also very tired. I may be mush tomorrow. You have been warned.
You ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow.
Great photo.
Don’t you know it’s gonna be
All right.
I love the Art Institute. Lol. Always think of Ferris Bueller.
Get some rest. Hope it’s a mush free Monday.
Your brain might already be mushed.
The proper way is ” May brain Mao be mush.”
Hope you had some fun too. There is such great food in Chicago.
and every tableau looks better in black and white
I still have my quotations of Chairman Mao, and I won’t lend it to anyone!
His essay “On Contradiction” remains the clearest explanation for laymen I have ever seen of dialectical materialism.
You mean he painted something other than soup cans? Who knew?
(For the humor impaired, yes this is sarcasm.)
I’m told that taking pictures of cats is good therapy for mushbrain. Sharing the pictures is not in any way required.
I own a vintage 1975 edition of his Little Red Book (proper title of course being “Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-Tung”). It’s filled with some genuinely brilliant ideas, all weighed down by their imperfect source (and that’s putting it lightly). My favorite Mao quote of all time: “If the people have to fart, then let them fart!”
I am actually surprised. I read a translation of his “On Guerilla Warfare”, and he was a tedious, boring writer. Also the work was a rehash of Sun Tzu and von Clausewitz, so nothing revolutionary there. (Unless mixing Sun Tzu with von Clausewitz and maybe a dash of von Moltke is revolutionary).
A friend of mine was in China during the whole Tiananmen square thing and brought me back a Mao poster when he was airlifted out of “trouble”… It is surprisingly gorgeous and very well printed. I know have to dig it out after reading your post!
I think we were there on the same day. I’d never before seen an exhibition that crowded, and the people there were really excited and engaged by Warhol’s artwork. I was there with a friend who had an interesting connection to the artist: His father had a fabrics business which did silk screen printing, and Warhol sometimes used their equipment to do larger projects (The Sunsets series done for the Hotel Marquette might have been one of them.).