Airplanes and Parachutes
Jonathan Napack, writer, critic and a specialist on Chinese and Asian art passed away on 20th January 2007. He was just 39. Art Basel recently published an anthology of Napack’s writings and it was released at Asian Art Archives, Hong Kong. JohnyML writes on Napack, his life and times.
Some times death, only death can bring people together. Not because it is a great leveler, but because the sudden absence of a person makes you feel the void and you see yourself in that void. Arundhati Roy says, when someone dies, he or she leaves a void in the atmosphere, in his or her shape.
That means we all pass through several voids generated out of imagined contours every day without knowing that our contours will also find a place in this invisible world, one day, some day.
Death, at times makes even strangers friends. A dead stranger suddenly reveals his friendship and kinship with you through his death. Jonathan Napack became a friend of mine through his death. He did not know I existed in this world, nor did I know that he was there.
Both of us were there operating in the same field, in the same hemisphere. Almost during the same time Napack and myself were working as journalists and art critics. He concentrated on art, art market, politics and food. I was writing on the national politics of India, art, literature and cinema. I developed my ‘taste’ by testing my abilities in political reporting. Napack developed his ‘taste’ by tasting cuisines from all over the world. He became international as he worked between countries. I remained ‘Indian’ as I did not move an inch from Delhi!
Paris based art critic and curator Hou Hanru writes about his friend Napack: “In a world where anything goes, it is essential to insist on your own taste; your own value and judgment about what real value of life is. And Jonathan’s obsession with good taste, or simply Taste, became a rare example in the trendy crowds that we come across.”
Jonathan Napack died on 20th January 2007. He was 39 years old then. Born on 13th February 1967, Napack was brought up in New York. He started working as a journalist and contributed articles to a rebellious art journal, now defunct, called ‘SPY’. He learned Chinese all by himself when he was in school. In 1997, he decided to shift his base in Hong Kong. For ten years till his death in 2007, he traveled all over the Asian countries, witnessed the birth and growth of art market in these countries. He dispatched articles to all the major international art magazines and newspapers. He connected himself with all the major figures in the Eastern art scene, through his pleasant personality, lucid writing, incisive visions and above all with his ability to call a spade a spade.
Internationally acclaimed Chinese artist Wei Wei writes: “Jonathan was the kind of person who should have no job at all. He had sharp perception and fierce opinions. And so where others were concerned, he could harm and be harmed, even if he was straightforward, without malice.”
Wei Wei continues: “He would repeat something I once said about him: “Jonathan distorts reality, but his distortions are always more interesting than the truth.” He liked a kind of vodka that had a blade of grass in it, and single malt scotch.
Napack in Chinese means “Parachutes”.
Napack traveled incessantly between Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Tokyo, Bankok, Singapore, Ho Chi Minh City, New York, Basel, Paris, Venice, Miami and his home was in Hong Kong.
Hou Hanru says: “Everywhere, he insisted on going to the “right places” and meeting the “right people”. This rightness signifies a certain kind of person: real, sincere, smart, open, occasionally, ‘crazy’ and always with a sense of good humor and self esteem…no matter which geographic positions and social classes they came from. The only unbearable things for Jonathan were pretense and kitsch.”
Napack’s sharp tongue hurt many, as they enthused many others for he made comments on Chinese art scene, which was raking in money and turning kitschy in a phenomenal pace. About such a kitschy scenario vis-à-vis Napack’s relationship with it, Hou Hanru says: “My understanding of the reason for this is that contemporary art, during his career, became more and more popular but less and less tasty (like many new cuisine tricks). This is particularly true when one looks at how Asian, and especially Chinese art is becoming an extravagant vanity fair and how many works of horribly bad taste are paid for with immense amounts of money today. As an eminent expert in the field, Jonathan totally agreed with me on this point—it had been an obsessive topic that always came back to our discussions. In a way, we are all a part of the game of the making of this vanity fair. But it’s vitally important that we can still point out where Taste lies and what kind of art and artists really have Taste!”
How true! When I read this I feel both Napack and Hou Hanru talk about Indian art scene.
Jonathan Napack is no more now. But a collection of his essays has been published by Art Basel. The book is titled ‘Airplanes and Parachutes’- A befitting title for the memory of a man who traveled across continents and assumed a name which in Chinese meant ‘Parachute’. Metaphorically, Napack’s art criticism is a kind of jumping from airplanes; he gets an overall view of the scene down there, the jumping itself is thrilling, you feel the falling, but you are sure that you are safe. Napack dared to jump and he landed safely, though death in the form of water retention in lungs cut his jumping spree short.
This bilingual book (in Chinese and English), edited by Philip Tinari and released at the Asian Art Archives, Hong Kong, gives us the ‘taste’ of Napack’s writings. The first section has Napack’s impressionistic writings on places and people. The second part titled ‘New York’ gives the reader a glimpse of the investigative art journalist in Napack. Then there are a series of essays, reviews and articles published in international magazines. In the section of Criticism, one sees his catalogue writings and in the Essay section, one could see how Napack details the life and times of the Asian artists. The final section contains the ‘Food’ writings of the departed friend.
Napack’s writings evoke a meditative and chanting mood. The music and rhythm of words and the flow of ideas take you along. When you read Napack, you touch the soul of a person, so sincere, so intelligent and so soothing. He turns death into poetry and its menacing presence into luminous philosophy. There is full of light in Napack’s writings. Look at this for example, when he writes about life, death and destruction in Bangkok, he says:
“Bangkok stretches the membrane between death and life thinner than any other modern city. The courtesy and sensitivity towards others, their yielding, unthreatening character, the sweetness embodied in the wai greeting, all belie the fact that Bangkok is a murderously violent place, where mangled bodies daily litter the roads with blood, brain and bone. Tourist brochures call Thailand “The Land of Smiles”, but that smile might more accurately likened to the grimace of a skull.” (Death and Deconstruction in Bangkok)
At the age of 24, Napack did a story on the famous art collectors, Wildenstein & Co, for the Spy Magazine. His investigative mind dared to touch upon the history of Wildenstein Family (of Jewish descent) that made dealing with Hitler, while he was fuming out Jews in Auschwitz.
The confiscated art collection of Georges Wildenstein was brought back to him through political maneuverings and striking up deals with Hitler’s cronies. Wildenstein collection grew in strength and fame and at every juncture the family manipulated rules and regulations of the state to protect their collection. From Georges the collection went to Daniel Wildenstein and now the collection is looked after by his sons Mr.Alec and Mr.Guy, who have some ‘crazy’ lifestyles.
Napack did a Michel Moore act in this story, by analyzing all the historical documents and manuals of Wildenstein’s art business. This long article shot the young Napack’s fame to skies.
The art reviews that he dispatched from Asia to the western hemisphere are full of insights and intelligent observations. In one of the articles, while discussing SoHo, he says: “Art is an exotic microclimate, and the merest cold breath can apparently threaten its ecology.”
Napack has an eye to look at the subcultures that thrive, threaten and then join mainstream at the possible junctures. He talks about the ‘Political Pop’ of the Chinese artists after the Tiananmen Square incident and how this became mainstream art in a few years time as the market economy made its unstoppable entry in China. He comments on the Biennales and art fairs in the Asian countries. And in November 2000, during the Third Shanghai Biennale he did a crisp article and concluded it with the following statement: “Perhaps Shanghai is most aptly compared neither to the decadent, bohemian utopia of yore, nor the Maoist dystopia that followed, but Singapore—efficient, well organized, conceited, subtly repressive and more interested in international consumer culture than anything quirky or local.”
The story of Chinese-art.com is another interesting story by Napack. Started by Robert Bernell, a former Motorola executive in 1997, Chinese-art.com was the only portal in English that linked up the Chinese contemporary art to the rest of the world. Napack did not fail to notice how Robert Bernell worked like an art dot com missionary and the interview that he did with Bernell in 2001 gives a complete picture of the pioneering e-zine on Chinese art.
Robert Bernell’s reason for starting an ezine is very interesting and his mode of functioning is even further exciting. Napack asks him: Why did you start Chinese-art.com?
Robert Bernell says: When I worked for Motorola, I was eager to expand my knowledge about Chinese art, but had little time to do so. I started commissioning reports from academics and critics, who were willing to oblige for very little. These articles started piling up and I thought it was a shame just to stuff them in my drawer. So I started translating them and putting them on the web in December 1997.
“My philosophy has always been that the site is not about me. All I do is translate and provide the technical support. I commission a guest editor for every ‘issue’ six a year, with total editorial control. To distance myself even further, each guest editor is appointed by the previous one.”
Something exceptional, don’t you think?
Also Napack mentiones how curators like Peter Nagy took interest in the works of Ross Bleckner, an artist turned gallerist and cultural impresario. This article on Ross Bleckner is an intimate account on the interesting life of an interesting personality.
While observing Chinese art market and auctions Napack wrote in May 2006: “Watching these auctions, I began to wonder if things were actually ‘improving’ in China at all. May be they were actually getting worse. The radical undermining of orthodoxy, the sense of mental and physical freedom, that crude playfulness and deep engagement with life itself that made Chinese art so attractive, have been replaced in all too many cases by cynical, rote repetition without feeling or thinking.”
And while concluding, he quotes a friend, “The problem is, these artists don’t even like art anymore. They have forgotten why they wanted to be artists. It’s just a business now.”
While reading this I remembered how one artist friend responded to one of my articles, “You wait for the retaliation. Do you think they are going to sit idle? They can put you behind bars because they are very powerful. What is your authority to write all these things?”
A decently put threat. I don’t know whether Napack too got such sugar coated threats from Asian friends.
In one of the touching features that Napack did on the life of Ai Weiwei, the internationally acclaimed artist, in 2003, he rounded up the artist’s creativity in the following words:
“Some have missed the thread running through Ai Weiwei’s superficially disparate activities as an artist, a curator, a publisher, an interior designer and an architect. In fact they all have a unity of purpose and a certain strategy behind them—to resist easy understanding, to force us to really look and to really think, to back out a space for true freedom of thought and spirit in a society emerging from the long black night of totalitarianism.”
This anthology is a wonderful tribute to a man who was too ahead of his times and was a brave heart. In a daring soul do we find a kinder soul.
Napack might have made enemies in his life time, but those enemies, if they read this anthology as a piece of retrospective, would really wish him to come back to life. They would ask for some impossible divine intervention. But Jonathan Napack is no more.
But Jonathan Napack lives, in the pages of this book, in the hearts of his friends and family members, in the minds of those people who only knew him as a byline and in the minds of people like me, who came to know him through ‘Airplanes and Parachutes’.
Jonathan Napack died on 20th January 2007 and he was single. But since then he has become many. |
