Liu Ding - · PDF fileTang Xiaobing has highlighted the influence of Georg ... diately obvious forces at work in objective ... and it is precisely this interplay between truth and

Liu Ding

Rice, Mango, Pork... and Ghosts

Primo Marella GalleryMilan


www.primomarellagallery.com [email protected]

Viale Stelvio, 66(Entrance via Valtellina)

20159 Milan

T. +39 02 87384885F. +39 02 87384892

Ghost 3, 2016C Print on photographic paper, cm 60 x 80

Liu Ding Rice, Mango, Pork... and Ghosts

“Rice, Mango, Pork … and Ghosts” represents a new chapter in Liu Ding’s investigations into the legacy of Socialist Realism in China (for convenience, abbreviated to ‘SR’ from here on). These inve-stigations have taken the form of re-enactments of the visual culture of SR, and the development of propositions pertaining to its continuing influence as a tenacious ideological apparatus in contem-porary, globalized life. The current show develops a number of strands of Liu’s investigations: the role of the painted image in making concrete SR’s imagery, that imagery’s propagation out into the world, and the way the painted canvas can be used as a field of contestation for the meanings of these images; the role of photography as a contemporary revelation of SR’s presence in society, pro-viding panoramic views of its traces within everyday life, and holding those images for future analysis.

It is the nature of SR’s enforcement as an ideological bolster, to place a firm hold over culture. As such, once it has been applied within society as a whole, it cannot be unthought. Regardless of attempts to deny or move beyond it, culture still maintains an implicit dialogue with this aspect of aesthetic history. At one time it was instrumentalised as part of the Maoist doctrine, and attained a level of objectivity due to its imposition and adoption as a required stylistic form. That revolutionary impetus has become diluted over time, and while SR is still strongly associated with that particular period and its battles of visual culture, SR’s legacy has become unmoored from its direct co-option by the Party. This style has returned to a more ethereal plane, however it still maintains a ghostly presence in our lives and thoughts.

If it has been de-linked from the Soviet Communist and Chinese Maoist ideology by the factor of time, Liu’s work suggests it can now be adopted as a critical tool, to address not only its legacies in the va-rious parts of the world where it was embraced (predominantly Russia and China but in other parts of the world too), but also the practices and ways of thinking that grew up around the same time. This would take SR beyond a utilitarian understanding and return to it some kind of critical potential.

Chrysanthemum, 2016Oil on canvas, cm 180 x 160


Socialist Realism

Although originally codified in Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s, the Communist Party in China adopted Soviet Socialist Realism in the 1950s as a means to guide artists into undertaking a practical, revolutionary practice towards na-tional development in the New China. In his review of the development of a Socialist visual culture within China, Tang Xiaobing has highlighted the influence of Georg Lukács’s theory of realism on Chinese artists in the 1950s:

“The task of the realist writer or artist, asserts Lukács, is to ‘depict the vital, but not imme-diately obvious forces at work in objective reality,’ which involves piercing the surfa-ce of partial, subjective experiences and uncovering ‘a totality of social relations.’ A suc-cessful writer or artist discovers such a totality through abstraction … but then presents his discovery artistically as a mediated immediacy, rather than abstractly.” (Tang 2015, 79)

Within the Chinese experience of SR objects represented relate to this revelation of “totality” as potentially holding a revolutionary impetus. The development of SR claimed to reveal the future tendencies of the “real” through its representations, a revolutionary potential implicit in the state of things that could be activated by the act of representation.

As Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu have made clear in their own joint research into SR’s development in the Chinese context:

“As the revolution [in China] progressed and the [Chinese] Communist Party further de-fined Socialist Realism, it gradually evolved from an artistic style into an ideology with cle-ar viewpoints. It was the clothing of ideology, as well as ideology itself.” (Liu and Lu 2014a)

However, following the end of the Cultural Revolution, attitudes towards SR opened up. Zhang Xudong has outlined the more expansive conception of SR that developed within the emer-ging literature of the New Era period of the 1980s, pointing out that literary critic Liu Zaifu:

“… was intrigued by the new definition of socialist realism (formulated by Dmitry Mar-kov in 1978) as a ‘historically open system.’ … In Liu’s proposition, the emphasis seems not so much on loyalty to realism as such (the term had long ago degenerated into a label for literary convention and political orthodoxy within the state apparatus) as on the strategic in-troduction of ‘subjectivity.’ … [The] political purpose of this endeavour … is to break free by means of a shifted dwelling in the ‘inspirational device of the internal self.’” (Zhang 1997, 112)

Such a production of new subjectivities led to artists paradoxically reworking realism as a reaction to its emp-tying out under the sign of SR. Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu therefore propose that “realism emerged as a resistant stance” after the Cultural Revolution. At such a juncture practices that would seem innocuous in another context took on a heightened potential:

“… some of the members of the No Name Group and the Stars Art Group chose to paint landscapes, still lifes, and abstract paintings in order to gain more room for artistic practices.” (Liu and Lu 2014b)

The interpretation of each style and practice is highly dependent on the context within which they were taking place. As the meaning of SR itself changes depending on how it is used within a particular cultu-ral context, so the meaning of the reactions and developments in relation to SR are also contingent.

Twilights, 2016Mixed media, cm 6,5 x 28 x 15

Mango, 2016Oil on canvas, cm 180 x 160


Liu Ding & Socialist Realism

This ambiguous (and possibly ambivalent) aspect of SR, of its meaning and to the meaning that has been assumed for it, reveals SR’s openness to adaptation for alternative uses. The meanin-gs that SR came to represent were instituted as imaginary constructions of forces. These con-structions made up any particular understanding of SR, and the consequent understanding of SR in relation to its other or others. Each understanding marks out its own space of ideological operation, and in the process marks out an ideological space of its implied other. Liu Ding is the-refore able to adopt and adapt this space for himself, as a tool with which to confront the vi-sual ideology that had previously adopted SR and that it had come to represent so inextricably, as well as the concurrent visual ideologies developing in parallel to it in China, and other cultures.

Following on from the contemporary understandings of the meaning of SR and its place of activity, the legacies of these understandings must be addressed. Given that Liu is working after the initial understan-ding of SR has been worked through, it is this legacy that he works with and within. On a superficial level his artworks adopt many of the visible traits of the initial understanding of SR. Not only is the style and content following certain tropes that have come to be representative of SR, but Liu incorporates a fur-ther point of association by the system of production he has constructed – Liu does not paint the final works himself but engages another painter to undertake this task. This proxy painter has been trained in the official institutions and the traditions of SR, producing sanctioned paintings in the requisite style. By working with this painter Liu valorises his own paintings through the expert and involved hand of another. This is one way in which Liu directly keys into the systems of production that have been the mode of SR’s legacy – his artist-proxy carries within himself a weight of meaning that Liu’s work cannot help but express. This aspect of the production of the works allows Liu to exploit SR as method, style, and critical tool while maintaining a certain global distancing of himself from the meanings of his work.

Looking back over Liu’s recent exhibitions we can see how SR has become such a useful tool for him. “New Man”, his solo show in London in 2015, dealt with the teleological concept of the ‘new’ that was essentialised within SR, and in that way enacted and fulfilled. At that time the artist beca-me the producer of the state version of SR, following the precepts of SR’s approved forms, at the same time as tentatively feeling out the boundaries of their creative possibilities. “Li Jianguo Born in 1952” held in Shanghai earlier this year, used the invention of a fictional artist working in the later period of SR’s exploitation by the State, as it became an anachronism. This show attempted to em-body the processes of production within SR as it keyed into the experience of capitalism in China.


Tomato, 2016Oil on canvas, cm 180 x 160

The Paintings

The amalgamation of images on Liu’s canvases becomes a microcosm of the everyday as well as of the ideological wor-ld that we live in. Such a consideration and treatment of imagery is an assumption of post-modern visual culture. All around us the legacies of history live on in strange formats, negotiating their place in our visual field and our attention.

For “Rice, Mango, Pork … and Ghosts” Liu’s painted works comprise a series of painted collages that focus on various foodstuffs – the rice, mango, and pork of the exhibition’s title, but additionally potatoes, tomatoes, corn, chrysanthemums, pumpkins, and onions are addressed. These things have all come to hold resonance as signifiers of ideological thought in one way or another. The majority of these things are foodstuffs, and the relation of food to the body makes it a matter of life and death. This is a both a truth in relation to the specific history of China’s social development in the 20th century and a threat for the future, and it is precisely this interplay between truth and threat that forms of power find so useful, and with which they are able to project their meanings onto these objects. Because of this urgency, implied and then exploited via these seemingly passive objects, the objects become instrumentalised to serve the purposes of the State.

In Liu’s paintings these foodstuffs are juxtaposed with other images that relate to ideological production in-ternationally, and Liu’s canvases come to reflect this spacial process in their arrangements, enforcing a recko-ning of the various visualisations with each other. This reckoning is never allowed to resolve itself, but routes are constructed through the imagery, tracing connections and differences that subvert the historical as-sumptions associated with SR, but also the assumptions associated with any other imagery that Liu places alongside.

If collage takes existing things from the world and—without changing their basic material reality—pits them together in a new whole, then the painting of that collage shifts all those basic materials into the purview of painterly considerations. So not only does the juxtaposition of the elements appearing on Liu’s canvases question the meaning of the subject matter represented in them, but the painting of these collages places into question the possibilities of the collage medium as well. Of course, such a consideration has a long lineage, perhaps most clearly established as a visually subversive tactic in Cubist investigations of the world. In the early 20th Century Georges Braque incorporated painted representations of newspaper headers and pasted pieces of cloth or paper pre-printed with wood grain designs in his works. Cubist artists’ establishment of this interplay betwe-en reality and representation on the surface of the canvas was merely one landmark in the on-going interrogation by artists of the relation between the meanings associated with a reality and the adjusted meanings associated with its reproduction.

So Liu’s paintings are just that—paintings. They mimic various styles and forms of representation, painted or otherwise, yet always return to the painted mark as the holder of privileged meaning in the context of this series of works. Even the abstract marks on his canvases are proposed as considered actions by the artist, not designed to abstract from reality but to embody the reality of the abstract as a form holding implied meaning, as a realist representation of the historically contingent abstract mark. These “abstract” marks, the painted marks Liu Ding has directed the proxy artist to produce, represent the marks that in turn have come to represent “abstraction”. This treatment of abstraction suggests that each element in these painting can serve to subvert the other elements, in terms of form, style, content, and interpretation.

These elements also refer back to their instrumentalisation within the state ideology, and this process of instrumentalisation is also reflected in Liu’s paintings in a way that attempts to subvert that ideology. These paintings propose that symbols and ima-gery that once held specific ideological implications subsequently became normalised amongst their intended recipients. They also became normalised for observers outside of that environment as representative of a particular ideological environment as “other” and readings of these as positive or negative are traits that are applied by those observers. Such a structure of under-standing and meaning lives on even after their supposed demise – the symbols and imagery are still present in our daily environ-ment and in ghostly form in our historical consciousness. However, their assumptions and implications may be upset and their meanings again set loose when they are brought together with other, equally loaded, images from other social environments.

Pumpkin, 2016Oil on canvas, cm 180 x 160


Onion, 2016Oil on canvas, cm 180 x 160


The Photos

This ghostly presence comes to the fore in Liu’s doctored photographs taken of the everyday environments of China.These photographs capture moments in spaces that he proposes hold these loose readings, with various ideological apparatus jockeying for attention in the visual field. They serve as evidence of the apparatus in view, even if the full extent or meaning of that apparatus is not evident. In relation to a previous series of photographs (Beijing (Series No. 1) (2014)) that the current series builds upon, Liu sees the act of capturing these snapshots as primarily directed at a future observer who will look upon these pictures with privileged knowledge of the significance of the things they show. Liu is pragmatic about this: “my work is made for the future … because when you’re inside the changes you don’t easily recognize them.” (Sanderson 2016, 246)

Most of the photographs in this new series have been taken while driving around a city. The viewpoint is from a car win-dow, from the middle of the road alongside other traffic, directed at the features that lie alongside the road. The buildings, bridges, structures for advertising, the other vehicles travelling side by side with the photographer are captured. In most cases there is an obvious indicator of the presence of an ideological apparatus – perhaps one of the ubiquitous banners strung up on railings by the side of the road, with inspiring slogans written in white characters; or a cartoon image repre-senting an idealised family, in an idealised urban environment, encouraging good citizenship. Elsewhere a sequence of pithy, two-character phrases appears in a garden setting, the words encapsulating the desired characteristics of the participants of a harmonious society: (to paraphrase their translation: patriotism / innovation / tolerance / virtue).

The chaos of everyday life in the overwhelming consumer society of China might suggest that its throng of distractions would diminish the power of the ideological structures that appear in these photographs. However this would ignore the fact that the chaos is partially a product of these apparatus. The ideological principles sustain themselves through organic structures that they have themselves constructed or have inspired, or that accrete around them, “naturally” as it were. By having become embedded in everyday life in this way they retain their potential to revert elements of society back into a space of authoritarianism if we are not paying enough attention. We might assume they are banal and anodyne markers of an anachronistic culture, and yet these signs and structures are an integral part of the construction of the contemporary social space. Such manipulated photographs present these ghostly presences and suggest that our social environment holds within itself the inherent traits of ideology. At times this social environment expresses this latent presence in unsettling ways; it becomes the canvas on which new social structures are being negotiated, and where the latent ideological pro-cesses can become realised in new ways. Liu’s photographs attempt to capture these structural elements, and his docto-ring inserts ghostly elements of gathering clouds and crossing shadows as a way to make strange these everyday scenes.


Potato, 2016Oil on canvas, cm 180 x 160

In a way Liu’s adoption of the technique of painted collage comes to represent the ideological warfare that still takes place between cultures and states, even within them. An object takes on specific meaning within a cultural or ideological environ-ment, and its relative value is altered. In 1968 the mango fruit took on ideological significance when Mao Zedong gave a box of the fruit to the workers who had played a part in quelling the battling student factions that marked the early stages of the Cultural Revolution. The mango became symbolic of many features of this situation, from Mao’s benevolence towards his obe-dient subjects, his own self-sacrifice, etc. In this way these objects develop out of their prosaic meanings and come to embody a sense of belonging to an ideological effort – in the case of the mango of a reward related to the development of the nation. This embodiment is wished upon those objects, as it were; and they are seemingly helpless in being adopted for this ideological use.

One consequence of Liu’s adoption of the collage method is that by directly bringing together and addressing the particular signs he selects, by highlighting their relationships through this method and then painting the overall arrangement of ele-ments, his paintings themselves enter into the general economy of symbols that the individual elements establish and main-tain. These paintings create a new flattened configuration of the elements and their meanings, and reconfigure the relations and values that these elements represent. The elements no longer act as carriers of an ideology (or at least not in the way they were perhaps intended) – whether that of a “Communist” China or a “Capitalist” America (although the systems are far broader than such names imply). By painting these collaged elements Liu places SR onto a flat playing field with the many other sign systems and ideological apparatus that he is addressing. On top of this, his manipulated photographs propose that our social environment is also a collage that holds within itself the structural traces of the ideological apparatus, and the marks he adds to these photographs suggest that at times these environments can express this latent presence in un-settling (or “revolutionary”?) ways. Society is a canvas on which ideology can be negotiated, where ideological processes can be made explicit or latent, and hence become realised and adapted to their situations. To what end it is difficult to predict.

Is this an indication of the action of globalisation? That the historical meanings of these elements in their local environ-ments, where they had such extraordinary powers to inspire and empower people, have apparently been rendered meaningless by the corruption of time and the vagaries of human activity (vagaries justified by these images?), and have been smoothed over as they have entered an internationalised and globalised field of inferences? But do they entirely relinquish their original meanings in the service of a new and over-arching ideology? Or is the former apparatus me-rely idle, lying dormant until a gravity-like force causes it to enter the natural cracks in the ideology of globalisation?

Edward Sanderson

Corn, 2016Oil on canvas, cm 180 x 160


Course (as in political course)2016

Plaster relief, purple sand flower pot, a polo uniformCm 60 x 130 x 150 (podium), cm 21 x 9 x 9 (flower pot), cm 100x 45 x 32 (plaster relief)

Biography

Liu Ding was born in Changzhou, Jiangsu province in 1976, currently based in Beijing as an artist and a curator. His work has been shown at numerous art institutions including Tate Modern, Tur-ner Contemporary,Arnolfini, UK; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo; São Paulo Muse um of Art, São Paulo; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Kunstmuseum Bern, PasquArt Biel, Swi-tzerland; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Seoul Museum of Art; Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco; Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai; and Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei. He has participated in various biennials such as 2015 Istanbul Biennial, 2015 Asia Pacific Triennial, 2014 Shanghai Biennial, 2012 Taipei Biennial, Chinese Pavilion of 2009 Venice Biennial, 2008 Media City Seoul, and 2005 Guan-gzhou Triennial. He has co-curated Little Movements: Self-Practice in Contemporary Art at OCAT, Shenzhen (2011) which has travelled to Museion in Bolzano, Italy (2013) and Shenzhen Sculp-ture Biennale in 2012. His writing and editorial works include: Little Movements: Self-practice in Contemporary Art (Guangxi Normal University Press, 2011), Little Movements II: Self-practice in Contemporary Art (Walther König, 2013), Accidental Message: Art is not a System, not a World (Lingnan Art Publishing House, 2012), and Individual Experience: Conversations and Narratives of Contemporary Art Practice in China from 1989 to 2000 (Lingnan Art Publishing House, 2013).

Pork, 2016Oil on canvas, cm 180 x 160


LIU DING (1976 Changzhou Jiangsu Province, China)

Education

2001 established Pink Studio, Nanjing2004-2005 founder and member of Complete Art Experience Project2007-2008 artistic director, JoyArt, Beijing, ChinaCurrently lives and works in Beijing as an independent artist

Selected Solo Exhibitions 2016 Rice, Mango, Pork... and Ghosts, Primo Marella Gallery, Milan Li Jianguo Born in 1952, Art Antenna, Shanghai, China 2015 Reef: A Prequel, Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, Netherlands2013 BMW Tate Live: Liu Ding Almost Avante-garde, Performance Room, Tate Modern, London, UK2012 Take Home and Make Real the Priceless in Your Heart, Frye Art Museum, Seattle, Wa shington, USA2011 Gravestone for Rumour Mongers/Grabstein für Verleumder, L.A. Galerie, Frankfurt, Germany2010 Liu Ding: Conversations, Moscow Biennale for Young Art, Aftergallery, Moscow, Russia2009 Special project: Chen Ke, Primo Marella Gallery, Milan2008 Traces of Sperm, L.A. Galerie, Frankfurt, Germany2007 The Ruins of Pleasure, Marella Gallery, Milan, Italy Tiger, Universal Studios Beijing, Beijing, China2006 Samples from the Transition – Products, L.A. Galerie Frankfurt, Germany2005 Samples from the Transition – Treasure, Long March Project Room, Beijing, China2004 Noah’s Living Room – The Power of the Mass, China Unlimited, Berlin, Germany Image Beyond Image – Liu Ding’s Photography, Rooseum, Malmö, Sweden2001 White Ecstasy – Liu Ding’s Installation, KEYI Gallery, Nanjing, China1998 Unbalance – Liu Ding’s Paintings, FEIFAN Art Center, Nanjing, China Selected Group Exhibitions 2016 Chinese Whispers, Kunstmuseum Bern and Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland Discordant Harmony, Guandu Museum of Art, Taipei, Taiwan 2015 Discordant Harmony, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan Do Disturb, MOMA PS1, New York, USA 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia The 14th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey Do Disturb, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France2014 Shanghai Biennial, Shanghai, China 5000 Names: Hans van Dijk, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art , Rotterdam, Netherlands2013 Chen Shaoxiong and Liu Ding, Primae Noctis Art Gallery, Lugano, CH2012 Taipei Biennial 2012, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan The Tanks – Art in Action, Tate Modern, London, UK2011 A Museum That is Not, Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou, China Marker, Art Dubai Projects (non-profit curated programme), Madinat Arena, Dubai, UAE The Global Contemporary. Kunstwelten nach 1989, ZKM - Zentrum für Kunst und

2010 Lianzhou International Photo Festival 2010, Lianzhou, China The Third Party – An Exhibition in Three Acts, Platform China Contemporary Art Institute, Beijing, China Zeitgenössische chinesische Fotografie, Oldenburger Kunstverein, Oldenburg, Germany Glass Factory – Art in the New Financial Era, Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China Mush-room, Aftergallery, Moscow, Russia2009 Chinese Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennal, Venice, Italy The 2009-2011 Vancouver Biennale, Vancouver, Canada 5th Latin-American Biennial of Visual Arts – VENTO SUL, Instituto Paranaense de Arte, Curitiba, Brazil2008 China: Construction Deconstruction, Museum of Art San Paulo, San Paulo, Brazil Aurum – Gold in Contemporary Art, Centre PasquArt, Bienne, Switzerland Art Multiple, Ke Center for Contemporary Arts, Shanghai, China New World Order, Groningen Museum, Groningen, The Netherlands2007 China Power Station II, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway Foreign Objects, Project Space, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria Thermocline of Art – New Asian Waves, ZKM Center for Art & Media, Karlsruhe, Germany2006 AllLookSame? Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy Dual Realities – The Fourth Seoul International Media Art Biennale, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea China Power Station I, Battersea Power Station, Serpentine Gallery, London, UK Beijing Biennial of Architecture 2006, The National Museum of China, Beijing, China2005 Renovation – Relations of Production, Long March Space, Beijing, China Beyond - the Second Guangzhou Triennial, Guangdong Art Museum, Guangzhou, China2003 Illusion, Artist Commune, Hong Kong, China Play Not Play, Beijing Tokyo Art Projects, Beijing, China Aphrodisiac, Hai Shang Shan Art Centre, Shanghai, China2002 Death is Silence, Yan Club, Beijing, China New Urbanism – Chinese Contemporary Art Exhibition, Guangdong Museum Of Art, Guangzhou, China2001 Money Funny Honey, Taikang Top Space, Beijing, China Inauguration of the New Gallery, China Art Archives and Warehouse, Beijing, China1999 Aesthetes and Vagueness – Performance Art Exhibition, Qinliang Park, Nanjing, China The Feeling of Floating, Nanjing Normal University Museum, Nanjing, China

Rice, 2016Oil on canvas, cm 180 x 160


Edward Sanderson

Edward Sanderson is an art critic living in Beijing with a particular interest in alternative cultural practices by artists in China, and contemporary artists working critically with the art/gallery systems.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Liu, Ding, and Carol Yinghua Lu. 2014a. ‘From the Issue of Art to the Issue of Position: The Echoes of Socialist Realism, Part I’. E-Flux Journal, no. 55 (May).— — —. 2014b. ‘From the Issue of Art to the Issue of Position: The Echoes of Socialist Realism, Part II’. E-Flux Journal, no. 56 (June).Sanderson, Edward. 2016. ‘“New Man”: Liu Ding in Conversation with Edward Sanderson (trans. Carol Yinghua Lu)’. Translated by Carol Yinghua Lu. Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 2 (2-3): 235–48. doi:10.1386/jcca.2.2-3.235_1.Tang, Xiaobing. 2015. Visual Culture in Contemporary China: Paradigms and Shifts. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Zhang, Xudong. 1997. Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-Garde Fiction, and the New Chinese Cinema. Post-Contemporary Interventions. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.


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Liu Ding - · PDF fileTang Xiaobing has highlighted the influence of Georg ... diately obvious forces at work in objective ... and it is precisely this interplay between truth and