It is no secret that Giacomo Puccini’s opera Turandot (1926), the source text behind New York-based sculptor Covey Gong’s solo exhibition at SculptureCenter, presents a mythic and embellished vision of dynastic China. The opera’s narrative, in which a princess who poses riddles to vet suitors is bested at her own game, comes from Haft Peykar, an epic poem by the twelfth-century Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi. This was reworked into a short story by an eighteenth-century French orientalist and adapted for the stage in Germany in 1801 before making its way into the Italian composer’s imagination. Puccini never visited China; his posthumously-produced opera illustrates something akin to what artist Astria Suparak, in her ongoing critique of science fiction cinema, calls “Asian futures without Asians.” One need only to swap the word “futures” with “pasts” or “legends.”
For a while, I have avoided the word crisis as it refers to our ecological condition because it seemed to provoke an intellectual standstill, the kind of dismay that concludes effort or even further consideration. Recent chatter about the AI crisis appeared similar. The crisis in arts funding did the same. There are even claims of a crisis in any social imaginary. Recently, however, I have begun to wonder if the permanent crisis of the humanities might not provide a different attitude towards crisis across these different areas.