Illustration:
ill. 5.75 c (set: 5.75)
Date:
1988
Genre:
collage
Material:
scan, paper, grayscale; original source: collage, greyscale
Source:
Spiegel spezial 1988: Spiegel spezial. Die Wilden 68er, 1 January 1988.
Keywords:
parody, idol, 68er, German student movement, Mao Zedong, Mao portrait

1968-er Banquet (Wu yue fengbao de wancan 五月风暴的晚餐)

Art works like Liu Liguo’s Laughing Buddhas Mao (2005, ill. 5.59a and ill. 5.59 b) and Zhang Hongtu’s comic interpretation of the “red sun” as the “wrong sun” in his depiction of capitalist Quaker Oats Mao (1987, ill. 5.25) are playful in their negotiations with Mao’s godlike qualities. This can be said, too, for Zhang Hongtu’s 1989 work entitled The Last Banquet (ill. 5.75 a). It is a very close parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s (1452–1519) The Last Banquet (1495–98) except that everyone, including Jesus and each one of his disciples, is Mao (ill. 5.75b). It may be possible that this image is in fact the parody of a parody, as the participants in the (European Maoist) 1968 movement, too, had an image like this that included all their idols which is seen here: Che Guevara and Mao Zedong next to Wolfgang Lefèvre, Rudi Dutschke, Gaston Salvatore, Fritz Teufel, Horst Mahler, Rainer Langhans, Karl-Heinz Roth, Bernd Rabehl, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Christian Semler, and Hans-Jürgen Krahl.