Contemporary Chinese Art. Academia. Fried Chicken. Terracotta warriors.

I met SY at the art bloggers’ party the other night; she’s a friend of MY’s. Coincidentally enough, it turns out we both wrote our M.A. theses on the same subject: Chinese artist Yue Minjun (he of the bald, pink, grinning figures). Over a ginormous dish of Korean fried chicken, SY was bemoaning the fact that, in hindsight, there’s so much she would have done differently.

Boy, do I know the feeling …

It got me to thinking about my thesis-writing experience. Mostly I tend to be my own harshest critic, but, oddly enough, those couple of months of my life weren’t all stress and hair-pulling frustration. Don’t me wrong, a lot of it was, but at the end of it I actually … kinda liked the final product.

Oddly enough.

For me.

Anyways. So the ACM is currently hosting Terracotta Warriors: The First Emperor and His Legacy, where a small number of the famous terracotta figures from the Emperor Qin’s army are on loan from Xi’an. Eight of them, to be exact. Yue’s work – and that of Fang Lijun‘s, the other artist I wrote about in my thesis – have much in common with the so-called First Emperor’s funerary legions, and I devoted a short portion of my work to exploring these areas of confluence, along with a brief excursus into Peircean semiotics.

Thought I’d give it a bit of an airing out here.

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The Semiotics of Repetition: Yue Minjun, Fang Lijun and the Qin Terracotta Warriors

Apropos of his work, Yue Minjun has observed:

In the year of 246 BC, the first Emperor of Qing [sic] Dynasty built a huge tomb for himself. Thousands of warrior figures, chariots and other things were buried in this colossal and gloomy underground kingdom. These warriors all wear a similar expression, serious and stiff.[1]

Critics have likewise noted the structural resemblance between Yue’s constantly reiterated figures and the terracotta army of Qin Shi Huang 秦始皇:

These soldiers, created according to a standardized criterion and fired from hard clay, were taller than real men. By means of sheer numbers and a rigid, schematic arrangement, they formed a single unit in which each individual member existed solely for the purpose of serving the collective. The critical base of Yue Minjun’s work is founded on this particular Chinese conceptual lineage.[2] (See below.)

The terracotta army, Xi’an.

Similitude, seriality, quantity—the tropes inherent in the mortuary objects of the Qin emperor, produced over two millennia before, are likewise at work in Yue’s contemporary iconographic negotiations, a fact apparent at first glance. His oeuvre in both painting and in sculpture is visually dominated by the one salient motif that also informs much critical discourse surrounding his art: the relentless, iconic image of the neon pink visage, with its close-cropped head of hair and tightly scrunched-up eyes, mouth wide open to expose two rows of perfectly even white teeth, its expression lodged somewhere between a manic grin and a grimace of pain. Even the most cursory survey of Yue’s output bears this out, from his Idol Series 偶像系列 组图 of 1996, which presents a mass of smiling, laughing pink faces arranged into a grid-like composition on the canvas surface; to The Night Wind 晚风 (1997), featuring a rhythmically calculated line of the same figures queued up in a horizontal column, each and every one hugging his knees and smiling into an unknown distance; to the unruly multitude of forms piled up, helter-skelter like a trash heap, in Garbage Dump 垃圾场 (2003). (See below.) It is Yue’s Contemporary Terracotta Warriors series, 现代兵马俑, however, that brings the historical connections of his work most clearly to the fore, the explicit reference to the subterranean legions of the First Emperor emphasizing the correspondences with the visual culture of an earlier epoch. A veritable phalanx of Yue’s figures – clad in a uniform of white tee and black pants – stand poised like the infantrymen of the terracotta army, ordered into the rigidity of a military formation and seemingly frozen into their postures, positions and ranks for all time. (See figures below.)

Yue Minjun, Idol Series (right) 偶像系列 组图 (右) (1996)

Yue Minjun, The Night Wind 晚风 (1997)

Yue Minjun, Garbage Dump 垃圾场 (2003)

Yue Minjun, Contemporary Terracotta Warriors 2 现代兵马俑 2 (1999)

Figures of infantrymen from the Terracotta Army.

Although, unlike Yue, Fang Lijun has never drawn any links between his work and ancient funerary material culture, the visual field generated in his paintings and woodcuts is also produced by the repetition of the single individual to represent a crowd, raising similar issues of similitude and uniformity. His Heads (2002), for instance, an installation piece comprised of some 15,000 small, gilded bronze heads mounted on slender steel rods, immediately calls to mind the massed, ordered profusion of the Qin warriors. It also appropriates the very experience of viewing the army in its underground pits today: laid out like a carpet of gold-tipped needles on the floor, Heads obliges the viewer to look down at its gleaming plenitude, in the same fashion that visitors to the Qin emperor’s mortuary complex in Xi’an today are required to gaze at the sea of subterranean statuary from the height of a platform at ground level.[3] (See below.) Elsewhere, Fang’s Series 2, No. 2 系列 2，第 2 号 (1991 – 2), which features the famous yawn so prominent in his paintings from the early 1990s[4], positions the main, yawning figure up front and center, against the backdrop of a cerulean-blue sky and a row of identically bald men with heavy-set, simian facial structures, each indistinguishable from the other. (See below.) The same figural complex appears in most of his work from this period: Series 2, No. 4 系列 2，第 4 号 (1991 – 2) reproduces a group of them, clad differently in blue Mao suits or the usual standard ensemble of a white button-down shirt and pants (donned by most urban-dwelling men in China in the 1980s), but otherwise sporting the same close-eyed expression and ponderous, hulking physiognomy. (See below.) Fang’s later work extends this strategy of reiteration to its most surreal limits, where even the most superficial differences of dress are eliminated, retaining only the omnipresent facialities. Untitled, from 2002, jettisons any trace of recognizable space from the composition altogether, instead filling the pictorial surface with a densely-packed agglomeration of bald, squinting heads, the yawn of previous paintings here transformed into gapes of astonishment or slack-jawed howls of dismay, the immediate effect of the piece one of near-hellishness. (See below.)

Fang Lijun, Heads (2002) at The Lab in Belmar, Colorado, 2007.

The terracotta army, Xi’an.

Detail of Heads.

Fang Lijun, Series 2, No. 2 系列 2，第 2 号 (1991 – 2)

Fang Lijun, Series 2, No. 4 系列 2，第 4 号 (1991 – 2)

Fang Lijun, Untitled 无题 (2002 – 3)

Both Yue’s and Fang’s creations are generally read as portraits of the artists themselves. Despite their obviously outlandish appearance, characterized by the saturated skin tone, an improbable number of teeth, and the impossibly smooth complexion free of wrinkles and blemishes, the facial peculiarities of Yue’s ubiquitous figures are understood as a form of pictorial autobiography, a self-portrayal. (See below.) On the occasion of Yue’s first museum exhibition in the U.S. in 2007, a New York Times reviewer observed: “Your first reaction upon meeting Yue Minjun might be, yes, it is indeed he! The face with the enigmatic, jaw-breaking grin, perhaps the most recognizable image in contemporary Chinese painting, is a self-portrait.”[5] Fang’s iconography of reiteration gestures in the same manner towards an originary moment in the artist’s physical appearance, particularly in the “entirely personal” fact of his shaved head, according to one commentator.[6] As Fang explains, this resemblance was at least partly true: “[It] … was physiological; I was a compulsive head-shaver …”[7] (See below.) However, as in Yue’s case, the appearance of Fang’s figures reveal a gulf between his own image and those of his paintings, their distinctive semblance approaching caricature rather than being grounded in verisimilitude. The slippage between realistic transcription and inflected representation – between a strict sense of fidelity to nature and an adapted or modified rendering – foregrounds issues of individuality and collectivity. This dynamic was anticipated in the terracotta army of the so-called First Emperor more than two millennia ago, and by conflictual opinions of their ontology and function. The means of production allowed for synchronized corporeal articulations across the range of figural categories, from the standing to the genuflecting, both charioteer and foot soldier alike, while including at the same time more particularized representational modes. (See below.) The statues were assembled from a selection of prefabricated body parts crafted in molds, including the head; torso; legs (below the garment); arms and hands; feet; the plinth.[8] Details of facial physiognomy, such as the eyebrows, moustache and lips, were reworked by hand after the bodies were put together, as were the joints between the constituent parts. Those components, while conforming to a limited number of shapes – 8 different varieties of heads have been distinguished, for instance – could be, and were, combined with great diversity. (See below.) Warriors were also equipped with real weapons made from bronze, thus further contributing an aura of absolute lifelikeness. The cumulative effect is the oft-noted uniqueness of each separate statue, an assessment that, however, belies the extent of the modular process of manufacture. The figures, as such, were caught in a tension between these various representational modes, from structural uniformity (mass-produced components) to individual authenticity (hand-worked particulars) to actual reality (genuine weapons, as opposed to representations) – and it is precisely this interplay that finds resonance in the dialectic between the individual and the crowd one sees at work in Yue and Fang.

Yue Minjun in front of his artwork in his studio, Beijing. Photo from the New York Times, November 13, 2007.

Fang Lijun with two of his works, at his solo show at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum 台北市立美術館 in 2009, “Endlessness of Life: 25 Years Retrospect [sic] of Fang Lijun” “展覽主題：生命之渺—方力鈞創作25年展.”

A standing horseman from the terracotta army, Xi’an.

Terracotta charioteer.

Sections of a standing terracotta figure. From Ledderose.

Scholarly opinion has traditionally assigned these soldiers the role of posthumous protectors of the monarch, surrogates for the people who served him while he was alive, but more recent scholarship has indicated that the so-called individuality of the figures might instead be secondary to their social or ritual role in the grouping, a “notation of the specific segment of reality to which the figural image refers … sustaining distinctness of entity within a given context, without necessarily having to contain any qualities of individual personality.”[9] The American philosopher C. S. Peirce proposed a semiotic system based on a classification of different sign-types: a tripartite typology of icon, index and symbol. It is the first two sign-types, the icon and the index, which concern us here. Of iconicity, Peirce had this to say: “Most icons, if not all, are likenesses of their objects.” Or: “… firstly, Likenesses, or, as I prefer to say, Icons, which serve to represent their objects only in so far as they resemble them in themselves …”[10] Later, he qualified the concept in a more specific fashion: “An icon is a sign which would possess the character which renders it significant, even though its object had no existence; such as a lead-pencil streak as representing a geometrical line.”[11] In other words, likeness, as it concerns iconicity, is not predicated on actual existence; rather, the resemblance may relate to completely imaginary objects or to ideas (e.g. geometry) instead. An icon, then, may operate along the lines of visual similitude without gesturing at any particular object existing in reality. To return to the case of the terracotta army: any one statue may seem uniquely verismilar, distinguished from its fellows in myriad details (thus leading to claims that each soldier was a portrayal of a real human being), but it retains an undeniable, underlying structural resemblance to the rest of the group, being crafted from the same molds and parts. Like Yue’s and Fang’s figures – who, though changing clothes, are engaged in different activities, embody shifting performative roles, and inhabit different compositional settings and scenarios from one canvas to the next, are nonetheless comprised of the same figure over and over – the terracotta warriors are predicated on a structural likeness which serves as a basis for exterior difference, understood to be iconic signs without necessarily being portraits.

The driving force behind the phenomenon, the First Emperor Qin, is remembered by posterity for his unification of the Central Plains and the founding of a cohesive Chinese state. Aided and abetted by the Legalist-minded Li Si 李斯, who served as his Chancellor, the monarch founded a polity that boasted a powerful bureaucracy centered on his person, capable of regulating a variety of standardized systems throughout the land as both a means and a reflection of the new central authority. The most salient articulation of this power was the Legalist doctrine 法家, a utilitarian code emphasizing the role of the ruler in politics. One of the key Legalist texts was written by the philosopher Han Fei 韓非 (Li’s fellow student), in which he proposed three foundational tenets of strong, practical kingship: power 勢; strategy 術; and the law 法. The last of these was explicitly wed to a regimen of punitive measures: “Therefore … to unify the folkways of the masses, nothing could match the law. To warn the officials and overawe the people, to rebuke obscenity and danger, and to forbid falsehood and deceit, nothing could match penalty.”[12] Even more pertinently, the exercise of power by a sovereign was considered paramount to the maintenance of law and order. One scholar sums up this position as such: “Whereas the ruler as individual is limited in his capacity to regulate the conduct of others, from the strategically advantageous position of the throne he can use his political status as ruler to amplify his influence over others. It is this political status and its application as a fulcrum for increasing the ruler’s capacity to influence others that constitute his shih [power].”[13] In addition to imposing Legalism as a clear public ideology and the incontrovertible law of land – at the expense of other existing schools of thought, like Confucianism – the Qin emperor, with the help of Li, also standardized the written language, enforcing the small Seal Script 小篆书 as the state-wide norm (see below), and further consolidating systems of measurements and currency.

An example of a small Seal Script rock carving from Mt. Tai.

The modular, mass manufacture of the Qin subterranean army was possible precisely because of the centralization of political power, and the consequent ability of the state to marshal vast amounts of resources: manpower, materials, tools, time. In this sense, the terracotta statuary may be read as indices of the political system that brought about their existence – apropos of which, the Peircean index, as a sign, is premised on existential contiguities between representamen and object. Peirce stated that “an index is a sign which would, at once, lose the character which makes it a sign if its object were removed, but would not lose that character if there were no interpretant.”[14] As commonly understood in art historical circles, the painterly gesture, qua index, is a trace of the artist’s hand that emphasizes its own processual or representational nature, rather than being an image grounded in naturalism. Elsewhere, Rosalind Krauss has said of the index: “As distinct from symbols, indexes establish their meaning along the axis of a physical relationship to their referents. They are the marks or traces of a particular cause, and that cause is the thing to which they refer, the object they signify. Into the category of the index, we would place physical traces (like footprints), medical symptoms, or the actual referents … Cast shadows could also serve as the indexical signs of objects …”[15] As signs that exist “along the axis of a physical relationship”, indices are marks (like footprints) that act as material indicators of their origins (the foot that made it). The primary mechanism of the semiotic process here, then, is one of cause and effect. Moving back to the case at hand, the modular, serialized nature of the terracotta warriors not only index the specific methods and processes of their production, allowing archaeologists and art historians to reconstruct those means of fabrication, but allude to the very social forces which allowed for the sorts of large-scale operations involved. By one rough estimate, the workforce responsible for crafting the more than six thousand life-size human figures and horses may have numbered as many as a thousand men, toiling away in the eleven years from the time the emperor conquered various local territories and kingdoms (of the aptly-named Warring States period) in 221 B.C. to establish the empire, to his death in 210 B.C.[16] To churn out an average of some six hundred figures a year, each standing warrior weighing between 150 to 200 kg [17], and often involving the working of facial details by hand after the assembly of the body, after which the painting of the statue had to be done – those numbers must have been necessary, and it was the centralization of power in the hands of the First Emperor that permitted the forced conscription of laborers, convicts and slaves from the four corners of the realm to begin work at the site. This centralized body politic has been adduced as a socio-historical imperative of the Qin era, indexed by the formal, material and logistical characteristics of the terracotta army:

The Lishan mausoleum … occurs at a critical juncture in the history of Chinese art, at the moment when the coercive power of the ruler was matched with his ability to command vast economic resources and, above all, to exert exclusive authority over forms of visual mediation. Because of such an unparalleled capability … a microcosm could have been created that sustained claims to authenticity.[18]

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[1] “Contemporary Terracotta Warriors”, on Yue’s personal website, The Gallery of 岳敏君. See <http://www.yueminjun.com/en/biography/bio14.html&gt;.

[2] Sabine Kunz (扎比內.庫蒽茨), “Yue Minjun” (岳敏君) in Song Zhuang: Fang Lijun, Yang Shaobin, Yue Minjun, Li Dapeng (Bremen: Städtische Galerie im Buntentor, 2001), p. 45.

English translation my own; the text in Chinese reads: “这些士兵是按统一标准，用硬陶土烧制的，比真人还要高。通过数量和严格的排列，它们体现了一个集体，一个个人必须为全体服务的集体。岳敏君的作品就是批判性地建立在这一个中国传统观念上.”

[3] The installation received an exhibition at The Lab, a multi-purpose space in Belmar, Colorado, in 2007. See <http://www.belmarlab.org/fanglijun.php&gt;.

[4] Wu Hung, for one, refers to a “profound sense of boredom” expressed by Fang’s yawning figure; Karen Smith calls it “an image of mocking amusement.”

[5] Bernstein, Richard. “An Artist’s Famous Smile: What Lies Behind It?” New York Times, November 13, 2007. The exhibition, ”Yue Minjun and the Symbolic Smile”, ran at the Queens Museum from Oct 14^th 2007 to Jan 6^th2008.

[6] Karen Smith, “Fang Lijun: Sink or Swim”, p. 151.

[7] In Jérôme Sans, “Fang Lijun: A Primitive State of Humanity”, p. 17.

[8] Discussed in Chap. 3 of Lothar Ledderose’s Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 50 – 73.

[9] Ladislav Kesner, “Likeness of No One: (Re)presenting the First Emperor’s Army.” The Art Bulletin, vol.77, no.1 (March, 1995): 115 –132.

[10] Qtd. in T. L. Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs (Cambridge, U.K. & NY: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 215.

[11] Qtd. in Short, p. 215.

[12] From Chap. VI of the Complete Works of Han Fei Tzu, translated by W. K. Liao. Available online at the University of Virginia portal: <http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/saxon/servlet/SaxonServlet?source=xwomen/texts/hanfei.xml&style=xwomen/xsl/dynaxml.xsl&chunk.id=tpage&doc.view=tocc&doc.lang=bilingual&gt;.

In the original, the passage reads: “故  … 一民之軌，莫如法。屬官威民，退淫殆，止詐偽，莫如刑。”

[13] Roger T. Ames, The Art of Rulership: A Study in Ancient Chinese Political Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1983), p. 72.

[14] Qtd. in Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, “Semiotics and Art History.” The Art Bulletin, vol. 73, no. 2 (June 1991), pp. 174 – 208. See p. 189.

[15] Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Part 1” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass., and London, U.K.: MIT Press, 1986), pp. 196 – 209. See p. 198.

[16] See Ledderose, p. 70.

[17] See Ledderose, p. 70.

[18] Kesner, p. 131.

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The Last Empress of China: Poster Girl for the Anti-Tobacco Movement

Image of the day: a blurry 1920s photograph of …… whom ?

It’s probably obvious to some – title’s a dead giveaway anyways – but just a quick note: regular users of public transportation in Singapore must have seen ads for the latest “I Quit” campaign by now, with pictures of people who’ve pledged to quit holding up two cigarette-less fingers, and wearing tees proclaiming the proud fact (below).

Anyways, it put me in mind of the black-and-white image above, which I love, simply for its sheer spontaneity and contextual incongruousness: that’s the so-called last emperor of China, Pu Yi, lighting a cigarette for his empress, Wan Rong.

It was probably taken sometime between 1922 and 1924, on the grounds of the Forbidden City: the five-year-old Pu Yi officially abdicated his position following the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 – bringing Manchu sovereignty to an end, as well as two millennia of dynastic rule in China – but was allowed to stay on in the imperial palace. This he did, right up to the year of his sixteenth birthday in 1922, when he wed, taking Wan Rong as his empress and Wen Xiu as an imperial consort. Two short years later, however, Pu Yi and his entourage were hounded out of the Forbidden City by the Christian warlord Feng Yuxiang, whereupon they decamped to Tianjin.

Numerous photographs exist of Wan Rong’s brief residence in the palace though. She’s seen romping through the gardens; daytripping with her mom outside of the imperial compound; just hangin’ out with her English tutor, the American missionary’s daughter, Isabel Ingram (below); even trying to ride a bicycle (below); and, of course, smoking. Thanks to Bertolucci, it’s no secret that the last empress of China had issues with opium addiction, and apparently even from her early days the cigarettes she smoked contained small amounts of the substance.

It ended up taking her life.

In 1946, at the age of 40, Wan Rong, abandoned by Pu Yi and having fallen into Communist hands, died of withdrawal symptoms and malnutrition in a jail in remote northeastern China.

R.I.P.

The moral here, I’m sure, is clear enough: Philip Morris really doesn’t need any more of your $$$.

Wan Rong shortly after her marriage.

Wan Rong with her English tutoress, Isabel Ingram (right) and Reginald Johnston (left), her husband’s.

Wan Rong on a bike, in the Forbidden City.

Wan Rong dressed as a fashionable ’20s flapper, indulging in her favourite vice. With her is her husband. This picture probably dates to their Tianjin years.

Ai Weiwei: Walking Free, Not Talking Free

So, almost three months after Chinese artist Ai Weiwei disappeared into the no-man’s-land of detention, he’s finally been released by the authorities. Not without a proviso, however: apparently he’s free to walk, but not talk. An LA Times article (reproduced below) has the scoop.

Free Ai Weiwei, a site dedicated to the cause, also has up to the date news.

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Ai Weiwei upon his release. Image from the LA Times.

CHINA FREES AI WEIWEI ON BAIL.

The government cites ‘good attitude in confessing his crimes’ in its abrupt release of the acerbic dissident Ai Weiwei, who was in prison for two months without charges. He may now face a civil case. By Barbara Demick.

After languishing for more than two months in prison without formal charges, China’s most famous dissident artist was abruptly released on bail late Wednesday.

The official New China News Agency reported that Ai had been freed “because of his good attitude in confessing his crimes as well as a chronic disease he suffers from.”

The 54-year-old artist is reported to suffer from diabetes and high blood pressure, although he was not known to be seriously ill. More likely the release was a belated response by Chinese authorities to the international reproach that followed Ai’s arrest April 3 at the Beijing airport.

But it appeared that he would not be able to pursue the biting criticism of the Chinese Communist Party that had permeated his artwork and writing.

“I’m not allowed to talk. I’m on probation,” he said apologetically to reporters and supporters who greeted him about midnight as he returned to his studio in northeastern Beijing.

Dressed casually in a gray T-shirt and appearing in good health, he said his future plans were to “enjoy life.”

“Everybody should enjoy life. I can’t say anything,” he said before disappearing behind the gates to the studio.

Though dozens of others have been arrested over the last six months in a crackdown on activists, it was Ai — by dint of his stature in the art world — who inspired petitions and demonstrations across the world. In London, the Tate Modern gallery installed large black letters across its facade reading, “Free Ai Weiwei.” In New York, a Cuban artist used a slide projector at night to cast the artist’s face onto the Chinese Consulate.

Ai had not been formally charged, although the state media reported that his company, Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd., had evaded “huge amounts” of taxes. The New China News Agency quoted police as saying that “the decision [to release Ai] comes also in consideration of the fact that Ai has repeatedly said he is willing to pay the taxes he evaded.”

The wording suggests that Chinese authorities might switch their case against Ai to a civil proceeding, which would allow them to back away gracefully from a situation that has brought great embarrassment. Ai’s attorney, Liu Xiaoyuan, wrote Tuesday night on Twitter that they were still awaiting an accounting from tax authorities of how much money was supposedly owed.

Four of Ai’s associates remain missing, and are presumed to be in secret detention.

His assistant, Du Yanping, confirmed that Ai had returned home and reported with some satisfaction about her plump boss: “He got slimmer.”

Human Rights Watch applauded Ai’s release, adding its own caveats.

“The public announcement of his release signals that the Chinese government has had to respond to international pressure and that the cost/benefit ratio of continuing to detain him was no longer tenable,” Phelim Kine, an Asia researcher with the organization, said in a statement. “Sadly, other Chinese citizens less well-known than Ai Weiwei who have been forcibly disappeared since mid-February remain incommunicado, whereabouts unknown and at high risk of torture.”

Ai, a provocative artist and one of the designers of the Bird’s Nest stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, in recent years had become one of the most acerbic critics of the Chinese Communist Party. Much of his latest work has revolved around the tragedy of thousands of children killed when shoddily built schools collapsed during the May 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province.

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[Review] Video, an Art, a History 1965-2010 … part the first

[This post is the first part of a two-part review.]

Trying to review an exhibition of video art is pretty insane.

It took me three separate visits to the SAM – which worked out to a total of five and a half hours, not including a curator’s tour – just to finish seeing all the stuff in their latest show, Video, an Art, a History 1965-2010: a Selection from the Centre Pompidou and Singapore Art Museum Collections.

Oy.

Towards the end, the galleristas were beginning to look at me funny.

Anyways. First, a personal caveat: I’m pretty ambivalent about video as an art form. I’m not saying it can’t be art, but so much of what I see these days isn’t all that different from traditional narrative cinema, or are simply documentary components of larger multi-media projects. Then there are the ones which capture performative works for posterity. This may all perhaps be a bit of a moot point, seeing as how certain art historians and academic departments – not to mention practicing artists – are increasingly situating their work in the space between art and film, under the broad aegis of the visual culture paradigm, but take, say, Chinese artist and filmmaker Liu Wei’s A Day to Remember (below), for instance, which was included in the show. Liu walked around Tiananmen Sq. and the Beijing University campus on June 4th, 2005, asking random strangers on the street if they knew what day it was, and those recorded responses became A Day to Remember. Most of the replies were unsurprising, given the general self-censorship which ordinary Chinese citizens still practice as a means of negotiating socio-political minefields, and while I thoroughly enjoyed the piece, sitting through most of its short runtime of thirteen or so minutes there in the darkened gallery, I couldn’t for the life of me explain to myself why this should be in a museum – as opposed to being aired on TV, say. Because if I didn’t know better, I’d have said it was a clip from some documentary program. Yes, museums regularly play host to film screenings, and, yes, video art and film are perfectly legit subjects of academic inquiry by art historians, but museum programming and the shifting inclinations of academia still don’t explain why some televisual works should be screened on their own in museum galleries as art, when they they might make just as much sense – if not more – when viewed in a theatre or on an educational or arts channel. Which is not to say that video art, especially in it’s early, experimental days, did not attempt to insinuate itself into the realm of mass media, but these days it seems almost as if the mass media has staged some sneaky counter-colonization, asserting its own aesthetics as art …

A Day to Remember 忘卻的一天, Liu Wei (2005). Caution: Unreadable subs, and a minute-long commercial in front.

Perhaps the advent of twentieth-century strategies like abstraction and conceptualism opened a whole stinky can of worms as far as aesthetics are concerned. British artist Ceal Floyer’s Construction, which appeared in the recent Singapore Biennale, pretty much consisted of an empty room with four white walls … and a soundtrack of construction noises that periodically played overhead. When I described it to a friend, all I got was a rolling of the eyeballs. Ok, so it isn’t everyone’s idea of art. If any vaguely aesthetic experience may fall under that  label, then why not televisual works like Liu Wei’s as well ? But here’s where a large part of my discomfort stems from, I think: something like Floyer’s piece can only be dubbed (conceptual) art, and very little else. In the manner of John Cage’s pioneering 4’33″, a three-act symphony of utter silence, works based on an aesthetics of absence which explicitly challenge the limits of the experiential categories they operate within – like composed music and ambient urban soundscapes, for instance, or even <gasp> Art – are founded on an interrogation of those boundaries, and thus, while perhaps unfamiliar on a formal basis, nonetheless are works calling themselves art and attempting to do what postwar art does best (at least since the prescriptions that Clement Greenberg laid out in Modernist Painting*): challenging it’s own physical and discursive limits. Liu’s video piece, on the other hand, could be contextualized as art – mostly from being included in an art exhibition – but when something looks like an elephant and behaves like an elephant, housing it in, oh, the aviary, doesn’t exactly make it a cockatoo, does it ? Why call A Day to Remember video art, when it doesn’t a. stage a critical intervention of some sort, b. challenge the parameters of its particular medium, c. function within a larger artistic program, or d. present an aesthetic experience, as opposed to serving a straightforwardly documentary purpose ?

To put it another way, is anything televisual or even filmic a priori admissible as video art these days ?

* To wit: “The essence of modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.”

Screengrabs from A Day to Remember.

Having said that though, I have to admit, I loved the show. (The five and a half hours speak for themselves. Plus the extra hour and ten bucks for the guided tour.) As SAM exhibitions go, Video, an Art is massive, ambitious and – in a local climate of continuing conservatism in the sphere of the arts, just look at the dismal response to this year’s Arts Fest. – real ballsy. It was co-curated by the Pompidou’s Christine van Assche (big name, by the way) and the SAM’s Patricia Levasseur de la Motte. Hats off to these girls. I may not agree with every single inclusion, but in terms of it’s depth, daring and breadth of vision, the show is a major step forward for the local visual arts scene – we can’t always be looking at Nanyang school stuff or contemporary reformulations of traditional Chinese ink painting, no offence to partisans of those genres. Quibbles aside, Video, an Art makes a definite attempt to be conceptually coherent: it is divvied into six different categories, starting with “Utopia and Critique of Television”, which looks at the emergence of video art in the ’60s, both as a critique of the totalitarian aspects of network TV and as a new aesthetic medium in its own right. Next is “Identity Issues”, a rather amorphous grabbag of various pieces, some of which seem to me to be pretty tangential to the theme; “From Videotape to Interactive Installation” includes participatory video works, and “Landscape Dreams” – probably my least favourite of the lot, art-wise – feature pieces which reimagine the role of the environment, both natural and built, in our lives. Over at 8Q, “Memory: Between Myth and Reality” offers a take on the role of the media in our personal and collective mental lives, and, finally, “Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Narratives” is pretty self-explanatory.

The Third Memory (1999), Pierre Huyghe. Installation components which reproduce media coverage of John Wojtowicz’s 1972 holdup of a Chase Manhattan bank.

The primary players in the drama: Wojtowicz (top) and Elizabeth Eden (born Ernest Aron; bottom).

Video component of The Third Memory, in which Wojtowicz reenacts his crime.

One of the highlights for me was finally getting to see Pierre Huyghe’s The Third Memory (above), a multimedia installation which excavates the sedimented layers of personal narrative behind the notorious 1972 holdup of a Chase Manhattan bank in Brooklyn by John Wojtowicz and Sal Naturile. A simple bankjacking soon turned into a day-long media circus; it was later immortalized in the critically acclaimed Sidney Lumet film, Dog Day Afternoon, which starred Al Pacino as the Wojtowicz character and the enormously talented but short-lived John Cazale as Naturile. I’ve always been curious about the events behind the film. The bare bones of the story are well-known: Wojtowicz was a man with an ex-wife, two kids and a male lover desperate for a sex change, and it was to bankroll the latter’s surgery that he decided that sultry summer day on his outrageous course of action. The holdup soon became a standoff, and in the ensuing melee the teenaged Naturile was shot and killed, and Wojtowicz landed himself a twenty-year jail term, of which he eventually served ten. He also sold his story – the result was Lumet’s 1975 film – and a portion of the proceeds was used to transform his erstwhile squeeze, Ernest Aron, into Liz Eden.

Jeanne Parr, from The Jeanne Parr Show.

That’s it though. I never knew much else about either Wojtowicz’s or Eden’s personal histories, and Huyghe’s work goes a long way towards putting together a narrative that positions itself somewhere between real-life occurrence and Hollywood flick, hence The Third Memory. Its centerpiece is a reenactment of the crime with Wojtowicz as director, and juxtaposed against this is actual footage from the film – or at least that’s what I’ve read about it. I sat in the gallery for almost ten minutes, and didn’t see anything of Dog Day Afternoon; mostly it seemed to be a staging by the now rotund, geriatric Wojtowicz of what is presumably his hazy recollections of that fateful day, a performative hybrid of personal reminiscence inextricably fused with cinematic imaginary, and while the gusto he put into it was certainly admirable (cancer was to claim his life several years after this), what little I saw didn’t quite measure up to the work’s reputation. Pity … The rest of the installation was great though. In an adjoining room were reproductions of contemporary newspaper coverage and a Life magazine article just chock-a-block full of details about the crime and its protagonists, as well as a recording of an episode from The Jeanne Parr Show* on which Liz Eden appeared. Wojtowicz was also interviewed from jail, and the breakdown of the relationship between him and Eden gets rolled out and dissected in pretty stark detail.

How I miss Jerry Springer … You’d think I’m kidding, but I’m not.

*A bit of trivia: Parr (above) is a former CBS reporter – who apparently had her own talk show in the ‘70s – and, more pertinently, the mother of actor Chris Noth, a.k.a. Mr. Big from Sex and the City. Is it just me, or does she resemble a younger version of her son in drag ?

[To be continued.]

[Review] Surfaces of Everyday Life

Its kinda odd to think that a warehouse space in Tanjong Pagar Distripark – a cargo storage and shipment complex next to the Keppel docks – is now playing host to limited edition Warhols and multi-million-dollar pieces by Pollock, Hirst and Jasper Johns.

But, thanks to blue chip art dealer Ikkan Sanada, that’s the delightful reality.

Sanada recently relocated the base of Ikkan Art International from NYC to Singapore (read about it here); he joins a growing number of art spaces sprouting up in the Keppel warehouse neighbourhood, which include Valentine Willie, Fortune Cookie Projects and L2 Space. Are we seeing our own meatpacking district in the making ? – albeit with storage depots instead of disused slaughterhouses, industrial containers and cranes taking the place of transgender prostitutes and cobblestoned streets. In any case, the new kid on the block represents the arrival of an international player on the local visual arts scene, which can only be good news.

Blk 39, Tanjong Pagar Distripark (where Ikkan Art is located; top), and neighouring Keppel Container Terminal (bottom).

Sanada’s inaugural show is titled Surfaces of Everyday Life: Postwar and Contemporary Masters from Ai Weiwei to Andy Warhol. As the name-dropping suggests, the exhibition features work from a range of 20^th century luminaries, both Western and Asian: Warhol, Ai, Matisse, Pollock, Hirst, Johns, Richter, Oldenburg, Stella, Tracy Emin, Takashi Murakami, Yayoi Kusama and Yasumasa Morimura, among others. Johns, in particular, is represented here by a series of original prints produced in the last two decades, including a number apparently never before shown. Those prints, however, were the least interesting things I saw – if only because I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at. Johns made his name back in the ‘50s with his richly textured, vividly coloured encaustic canvases that called into question the iconicity of common images, like the American flag; these recent pieces seem to indicate a 180-degree turn in sensibility, being most black-and-white or thinly tinted intaglio prints of indecipherable patterns, silhouettes and abstractions. Johns’ work seems to have made a detour into the personal, which I think is the only – if overly convenient – way of accounting for some of these pictures, and titles like Shrinky Dink (below).

Shrinky Dink 1 – 4 (2011), Jasper Johns.

Pyre 1 and 2 (2005), Jasper Johns.

In other news, the show itself came across as something of a hodgepodge of the greatest postwar hits. It is called Surfaces of Everyday Life, but that thematic framework really encompasses two different theoretical concerns: materiality (surfaces), and the everyday. While those ideas have been brought to bear on each other – in very interesting ways – by certain academics and thinkers*, they are still necessarily separate concepts. And at times it seemed like the pieces in the exhibition either fell into one category or the other, only rarely demonstrating discernable links to both. Admittedly, though, Sanada has been pretty candid about the rationale, or lack of one, behind some of these inclusions – “I am not pretending to be a museum curator. The works you see in this exhibition are a reflection of my personal taste” – so perhaps the connective tissue there, between the notion of materiality and the prosaic, was supplied by his own predilections. Charles Merewhether of Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Singapore, though, provides a different take. In a brief but incisive essay for the exhibition, he explicitly adduces mass production and consumerism as the glue between the everyday and the material: “Critical to the transformation of the “everyday” was the process of modernization, most notably industrialization and mass production. … What emerges from this period is a number of artistic practices that critically engage the ethos of consumerism within the development of industrial modernization—practices seeking not just to understand the logic of consumerism, but to harness and appropriate the energies of consumerism … Materiality was of primary importance ……” (Read excerpts here.)

* See for instance, Bill Brown’s Thing Theory (Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 1 [Autumn, 2001], pp. 1-22).

All that, however, doesn’t explain the presence of works like Frank Stella’s Cinema de Pepsi (below), which is comprised of two squares divided up into geometrical bands of varying shades and hues. This canvas is quintessential Stella: blandly, calmly non-pictorial, denying even the painterly gestures of abstract expressionists like Pollock, Rauschenberg and Johns, and insisting on the primacy of the flat canvas surface and the materiality of the art object. Speaking of his own praxis, he declared that “Its posture is not romantic. Its method is not improvisational. It’s a more classical, more controlled art, that in a certain sense reacted against the “action” conception of abstract expressionism, and against what by the late 50s had come to be a great deal of very bad painting made in abstract expressionism’s name.” (Quote here.) While the alternating strips of colour in Cinema seem to suggest some kind of movement – a sort of optical illusion of advance and recession – I guess the point here would be that, up close, the appearance of hard-edge painting gives way to fine textural nuance; the seemingly defined lines begin to betray tendrils of paint seepage and other surface irregularities.

Cinema de Pepsi (1966), Frank Stella.

Detail of above.

Which explains “surface”, but not “everyday life”. (Its hard to imagine anything less evocative of the ordinary than Stella’s abstract, meticulously calculated canvases.) What does, however, are, say, Claes Oldenburg’s oversized food objects, or Ai Weiwei’s sunflower seeds or block of tea, or Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans – all featured in the show. Oldenburg’s Leaning Fork With Meatball and Spaghetti II, in particular (below), produced in collaboration with wife Coosje van Bruggen, was definitely one of the more eye-catching pieces. In a well-known statement of 1961, the artist remarked: “I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap and still comes out on top … I am for the art of neck-hair and caked teacups, for the art between the tines of restaurant forks, for the odor of boiling dishwater … I am for the art of rust and mold. I am for the art of hearts, funeral hearts or sweetheart hearts, full of nougat. I am for the art of worn meathooks and singing barrels of red, white, blue and yellow meat.”*

In other words, an art of the mundane and the everyday. Duchamp and his Readymades were an acknowledged influence: Oldenburg recalls seeing Duchamp’s work at the latter’s 1963 retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum – and coincidentally, a signed copy of a poster for that now legendary show is on display here (below). As art historian Benjamin Buchloh remarks, Oldenburg was “the first sculptor after Duchamp who uses a kind of iconography that is completely alien to all preceding sculpture, which is the industrially produced, ready-made object.”^** The avant-garde Dadaist project, formulated as an overt critique of the separation of art from the praxis of life within bourgeois society, by which the autonomy of the institution of art is understood as a corollary of the rise of the leisured classes and the ensuing social divide,^*** finds a re-articulation in Oldenburg’s hands. His oversized foodstuffs, in particular, represent an attempt to recuperate our experience of the familiar, the prosaic, which become embedded in the routine of daily life as so much background noise. These humble things – the things we eat every day – exist for the most part below the threshold of sustained attention and memory because they function as conveniences, their constant repetition and easy availability within the circuits of modern consumer culture serving to mask their ubiquity, to lull and dull us into “social forgetfulness and thereby constitute the sphere of hidden historical otherness.”^****

* See Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1995).

** See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Three Conversations in 1985: Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Robert Morris”, October 70 (Fall 1994).

*** Peter Bürger discusses this idea at length in his classic Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). See the section, “On the Problem of the Autonomy of Art in Bourgeois Society.”

**** C. Nadia Serematakis, ed., The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1994).

Leaning Fork With Meatball and Spaghetti II (1994), Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.

A Poster Within A Poster (1963), Marcel Duchamp. “Poster for Duchamp’s Retrospective exhibition held at the Pasadena Art Museum, October 8 to November 3, 1963, signed and dedicated by the artist. Edition of 300, only 10 of them were signed by the artist.” (from the wall label)

As subjects of artistic intentionality, Oldenburg’s food objects imply participation in the long, if historically unremarked, genre of the still-life, a tradition that reaches back into antiquity. The category of painting the Romans referred to as xenia stands at the hoary head of a genealogy that is defined largely by its exclusion of the human form, according to Norman Bryson, a denial of the visual dimension of the animate that at the same time “expels the values which human presence imposes on the world.”* While this statement belies the peculiarity of Oldenburg’s anthropomorphized objects – and, indeed, a feature of his modus operandi – Bryson’s distinction between megalography and rhopography presents one of the chief cruces on which turn Oldenburg’s strategies of interruption, dislocation, defamiliarization. Megalography is the stuff of history painting and portraiture, which deal with the grand themes of mythology, religion, literature and history, allegories of the great and good, as well as the invocation of the lives and likenesses of celebrated men and women. Rhopography, stemming from the Greek rhopos (trifling things, or small, inconsequential goods), portrays that which the prescriptions of the class of momentous events and illustrious personages programmatically omit from their range of subject matter: the undramatic material base of life taken for granted in an age of plenty today, a substratum of habitual, habit-forming objects which define the contours of “hidden historical otherness.”

In his appropriation of the trope of rhopos, Oldenburg displays a preference not just for an iconography of the edible, but also for a particular type of fare. A quick survey of objects from his 60s period discloses the predominance of the sort of foods that have come to symbolize a twentieth-century America of the diner, the deli, the fast-food restaurant: burgers, sandwiches, cakes, pies, ice-cream, baked potatoes, breads, and roasts – as choice of meatball and spaghetti, for one, seems to suggest. Despite the claim that his choice of subject is “only an accident, an accident of my surroundings, my landscape, of the objects which in my daily coming and going my consciousness attaches itself to”, Oldenburg’s art, in its foregrounding of gastronomic (all-)Americana, clearly reflects an exclusion of other types of cuisine, perhaps the kind of food that he may have been accustomed to growing up in a privileged Swedish-American household in the 1930s and 40s (his father first served as Swedish Consul in Chicago and, later, as Consul General). More than simply being determined by considerations of cost, taste and custom, however, what people eat is very much an indication of their values. The introduction of the technologies of food preservation and processing radically altered the American diet in the mid-twentieth century, freeing up a whole generation of women for the workforce and shifting the main site of food preparation and consumption from the domestic kitchen to the cheap eating establishment and food retail outlet – originating, ultimately, in the processing line – with their quick, affordable, labour-saving meals, a medley of the “bleached, dyed, sulphured, refined, synthetic, dehydrated, adulterated, and emulsified”^**, a celebration of everyday realities that continue to shape our dietary habits and lives.

^* See Bryson’s perceptive, valuable study, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990).

^** Linda Weintraub, ed., Art What Thou Eat: Images of Food in American Art (Mount Kisco, New York: Moyer Bell Ltd., 1991). Her Foreword contains a brief history of American gastronomic practices.

Untitled (1966), Donald Judd.

Donald Judd – a personal favourite – was represented in Surfaces by a stainless steel piece (above), a horizontal bar hung on the wall, and marked along its length by spherical protrusions set apart at gradated intervals. Classic Judd. The piece, like Oldenburg’s Meatball and Spaghetti, sits comfortably at the intersection between concerns with materiality and the everyday – though the artist himself might have begged to differ. Judd was famous, or notorious, for his theoretical pronouncements on his own work, insisting on the abstract, non-associative autonomy of his ‘specific objects’, their essential resistance to any sort of gesture towards a reality external to their particular forms. However, a number of critics, most notably Rosalind Krauss, disagreed. She openly refuted his claim of hermeticism in her well-known essay, “Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd” (Artforum, vol. 4, no. 9 [May, 1966]). Judd’s sensuously tangible and seductively engaging objects were, for Krauss, the epitome of “the inadequacy of the theoretical line, its failure to measure up (at least in Judd’s case) to the power of the sculptural statement.” His artworks were “insistently meaningful” to her, and that meaning was generated through an embodied experience – meaning denied by a solely optical involvement from a single (frontal) perspective. Krauss saw Judd’s work as “objects of perception, objects that are to be grasped in the experience of looking at them” (italics mine). The impression of tactility, in both a metaphorical and corporeal sense, seemed especially important to her: “the work plays off the illusory quality of the thing itself as it presents itself to vision alone … as against the sensation of being able to grasp it and therefore to know it through touch.”

Don Judd in the 1960s. Image from Mondoblogo.

Other critics have noted that “Claims … that Judd’s art has a discrepancy – or even a falsification – as its heart, have by now long been central …” (David Raskin, “The Shiny Illusionism of Krauss and Judd”, Art Journal, no. 65 [Spring 2006]).The juxtaposition between Judd’s own conceptualization of his work, and the manner in which it has sometimes been received, makes this disjuncture all too clear. Krauss noted the deceptive appearance of his art, of the necessity of an embodied experience with which to grasp it in its actuality, a process that foregrounded the way the materials were “used directly” – in his own words – and, thus, the resultant, insistently tactile quality. Judd’s work appears to deny the possibility of any haptic exchange, by dint of his critical pronouncements as well as their circumscribed status as high art objects, but reception tends to elude those sorts of pre-determined channels. Judd’s objects, as three-dimensional forms in space, as staunchly material presences that incline towards the non-figural and a-referential, can be said to evoke a response beyond the purely visual – i.e. to draw attention not simply to their forms, but to the almost tangible qualities of their surface texture. To return to Krauss’ assessment of Judd’s art as inducing the perception of graspability and a touch-based epistemology, perhaps it should be noted that the haptic entails more than just an appeal to tactility via the mechanism of sight, but implicates the entire sensorium in a synaesthetic act of looking as well. Krauss brings to mind Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s characterization of embodied, multisensory experience: “The senses intercommunicate by opening onto the structure of the thing. One sees the hardness and brittleness of glass … One sees the springiness of steel.” Or, to quote Carolee Schneemann on her own performative practice: “Vision is not a fact but an aggregate of sensations.”

Judd’s objects present a façade of finished, flawless, machine manufacture. In other words, their industrial look, or the appearance of being the products of the factory line rather than the artist’s tool, was – and is – very much the initial impression that they left on viewers. Barbara Rose, for one, remarked that they seemed “machine-made, standardized …. easy to copy and not hand-made”; another reviewer spoke of the “slow, determined beat of a stamping machine” (Jane Gollin). And Robert Smithson, in detailing Judd’s preferred materials and the sources he turned to for them, listed a catalogue of obscure-sounding trademarks and industrial locations:

He may go to Long island City and have the Bernstein Brothers, Tinsmiths put “Pittsburgh” seams into some (Bethcon) iron boxes, or he might go to Allied Plastics in Lower Manhattan and have cut-to-size some Rohm-Haas “glowing” pink plexiglass. Judd is always on the lookout for new finishes, like Lavax Wrinkle Finish … Judd likes that combination, and so he might “self” spray one of his “fabricated” boxes with it. Or maybe he will travel to Hackensack, New Jersey to investigate a lead he got on a new kind of zinc based paint called Galvanox, which is comparable to “hot-dip” galvanizing.

(Robert Smithson, “Donald Judd (1965)” in Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996].)

While the stuff of Judd’s art were, literally, heavy-duty substances and materials, the actual execution of those pieces remained a very hands-on process for the artist. Much of his early 60s work were produced manually at a small, family-run piecework shop called Bernstein Brothers Sheet Metal Specialties Inc., which produced a range of items for industrial purposes, like smoke stacks, general roofing, skylights, ventilation systems etc. The procedure for constructing one of Judd’s pieces at the Bernsteins’ typically involved a high degree of hand operations:

… adapted from the shaping of ventilation ducts and industrial sinks, [the process] involved measuring and cutting the sheet iron, notching it with hand shears, and folding it in a brake die. … the sculpture [was finished] by truing its angles with a rubber mallet and … reaching inside the back to solder its three pieces carefully together.

(Joshua Shannon, The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Rise of the Postmodern City [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009].)

Don Judd (right) at the Bernstein Bros. workshop, 1968. Image from DB Artmag.

The appearance of industrial manufacture, then, belied the manual labour that went into the production of Judd’s pieces; their materials, the “adapted” processes, the high degree of finish, and their geometric, modular shapes all went towards suggesting an origin in the factory rather than the studio. And it is precisely this deceptive indexing of industrial means of fabrication and engineering, the assumption of the look of capitalist, technocratic power – by creating objects resembling mass-produced commodities, objects which then enter our everyday lives as items of utility – that engenders the desire to touch. Or, to put it another way: Judd’s objects, in suppressing most visible traces of the artist’s hand*, and approximating the appearance of those ordinary things that we use in our mundane lives, like floor boxes and stacks and bleachers and architectural columns, breaks down the barrier between the visual and the tactile that is part and parcel of the contemporary experience of art – that is to say, the dictum that one can look, but should not touch, is expressly infringed upon.

* See Josiah Mcelheny, “Invisible Hand”, Artforum International, vol. 42, no. 10 (Summer 2004).

By adopting the aspect of everyday articles, Judd’s objects almost seems to invite the viewer to experience them in those embodied ways with which we come into corporeal contact with those familiar things. One handles a box, sits on a bleacher, perhaps unthinkingly runs a stray hand over a row of colonnades in strolling past. And although it is difficult to conceive of actually picking up one of Judd’s box-like sculptures or parking your behind down on his Bleachers piece, it is not too far a stretch to imagine kissing your reflection in a particularly shiny surface, or using it, mirror-like, to peruse the state of your hairdo – which is exactly what critic, Anna Chave, witnessed two girls doing one day in the MoMA. She relates the following incident involving a “gleaming brass floor box” of Judd’s on display in the museum: “… two teenage girls strode over to this pristine work, kicked it, and laughed. They then discovered its reflective surface and used it for a while to arrange their hair until, finally, they bent over to kiss their images on the top of the box” (Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power”, Arts Magazine, vol. 64, no. 1 [Jan, 1990]).

…… Hey, I did say Judd was a favourite.

But enough of the art history and the theoryspeak, I think.

Being at Sanada’s was like New York all over again: the quiet moments of wonderment at MoMA, amidst the throngs of tourists; the endless galleries in Chelsea; the marathon Met walkabouts.

It was nice …

Some of the other stuff in the show:

Death of a Nerve (1976), Yayoi Kusama.

Black Bean (1968), Andy Warhol.

Number 21 (1950), Jackson Pollock.

Reverie (The Melody Haunts My Reverie) (1965), Roy Lichtenstein.

Blinding (2006), Tracy Emin.

Untitled (2010), Joel Shapiro.

And Then And Then And Then And Then/Abstraktes Bild (2006), Takashi Murakami.

Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds) (2009), Ai Weiwei.

Portrait (Van Gogh) (1985), Yasumasa Morimura.

Surfaces of Everyday Life: Postwar and Contemporary Masters from Ai Weiwei to Andy Warhol runs at Ikkan Art from 18 May to 5 June, 2011.

Ikkan Art Gallery, Artspace@Helutrans,
39 Keppel Road #01-05,
Tanjong Pagar Distripark,
Singapore 089065.

http://www.ikkan-art.com

Open:
11am – 7pm, Monday – Saturday
1pm – 5pm, Sundays and Public Holidays

The Enchantment of Things .. or Why Steal From a Major Museum ?

The ‘ball’, a bejewelled gold purse produced c. 1950-60. One of the nine articles pilfered from the Palace Museum, Beijing.

News of the recent theft of a number of early to mid 20th century purses from the Palace Museum in Beijing – a.k.a. the Forbidden City – has been making the rounds.

Here’s the New York Times on the incident that’s caused a couple of red faces in official circles:

A thief hid in the Palace Museum in Beijing’s Forbidden City after closing time on Sunday night and stole nine 20th-century gold purses encrusted with jewels from a temporary exhibition, embarrassed Chinese officials said Wednesday.

The small Western-style gold purses had been lent by the Li Yiang Museum [sic] in Hong Kong, which in turn had been lent the purses by a Hong Kong art collector.

A Palace Museum worker tried to stop a “suspicious man” inside the museum at 10:30 p.m. on Sunday, but the man ran off, prompting the worker to sound an alarm, Palace Museum officials said at a news conference in Beijing. Two of the purses were found in “slightly damaged” condition, they said, but the other seven were taken from the museum.

A spokesman for the Beijing police said by telephone on Thursday that the police had detained a suspect on Wednesday evening and had recovered some of the missing seven purses, although he declined to say how many.

Neither the Palace Museum nor the Li Yiang Museum [sic] tried to assign a value to the missing purses.

The full range of burgled items. Image from China.org.cn.

The round purse in the first picture (top), referred to as the “ball”, is apparently the most valuable of the lot. A piece over at online portal China.org.cn notes that it is a personal favourite of Fung Yiu-fai’s, the owner of the Liangyi Museum, which loaned the stolen pieces to Beijing:

The ball” refers to his [Fung's] favorite piece – a Tiffany egg-shaped gold cosmetic container inlaid with olivine and turquoise stones. Wong said a jewelry appraiser told her that none of the mines that produced this type of olivine is still operating.

After six hours of waiting, Fung and Wong learned that nine gold purses and cosmetic containers covered with jewels were stolen. Two items had been found, but were damaged, at the foot of a wall on the east side of the museum. “The ball” is on the list of missing items.

The perpetrator, one Shi Bokui. Image from What’s On Tianjin.

A lot of the commentary so far has emphasized the culprit’s particular modus operandus: he snuck into the museum via a self-dug hole in a wall, smashed the display cases and took the stuff, returned to hiding, and walked out the following morning without hassle. In his own words, Shi Bokui 石柏魁 of Caoxian country, Shandong province,

… said he had visited the Forbidden City as a tourist on Sunday evening, decided when he saw the golden purses and powder compacts to steal them, and had hidden until the museum closed. Then he broke open the display case, grabbed his loot, and hid himself again until morning.

(Read the full article at er, The Christian Science Monitor.)

Easy as ABC, no?

Thomas Crown has nothing on this guy.

An article in the local Straits Times today though, reveals just why Mr. Shi decided to help himself: “Bewitched by the dazzling display while touring the museum, he went on a stealing spree after everyone had left, he said in a confession on national TV.” (“Red faces over art theft at Forbidden City”, The Straits Times, May 14 2011.)

Shi is far from being the first person to be so turned on in a museum that he let his fingers do the talking, but his DIY, can-do approach to art theft really puts him in a class all his own.

Does it really happen ? – the allure of artistic bling being so great that one hazards all to smash a glass case and simply take something ?

In his rereading of Karl Marx’s notion of the commodity fetish, University of Chicago academic Bill Brown observes that – in the traditional account – the commodity as such is both a sensuous thing and, at the same time, a suprasensible one (both material and immaterial), while commodity fetishism, in its animating of the commodity-form through the privileging of exchange-value rather than use-value, renders those material or sensuous qualities void, since the commodity-form has “absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material [dinglich] relations arising out of this” (qtd. in Bill Brown, A Sense of Things [U. of Chicago Press, 2003], p. 28). Brown, however, also gestures at a lack in Marx: the issue of consumer desire, which is tied to the sensuousness of the commodity, and “without which capitalism … cannot be sustained” (Brown, 29), is never addressed. Thus, “it is at the moment where Marx intimates not the fetishism he theorizes but the more pedestrian, not to say less powerful, fetishism through which objects captivate us, fascinate us, compel us to have a relation to them, which seems to have little to do with their relation to other commodities. This is a social relation neither between men nor between things, but something like a social relation between human subject and inanimate object, wherein modernity’s ontological distinction between human beings and nonhumans makes no sense” (Brown, 29).

Commodity allure is the commodity fetishism of the new millennium perhaps ?

In any case, Shi, I think, has now become its public face.

At One in the Fuchun Mountains

Portion of Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains scroll currently in the collection of the Palace Museum, Taipei. Image from this website – please excuse the watermark.

Yet another piece reproduced from today’s edition of The Straits Times (23 April).

Seems like the two parts of Yuan master Huang Gongwang’s prized scroll, Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains 富春山居圖  (c. late 1340s to early 50s), is being rejoined.

Quite the watershed moment.

Details below.

—————

PIECES OF 660-YEAR-OLD PAINTING REUNITE

TAIPEI: Taiwan’s top museum will display a torn 660-year-old Chinese landscape painting by bringing together its two pieces, which have been separated since 1940 with one kept in China and the other on the island.

The longer portion of Dwelling In The Fuchun Mountains, measuring about 6m, is stored in Taipei’s Palace Museum.

It will be reunited with the 0.5m part shipped from China’s Zhejiang Provincial Museum at an exhibition opening on June 2, said Palace Museum director Chou Kung-shin.

The painting by revered Chinese landscape painter Huang Gongwan [sic] was split into two parts some 300 years ago as a private collector burned it as he was dying, but a relative quickly saved it from the flames, Ms Chou said.

“Huang finished the scroll at 81, when he was already a master painter,” she said. “it is an important work in art history, and has changed hands among many noted collectors.”

The longer part was among 600,000 treasures moved from China to Taiwan in 1948, during the last stages of the civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communists, some of which are now on display in the Palace Museum in Taipei.

The 40-day exhibition is widely seen as a gesture of support by the Chinese government for Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou, on account of his efforts to engage the mainland and reduce political hostilities.

But more important, according to reports in China, the unity of the two fragments is highly symbolic of the inevitability of China’s reunification with Taiwan, which Beijing considers part of Chinese territory temporarily separated from the mainland because of ideological differences.

In February, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao highlighted the political significance when fielding questions from netizens, saying that it is his wish that the “landscapes” of China and Taiwan would one day be reunited, paralleled by the unity of the “landscapes” in the Fuchun paintings.

China has long said that the historical exhibits in Taiwan’s Palace Museum rightfully belong to Beijing, but since 2008 has encouraged museum exchanges after Mr Ma came to office.

Taiwan’s Palace Museum and its counterpart in Beijing, also called the Palace Museum, held their first joint exhibition in Taipei in 2009.

ASSOCIATED PRESS, XINHUA

—————

Gustating Down Memory Lane

Dinner at Chalk began indoors. I started off with some cream of corn – which sounds like it came out of a red and white can or a Warhol silkscreen – but the soup was fantastic. Rich and smooth, with nibblets of cut corn and chewy hunks of fat-fringed chicken swimming just beneath the milky, flaxen-hued, herb-speckled surface … absolutely dee-lish. CH ordered the escargots, which were pretty darned tasty too, especially when a ready supply of home-baked bread was on hand to soak up the pools of garlicky grease with. They were certainly a step up from the snails I’d had at Cocotte; served with gruyère on little bits of puff pastry that managed to mask the taste and texture of the molluscs, those were definitely an experiment that didn’t pan out.

Anyways, entrée-wise, we decided on a beef stew and the stuffed quail. The beef was good, braised to supple softness in a piquant red vino gravy – though not particularly outstanding. The quail was something else. Smooth, moist, stuffed with a mix of minced meat and diced vegetables and cooked to glazed, lightly charred perfection, it slid down the throat like so much vintage booze. Speaking of alcohol, however, the one sour note of the evening was the beer. I had a König something-or-other from the tap, which turned out to be uninspiring. Usually German brews are spot-on for the money; this was a rare misfire.

Beef in red wine stew with a side of veggies and mashed potatoes.

Stuffed quail on a bed of beans and carrot leaves.

The restaurant.

Chalk is situated at the Old School – the former Methodist Girls’ campus – and so named for their occupation of the school’s science lab. (A throwback to the blackboard era perhaps.) Nestled in the serene environs of Mt. Sophia, the complex exudes an idyllic, laidback charm, all low, whitewashed buildings and aged umber- and tan-coloured tiles and towering coconut palms and viridescent foliage sighing slightly in the thick, tropical late afternoon breeze. By the time the main courses had been polished off, nightfall had descended, and we took our coffees out to the terrace for an al fresco tête-à-tête, along with a small cake of sticky date pudding accompanied by ginger ice-cream and a glutinous butterscotch sauce. It was lovely out there. Under the low glow of the streetlamps, we had a view of the buildings rising up from Orchard and Handy Rds down the hill, lit up like ginormous slabs of glass-encrusted confection. Talk moved from casual banter to personal histories, and thence to the bewildering changes Singapore has seen in the last decade or so. I was surprised at how many memories CH and I share: he’s a naturalized Singaporean, having grown up in Mumbai and the U.K., but as he reminded me he’s been here fifteen long years, and the place is pretty much home these days. The 1990s was the era of my coming of age, and the further it slips away behind history’s onward stride the more my recollections of growing up then seem to lodge themselves in the nooks and crevices of my mental universe, peering out from beneath the ostensibly unbroken flux of everyday life in the here and now ..

In the words of a pastry-chompin’ Proust:

The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it … as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me … immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents.

- Swann’s Way, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu

With the big nude dude at Old School.

A terrace with a view.

Chalk

Old School, 11 Mount Sophia Road #01-03, Singapore 228461

http://www.chalk.com.sg/chalk/

[Review] Collectors’ Stage & ‘Ai Weiwei: Fairytale’

A couple of weeks ago, KE and I signed up for a curator’s tour of Collectors’ Stage: Asian Contemporary Art From Private Collections at the SAM. Or, well, I prodded him into it  …… Anyways, it was an opportunity to view a couple of incredible pieces (including a personal favourite I’d only ever seen in reproductions before), listen to the show’s curator recite from the wall labels (which she’d clearly either written herself or committed to memory), and experience what being in a museum after hours was like (awesome). I didn’t have time for a more leisurely walkthrough on my own though, or photographs, so before a screening at 8Q yesterday of Ai Weiwei: Fairytale, a film on the making of the artist’s 1001-man-strong contribution to the 2007 Documenta festival, I swung by Collectors’ Stage for a second look.

Still good.

Rumah Rumah Coklat (2004), Rudi Mantofani

Detail of Rumah Rumah Coklat

I’ve long been a fan of Indonesian artist Rudi Mantofani’s Rumah Rumah Coklat (above). Currently in the possession of prominent Jakarta-based collector and real estate tycoon Deddy Kusuma (there’s a profile of him here), it was a spine-tingling experience, finally getting to see the piece in the flesh. The label does a great job – surprisingly for the SAM – of gesturing at its visual impact and socio-cultural implications:

Rumah Rumah Coklat (‘Chocolate Houses’) appears on first sight to be an abstract painting, its brown, speckled surface evocative perhaps of the texture of cracked, dry earth. On closer inspection however, the painting reveals itself to be a landscape of comprising hundreds of brown rooftops, punctuated by the occasional green shrubbery of trees.

The artistry of this work lies in Mantofani’s ability to capture the undulating rhythm of the rooftop through the use of varying shades of brown, while simultaneously delineating, with great precision, each individual dwelling. The viewer is therefore led from a bird’s eye view that surveys the landscape below and discerns an indistinguishable sprawl of brown shapes, to a more grounded perspective where one finds oneself in the middle of a scene teeming with humanity.

Rumah Rumah Coklat is a poetic tribute to the landscape of Mantofani’s home country. At the same time, the artist touches on very real social and urban issues confronting Indonesia’s cities and towns, where houses are packed close to each other in suburban sprawls without any breathing space, privacy, or proper planning.

Despite the glib pronouncements, like the comparison to an abstract picture – you’d have to be standing pretty far away for that to work out, plus they’d put Mantofani’s painting next to an actual abstract canvas and the differences were all too clear – a lot of the above does ring true, especially the allusion to Indonesia’s population woes. Indeed, the composition, in its hermetic, airless profusion of almost identical brown-roofed homes, seems to foreground the central problematic of any collective: the tension that exists between the individual and the crowd. The homogeneous sea of structures here connotes of course the idea of the multitude while simultaneously “delineating, with great precision” the solitary, discrete dwelling, emphasizing the auratic presence of the individual component while repeating it almost ceaselessly to approximate the aspect of indistinguishable commonality. The lack of either discernible windows or doors, especially, belies any claim about these houses being representations of functional domiciles, and indicates perhaps the possibility of a more generalized reading. Caught in the slippage between a near uniform mass (“the bird’s eye view”) and clearly defined individual units (“a more grounded perspective”), the polarity then between the inexorable constraints of civilization and collective existence, and the centrifugal pull of individual psychology and personal exigencies, seems suggested by the iconography of repetition which Mantofani deploys here. An analogous example – or a filmic illustration of this dialectic – may be found in the opening sequence to the 1973 sci-fi flick, Soylent Green (below). The montage moves from black-and-white snaps of 19th century folk happily at leisure, only to move through the passing of time and the rise of urbanity and technology to finally arrive at teeming rows of standardized vehicles, developments, factories and, yes, people, all semblance of that vital legacy of the Enlightenment – individual humanity – irrevocably ensnared in homogenizing, monolithic corporate networks.

Along those lines, Ai Weiwei: Fairytale was an eye-opener. As I said to MY, whom I caught the film with, I wished I’d seen this before I’d embarked on my M.A. project. So much, so relevant …

The artist’s Wiki entry describes the work thus:

Fairytale is the title of Ai Weiwei’s contribution for Documenta 12 in 2007. For this project Ai Weiwei brought 1001 people from all over China to a small town in Germany called Kassel. They were chosen through an open invitation he posted on his blog. Ai even designed clothes, luggage and a temporary home in an old textile factory. He let them wander around the city during the exhibition time of three months. The participants were divided into five groups that each stayed in Kassel for eight days. According to Philip Tinari the primary design object here is not the clothing or suitcases but the participants’ experiences, even their spirits.

Ai Weiwei posing with a portion of the 1,001-strong Chinese contingent who travelled to Kassel, Germany, under the auspices of his Fairytale project in 2007. Image courtesy of  Sinopop.org.

Improvised sleeping arrangements for Fairytale participants at Documenta, Kassel. Image taken from ArtZineChina.com.

The film itself, an extensive 2 1/2 hour affair, documented the process that was involved in getting a thousand and one Chinese citizens to Germany. The logistics of it all was mind-boggling: the planning, the production, the paperwork, the large-scale accommodation and food preparation made necessary in Kassel. (Even the simplest task seems daunting when multiplied a thousand times, let alone arranging a vacation for a thousand people.) A goodish amount of screen time, though, was given over to recounting individual participants’ stories, in particular those from smaller industrial cities and rural communities in the hinterlands. We witness a village family sitting around in their wood-constructed abode, discussing their guileless visions and naive hopes of what going abroad entails (i.e. marrying foreigners and the like); a young, impoverished boy who dreams of attaining wealth through selling socks, but whose immediate reality is army enlistment; a vocal policeman who gets fired for expressing himself too openly in the local papers, and has a hard time thereafter trying to apply for a passport. These are just some of the intensely personal tales which the film brings to life for us, but as the narrative shifts to Kassel and the art festival, all sense of particularity is lost in the logistical rush to quarter and feed the hordes of Chinese tourists. Village farmer, university student, unemployed city dweller – selfhood becomes subsumed in a blur of uniform luggage, mass lodgings (above), factory-line culinary production, interchangeable identities. Transposed from their home country to a context where they become part of a large-scale “presentation” (as a Kassel local puts it) of China and the Chinese character, otherwise distinct personages with diverse backgrounds and histories are merged into an uneasy collective, thus enacting again the dialectical oscillation between the individual and the mass.

Yogya Bintang House Mini (2008), Yoshitomo Nara + graf

Pesawat Terbangku (2009), Yudi Sulistyo

But back to the exhibition. A number of pieces were on loan from corporate or foundation collections; these were the more sizable installations, such as Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara’s Yogya Bintang House Mini, or Pesawat Terbangku (“Flying Machine’) by Indonesian Yudi Sulistyo (above), just to cite the more salient works. Another striking contribution is Shen Shaomin’s Summit (below), which, rather morbidly, consists of Tussaud-like models of the twentieth century’s best-known Communist leaders – Mao, Lenin, Castro, Ho Chi Minh and Kim Il Sung – either entombed in glass coffins or on their deathbeds (in Fidel’s case). The piece is purportedly a response to the recent global financial crisis, a contrarian insistence on the “failures and death of socialist ideology” and the continued relevance of capitalism. Despite the grandiose claims, and the sight of those corpse-like figures in the darkened silence of the gallery, Shen’s work seems .. oddly unconvincing. If anything, ‘deracinated’ is the first adjective that leaps to mind here. Prophesying the death of Communism to the capitalist world is rather like lugging coal to Newcastle; we’re most of us already hopers, if not believers. One can only imagine, though, that displaying a duplicate of Mao’s cadaver in, say, China itself, where the real deal still lies in state, would be a fantastically subversive mode of declaring the end of Socialism vis-à-vis the reverence accorded the Dear Leader’s wax-ified remains.

Summit (2009-10), Shen Shaomin

Summit (Mao)

Summit (Castro)

Summit (Castro). The model of Castro, the sole figure of the group still alive as of 2011, was rigged up with internal gadgetry to make it seem as if he were breathing.

Generally I’m not a fan of Yoshitomo Nara’s infantile portraits, but this work, produced in collaboration with Japanese design unit graf, is pretty interesting. It emerged from the artist’s time in residency at the Cemeti Art House in Yogyakarta; the wall label notes that

Made from reclaimed wood from Indonesia, Yogya Bintang House Mini breaks down barriers and inhibitions with its playful approach, inviting us to experience once again – and hold on to – the sense of curiosity and wonderment that pervaded our childhoods.

Which begs the question: how many children these days, raised on a diet of Facebook and anime and Miley Cyrus, would want to waste more than a minute or two of their short attention spans on a dilapidated-looking wooden structure? Sure, the charming, quirky windows look in on a furnished interior boasting the artist’s signature drawings (below), but this is no dollhouse nor princess castle – it’s a run-down building made from recycled materials, with a billboard for beer on its roof … Of course, the point may be that the piece is directed at adults, but I personally wasn’t reliving “the sense of curiosity and wonderment that pervaded” my childhood so much as I was very aware that I was looking at a replica of a beat-up wooden kampung house passing itself off as seni in a museum.

Interior of Yogya Bintang House

View of Yogya Bintang House

There was one aspect of the piece that did speak to the experience of being a child though – or what the curator referred to as the home’s “secret.” Tucked into an occluded room at the front of the structure was the figure of a small, downcast dog (below), which was only visible through cracks between the wooden boards. These little peepholes were positioned at waist-level, thus ensuring that unless one were really scrupulous in investigating the piece, it was a child who stood the likeliest chance of stumbling onto the hidden surprise. Regular readers of this blog may probably see where I’m heading with this: yes, the Freudian Uncanny. (I tend to abuse it somewhat, but a useful idea is a useful idea.) Freud, in his eponymous essay, arrives, through a semantic interrogation of the terms heimlich and unheimlich, at the conclusion that the former, which commonly functions in the sense of “familiar” and “native”, “is a word the meaning of which develops towards an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich.”He quotes from the 1877 dictionary of Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm: “From the idea of “homelike”, “belonging to the house”, the further idea is developed of something withdrawn from the eyes of others, something concealed, secret … The notion of something hidden and dangerous … is still further developed, so that “heimlich” comes to have the meaning usually ascribed to “unheimlich”. Freud’s point, of course, was the the unheimlich is marked by the return of the repressed, surfacing from the depths of memory or returning from the unconscious; Nara’s piece, featuring an occluded presence embedded within the realm of the domestic, conflates quite neatly the idea of the home as an analogue of the Uncanny, and the existence of the Uncanny, in the form of a childhood memory, hidden in the home.

Yogya Bintang House

Yogya Bintang House

[Review] Art Stage Singapore 2011

Kedai Runcit No. 12 [Retail Store No. 12], Gallery 12, Malaysia. A stand made up to resemble an old-school candy and toy store – of the sort one would be hard-pressed to find in Singapore these days – featuring young Malaysian artists. Beyond nostalgia, a droll comment on the undeniably commercial and elitist nature of the international art fair ?

The inaugural edition of Art Stage Singapore was a mammoth affair. Occupying an entire basement level in the suitably massive Marina Bay Sands Exhibition and Convention Centre, the event touts itself as “Asia Pacific’s new top international modern and contemporary art fair … a meeting place, a show, a market place, an ‘instant’ museum, and much more.” At least that’s the vision set out by its director, the redoubtable Lorenzo Rudolf – or the man who used to helm the prestigious Art Basel. (Read an interview with him here.) I’d headed down a tad earlier to catch a panel discussion on contemporary Chinese art – involving artist Shen Shaomin*, critic Pi Li, and collector Ulli Sigg, among others – but even then it took me nearly four long hours just to give the place a cursory once-over. Leafing through the catalogue (which cost a surprisingly economical 10 SGD), I realized just how much I’d missed. In that vein, this post adopts a straightforward ‘greatest hits’ approach, listing my three favourite moments of the afternoon.

* Shen’s short slide show, presented as part of the discussion, featured numerous photos taken with scholar and art historian Wu Hung, as well as a selection of Wu’s comments on his (Shen’s) work. Wu is an accomplished academic and a gifted thinker, as well as being my former advisor – something not lost on the artist, who clearly had bromantic feelings going on <lol> ..

A disclaimer, though: some of my choices are going to seem pretty obvious, insofar as works like Ai Weiwei’s large-scale installation, Through, quite literally stood out from the run-of-the-mill offerings; and there were a couple of stops, like the Singapore platform, titled Remaking Art in the Everyday, or the contribution of Malaysian Gallery 12, Kedai Runcit No. 12 (above), that I wished I’d paid more time and attention to … but, alas, I had to rush off for a German dinner at Brotzeit with CH and his delightful friends, KR and IG, who happened to be visiting from Mumbai.

Plus, after a couple of hours I was getting pretty art-ed out already.

Anyways. Bearing that in mind, here we go.

1. Through (2007-8), Ai Weiwei

As mentioned, Ai’s installation was one of the highlights of the event, if only in terms of sheer size. Taking up a space of some 115 sq meters, it involves colossal wooden beams and traditional Chinese furniture (mostly tables) dating from the Qing era, or so the wall label informed us. The objects were all mutually supportive, with niches and holes cut into each to accommodate the other, in effect creating a geometric forest of wooden structures. The artist declares that “certain objects, certain materials, need a certain scale to achieve a clear identity and voice, and that is what large-scale events provide. Artists are not in a position to decide the conditions imposed upon them but they can make statements about those conditions.” Which is well and good, and pretty commensensical as artists’ pronouncements go; the label continues:

Employing materials and techniques embedded in Chinese culture, Ai’s elegant objects can overwhelm viewers who do not fully grasp the conceptual implications of his work; their imposing, meticulous physical presence and massive scale often require considerable teamwork and vast production spaces to realize, and are made possible thanks to the artist’s influence, wealth and sprawling social network.

As much as I appreciate the “imposing, meticulous physical presence” of the piece, in the same way I do Richard Serra‘s steel behemoths, and interesting as the meta-commentary on the role of the  contemporary artist is, surely scale can’t be the final word in any act of exegesis here. The vintage of the wooden objects certainly deserve consideration, for one, but the most noteworthy facet of the work, at least for me, is how they fit together as a cohesive whole. The niches cut into the beams of course reference the traditional process of construction for Chinese furniture, where, instead of nails, joints are used to fit the different parts together. This seamless mode of joinage, however, is belied by the disruptive manner in which the vertical beams and the horizontal tables come together: large holes are cut into the tabletops to allow the pillars to pass through. If one is allowed to adduce social factors in attempting to read the work, then perhaps a statement on the supposed cohesion of Chinese society – founded on paternal Confucian strictures and the extended familial unit – and the intrusion into that sphere by the praxis of the modern Communist state, may not be altogether implausible.

Along those lines, could then the solitary pole (below), standing in the midst of the installation and dwarfed by its fellows, be emblematic of the individual, subjugated by  overarching socio-political structures ? I’m finding it difficult otherwise to account for its presence …

2. Procession (2009), Paresh Maity

I l-o-v-e-d this piece. 50 metallic ants, put together from used motorcycle parts, including lit-up headlights as Cyclopean eyes, crawl across a bed of twigs. Cue B-grade horror flick featuring the invasion of giant bugs .. Below is a still from Them! (1954), an old black-and-white sci-fi film about the attack of oversized radioactive ants.

Procession also reminds me of other art-animals put together from found materials – Picasso’s Baboon and Young, for instance (below). Both Picasso’s and Maity’s pieces are witty, humorous likenesses, a point of intersection between the industrial and the zoological. Baboon, in its indexing of the goods of the factory line, the commodities of mass production – a jug, toy cars, an automobile spring – reifies the “typically Cubist paradox”* of interrogating the semiotic and material modes of visual representation with these signifiers of daily life, provoking metaphysical uncertainty. It re-directs the aims of both analytic and synthetic Cubism: it does not merely yoke together its various elements, but engages them rather in an active reconstruction of the once fractured subject. Analytic Cubism’s shattering of the human figure into its constitutive planes and dimensions witnessed in, for instance, Ma Jolie, and the figure-ground reversal of, say, Guitar (1912) – where positive and negative spaces are inverted so that the sound hole of the instrument is indicated by an empty can projecting outwards – is here explicitly denied by the re-assembling, or re-imagining, of disparate industrial fragments into a new organic whole. Like Baboon and Young, Maity’s ants, constructed from vehicular parts and re-imagined in their, or a, natural habitat (the bed of twigs), gesture at once at both the realms of nature and society; they are hybrids caught in the flux between two dialectical poles which yet firmly occupies its own semantic space between these variable ontologies.

* See Timothy Hilton, Picasso (London: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 1975), p. 119.

Baboon and Young (1951), Pablo Picasso. Image courtesy of MoMA‘s website.

3. Crystal City (2009), Wu Chi-Tsung

Here’s the scoop on Wu’s piece from the catalogue:

Taiwanese artist Wu Chi-Tsung (吳季璁) presents 水晶城市, or Crystal City (2009). Through a series of installations using a projector, LED lighting and plastic, Wu reveals the invisible city in which modern society resides, made up of electronic equipment, programs, networks, media and information. The artist chose the word “crystal” because this information-dense city grows like one; each component element organically comes together, infinitely expanding and spreading according to a set internal rhythm and logic. it is a city that is transparent, light, and lacking in real physical volume, but it projects a very real experienced world of unparalleled reality. It is this space that the artists considers contemporary society’s spiritual home.

At its most essential, Crystal City is a cluster of transparent boxes assembled in a dark room – with a toy train, bearing a light, making its way back and forth, casting a series of constantly distending and dissolving shadows. Beyond the pure visual pleasure derived from watching the gossamer silhouettes shift and morph and flicker across the surface of the wall, the piece also calls to mind Plato’s allegory of the cave:

Plato likens people untutored in the Theory of Forms to prisoners chained in a cave, unable to turn their heads. All they can see is the wall of the cave. Behind them burns a fire.  Between the fire and the prisoners there is a parapet, along which puppeteers can walk. The puppeteers, who are behind the prisoners, hold up puppets that cast shadows on the wall of the cave. The prisoners are unable to see these puppets, the real objects, that pass behind them. What the prisoners see and hear are shadows and echoes cast by objects that they do not see … Such prisoners would mistake appearance for reality. They would think the things they see on the wall (the shadows) were real; they would know nothing of the real causes of the shadows.

(Summary from a University of Washington page – read it in full here.)

Standing at the entrance to the little room, watching the exquisite dance of shadows from the harsh fluorescent glow outside, its not hard to imagine that Wu is deliberately making claims, contra Plato, for the impalpable realm of shadows as the highest form of “unparalleled reality” – a postmodern idea if ever I heard one.