Entrails-like Passages for Endless Hide-and-seek--Reading Daily+
Text by Yun-Ting CHANG (Assistant Professor of Fine Arts Department, National Taiwan University of Art)
Charles Pierre BAUDELAIRE is to modern art as Italian poet Filippo Tommaso MARINETTI is to futurism. German poet Hugo BALL is to Dadaism as French poet Guillaume APOLLINAIRE is to Cubism. French litterateur Andre BRETON is to surrealism as…Writers have added fuel to the fire of art trends in countless examples throughout art history. As what has played out in interdisciplinary trendy modern art exhibitions, inviting writers to take part in exhibitions is not too rare an occurrence. The 2018 Fall Season’s Biennial coincidentally produced a novelist: Post Nature—A Museum as an Ecosystem invited Ming-yi WU to participate in the exhibition, and Daily+ invited Yi-Chin LO to produce a novel on the spot—bringing a “novel” approach in his work to the Biennial.
Through Wall Climber, novelist Yi-Chin LO traced the renovation of old military-dependent housing in the exhibitions “Northern Campus” and “Nine Single Rooms Art Space.” Kneading together the alleys and lanes of the area’s densely-yet-orderly staggered houses, the real and the artificial blend complexity levels of story axes to effusively describe a life story of weary exile. The story scene merged fragments of previously-occurring works of art in this place with the life memories of LO’s childhood Yonghe military village.[1] Through LO’s pen, the exhibition space’s unique imagery and ambiance—as Agalmatolite’s age-accumulated complex patterns and Jiangnan Shui Township’s glossy Jiangxi pickled vegetables[2]—permeates a unique scent. Curator Chun-Yi CHANG provided the novel to participating exhibiting artists as one of their creative references. Consequently, through exhibit space as a main axis of writing that turned into a “novel,” and through “art works” that came to fruition through referencing said “novel,” a dynamic loop was gradually established through a type of mutually-penetrative relationship between art work, text, and exhibition space.
Inconsistent Storylines
Pierre-Laurent CASSIÈRE’s work responded to Teacher Chen’s house view in Nine Single Rooms: a dark exhibition space filled with wind sounds, faint blinking lights in corners, old steel fans perched on steel desks. Through modifying the frequency of blinking lights, the artist created visual illusions of completely still fan blades as if time had stood still. It was as if viewers were in a still frame in the novel, entering some past Moment in an old house. Dorian GAUDIN transformed the novel’s characters stories of exile migration and identity into Lucie’s Dream. In the conception of this work, the artist attempted to create a work that appeared to be unrelated to the novel but was indeed a response to it. Finally, GAUDIN chose to disperse the novel’s characters on a “bed” that slowly moved about the exhibition space. A familiar everyday object is no longer just situated in the corner of a room—leaving behind its original use, the bed transforms into a perpetually spinning sleepwalker in the exhibit.
Novels are fictional stories. Through Wall Climber, the exhibit provided artists with a fictional perspective for an image of the exhibition space. When each artist read it through his own perspective, went down the path of his own creative process, and used different types of artwork to respond to this viewpoint, it slowly refracted other perspectives that again and again divided into different axes. Much like Jorge Luis BORGES’ forked path garden, there was no so-called single outcome. From each intersection there extends an intricate narrative axis, and numerous endings that serve as the beginning of another story.
Familiar Perceptions
Nicolas TOURTE’s I Don’t Know illustrated a past memory. Projection mapping cast an image of a man on a sofa catnapping, reading, sipping on tea, chatting on the phone, and other everyday routines. The intersection of shadows and real objects strengthened the special thin characteristic of images, allowing the screen to look even more like a scene that disappears in the blink of an eye—every person’s ordinary destiny that will finally be left behind. Ho-Jang LIU returned to his place of residence during his time at art school. He used his current stage of creative thinking to reimagine his sculptures from 1993 to 1994, and to renegotiate the relationship between art works and space. At the same time, he also underwent a writing plan, and wrote letters to residents of the Taipei art settlement. In some way, these actions filled in the period of absence after the artists left this place. In the renovated interior of an old house, the household items had already been cleared out, but run-of-the-mill activities in the home were projected like a mirage that had returned. Scenes from the past leapt before the eyes through the involvement of previous artist residents.
In Youki HIRAKAWA’s Vanished Tree, there was a projection of forest treetops swaying in the wind on a vaulted waterproof ceiling. On the floor was a screen showing cross-sections of tree stumps. The up-and-down gaze of viewers recalled the vanished trees between the two extremes. The absent area of the image was where the imagination began to emerge. Stepping into Chih-Sheng LAI’s Drifting Sandbar, when the long suspended trapezoidal boards’ intersecting steel cables begin to faintly shake from here to there, the long grey boards underfoot emitted a croaking noise. This type of atypical walking experience will become even more obvious after returning to solid ground. The point of this work perhaps is that people walking on land is an incredibly familiar perceptive experience. In this work, there are many miniscule sensations that appear to need a suitable level of concentration to identify them. However, instead of saying that focusing will allow our every perception to change, perhaps it’s better to say that the things in this work that exhibit change actually take familiar everyday things and make them into strangers; allowing us to rediscover our perceptions and find the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Strangely Ordinary
The sounds of Claude CLOSKY’s Notification emanated the exhibition space. Hundreds of cell phone charge cables were hung about the space at random. Carousel format advertisement images circulated frequently on tablet PCs mounted on the walls. When we leave the exhibit, the sound of cell phone notifications perhaps will recall the experience of viewing this artwork. The next time we are searching for our phone charger in every corner of our homes, perhaps we will think of the massive amount of charge cords hanging in the exhibit hall. Flooded with our everyday life cell phone notifications, the ordinary behavior of searching for a charge cable suddenly seems singled out from habitual phone usage; revealing the common occurrence of technology in human lives. Everyday behaviors were also brought to light in Julien PRÉVIEUX’s What Shall We Do Next?, where the everyday act of browsing one’s phone is turned into a performer’s abstract dance moves; playing out the operational and conditional relationship between man and machine. In another of his works, he mocked French society’s must-have “motive letter” (cover letter) for job seekers. For a period of time spanning seven years, the artist replied to every employment ad with the playful Letters of Non-motivation, pointing out the ridiculousness of the corporate hiring system.
These ordinary art creation practices capture creative resources, each opening up to overflow dimensions outside the ordinary. People follow these “overflows” to temporarily leave behind the familiar, and when the journey carries them to another place, they then have a perspective to look back on. Those things that were originally incredibly ordinary appear strange and unfamiliar upon recollection, but it’s only with ordinary things that have become unfamiliarized that there is a possibility to highlight the primitive uniqueness of the ordinary. So the essence of the ordinary that opens up to another place not only is displayed in the works, but also happens to coincide with Wall Climber and the curation objective—it’s a place that seems so close yet so far away; a place that a wall climber constantly moves toward.3 The ubiquitous “place” provided novels, art works, and the exhibit with various reading paths, just as in “Entrails-like Passages for Endless Hide-and-seek,”4 allowing each reading to be like a fresh start to a logic game; each time experiencing rich fantasy situations in the game.
[1] From 2016 onward, “Northern Campus” and “Nine Single Rooms Art Space” became part of Our Museum’s large exhibition gallery. In the planning stage of Daily+ when curator Chun-yi CHANG led novelist Yi-Chin LO to have a look around, she described many previous contemporary artworks that were created in these sites, as well as that exhibition’s legacied as-of-yet unloaded work 254 Yen. While writing his novel, LO cleverly included this work into his writing, and it became main character TSAI’s story view.
[2] These two images are metaphors for this area’s space which were referred to during Yi-Chin LO’s discussion on forum Wall Climber of Us All.
[3] “Each time he climbed the wall it was his escape from death.” (Yi-Chin LO, Wall Climber, 2018, p.15)
“As a folding mark cut slightly on the inner of the daily, the daily+ diverges the dimension of the daily to the unknown, to a place seemingly close yet out of reach, and endows the daily with a future never expected.” (Daily+ Curatorial Discourse) For more information, please refer to: https://biennale.sense-info.co/tw/home#curatorial-discourse
[4] This sentence originates from Yi-Chin LO’s novel Wall Climber, and also from Guide of Wall Climbering—an extension artwork out of the novel by curator Chun-Yi CHANG. These sentences are selected from the novel and turned into 12 tablet inscriptions, and embedded on the buildings’ outer walls in Northern Campus.